 Hey everybody, tonight we're debating Missing 411, and we are starting right now. Ladies and gentlemen, thrilled to have you here for another epic debate. This is going to be a fun one, folks, and one I'll let you know of is your first time here at Modern Day Debate. I'm your host, James Coons, and at Modern Day Debate, we are a neutral platform, hosting debates on science, religion, and politics, and we want to let you know, no matter what walk of life you are from, folks, no matter what walk of life, we hope you feel welcome. I'm glad you're here and also want to let you know of it's your first time here or maybe fiftieth time here, but you forgot to hit that subscribe button somehow. Well, hey, consider hitting that subscribe button so you don't miss any debates, such as, you'll see at the bottom right of your screen, very exciting as Donald Cronos will take on Kent Hovind as it's been about a year, I think, since we've had Kent Hovind on. And so that should be an exciting one this Wednesday, and so don't miss that. Be sure to hit that notification bell as well, and we're going to give you a couple more housekeeping type things for the channel, and then we'll get into introducing the speakers. So in particular, want to let you know, folks, we are excited that we are on Twitch as well. So if you like watching from Twitch instead of YouTube, hey, now we've got that link in the description, and I will put that link in the chat right now as well. And if you love podcasts, well, hey, pull out your phone right now and check and see if we, modern day debate, are on your favorite podcast as we want to make sure that we are so that can be useful to you. And so if you happen to find that we're not, we're on almost every podcast app I've heard of, but we're trying to get on every single one so it's as convenient as possible for you. And with that, we're going to introduce our speakers. We're thrilled to have them. It's been a while, James W. I think it's been even longer since we've had good old T jump on. So James W, thrilled to have you back. He's linked in the description, folks, and want to say thanks, James W, for being here and what can people expect to find at your link in the description? Oh, I think you might be muted. We can't quite hear you, James. Hold on, folks. I think he's working it out. He was actually coming in crystal clear before we started. So I'm surprised myself. Are you there, James? We lost James. So what we will do is introduce Tom Jump as James, works out those kinks. And so Tom Jump is linked in the description, folks. He is back. You give me James? Yes. What I was going to do is while you're working that out, I was going to introduce Tom and then I'll come right back to you. And so. That's fine. Go ahead. Absolutely. So Tom, thrilled to have you back. It's been a while. Folks, you can find his link in the description. And so Tom, what can people expect to find at your link? I'm a professional mattress tester. I record myself testing mattresses for about eight hours. You can see that on my channel. Pretty epic. You better check that out, folks. So also, thrilled to have you back, James W. And so James, if you could share what people can expect to find at your link, the floor is all yours. Thanks for being here. You ready for me, James? Yes. So if you would like to share what people can expect to find at your link, that's, I don't know if you're. I don't have a channel set up yet, but that's something I may do at some point in the future. But right now I am on the wonderful YouTube user Amy Newman's channel and I go on there. We do at least three to usually two to three podcasts per week. We are touching the hard hitting theological issues of the day. We just started a Bible study that we have been doing and we just did episode three. We just wrapped that up about five in the morning today. So go check it out and yeah. You got it. Just link Amy's channel down there so that they can check that out. And with that, we're going to jump right into it. So James W. will be arguing on behalf of Missing 411 being legit and Tom will be playing or not playing, but legitimately will be the skeptic tonight. We don't do Davils advocate debates. We think that they're great, but we don't do them here at modern day debate. And so this is for real folks. So James W. the floor is all yours. All right. I'm going to share my screen very quickly. Let's see if you get that. Yes. Now we are seeing your desktop. Okay. So this is just a basic presentation mode I had. It's more to guide me along with what I'm doing, but the concept of missing 411. So it's a series of books and documentary films about missing persons, particularly missing people that happen in our national parks and forests. And the guy who began writing those, his name is David Polities. He was a police officer for over 20 years and he has been an amateur crypto zoologist. He has been doing research into the big foot phenomenon. And during the course of this research, which a lot of it takes place in our national parks and forests, he became, he came across a park ranger who had commented to him about the unusual disappearances that were happening in these national parks. And he wanted to take a look at that. And he spent many years now looking at over thousands of cases that go on in our national parks and to give everybody a scope idea of the problem, I just want to put everything into context here. So we have a guy named John Wayne Gacy here. He's a serial killer. If anybody's ever heard of him, if you know that, you'll be familiar with it. And he operated from in the 1970s. He was active for six years. He killed 33 people, 29 bodies were identified. He was executed in 1994. And he was averaging about 5.5 victims per year during that span. He's one of the most notorious killers in American history. He would kidnap sexually badder and strangle young men that he picked up. And would you be happy if you thought, or how would you feel if there was a John Wayne Gacy in your community? I don't think anybody would be happy. There's been books written about that people like this, documentary movies, all sorts of fascination that go on with cases like this. And how bad the problem is for the country. So 2019, there were 609,275 reports of missing persons. Now 543,921 were resolved, and that's where the person is located, dead or alive. And that's from the FBI. So that's an 89% case solved rate. So that, but that still means 65,345 cases were not resolved. And you can see that the numbers for 2018 are equally as grim. And those numbers, that's the raw data. So the numbers are skewed because there are duplicate entries and there are people who should have been removed, but family members found the person. They forgot to call the police and tell them they found it. So the entry just hangs there. So it's probably a fraction of that, but it does give you a scope of the problem that if we're losing 8,000, 9,000 people a year that are disappearing without trace, you have to ask yourself, where are they going? So even if we reduce the raw data by 90%, it's still 5,000 people a year which is disappearing. And that's just the United States. And this phenomenon happens all over the world. And yeah, so people are allowed to disappear, right? That nobody has to report for duty to work. You can just disappear if you want. And no doubt that happens, but in the modern era with electronic information and with finances and everything, those cases are pretty easy for police to solve. They tend to solve those pretty quickly through financial records and then they find the person and he just says, yeah, I just don't want to talk to my family or friends anymore, which you're allowed to do. Those cases are not too hard to find. Suicide, yeah. People do commit suicide. They don't always leave a note. They don't always tell everybody. But the problem is that if you commit suicide, it's hard for you to dispose of your own body aside from jumping into an acid vat or volcano. Somebody's got to find something. And human trafficking, no doubt this does happen. It probably happens a lot more in the third world than it does in America. But I'm sure there are cases that the police do solve from time to time, so we do see that it does happen. But the scale is the only matter of question and that. And we see we have 18,000 homicides per year. So if we have 10,000 people disappear, I mean, that's almost 50 percent of the known homicides that are taking place. That means if that's true, there's a lot of people out there committing a lot of crimes and the police are just totally inept to solve it. I mean, and these guys are so good that they could make the body disappear. The victims are never identified. And we know that that's something that's actually not easy to do because that's actually usually how these people get caught is either trying to dispose of the bodies or. Disposing of them incorrectly. So the missing four one one. So yeah, there's a lot of missing people. So what does that have to do with missing four one one? Well, if you look at the big picture, instead of looking at everything in a total vacuum, you get different kind of context that you see what's going on. You know, so missing four one one. So millions of people visit our parks and forests every year. The overwhelming majority make it out unharmed. Unfortunately, every year, many people go missing inside these parks. That's unavoidable. That's consequence. Bad things happen, right? And many of these parks parks are very large. Thousands, even millions of acres with tough terrain that if you're not experienced in navigating that terrain, they could be very dangerous and they have dangerous animals in these parks, bears, mountain lions, wolves, reptiles, alligators, all of which are capable of killing a adult human being. And that's tragic. But it is just a consequence of having these wilderness parks. The issue is that we run across cases where none of that makes sense, where there is no rational outcome or rational cause for what we're seeing. And there's a lot of different hallmarks of these cases. They usually happen in rural areas. So this is some of the criteria that David Politi's looks at in a case that helps him to screen out cases that he's not interested in because there's a plausible scenario that doesn't fit within the scope of his work. There he doesn't want cases where there's human suspects. So if somebody suspected of killing somebody, that's not a case he's going to look at. He doesn't want people with a history of mental illness. No reason to think they voluntarily disappeared. No evidence of animal attack or homicide. The tracking dogs in bloodhounds that are brought in are not able to trace a scent of the person. A lot of times when they come to these cases, they they walk around in a circle for a little bit and they just lay down or they have no interest whatsoever in pursuing the scent. And when the victim, if the victims are found alive or dead, a lot of times they're missing clothes, especially shoes, often in very cold climates. And there's a change in weather pattern pattern a lot of times after these disappearances. And when the victim is found alive, often they're unconscious or semi conscious or in an altered state of consciousness. And a lot of these victims are located next to rivers or lakes or bodies of water. And yeah, people do drown in bodies of water. That does happen. And the people who do search and rescue, they're not dumb. They're aware of this. So if there's a creek or a river or a body of water that is near where somebody goes missing, they're going to check that. And human bodies, they float