CVS Live Guest - 2021-03-05 - Brenda von Ahsen

Author Streamed Friday March 5th, 2021

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I interviewed Brenda way back in late June 2019. This time we talked a little bit about Brenda's ongoing education in philosophy with digressions into other more mundane topics. As usual it was a pleasant and friendly conversation, sadly youtube chopped off the last few minutes, but it was mostly our goodbyes.


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These YouTube transcripts are generated automatically and are therefore unformatted and replete with errors.
all right so i think we're live it seems to be indicating that we're live so i'm here with brenda vanassen once again brenda how are you i'm i'm just fine thank you and how have you been since i last spoke with you it's been at least a year just generous yeah yeah i got a tan and learned how to play the ukulele and you changed your name to obama obama yeah i yeah i didn't recognize him rest people people get a tickle out of that yeah i will ask you to make them jiggle a little bit when you're speaking when you're going on a prolonged um rant or whatever just make them jiggle just a little bit for us that would be good sure sure so when i did my last live stream uh you did a little live chat thing just asked if i wanted to chat about something i think it was about uh evolution versus creationism is that right well i as i recall we did i don't recall talking in depth about evolution versus creationism my recollection is that we just talked about things in general yeah um that's what i recall yeah yeah you remember we did a second interview and i had technical problems and lost it do you remember that i remember that but i have no recollection what the details of that thing were yeah i'm sorry about that but um so i'll just let you lead the conversation because i'm my mind is elsewhere and you can draw me into the topics that uh that you think might be of interest to the listeners or just to yourself generally okay well um i live in minnesota and in minnesota here we have a program uh from the state where uh people who are seniors and i'm a senior are eligible to take courses at the university of minnesota or a reduced fare i pay ten dollars a credit which means forty dollars for a four credit course wow i'm taking two courses right now one is critical thinking and the other is a history of philosophy of modern philosophy in the critical thinking course right at this time we are studying the scientific method and we've been this study induction deduction and abduction in the history of western philosophy we of course start with descartes because it's modern modern philosophy typically starts with also john locke but we've also all are discussing people who were not quite so famous like ammo and margaret cavendish margaret cavendish is the one we're studying right now she had a book called the blazing world which is touted to be one of the first science fiction novels or or works ever produced and it is a a fantasy and she is touted as being one of the first uh early um feminist writers of her time she was a um a very privileged woman but she did not receive a big uh really in-depth education and so she experienced a lot of discrimination of that time a lot of women of that time were not well educated she was extremely prolific all throughout her life she wrote poems and plays um she was married to the duke of newcastle and um she was a a royalist in a time of political upheaval during this during the 16th and 17th centuries when there was a lot of you know political um things going on um so she was a defender of the aristocracy nevertheless she was also a feminist so she had a very um nuanced uh physicians she was uh she scandalized people quite a lot because she would often um wear clothes they don't describe it in detail but they they she wear wears clothes that were not you know not as feminine as as the times called for she was um she engaged in an intellectual pursuit crime did not do she advocated that women should be receive an education which for that time was a radical feminist point of view that women should be educated um and she had a very her her um her system of of philosophy was sort of a one where everything is conscious and self-moving um the uh the everything is everything is is sort of material in a sense uh the soul is material spirits are meaning that their she had a period of atomism uh which she then later abandoned for what i understand to be a kind of holism so sh and she was um not necessarily always in favor of the of the corpuscular theories that were promoted by descartes and who were the main leaders of the materialist movements at of that time she she didn't like the fact that they were unthinking corpuscles and atoms she felt that they had to be uh thinking and alive and and endowed with self-movement so um that was sort of her metaphysics it was is very different we don't think it's correct today but it was definitely very creative and another theory that she should have received more more um she should have received more attention than she got because her theories weren't that different from some certain men who had similar theories because there were a lot of theories about because people couldn't didn't we didn't know that atoms existed we didn't know that cells existed i mean her early things is she was showing up issues given a microscope or demonstrated a microscope was demonstrated to her and they showed her a flea and she was shocked to see how how monstrous the flea was um in comparison and uh i i would imagine a lot of people you know you look at the electron microscope photographs today of things like tardigrades they look like monsters right out of a science fiction novel and to the people of that time a flea in a microscope was was pretty was probably pretty shocking to to them you know and the people were also shocked about you know the the telescope was um also not that old of an instrument and it was revealing things about the world and and beliefs and that was also probably shocking and upsetting to people so she had a very different um she had a lot of uh radical ideas her name was her name again was margaret cavendish okay and if you google her you will find a large there's an entire website devoted to