after a few days of decomposition. They don't just sink to the bottom and stay there. And that's even if the bodies are weighted down. As Scott Peterson about that, he killed his wife through her in a bay that connected the ocean with several cement weights. And a couple of months later, her body still floated to the surface and was recovered and he's in prison today because he couldn't make that body disappear. And a lot of times when these victims are found and they're asked what happened, they're not really able to give a coherent explanation for what happened that makes sense to really anybody. And when we see this happen in case after case, when these people go in there and they're with other people, the people that they're with often, they say this consistently, that they merely looked away from the person for just a matter of seconds. It's like if you're at a campfire with somebody, you're looking right at them. You look down to look up at your watch and you look back up and they're just gone. There's no trace of them, no noise, no nothing. And we see that happening in a lot of these cases. Not people going in there alone. It's people going in there with friends and family and they're with them. And these people are still disappearing. Now, who knows what it's connected to, but a lot of these people seem to be physicians or physicists may just be that those people tend to earn a lot of money, so they have the free time and money to take these vacations to these parks, but it's still something to consider. And when the victim is deceased, a lot of times there's no apparent cause of death. It's hard to determine why they why they died. And a lot of times in these cases, we see that the victims are found alive or even dead, but the location that they're in is a place that would be very difficult, virtually impossible for them to get to. We have one case where a two year old child was missing for 20 hours and managed to hike 20 or 12 miles in 20 hours. Two years old, anybody who has a who has kids, if you're a parent, you know, that that's not really plausible. That is not what happens. And we see in a lot of these cases where we do know what happens with a young child like that, they end up walking maybe a few hundred yards, maybe a few, you know, maybe a quarter mile and then they sit. They're not going to hike up a mountain, 12 miles and be found alive the next day, something else happened. Other than that, we're not really sure what it is, but it doesn't seem to make sense that children would be able to do this. And then a lot of times these people are found alive or dead. It's in an area that's been searched previously by sometimes many times, three, four, five times by different groups. And you're going to say that dozens of people went down a trail and this person had been there the whole time and just nobody missed it. Well, no problem. They all just missed it. Well, sure they did. Sure they did. So what's going on here? And it seems like these humans are being hunted in these parks. Now, the question we have to ask ourselves is who or what is hunting these people? And we know that in these cases, the missing 411 cases, they don't fit with animal predation. We know what animal attacks look like. You can pull up videos. You can pull up pictures of what happens after a bear attack online. It's a bloody, gruesome, nasty. These people are seriously injured. It's not something that's going to happen quietly. And, yeah, these these not these are not normal forms of animal animal predation. We don't have ninja style grizzly bears stealthily skulking up on people and taking them, you know, without anybody hearing anything and then disposing of the body bones at all so that no one ever sees it. And while animal attacks do happen, if an animal is accustomed to using humans as a source of food that they call the man eaters, you know, once an animal makes that that leap to that, they typically will prey on humans until they're they're killed. They don't just it's not an occasional thing like, oh, I think I will attack a human today. It becomes, you know, they've made humans their natural prey and people will the park officials will see that and they will go out and kill the animal. Now, an unsettling yet probable truth is that people seems to be being hunted in these parks. And if it is other people hunting these people, then the police are totally inept at being able to solve these cases. And that's something that should be unsettling to us all, that people if it is just people, they're apparently able to get away with murder and the police are just not very good at solving these cases. So when you look at all these cases, you arrive at a residual. You you filter out a lot of the cases that have plausible other explanations. And then you're with questions or cases that don't fit within our normal paradigm. They don't have a conventional, rational explanation. So what's happening in these parks? And the truth is, I don't know, you know, this is a debate. I would be glad to lose. I would like nothing more than to find a rational, plausible explanation for what's going on that fits within the paradigm that we would call normal. You know, I don't want there to be, you know, the terrible events happening in these parks that are unsettling. Now, we don't know what we don't know. You know, what we do know, but we don't always know what we don't know. And we as a species, we very proud of the accomplishments we've made over the past few centuries. And that's true. We've done a lot in a very short period of time. But there's still things that we don't know that we don't understand. We don't even know we need to look for it. We find ourselves, we evolved to live on a planet and evolution has given us just a few tools we need to survive on this planet. Evolution only cares about our survival. It doesn't care that we have a full or complete understanding of reality. And evolution selected a tiny spectrum of the electromagnetic waves that we receive that we call visible light. And it said, this is the most important information you need to survive. Everything else gets filtered out because it's either unnecessary or evolution considered it to be extraneous. We only see this small part of the thing and we only see objects that reflect light. And we only see a small amount of matter that exists. We call it regular matter, but it only composes about 20 percent of all matter. 80 percent of the matter out there is dark matter. Not only can we not see it, we have no clue what it is, except we observe it through gravitational effect and it appears not to interact with regular matter. And infrared light was discovered in 1800. It's all around us all the time. We never knew that we had to look for it because we don't see it. They was discovered by accident, measuring the temperature of other frequencies of light. And then they found there's something with no light on it that has a higher frequency or a higher temperature. So I think hubris is a problem in this. And humans have always considered themselves to be at the cutting edge of human knowledge and intellect. And we try to force everything that we see to fit neatly within our current understanding, within our current paradigm. And anything that seems to fall outside that we disregard or we we we're not comfortable with it because it makes us question things that are at the core of what it means to be human. It makes us question the very notion of reality that we find ourselves in. You know, we still don't know. The Roanoke colony disappeared in 1858, North Carolina, 120 people. It's nobody alive today who has any idea what happened to those people. It's just speculation. Nobody knows for sure. Mothman, West Virginia, 1996 through 1997, numerous families, different people unknown to each other, all make claims that they saw a large flying man with 10 foot wingspan and glowing red eyes. Nobody today has any idea what they saw in that wilderness. Nobody knows the proposed explanation that it's just a sandhill crane doesn't seem to be likely because no one's mistaken cranes for the Mothman before that and it hasn't happened after. But when you have to force it to fit within the paradigm, what you consider normal, you arrive at conclusions like that. The Slender Man stabbing 2014, Waukesha, Wisconsin, two 12 year old girls stabbed one of their friends, and they claimed after that that they were told to do so by the Slender Man that they met out in the woods. Not a very likely scenario, but interesting. Nonetheless, we've seen cattle mutilations all over the country. And these cases actually mirror the missing 411 cases in a lot of ways. These cows are being found deceased in the fields, no apparent injury. Organs or body parts surgically removed, blood drained, no blood on the floor. The FBI or the ground. So it appears that the animals being transported somewhere else, having these procedures done and then being dumped close to where it was found. The FBI looked at it for 10 years. They found a lot of these cases have a rational explanation. It's unusual forms of animal predation or whatnot. But there were cases that they were able to exclude everything rational that we know to be rational. And there's still no explanation for what happened in these cases. And finally, I'm not proposing a supernatural explanation. I'm proposing the possibility that there's an explanation that would be within the natural world, but is just something that is on the edge or just beyond our ability to understand. It doesn't fit within our known paradigm and it wouldn't be supernatural. Wouldn't be demons or ghosts or anything like that. It would just be a layer of reality that we just don't have the ability to comprehend yet. And so just follow. I can't say with absolute certainty what's happening. I can't even say with absolute certainty in these cases that there is something totally mysterious going on. Like I said, I would like nothing more than to be shown that these cases are all logically explainable and they all make sense. And if nothing else, if this only calls attention to the people who are going into these parks for parents to keep a closer eye on their children for people to keep an eye on their friends when you go into these parks, realize that there are dangers in these parks and everyone wants to go and have fun. But you also want to come out alive. These people have families. They're not just numbers on a piece of paper. A lot of the things we debate here are academic, like the moon landing. I mean, of course, if people want to believe that the moon landing is fake, OK, it's not supported by the evidence, but no one's going to die because of it. You know, it's just people making a ignorant or irrational choice. But in this case, there are people's lives in the balance. So keep an eye on your families, keep an eye on your friends. And if you're going out alone, take GPS equipment, take the equipment you need to survive. Enjoy these parks and forests. They're beautiful, but come out alive. Thank you. Thank you very much, James W. We'll now kick it over to T jump for his opening statement and then we'll jump right into the open conversation. So with that, Tom, glad to have you back. Like I said, it's been a while. He's on mute. All right. So I don't really understand anything he just said, like stuff people disappear. We can't always explain it. Therefore fringe natural stuff. Like I don't, I don't get it. Like I'm from the fishing 411. Like according to the guy who wrote it, Pallades or whatever, there's some special mysterious thing about these disappearances, but this has been addressed like Kyle Pollock, a data scientist, host of the data skeptic podcast, documented his analysis of Pallades claims in the article missing 411 and presented his analysis of the skeptic camp held in 2017 by the Monterey County skeptics. He concluded that all the allegedly unusual disappearances represent nothing unusual at all and are instead best explained by non-mysterious causes such as falling or sudden health crisis leading to lone person becoming immobilized off trail drowning bear or other animal attack, environmental exposure or even deliberate disappearance after analyzing the missing person data. Pollock concluded that the cases were not outside of the frequency that would expect or that there is anything unexplained that I was unable to identify. So this presentation was discussed. So essentially, yeah, there's nothing, there's nothing special about any of these at all. It's just normal people disappearing for normal reasons. And then we as humans, because we're foundable and don't have all the evidence, especially in strange contexts like the forest can't always identify everything that happens. So there's not, this is nothing special about this. I don't get it. I don't get why this is supposed to be evidence of something on the fringe of the natural. Like it's just normal disappearances that happened more often in the past. Like would it be more often in the past? Since it happened more often in the past, is that more evidence that there's this fringe natural thing 100 years ago? No, just means we didn't have the same level of technology. And in the future, when we have more technology there'll be less disappearances that we can't explain because we'll have more technology. Like there's nothing special about this whatsoever. I don't even understand what the argument is supposed to be. We can't explain therefore fringe natural. It's just an argument from ignorance fallacies. Like I can't understand how it could be X. Therefore it's Y. Like it's not how it works. So I don't really understand the argument. For the most part, it seems like a basic argument from ignorance, argument from incredulity that has been debunked by a data scientist already. So I'll just conclude there. Thank you very much. At modern day debate, that makes it easier for me to see every question from you in the Q&A, or I should say in the live chat to throw into the Q&A list. With that, gentlemen, the floor is all yours. Well, yeah, I mean, a lot of these cases, they do have hallmarks that just seem very unusual. And families want answers. They want to know what happened to their loved one when their loved one goes missing. And when nobody's able to provide them with a rational explanation or anything that makes sense to anybody, they're still going to want answers. And that's just a natural part of humanity. Yeah, you're exactly right. It is a natural part of humanity. That's exactly why there is such a thing as an argument from ignorance, an argument from incredulity fallacy. Like all fallacies, biases, and illusions, all the thousands of named ones we have, are all common examples of human brains that we know human brains fail. Here are examples where the human brain fails consistently. So here are Russell and the Bushes. We think it's a lion because 1,000 years ago, or 10,000, tens of thousands of years ago, when there were two different groups of people, one group of people who, every time they heard of Russell and the Bushes, they thought it was a lion and ran away. And the other group of people, when they heard the Russell and the Bushes, they said, well, I can't prove it's not a lion. So we're going to be skeptical and just remain here. Like the ones too just always thought it was a lion and ran away, survived more. So we have, as human beings, we tend to experience that fallacy, type one, type two, distinction fallacy, that we always see agency in things that we can't explain, because it had a benefit for survival, just like every fallacy, and biases, and illusion, and delusion, and hallucination. So the fact that we have these proclivities to want to insert answers where we don't have answers is why so many people believe in the God. Like, yeah, but this isn't evidence. Like you can't say we don't know therefore X. It's like the famous Neil deGrasse Tyson quote. Oh, look, it's an unidentified flying object. I'm going to now identify it as aliens. Like, no, you can't do that. It doesn't work that way. So essentially, all you've said is there's stuff we can't explain. Like, yeah, obviously, there's lots of stuff we can't explain, because we don't have all knowledge. Doesn't mean it's not explainable. Just means we haven't thought of an explanation yet, or we don't have the evidence yet. And that's it. Exactly. That's all I'm saying is, yeah, we don't know what's happening, but don't say that it must fit within what we would consider our normal paradigm is where, you know, that's where I differ. Because, yeah, we don't know. It could be just parts of the nature that we just don't understand yet. You just contradicted yourself. So you just did the, oh, look, there's, we don't know what's happening. So we can't conclude it, or we should conclude it's not natural. Like, that's not only a contradiction. You can't think of what it is. If we can exclude every natural explanation we know of, then we have to conclude it falls outside that scope. Yeah, you can't do that ever. It's like literally impossible. The problem under determination, you literally can't do that. It's one of the classical fallacies in reasoning to think that you can rule out every possibility, like, no, there's literally infinitely many things that could always explain every data. I said a rational possibility, not irrational. Yeah, there's always going to be infinitely many rational possibilities that could always explain the data. Necessarily. You can't rule out all rational possibilities. It's literally impossible. Your brain isn't capable of doing that. Well, it could be rational within our paradigm. Reality doesn't care what we currently think about it. Reality is just going to be reality, whether we understand it or not. Right. But again, I'm not seeing how this is an evidence of your position. So if we have an event that we can't explain, there's two possibilities. It could be explained in a way that we don't understand yet. Or there's some new thing there that we've never discovered. It's always more supported to say it's explained by the things we've already known about that we just haven't figured out how yet. That's it. That's always going to be the better explanation because of induction. It's more supported, but it doesn't mean it's always true. That's just a way that we use to evaluate claims. It doesn't mean it couldn't be. It just means that we tend to find that it works better the other way, usually. Yes, like 99.999% of the time, usually. Yeah. So if it works at that level of proclivity, that probability, then that's evidence against your hypothesis. So if everything we've always discovered is always caused by other things we've always discovered with a pretty high reliability rate, saying that here's something we can't explain yet is always going to be better evidence to say it's going to be explained by one of the things we've always discovered yet. Rather than saying a new thing exists. So you can't say here is something we can't explain there for a new thing that we haven't discovered yet. Literally doesn't work as an argument. Well, it might not be what we typically see, but then again, we don't know what we don't know. So we don't know the other possibilities that could be out there. I mean, we're just trying to force everything to fit within what we already know. I mean, people have done that for centuries. You know, the God claims that was because things that in the past that claim fit within the paradigm of a God. So that's how they evaluated it. Now we don't do that anymore. We use naturalism, but we don't have a complete picture of the natural world. We just have these very limited tools that we have to survive on this planet. And it doesn't care whether we know all truth or everything. It just cares about helping us live long enough to reproduce. That doesn't matter at all to the point. So again, you're still stuck on this one issue. Like, yes, it's possible Santa Claus. There is a magical Santa Claus that actually exists that's going around kidnapping, killing people. Yes, that is a possibility. But does that mean it's reasonable to believe just because there's events that we can't explain? No, it's not. It's reasonable to believe that's not the case, that there is no such thing as a magical Santa Claus. Everything is imaginary until demonstrated otherwise. So if you have a hypothesis that people are being kidnapped by whatever, at least some natural thing that is outside of our understanding or whatever, that is imaginary. It's something in your head and only exists as an idea in your head. Until you actually can confirm that independently of the idea in your head, then it's reasonable to include that's just imaginary. Just like Pixie, Santa, leprechauns, everything. Until you can come up with some confirmatory evidence that is verified independent of your hypothesis, all you have is a hypothesis, like it's nothing. So all you've said is here's something we can't explain. I'm going to make up a hypothetical explanation. Cool, we can all do that. Well, here's something we can't explain. All attempts that have been made to explain it rationally fail. It can either be some other thing that we don't know about or what, or logic fails, reality fails, I don't know. Never, there's never an option that we cannot rationally explain it, it's not an option. Like literally it's always going to be the case that it's always necessarily going to be rationally explainable. It's just you don't like the rationale, that's it. So it's just your subjective opinion that you don't like it being rationally explained in reason X, like as I presented, Kyle Pollock said, yeah, all of these are rationally explained by known science, like nothing of this is special. Whether or not you think it can be rationally explained doesn't make a difference. So if we have say a two year old child who is hiking 12 miles through wilderness overnight in subzero temperatures and less shroud, a outdoor survival expert could not make that same hike in anywhere near that amount of time, you just have to say, well, it must have happened somehow that this child was able to do it because that fits within our paradigm and until you prove that it couldn't happen. No, it's really easy. It's really easy. Like it didn't happen. There you go. That's how it fits into the experiment, it didn't happen. So you're just saying that these cases are made up or? Yeah, that's the explanation. Some of them are just made up. Yeah, we're misremembered. Incorrect statistical data, incorrect recording data. Like it could be that when they were found them and they said they're missing at this point, we found them at this point, they just wrote down the number wrong. There's always kinds of ways to explain this. Even if it literally happened, you still couldn't include magic, like no, or natural magic, no, you still, it's not evidence of anything. And like I said, that case was mentioned, Kyle Pollack, he didn't, there was no recording of that and the distance traveled could easily be traveled by a hiker, not by a two-year-old obviously because, but that didn't occur. Like the case that you're mentioning was actually mentioned by Kyle Pollack and the two-year-old was never found. It wasn't found at all, so I don't know what you're