her with the database of her works um it's very she's very creative um i you know obviously i don't think that everything is is alive and animated and and and she would say that they make decisions so you know that's that's that was her belief and i don't really think that that applies but that's what she thought she thought there were basically four kinds of things um four kinds of shapes like uh spheres for water squares for earth let me see i can't remember what fire fire was just sharp points they were thought so they associated things like like if something if something was like biting at your tongue they felt that well it must have then the substance of which it was made which they couldn't see must be like sharp and pointed uh water which is fluid and flows that will that much must be um that must that must be spherical um earth is solid and packs so that must be cubes little cubes that's that was her that was her metaphysics at the time sounds very much like some of the pre-socratics uh yeah talked in those terms she also thought that but she also thought that for instance so we can't know anything about god she believed in god but she didn't think that you could know anything because you can't know anything about infinity and um and so she so her world animistic but it wasn't like it was it was sort of removed i'm i'm not sure if i if removed is the correct word but i'll say removed or at least a one or two steps past past god god didn't directly animate everything things moved on their own they had their own will they had their own intentions and god wasn't so much you know he created things but they they didn't they had their movements was their own so so they moved um so these these these um these things would move on their own yeah i used to believe that i used to believe that everything was alive and every every sub every subset of those living things was also alive and you have to have that fractal sort of image if you have that point of view like she's describing there or that you're describing about her worldview i mean if if i'm alive if you grant that much then you would also according to her worldview you'd have to grant that the molecules in my fingernail are also alive and they're moving of their own volition i used to i used to when i was a pantheist that was the sort of hippy dippy view that i took without any scientific basis for it was just an intuition that uh life is everywhere life is everywhere you know i'm not a hundred percent sure if she'd be a pantheist i think she would be should be a pan psychist today okay i think what's a psychist pan psychism believes that consciousness um is a fundamental aspect of the universe okay it appreciates everything it's irreducible and so you have electrons protons and stuff and you have uh properties such as consciousness are a fundamental part of the universe and i think she would believe i think she would believe something like that i i can't yeah it's hard to say for 100 sure but that's somewhat similar um conception to her view um and she also wrote quite a lot of plays um she wrote and poetry and she explored she had um views about marriage i don't think she um it's kind of weird she was very much in love with her husband yeah and and their relationship and stuff but she kind of didn't really um she had some negative views about marriage um and she she felt she had a lot of you know in one of her works in the blazing world um her character has a a platonic relationship with an empress of another world and so it's definitely not sexual but it's definitely also a platonic relationship which is very very close and intimate and um i think in some of her plays there's a fair amount of dressing possibly um possibly because i haven't read deeply into her plays and poetry so i can't i can sort of only generalize it seems to me like they would be um there would be some cross there would be some same-sex i don't know if there was is actually actually sex but definitely same-sex attractions or affiliations um i think she was flexible in that regard maybe but i can't really say for sure is that why one of the things that attracts you to her because she was she no it's because she's a signed reading i know but the point is you've read a lot of stuff uh and this is the one that you seem to be most excited about or at least it's the first one that you've talked about to me uh because it's what we've been discussing for the past week or so okay it's fresh on my mind before that it was john locke before that it was ammo who was a critic of descartes that was an african man from from from yeah from guinea or i think which which was a horrible instance of of the slave trade and he was he was nevertheless a very successful lawyer and a black man in a time when um black men from ghana i think that's the correct i got the correct name of the country right now ghana were were um shipped and sold at the same time that he was a he was a a lawyer in europe and married married into wealth in europe uh i wrote a treatise that we read that was uh offered a different or a criticism of descartes right so so we read a major philosopher and then we read some of the contemporaries who critiqued him who are not necessarily always well known yeah and so that's what we're doing with uh and and now with uh margaret's uh with margaret cavendish and i would expect next week going to either spinoza or leibniz i can't remember which is next yeah that was one of my favorites spinoza he was always one of my favorites and he was he was he was classified as an atheist he was he was accused of being an atheist yeah i read the tribunal or whatever the jews had a session condemning him it was pretty brutal um but i was an atheist when i was a spinozist and uh yeah i i've lost my sort of the romance of spinoza now that i'm a catholic but i i started out he was he was one of the first that got me really excited and uh i classum is a pantheist well that's my understanding not in that module yet we're not in that module yet so i i yeah that's my understanding he's class that way he's one of the more interesting ones in terms of modalism too in terms of the possible and he said that whatever is whatever is possible is actual eventually is going to be actual so there's no such thing as an unfulfilled potential there's no such thing as a