talking about. No, in this case, they were found 12 miles away. It might be a different case, but actually we do find in these cases, a lot of times it seems unlikely, but usually the children end up surviving a lot more often than the adults in these cases. A lot of times the adults go missing and they're never found at all. A lot of times when you do find a survivor, it happens to be a child laying in a thicket down a trail where people had gone up and down the trail numerous times, dozens of people and you just have to say, well, he must have just been there the whole time and everybody just missed it because that fits within what we're comfortable with. That's a comfortable explanation for us. Literally you could just walk there after the fact or he could have been sleeping and people walked past it and didn't notice which is extremely common. Like if you've ever seen snipers hiding in the bushes, like you could walk past them a thousand times, like literally right on top of them, you'd still never see them. So if there's a kid lying in a bush, yeah, you're probably not going to see it. None of that is surprising. Well, I mean, you have to look at some of these trails and a lot of them, they're sheer trails, they're sheer cliffs and there's nowhere to go. You've got a line of people walking through a sheer cliff, there's nowhere to go. It's cliff up and down each side of the last person there never makes it back to camp. You look through, you don't find a body anywhere. You just have to conclude, well, maybe a bear just came out of nowhere and took them somewhere and yeah. Where they fell, where they walked the other direction or they just didn't follow you down the cliff and you just didn't notice and you thought they were there the whole time. There's tons of natural explanations here. And none of that is weird. None of that is weird. Maybe the bloodhounds just decided they don't want to track that day or maybe their noses were stuffy. They didn't feel like catching a scent. Because as you mentioned, many of these recordings have strange natural weather occurrences. Like if it rains, then yeah, dogs aren't going to be able to track the scent. It's raining. Yeah, there's lots of the ways. I mean, it's very hard to trick a dog. They've tested it numerous times and their noses are pretty uncanny. Yeah, unless the air particles are washed away by the rain, in which case, they're literally not there anymore. So if it's raining out, dogs can't smell anything. I take my dog out in the rain. He smells all the time. So he seems to be able to pick up scents. There's lots and lots of ways in natural occurrences where weather and winds can blow away the particles and there's nothing left for the dog to smell. That's a real thing happens all the time. Dogs don't always work necessarily. It's not like you place a dog and it can track literally anything, anywhere in the world, it doesn't work that way. And then you have a lot of these cases, particularly in the modern era where they have infrared flare radar in helicopters that can fly over and even if there's a body there, it takes about a day for the body to cool to ambient temperature. They should be able to see it, but there's nothing there, nothing to see. Infrared doesn't see through things, it's not X-ray. Well, I mean, this is out in the forest, it's not in buildings, there's... Yeah, there's these things called trees that they did the same thing. Yeah, they can see through trees, they can, you can look at helicopter things from the police videos and you see criminals hiding in bushes and the helicopter sees him very clearly from the air. They can heat up the bushes because the heat goes to the bushes, you can't, it doesn't heat up the trees. So the trees above you that are like a canopy trees, you're not gonna see through them with thermal vision. Thermal isn't X-ray, you don't see through things. You can't like see through a wall. If a tree is like a wall. Well, it would have to be a pretty big tree to completely obstruct the heat. And we see this in not just one case, if it's one case, it might be okay, but you have case after case after case. No, there's nothing special about that at all. Like if you're hiding in a forest and you're under a big tree or several big trees, you're not gonna be seen. Like you'd have to be in the open to be seen. So, and the people walk by you and they still don't see you. I mean, it's just a lot of different ways that we try to look for people and they all seem to be failing in this. And then the body or articles will be found and you just have to say, yeah, they all just must have missed it because that's the only option I'm willing to consider. Yeah, dozens of people there, they all miss it because that fits nicely and neatly within what we're comfortable with. That's the thing that happens all the time, literally today. Like if you start walking through a forest and someone's playing hide and seek in the bushes and you don't see them, you won't see them most of the time. There's nothing special about that. That's like the most common occurrence. Like if you have a dice and it always rolls six then it's like, oh, it's probably just gonna be a six. Like, yeah, there's not a miracle there that they didn't see them. Oh, they didn't see them. Oh my God, because they're great sleuth detectives and would necessarily have seen them. No, they would have probably missed them. Those things don't work. Those are not reliable ways to find people is not to walk through the bushes and hope you find them. That is not a reliable method to find people. It's a very unreliable method. So the fact that they didn't- That's what they do. Yes, it's because we don't know anything better. So that's all they can do. It doesn't mean it's good. Because they do, it doesn't mean it's reliable. I mean, you only have these cases really where it doesn't work to say that it's unreliable because in these cases, it didn't work. It doesn't work in lots of cases. Like literally the one I gave you where there's a bunch of kids playing hide and seek and they're walking through the bushes. Like, yeah, like snipers that hide in the bushes. Yeah, these kids are not military trained snipers. They're just kids. And if they're lost, they're gonna be pretty scared. I mean, imagine being just a three or four-year-old kid lost in the middle of the woods and you hear somebody come look for you, you're gonna stay hidden. Yeah, or they're asleep, or they're unconscious, or they're not in the right state of mind because they have hypothermia or are dehydrated and can't move, like none of this is surprising. So if you're like completely asleep and unable to move then you're gonna be as good as a professional sniper who isn't moving. Well, that you're gonna be equally covered up and equally camouflaged and your sense gonna be hidden. And there's not gonna be any thermal signature because you're under or near a tree and that's going to obstruct any thermal radiation. Yeah, normally when you're sleeping, you like find a bush or something that covers you that is next to something large or like in a rock or a hole of some kind that protects you from other things trying to eat you. I don't know. I've never been a three or four-year-old child out lost in the wilderness. I can't relate. Yeah, most of those again didn't happen. Secondly, again, if you're trying to sleep in the wilderness, you try to find a hole or a ditch or a cave or something. So you're saying they didn't happen? So if there's a report of a child and their body is found three or four miles away at a 3,000 feet higher elevation, they had to get there somewhere. Somehow you're saying it didn't happen. Well, three miles is pretty easy to walk. But 3,000 feet it through rugged terrain up 3,000 feet? Yes, very easy to walk. Very easy to walk. So again, nothing. I think anybody who has kids would would. Well, again, I already debunked this. So so co-polyc, data scientist, host of the data skeptic analyzed all of this found there's nothing unusual. You can literally just read his analysis. There's nothing special about any of these cases. Most of the ones you're describing didn't happen. Those aren't the cases that actually happened. The kids mostly weren't found. They weren't found particularly far away. Other people were. There are other people who were found particularly far away like 14 miles away from grown adults. And none of that surprising because they can literally walk. There's none of these cases in the book that you mentioned are spectacular whatsoever. So what do you think's going on here? You just think it's humans wanting to see something into it or you think it's just a money-making thing? What did you think about the motivation behind all this? So it's argument for me during this argument from incredulity fallacy. People see things and then they make up explanations and conspiracy theories like they do of everything. It's the most common thing that happens to all things. That's why people think 9-11 was done by the Bush administration. Like that's dumb, but you make up explanations for stuff and say, hey, here's something that seems weird. I'm going to make up a hypothesis. Therefore my hypothesis like not. Well, you can test those hypotheses like that. Like you could prove through physics, 9-11 wasn't an inside job. In these cases, I mean. So again, you can never prove anything with certainty. You can never rationally, you never disprove all rational hypotheses. It's not possible. To any reasonable level of certainty you can disprove things like that through physics. You're without relying on word of mouth. I realize in a lot of these cases you do have to take witness information. And if you look through the book he actually does cite references for every source. Now, if you just want to say, well, maybe the source was wrong. Okay, I guess that could be possible, but it's not to say that they're all wrong or in all these cases, it's just a mistake of information or somebody's lying about something. And I do think in a lot of these cases, I do think that a certain amount of them are homicides that where people are never going to the park where say you want to kill somebody, you kill them outside the park, then you just say everybody went to the park that day and he walked out and got lost and we haven't seen him since. I do think that happens quite a bit, actually a lot of these cases, but I don't think it's satisfying to explain the whole paradigm in that way. There are millions and millions of very mundane explanations that each one could account for dozens of these things. And so you could just pick any of those millions of natural explanations and say, this one explains that. It was a clerical error. They wrote down the numbers wrong. They had the facts jumbled, they misrecounted the information, all kinds of very mundane things you could just add in there and say that could explain this fact. And you could just take all of those accumulation and put them together and say, any combination of all of these things is always going to be better than almost supernatural thing like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you want to say that there is an almost supernatural thing, like you would need to make some kind of testable predictions. Well, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Actually, that axiom does not go to the truth of a claim. It just goes to whether a claim should be believed or not. And I realized that's all we have because you can't prove, it's very difficult to prove things with absolute certainty. We can't really do that, but we have to make educated guesses based on the best information that we have. What is the definition of knowledge? I would just say it's something that we know. It's a fact that we know. In philosophy, it's a justified true belief. That's what knowledge is. So if you want to say that there is, you have some kind of a knowledge of this hypothesis of this supernatural, almost supernatural thing and you need a justification, you need a belief and it needs to be true. Those are the three factors. So we don't know if it's true. So you need a justification. And if you don't have a justification, all you have is a belief. So right now you have a belief. You've said, there's things you can't explain, you have a belief, okay? That goes to exactly nothing. And then you try to give a justification. Well, these are very strange things. Now, in philosophy, that doesn't count as a justification. That's just an argument for negative rates. So what we need for a justification is testable predictions. That would be a justification to believe that your hypothesis is true, but you don't have that. So right now you have just a belief and your justification is you can't explain stuff, which is the opposite of justification. So you don't have anything as far as I can tell, you just have a belief. Well, I'm not a philosopher. So I don't typically wait in those waters too much. I know you do a lot of work in there, but that's not my cup of tea. But again, I'm not being dogmatic about it. I'm not claiming absolute knowledge. I'm simply advocating that there could be things here that we aren't purvy to yet. And of course, the militant skepticism is gonna come in and say, no, nothing is ever connected. Everything is unexplainable. Everything is coincidence. Where are the people going? They went somewhere. Why? Because they just did. And if you have any further questions than that, you're a conspiracy theorist. Get off the internet and take a walk around the block to reconnect yourself with reality. Yeah, like if we see an event like a dice roll to six, there's two possibilities. One, somebody rolled it as a six. Or two, there is this Rube Goldberg machine thing that happened and somebody designed the dice specifically intended to roll six at this exact point in time. Like what's the most likely thing? Somebody just rolled it in the landing six. So that's the reasonable hypothesis. If you think you see a dice that's rolled a six and you've come up with this Rube Goldberg hypothesis that requires all these ridiculous things that have never been discovered yet, then yeah, that's crazy talk. You need more than a dice roll to six to come to the conclusion, there is this supernatural thing. Saying there's things you can't explain isn't evidence of anything. That's not a justification. Do you think that humans today have discovered every form of life there is on earth? Are you open to the fact that there could be life forms that we haven't just haven't come across yet? Yes, it's possible there are unicorns that we haven't discovered yet, but possible. It's possible, but I'm not postulating any one. I'm just saying, is there a possibility that there are forms of life? You would have to say yes, it could be a unicorn. It could be anything else, but it's definitely possible that it's there. Is it possible that Santa Claus exists? Well, that makes testable claims that we can test. I'm not, I guess it's philosophically possible, but no one would consider rationally. It's absolutely certain that there are animals that exist that we don't know about yet. And in fact, we discover new animals every single year. But you're just saying. So is possible Santa Claus exists? It's possible unicorns exist? Is possible leprechauns exist? Is possible and God exists? Possibility means nothing. Anything that is logically possible is possible. So it's not evidence of anything. Saying it's possible means nothing. It's not only possible that new animals exist that we haven't discovered yet. It's an absolute certainty that they do. You're saying, well, they are out there, but we have to assume that they couldn't be responsible. They wouldn't be able to take down a human or we would have seen it by now. No, I'm not saying that at all. So again, if you want to say that all of these cases are explained by some unknown animal that is working together and never been discovered yet, who's making thousands of people disappear. Yeah, that makes testable predictions that there's no evidence of that that doesn't work. It's not thousands of people a year. It's actually like these cases, the true missing 411 cases, they're 1600, but some of these cases go back to the, I mean, most of them start in the late 40s, but some of them go back before then, but they appeared and they're clustered, but they don't appear to be happening at a rate that would normally excite alarm. I mean, you ask only the government would do this, but they have two police agencies that work the national parks that have exactly the same job. Only government would come up with that, the park police and the park rangers, law enforcement rangers, and none of them really are forthcoming with data about these incidents in their parks. That's also addressed by the Kyle Pollock paper, like none of that is significant. The requests for data cost money because they have to locate all the data between all the agencies and go to the actual, like whatever the, where it happened and recorded, which they don't like just keep on file. So yeah, the fact that it costs them money is why they don't do it because it's completely waste of time. So there's no real interest there. It's not because they're hiding anything, it's because it costs money and time and they have better stuff to do than to answer weird questions about missing people. Yeah, it's not a big deal, right? Because we don't know what happened to them, but we just have to assume something must have happened to them. There you go, right? Well, obviously, if something happened to them, you have to assume something happened to them. And the most often- There you go, and any more questions of that is not a big deal, right? Well, if it's literally the exact same rate and explained by everything natural, then no, it's not a big deal. It's like, why do you think it is a big deal? I think we value human life and these people have families and these people are real people with real families and loved ones and hopes and dreams and they're just going in these parks to enjoy the scenery or to take a hike and they're not coming out and what happens to them really doesn't make sense with what we see. And I know the skeptics that you say they've gone through and debunked and looked at every single case and every single time found a natural explanation, but that's not what we see when we read through a lot of these cases, we do see things that don't add up. What about my explanation if they got the numbers wrong, couldn't explain literally every one of those cases? Well, not that that doesn't happen, but to pose that as an explanation for every single one. Wait, so remember, if we're talking about, is it possible, like is it possible there's an undiscovered species? Yes, is it possible that every single one of those is a clerical error where they just wrote the numbers down wrong? Is that possible? It could be, but that explanation to me is as unsatisfying to me as the undiscovered animal hypothesis is to you. I mean, it's just not... That's good, we'll go with that. So we have two very unsatisfactory explanations. One is from this new thing we haven't discovered yet. One is from this thing we've discovered and it happens all the time everywhere in the world with an extremely high rate of occurrence. People make mistakes and write stuff down wrong. Remember stuff wrong. Which one of those is the better explanation? Yeah, again, to postulate that it's an explanation for all these cases is unsettling to me. I don't think that's plausible. But again, if it's within our paradigm because we know that clerical mistakes are something that happens. So therefore, from the skeptical point of view it's always going to be more likely than something else. But yeah, I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm not saying it could not be clerical errors. I'm just saying that while recognizing that we do need to keep an open mind and be willing to go where the evidence leads you and even if that leads you to some uncomfortable areas that we don't understand a lot about. Like we just saw last week the Bigfoot debate on here. And you see, that's a very smart man. He's an accomplished doctor. He's a doctor. He's a very educated, smart person. He's not a kook. He's just following the evidence to where it leads him and he's willing to take that a little bit further to then what most people are comfortable with in the terms of scientific research. Yeah, I don't have any idea what you're talking about. There's lots of crazy PhDs who believe lots of weird things and they're very well accredited in their field and very good at their job. It isn't the fact that there's a PhD who believes something strange is not strange at all. But again, I'm still not seeing. So given my example, I'm just taking, it's just clarification. The only thing that explains literally all of the 1600 cases is people got the numbers wrong. That's, this is a hypothesis. It's possible that every single one of those 1600 cases of the however many thousands are reported every year are cases where people got the numbers wrong to make them look weird and strange like the baby walks 20 miles or whatever. That's a possibility. And because it's a possibility and it's also a possibility that there's a almost supernatural animal that we haven't discovered yet. That's also a possibility. Both of these explain all of the data potentially. But it's, which one is more reasonable to believe? Well, I mean, I don't think you're saying, because a lot of these cases, they don't hinge on just the numbers, just the clerical data. There are a lot of these cases. So I'm just posing this as a purely hypothetical. I'm saying my hypothesis just made up from nothing is that every single one of the 1600 cases that has seemed strange is completely explained by a clerical error and nothing else. That's just, it's a random hypothesis I came up with. And that is a possibility, right? It's possible. In that dichotomy where it's only those two explanations are allowed, of course, the skeptical position is going. So we can add another, we can say that some of them are explained by a clerical errors and some of them are explained by partial truth and some of them are explained by things that have happened to their natural causes, like the fact that people take their clothes off when they get hypothermia because they feel hot when they're not. There's lots of natural explanations that we can add in too, but that just adds more weight to the natural side. So I'm trying to take the most extreme natural hypothesis I can, the one that's the least plausible natural hypothesis. Though the one that's everything isn't just a clerical error, that's it. That hypothesis, just the most, the least plausible natural hypothesis is every one of these cases is explained by a clerical error. Obviously that's pretty ridiculous, but we're going to compare that to these cases, some percent of them is caused by this undiscovered almost supernatural animal or something. Which of these is more plausible? Well, I mean, when you force reality into that box for that hypothetical, of course it's going to, and put everything in those terms, of course that's going to be the more plausible of the two explanations, but that's not quite the situation we find