possibility that goes unfulfilled and so i'm not sure about what to think about that i'm not sure i believe in in that all modal possibilities exist i'm not sure i can believe that um okay hold on hold on now um well what he says is there's only the actual so if it's not actual it's not possible that's what i think what he says i'm not an expert but this is um there's a there's a difference between saying that and saying that everything that's possible is actual i think it's the other way around i think he says uh what's what's actual is the only thing that's possible if it's not actual it's not possible i think that's a sort of a negative take on what you were suggesting so so i was i went out today and i didn't but i thought about it but i could have gone to the grocery store yeah to get some groceries so i think i don't see any contradiction i having it being possible that i could have gone to the grocery store i didn't i did i don't know what he would say about the fact that today you thought about it and then tomorrow you actually do it so he'd say well yeah you see it is it is possible because you actually did it whereas if you never end up going to the store which would be a little bit weird then you'd say the reason you didn't go is because it wasn't possible to begin with well i'm able to go to the store anytime i i wish right i have the ability to go there should i should i have yeah should i have should i form the desire to go to my local grocery store i have the ability to well you're making you're making a lot of assumptions about your physical health and that you're nervous system isn't going to implode or something you know i mean well you there you're making a lot of assumptions that everything is going to go very smoothly with the public transportation system or whatever it is you're taking a lot of assumptions that's what i would take i would take uh i i don't own a car so i would take the bus i would i would leave my apartment i would catch the bus and get off at the correct stop and go grocery shopping and then make a return trip and i don't see any obstacles to that it seems to me to be logically possible because it doesn't entail any kind of contradiction yeah yeah i would need to i would need to look at what he actually taught in terms of possibilities in actuality but it's not uh from the brief outlines that i have heard during this years ago over the course of study of the history of philosophy uh it didn't it didn't really appear appeal to me it wasn't one of the things that made me a spinoza it was just one of those quirky little things and i'm sure he has good arguments because he usually does have uh well thought out arguments whether you agree with them or not is another matter you don't you don't have to you don't have a grocery store within walking distance like just around the corner kind of thing there is a convenience store within walking difference if i want to pay the price so items would cost a little bit extra yeah so then it would be a um cost benefit in my mind do i want to pay extra for the convenience of just walking half a block to the convenience store yeah yeah or get on the bus and go to the grocery store where um um the things there's a selection of fresh produce and uh items are typically lower priced than they are in a convenience store yeah so that would be like if it's raining maybe or if it's super cold uh i might not wish to make the trip on the bus yeah so uh you're not hyper paranoid about the covid sometime this month you broke up there repeat what you said i've had my first vaccination okay it's a two-stage vaccination vaccine so i get the next one sometime this month was that uh pfizer i i don't know i just went there okay vaccine uh i i don't care it's but yes it's very much very much a concern absolutely because i'm in a yeah yes because i'm older so yes i am vulnerable so yes i was concerned about catching about catching it because i felt like it could very easily um be fatal for me yeah so i was concerned about it yeah yeah yeah yeah are your lungs a particular weak point with you or not really my lungs are just fine i don't have any outstanding um health issues right but i'm old yeah oh that's the main one yeah old and a bit overweight i'm not diabetic i'm not diabetic but i am older so i don't know yeah it's a concern yeah i just mentioned it because i haven't taken public transportation since uh march last year full year yeah i don't mind i just wear a mask it's not a big deal to me and one of the side benefits of never taking public transportation is i haven't been sick i haven't had cold i haven't had the flu and it's all because public transportation is a really really good place to get sick well nationally my understanding is that cold season has kind of just been nipped in the bud because of the quarantine people are not interacting and it has effectively shut down the cold season that's my understanding i would get sick uh the beginning of winter and at the end of winter pretty much every year up until this year i hardly ever get sick no yeah i hardly ever get sick that's good good strong constitution in your uh in your course you mentioned the history of western philosophy modern philosophy and then there was another major thing that you mentioned i can't yeah yeah do you want to talk just a tiny bit about what excites you most from what you've learned so far in that course um well we've gone through you know basic logical thinking which is deduction induction and then the recent chapter that we've talked about has been the scientific method and and abduction so what is abduction and how does that differ from induction it is it well it is logically fallacious uh technically abduction is affirming the consequent but oh yeah yes but if it's used without that it is used in hypothesis formation then it's acceptable right so um give an example um if it rains the street will be wet the street is wet therefore it has rained um as a conclusion that's fallacious because i'm referring the consequent that the street is wet however if it's as a hypothesis then it needs to be subjected to further tests so then i see that it has rained out i make the inference that um it i mean i me i make the observation that the street is wet i make the fallacious inference that it rained but then i i take that as a