ourselves in. And I think that for all these disappearances, of course the reality is they're all a mixture of explanations. Like when you find out what actually happened, some would be unknown medical conditions, some guy on the trail had a heart attack and keeled over and fell into a gorge or whatever, I'm sure that has happened. And things like animal attacks where the bear hides the carcass really well and just nobody ever finds the bones. It's a mixture of all outcomes. Or the bear peels it and the wolves eat the bones and the vultures eat the rest. So the bugs eat the rest. So yeah, there's definitely lots of combinations in there. So we could say that if you take this one hypothesis of just clerical errors and then add in these other things like natural explanations of unknown diseases, a bear combined with wolves eating all the bones because wolves can't eat bones, just fine. And we add in those natural explanations, the hypothermia causing people to take their clothes off. Like those actually make the natural explanation better. So then those make it more likely. So if we take just the all clerical errors or bigfoot and clerical errors are better and then you add things like, well, they also have unknown diseases which are very common or they had hypothermia or there's a bear ate one and the wolves, that actually makes the natural explanation even better than just the clerical errors explanation. So if just starting with all clerical errors is better than bigfoot and then you add in all these other things that we already know about that could explain it naturally, that seems like you're just adding more weight to the natural side to make that argument even better. Right, and again, I'm not being dogmatic about it. I'm not saying all these cases must be very unusual or that there could not be a rational explanation found but I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that in totality to make that assumption that they're all explainable that way, I guess from your philosophical point of view maybe it makes it, but it's not actually it's not actually saying that it couldn't be something else. It's just what's more likely to believe. I totally agree. I totally agree. It's logically possible that there is an animal that we haven't discovered yet like bigfoot that's doing all of it. And it's logically possible that it has like an ability to turn invisible like the species from starving. Those are all possibilities. Yeah, and actually there are reports of people in the woods seeing things that look like they have predator style camouflage. Obviously we don't have good evidence of it. It's just anecdotal and all the videos that have been put forward are not very clear. So, just what people say it's not strong evidence. It's possible there are literal predators that are literally in the forest killing people. That's a possibility. It could be. And if they're possibly, I don't know why you keep saying it's possible because possibility, it doesn't mean anything. It's like saying, it's not a married bachelor. Like congratulations, it's not a married bachelor. So saying something is possible isn't evidence. It doesn't support your case at all. Any more than it supports the case for Santa existing. Well, I think if we keep an open mind and we keep looking at it, or if we close our mind and just say, it's gotta be something we already know about, then you're never really going to know what you're missing. You're never going to be looking for something that you don't know is even there to look for. I mean, if let's say, theoretically, if there was something taking people at a very slow rate in these parks, maybe one or two per year, I mean, that would not statistically come up anywhere. They could do that almost indefinitely without anybody being the wiser because statistically, it's just not going to blow up any red flag for anybody. All right. So I think that's a good point that yes, we should always be open to any hypothesis and I'm happy to be open to any hypothesis. Like you can literally come up with a hypothesis of anything. You can say there are literal predators and aliens doing little fighty thing in the movies in the forest. That could be, that's a hypothesis. But in order to make a hypothesis reasonable to believe, because everything starts as imaginary first and then you have to demonstrate it's not imaginary, you need to take your hypothesis and say, if my hypothesis is true, here's some predictions I could make of something we will discover given this kind of experiment. And if we can discover that, then that's good evidence of your hypothesis. You can say, if I think there is this above almost supernatural entity or animal thing that we haven't discovered yet, I can predict we will discover it under these conditions or if we do something like if we like rent through the entire woods, there's a group of 10 million people and we all just walked the entire woods, we discover it. If you made that kind of prediction, then that's great, we can test this. But just saying we can't explain X isn't grounds for justification, it's just a hypothesis. So every hypothesis is equal, doesn't matter what it is. You'd say it's almost supernatural species or predator or Santa Claus, they're all hypotheses. But in order to get something above the level hypothesis, you need some way to independently verify that it's true outside of your imagination and you haven't presented that yet. No, and I can see it from the outset that I can't provide absolute proof or even strongly compelling proof as to what's going on in these cases. It could be any number of things and I'm just open to the possibility and I do think that we need to keep looking. It's very easy for us to just sit here and discuss these cases because they don't really mean anything to us but these cases do mean a lot to people, they are real people and they're not just philosophical constructs or axioms, they're real people with real families and things are happening and bad things happen all the time and while we do need to try and keep as objective of mind as possible, we do have to understand the human factors in all this. People are going missing and bad things are happening. And like I said, you going into the wilderness with your kids, keep an eye on them because I've seen so many in these cases where people are literally saying they turned their head away and their kid was gone and they're found dead miles away and nobody knows how that happened. Maybe it's rational, maybe it's not but either way, it's very unsettling especially to the people involved in all that. To see your child playing hide and seek in a national park and you see them run behind a tree and hide there and then when the coast is clear and everybody comes out and you don't see your kid come out from the tree 50 feet away from you and you go behind the tree and they're not there and then they never find them again. That's very unsettling. Yeah, it happens in not forced to like there was a recently a case in Florida where a kid was eaten by an alligator and the parents turned away for two seconds and then the kid was gone underwater. So yes, that happens all the time. It's very important to try to prevent that as much as possible but we also have to take into account that the fact that things happen that we can't explain isn't evidence of anything. Just Google argument from incredulity. Well, I'm not making an argument from incredulity. I'm not just saying because I don't understand what's happening or how it happened, therefore couldn't be because remember I'm not proposing a particular solution or a particular outcome and saying anything else is incredulous but I'm just saying that there's cases here that we don't really know what's happening and to keep an open mind on it. So what I understood your argument to be was that here's a bunch of things we can't explain. Therefore it's possible it's almost supernatural undiscovered species. You say almost supernatural. I mean, it's just an undiscovered species that we don't are aware of yet. Borderlining the natural or something I think we're your exact words? Borderlining the edges of what we're able to fit within our current paradigm of understanding. Yeah, I'm just trying to paraphrase that. Yeah, I know, I know. I'm an atheist too. I know, make the claim that magic and all that, I get it. I couldn't remember your exact words. So since you said borderlining the natural I said like almost supernatural borderlining almost. Yeah, I'm not proposing a supernatural explanation or spiritual or I'm sure that whatever it is it would be firmly grounded in the natural world. Just there's a lot of the natural world. We've really only been looking at it scientifically for a couple hundred years and we've learned a lot in that time but I think a thousand years from now people will look back at us and look at what we knew and what our knowledge was and what we thought and they will probably think a lot different. They probably won't look as highly at us as we do now and humanity's always done that, you know? Well, did I accurately represent your argument? Your argument is here's a bunch of things we can't explain therefore that justifies the belief in this borderline natural thing. Therefore that justifies considering that as a potential hypothesis, not as an absolute hype but it's open to it. Yeah. What would not be something we should consider as a potential hypothesis? Things supernatural, God taking somebody to heaven or whatever or just, you know, witches and incantations and magic spells and someone did a spell on them to make them disappear and, you know, things like of that nature. Well, a bit more in general. Like for anything that occurs we're trying to explain it. What makes something a reasonable hypothesis and something an unreasonable hypothesis? Like in general, not just specific examples. Whether it makes sense, whether the experimentation pans out, I guess it depends on the claim. Again, you probably have a philosophical construct for it but I don't weigh in that point. I'm interested in how you would personally answer that question. As opposed to what's reasonable, it would just be an overall valuation of the circumstances, what we know and making logical inferences and seeing where you arrive at. Where does the evidence take you? You know, what seems like a plausible outcome? Okay. You would probably have a philosophical axiom about that but I don't, you know, we're all just trying to do the best we can. We're on this rock being hurtled around the sun. We have imperfect senses. We have imperfect information. Our brains are not perfect and we see things that happen. We just try to make the best sense of them. And a lot of times it does turn out that we are able to understand something and make sense of it but that doesn't always work, you know? Yeah. So my answer would be anything is a plausible hypothesis. You can put a hypothesis of anything and I'm fine with it but every hypothesis is just imaginary. It's literally equivalent to just a thing you've imagined. Like I imagine Santa Claus did it. My hypothesis is Santa Claus did it. Exactly the same thing. So from my perspective, I don't care what your hypothesis is. Any hypothesis is fine. We should consider all of them. I'm happy to consider all of them but we need some way, like you mentioned before we need some way to prove it to show that it's not just something in your imagination. So I fully grant that yes, we should take every hypothesis seriously and try to find some way to test it. But without that, it's just a hypothesis. We may go into the Q and A. So I'll give you guys just a quick two minute warning. I hadn't realized the time had flown by. So give you a chance to respond each one of you if you want maybe a couple of minutes and then we'll go into the Q and A. Sure, James, thank you. Well, I'm just going like we were saying before. So you granted everybody knows that there are forms of life on earth that we haven't discovered yet. There are things we don't know and we don't really know what forms of life we haven't discovered yet. We just know that we haven't discovered it yet. And so I think that is say, the idea that that could be a possibility is a lot more rational than saying an overweight man in the North Pole putting presents under the tree is a hypothesis for why there's presents under the tree in the morning. It's at least somewhat grounded in reality. Oh yeah, sure, I'm happy to grant that. I'd say it's a better hypothesis than Santa Claus for sure. I can say yes. The hypothesis, it's a undiscovered nature, natural animal of some kind is far better than magic or miracles are gone for sure. I can definitely, I would agree that your hypothesis is better than magic. We're going to jump into Q and A folks. I want to say thanks so much for all of your questions and starting it up. Appreciate your two seconds loading. Did you get the message from Amy Newman about the actor show? I didn't, but I will add it to the description. And folks, we are willing to link an after show no matter what side is hosting it. And so if you have an after show for a debate in the future that you'd like us to link in the description, let us know, we'll do that. And we usually ask if you do it beforehand, but Amy gets an exception because we like Amy. But let's see, Smokey St. Thanks, here we go. He says, for James W, okay, as I thought it was for me. For James W, my loyal channel supporter, why are you trying to avoid mentioning the many people lost in the expansive soy fields? Bias much? Well, you know, Smokey St. there, he indulges in quite a bit of conspiracy lore. He has some very unconventional views on things and he still won't pay his overdue soy bills. So they're going to have to send Brett Keen to repossess it out of his fridge if he doesn't pay with the next week or so. Amazing. And by the way, you know, the only person that I've ever reached out to, and I'm pretty sure if I remember right verbatim when I said, oh, you want to come on, moderate a debate? We'd love to have you. It'd be an interesting debate. And I got an F.U. It was from good old Brett Keen, and so. The forest gump of Christian apologetics. We don't have, we don't hold grudges here, Vogue. We wish people well. We let it roll off our back. Barron Salas, thanks for your super chat says, James W, I have a gold egg laying 10 for you. Only will cost you $10,000. Hurry up before it gets sold. Well, I would have to take a loan out. T-Jump, can you loan me $10,000? Depends if I can get a contract that put your house up for liquidity if you don't pay it, yes. Next up, thank you. Maybe some soy futures stocks. There you go. Thank you, Rodin, last name for your question. Said all the people went missing when T-Jump was not debating, proving that T-Jump's comfy chair is a bloodthirsty monster. Good to know. And, gee. Perucious. That is a valid hypothesis that my chair is actually the one causing all the missing people in the forest, also a valid hypothesis. Amazing. And, Jay Mixon, thanks for your question said, could the gentlemen restate their positions for clarity? So maybe if you could put it in a few sentences, each of you will give you a chance to do that. Like, what's the overall thesis, for example, James W, that you're arguing for? We know that you said it's natural. It's not like something that's immaterial or magic. You're saying that it's natural, but, well, let you explain yourself. Well, I would just say that there are a lot of cases. A lot of them probably do have a natural explanation whether or not we can understand it or not. And when I say natural, within our current, our currently understood paradigm, but there are some that don't seem to fit comfortably in that. And I'm okay with considering alternate hypothesis. Maybe it's, who knows? It could be aliens. It could be other forms of life, but it would definitely be part of the real natural physical world. Gotcha. And, Tom? There's always an explanation that you can build from combinations of known things. And there's always infinitely many explanations you can build of unknown things. We should always prefer the ones commoing with known things. Gotcha. And, thank you very much for your question, Jake4D, who says, watch Airsoft Sniper videos. Dozens of people walk past them within a couple feet and never see them. The right guy with a sniper scope. He is a dick. I've never seen those videos. Yeah, I've seen those videos. They're very entertaining. Gotcha. And, thank you very much for your question. This one coming in from Jay Mixon says, social cancers ascribe intellectual disabilities to people in a derogatory manner. Class intact is rare. That's something to do with the chat while you guys were debating. So, thank you very much for your question. This one coming in from Samuel Lilleholm says, for James W., what are your thoughts on the Nephilim? Any possible connection to Bigfoot? I'm an atheist, so I don't subscribe to the theory of the Nephilim. I'm open to, but agnostic about whether or not there's an undiscovered, homidid, referred to as Bigfoot Yeti Sasquatch. I haven't spent enough time looking at it to form an opinion, but I would be open to seeing evidence. Gotcha. And then, oh, do want to remind you folks, we are on podcast. Folks, we are very excited about this. We have seen people have given a lot of positive feedback about the podcast, which we really appreciate because we are working hard on it some days. And, no, the real, we are actually working hard on it. And so, I do appreciate all the positive feedback as well is that it's honestly, it's exciting to see that people, it's actually, it's getting a lot more downloads. And so, that's exciting. And so, if that's useful to you guys, want to let you know, pull out your favorite podcast app right now, we're probably on it. And if we're not, we'll work hard to get on there, just let us know. Next question from Dave Langer. Oh, I don't know, Dave Langer, James W, you might have to, you might have to put him in his place. He says, question for James W. Don't you think before you can claim the explanation of something is supernatural, you first have to show the supernatural is possible? Oh, yeah, it just depends on your definition of supernatural and that's not where I'm going. I'm not saying it would be magical or supernatural. I'm just saying that there's a lot of things out there that we don't yet understand and we don't know what we don't understand. So, yeah, it would all fit, I believe, within the natural world, just outside of what we currently know about it. Gotcha. And let's see here, looking for any extra questions that have come in. When is Darth Dawkins coming back from the Boo Bully? Well, we may actually have a Darth Dawkins debate this month, no joke, as Converse reached out to him and he said, I will come on to the debate channel if it's not James moderating. So if Converse moderates it, he might come back on. Darth Dawkins? Darth Dawkins, that's right. I don't know, I thought we were tying that. It's like, it's funny. Give me, give me first Darth Dawkins with Converse. Yes, do it. Oh, you could do a Kickstarter for that. I'd pay three bucks to see that. Where was it? You want to debate Darth Dawkins? Yes, yes, anytime. Father versus son, we'd love it. People would show up for that. That would be a big event. And so we are excited, though, as we do have a lot of epic stuff coming up. And so in fact, I'll be back with a post-credits scene to mention some of the upcoming epic debates, you guys, as we are pumped. We are one right now, we're close. We're close to setting up a debate on the title is Islam versus atheism, which is more dangerous. And so that should be a juicy one with the apostate prophet and Nadir Ahmed. So we're setting it up, it's not guaranteed. Mark my words, it's not guaranteed because I don't want to count the old ducks before their hatch, is that the phrase? Basically, that gets me in trouble sometimes. I share too much about a possible debate and then somebody's like, hey, I didn't commit to that yet. Why are you talking about that? So Amy Newman says, psh, you're an awesome mod gently keeping people on track. Thank you, bless your heart, you know? I don't know. It's funny that like the two of the people that I have the biggest problems with. I never even met Brett Keynes. Like, why are you so mad at me anyway? So we appreciate you guys. Triggered. Our guests are linked in the description. So if you want to hear more from Tom or James W and James W, the link for him is currently Amy Newman as they work together on different videos. And so you can check out more of James there as well as you'll hear Amy, who's a regular on moderated debate and rodent last name. Thanks for your last minute super chat. And now for my testable prediction, someone will go missing after this debate ends. So says the T jump comfy chair theory. And yes, it's true, you guys. We hope you guys take care of yourselves out there. As I mentioned, oh, Donald Kronos, let me mention this, you guys. Thanks for your reminder, Donald. You guys, if you were there last week, we are excited that this debate is happening. So one I want to mention, the one you're currently seeing on the bottom right of your screen between T jump and Samuel Nassan is going to be this Friday. So Tom is going to be flying out there in the next few days. And then they're going to debate in Georgia. It's going to be streamed live on moderated debate. We really appreciate the hosts that I actually can't make it. So they've been gracious enough though, to nonetheless, it sounds like they're going to allow us to stream that on moderated debate. And it'll be live there south of Georgia in case anybody's in that area. I don't know if they, with COVID, I don't know if they're letting people, how many people are allowed to cram in there, but. I mean, how we go get the chair down to Georgia. That's true. Getting Tom's chair to all these public speaking venues is no easy feat. And we're excited folks as if you were paying attention last week, this is Epic and we're so glad that it's actually going to work out. You see at the bottom right of your screen, Kent Hovind returns. It's been about a year, I think, that since Kent Hovind has been on, he's going to face Donald Cronos. That's going to be Epic. And so that'll be this Tuesday. So just a couple of days away, then Wednesday, David Fitzgerald is going to be here. He's a kind of, you could say, kind of a fairly famous mythicist. He doesn't believe Jesus existed. He's going to be debating a Christian and a Buddhist, Brenton, or as some of us like to call him, Big Brain Brenton. So Maynard saves things for your super chat site, are either familiar with Dyatlov Pass and or heard of the Wind Low Hum insanity hypothesis. I have not, have you guys? No, T-Jump will probably be able to check on it quickly. I mean, the Wind Love thing sounds familiar, but not the other one. Huh, super interesting. Could that be like a Alaska version of the Bermuda Triangle? I saw, I remember seeing something about that, like another proposed triangle up there. That's juicy. And next up, this one, do we have a question? Oh, cordial contender says, have Darth Dawkins versus Mr. Batman? I don't know if that'll ever happen, but it'd certainly be interesting. It'd be Tom's dad versus Tom's uncle. It has happened. I think there's, Tom's rabbit, I think he has Batman and Darth talking, and hilarity ensues. Oh my goodness, that would have to be hilarious. Seriously, I'm just trying to imagine. Sir, actually, I was trying to explain, sir. Don't pull the moustache, right? Oh yeah, what is your precondition for knowledge? That should be really good. But yes, we appreciate all you guys, and our guests are linked to the description, so I'll be back with a post-credits scene, but want to remind you that both James, W, and Tom are linked in the description. We appreciate them, and we appreciate you, everybody. Jay Mixon, last minute, Super Chat said, looking for a t-jump versus stated clearly, round two. I learned so much in that debate. So glad that you found that valuable, Jay Mixon. That was an epic debate. We loved it as well. And so that, folks, yes, that is kind of the vault for modern-day debate. If you go over to the science playlist, it's not too far. It's like maybe five to 10 debates back. And so, cordial conditers says, a lot of over-talking. Don't over-talk me. That's right. That phrase is like my favorite phrase of all from good old darts. So we appreciate you guys. I like the James as a girly man. That's my favorite one. Oh, that's right, yeah. Jay is a sicker. I'm not talking. Yeah, he did a rant after the debate on here that he was really angry at James. So Tom Rabbit uploaded his rant and one of his famous quotes from the rant is, James is a girly man. That's right. He accused me of giggling like a 14-year-old girl as well, which may be true, but still. I mean, you don't have to say it. Tony D says, let's see, smoky. Okay, we're not gonna get into that. So thank you guys for hanging out with us. We appreciate you. We hope you have a great night, both James W and Tom Jump. Have a good night. Thank you. Thanks. So we appreciate you hanging out with us. I love getting to just hang out with you after the show. It's honestly, it's just nice to kind of get to know you folks. I'm watching the chat. I do appreciate you guys hanging out here. Good to see you again, Boiled Pizza, formerly known as Mank Deems. And doubting Tom, it's good to see a King 101. Says Juicy Debates coming soon. You're right about that King 101. I'm seriously excited about the idea of what is more dangerous Islam or atheism that I think is going to be a juicy one. It's funny that I always think about when I host a debate, I always think who are the audiences that'll watch? We don't usually do theology debates anymore because many, many of our subscribers are atheists and a lot of them just aren't interested in theology. So we used to. And maybe once in a blue moon, if it's like maybe two big names, we would do it. But otherwise it's pretty rare. However, I'm finding it fascinating that Islam versus atheism, which is more dangerous, that would be basically, I'm just thinking, it would be interesting that the Christians wouldn't have a dog in the fight. But I imagine that they'd be watching with popcorn. They'd get a kick out of it. And I think everybody else would as well. But it's one that I would normally, I'd be afraid to be like, oh, that, well, the Christian members of the audience probably wouldn't tune in. But this one I think they would. And Manic Panda says, I liked this debate. Thank you, Manic Pandas, for doing that. Appreciate that. Christopher Hatch, good to see ya. Thanks for being here with us. And, see, SmokeySaint says, love me or hate me. All of you will remember me. I am sure that's true. Stripper Licker, thank you for being with us. Dave Langer, good to see you again. Oh, that reminds me, Dave Langer, because Dave Langer was the person that hooked us up on Twitch. So I do have to let you know, folks, we're on Twitch. I will, first, I'll say hi to the Twitch gang because right now they're hanging out there and they're probably like, James, you've ignored us, I'm so sorry, friends. But here, I'm going to be back in just a moment. Man, this computer I've got here that I type into to communicate with the chat is ancient. But it's okay, it just takes a little bit to load. So, Twitch chat, we're up to nine. That's cool, that's great. That's like average viewership in the old Twitch chat is definitely growing. And so let me see where you guys are. Oh, for some reason it's not showing me the live chat in Twitch sometimes. I don't know why that is, but here is, thanks Tussbeatbox for linking our Twitch. I'm gonna pin that to the top of the chat. And yes, we're excited though, you guys. If you have subscribed to us via Twitch, using your free Amazon Prime sub, because if you have Amazon Prime, you can use, you get a free sub that you can use on Twitch toward any streamer that you want, who's at least affiliate status. So what you can do is you can actually sub to us. And that helps the channel and it's no extra cost to you because if you don't sub to any channel, it's like it doesn't make any difference to your account. Whether you use the sub or not, everything stays the same. So that's just kind of a perk of your sweet Amazon Prime membership. So if you're an Amazon Prime person, consider, hey, let me know if you'd like to. We can send you the link for how you can sign up and subscribe to us on Twitch. And then what's awesome is that, like I said, it's each person, I think it's like $2.50 that goes to moderate date of eight per month. And reminder, if you have subscribed to us on Twitch with a Amazon Prime subscription, the free one, you have to renew it every month. So friendly reminder, you might want to go over there and just re-click. Basically, if you go back to moderate date of eight's page, which right now is in the chat, it's linked at the top of the chat. And if you click on subscribe and then you kind of like just look down and it'll be like under the normal paid subscription offer, you can, it'll say like free subscription from Amazon Prime and you just click that and it'll renew it. You have to renew it each month. And so we appreciate that. And Tuss Beatbox, thanks so much. She just shared the link for how you can use Amazon Prime to get that free Amazon or I should say free Twitch subscription, which you can use on any streamer you want. That's at least affiliate status, which we are now thanks to Dave Langer and many others. So thanks everybody at Twitch for helping us grow. And then I'm still learning Twitch. Embarrassingly, it's just, there's so many things that I've got to work on folks and I still haven't learned Twitch or Discord. I'm embarrassed to say that, but honestly, it really is. It's that busy that it's hard for me to do that. And so I think the word on the streets is you can use emoticons and sweet things. Like can you send pieces of pizza? I think that I saw that on Destiny's channel today. But yes, we hope Destiny is doing well. Our old buddy, it's been a while, he's been so helpful to modern day debate. When he comes on, people love watching. It's always a great time. He's a pleasant person. So we just really enjoy Destiny. But yes, seeing you in the chat, let's see, we've got Mark Reed, YouTube Surgeon General and many others, appreciate you guys hanging out. And yeah, I am excited, you guys. We have got a lot of epic debates coming up for real. And it's up in the air in terms of what happens with Fight the Flat Earth this Saturday. We almost had one set up, but it just didn't work out. And that was my fault. It fell through the cracks, you could say. So what we're going to do is we are working on setting up a possible debate this Saturday with Fight the Flat Earth. It's now kind of on the fence, you could say. And then by the way, P Mars, I guess, wants to debate veganism. I don't know who P Mars is. He seems like an angry individual, but you know what, we give everybody a shot, right? So cordial contender, good to see you again. Mosquito bite. Thanks for hanging out with us, good to see you. Roberto Rossio, thanks for hanging out with us, buddy. Appreciate it. Colin Lorenz, good to see ya. Thank you, YouTube Surgeon General, for your support. But yeah, really, I'm excited. I think we're gonna hopefully have a debate with Vegan Gaines and a professor next week. I haven't reached out to either. I've got to talk to them and make, you know, we've got to find a time that'll work for everybody. But that's the hope at least. And so that's another one to keep in mind and stick around for. And that's right. Yeah, we are excited about the future. We are going to do big things. We're learning, we're growing. There are a lot of things that we're still probably doing terribly wrong. Like a lot of our audio video stuff are branding. Someone told me it's terrible today. That's okay, we're gonna learn. That's the process. You gotta trust the process. You gotta stick with it. And this channel is going to become bigger and bigger. And it's exciting because our goal is to give everyone their fair shot to make their case on a level playing field. And so we are excited for that. And so we hope that you believe in that shared vision as we make it happen in the future. It's possible. We are persistent. We are going to stick with it and that's gonna happen. So thanks for all your support, you guys. We'll see you on Tuesday as Kent Hovind returns to take on Donald Cronos. Donald, are you still in the, let's see, Donald Link now. I am going to send you a link, Donald Cronos, to Zoom. I need you to figure this out. I'm sorry, Donald. I love you. So I'm gonna send it to you right now though via email. And then what we will do is called, we will, so we will try to get this to work. I have no idea what happened last time, but don't worry. We're resilient. We always stick with it. And so we're gonna figure this out right now. And so, stripper liquor, good to see you. Robert Page, thanks so much for your support, buddy. That means a lot. I appreciate your kind words. We're excited about the future. We really are. Invite. Now Donald Cronos, I'm sending this via, let me see here. Let me find this universal artisan. Good to see you again. So it sounds like a good lineup, James. Absolutely, we're excited about the future, you guys. It's gonna be epic stuff. So we appreciate it. Now Donald Cronos, I sent you the link to this Zoom chat right now. So hopefully that works out. Jim Benton said, are you open to having an interview? I'd be willing to do an interview on another channel, but on modern day debate, we try to keep it where it's as strict as possible that we only host debates other than the occasional, like if I do a video saying thank you or if I apologize, if I did something stupid. So YouTube Surgeon General says, Craig is ready to work with and fun. Shouldn't have any issues. Yeah, Craig is usually up for a lot of stuff. I don't know if he'll be up for what I emailed him today, but we'll see. And let's see. King Crew, where is this? What did I just see? Who is Sam? Sam Harris has a few more than 50,000 subscribers. So that's a possibility, but for real, like we'd like to have him, but it's still, he's a little bit bigger than 50,000. He's like, he's gigantic, like Jordan Peterson level. So it's going to take a little bit longer, but we are, that is something that we do have as a goal in the long term. So I want to say thanks everybody for hanging with us. Keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable. We appreciate you. We're excited about the future, you guys. And so we appreciate all of your support. We love you guys. I hope you have a great rest of your Sunday. And thanks for hanging out with us. We will see you on Tuesday, as that should be epic, amazing.