hypothesis and then i test to see whether or not it actually has rain okay so then i would do things like i would investigate well you know was it a sprinkler no it wasn't a sprinkler are there did the weather does the weather say it's gonna it has rain today the weather might say yes it has rain today and there are dark clouds over me and it's raining over there and that cloud was recently over here so then i can make an inductive inference that probably um it has rained and that and that raining is what explains the street being wet okay and why did uh why did people feel the need to add this abduction to induction reduction because induction um there there are problems with it it was simply making inductive reference inferences because induction is um not not very powerful it's not it doesn't give you a very good um because um typically inductive inferences are under right i'm sorry inductive inferences are underdetermined okay which means that there's you know i can um if it rains the street will be wet it has rained therefore the street is wet and i could investigate and see say yes all it meets all those conditions but it could be the case that um descartes demon made it rain or made made the streets wet and it's just a coincidence and there's an infinite number of um ways of explaining why the street is wet and the inductive inference doesn't um doesn't shut off all of those all of those other possible explanations and so abductive reasoning is a way to to at least um whittle down some of those some of those uh possibilities i think what it brings to mind is uh two things common sense and intuition do those play any role in abduction oh possibly yeah i think that would be the basically an induction you're making a hypothesis you're making a guess so yeah your intuitions and your background knowledge are going to be very important in your hypothesis formation and what you form so somebody who is a physicist and has a great deal of experience in physics is going to be have a better background knowledge about what is the what the most uh what the best hypothesis is versus somebody off the street they're going to go i don't know you know who know you know they're not going to know but they don't have the because they don't have the training and the education in the background to to know what a good um what a good abductive hypothesis would even look resemble or look like yeah yeah what do you think about deduction did you learn anything about deduction or were there any nuances that you hadn't considered before you took the course well for me no but you know of course it does the usual thing which is deduction of course gives you certain knowledge i mean if if the premises are true then the collusion conclusion must be true however a lot of our daily day-to-day reasoning is not going to be deductive it's not going to be it's going to be very very rare when we um can actually say with certainty that something is true that's it's most of our everyday inferences are inductive rather what do you think what do you think about conditional deductive uh i guess you could call it sort of uh um you know you're not committing to the premises you're just saying if these premises are true then it necessarily follows x y inside i think that would be induction wouldn't it i'm not sure um if these well i i s no that no that wouldn't be um so yeah sure if if the premises if i premise premise one and it says if if a then b right yeah second premise is a therefore b yeah that makes sense yeah like uh if you've got a plus a equals four and i say well i make a conditional deduction that if a equals 2 then a plus a equals 4 but if a equals anything other than 2 then a plus a does not equal 4. so is that deduction would you say it's a conditional deduction where we don't know what a is but the only a that fits with the answer is is two in this case is that does that fall within the realm of deduction for you a conditional i'm not sure but it sounds to me like it would yeah because that's that's kind of how i am with my religion like if this is true then it follows that that is true but i don't necessarily have to be 100 committed to um the premise you see what i mean this is like there's a leap of faith involved with religion yeah if if all men are mortal and socrates is a man then socrates is mortal right and it will depend on whether or not all men are mortal and and that might be an induct that would be something we would need to to discover about the world would be um something based on experiment which our experience and we say well it seems like all men are mortal maybe some men are immortal yeah not in this realm or whatever you'd at least at least one man who has never died and we he just keeps himself quiet and he's never gets noticed and how would we know we wouldn't know yeah so have you learned enough from your critical thinking course to change the way that you think critically about ideas and arguments or no the critical thinking courses is sort of basic for me okay it's it's not new to me because i've been in this in the uh community enough that i have on my own read resources on how to how to do prac logic properly and so i've had a lot of talks with people what's exciting to me is the other class because i've never heard of margaret cavendish before she's an interesting person um creative and in innovative um per historical person that is interesting so so that's more interesting to me um the the critical thinking although it's good it's a good course so i i don't i don't regret that at all i don't and i don't think it's i don't think it's uh bad or anything like that yeah it wasn't wasn't a waste of time for you but it just reaffirmed reaffirmed what you knew um i don't want to talk gossip i i don't want to gossip about people but i'm just wondering uh if the landscape is changing online with the atheist community if i've heard a little rumor that maybe matt de la hunty was sort of fading out into the background or maybe coming under attack by some people it's been not been my experience that if anything he's been had more of a presence okay he is regularly showing up on the atheist experience and stuff okay so that's not my that's not my perception hope what has happened you know um the people that i watch are people like doug from pine creek met dill hunty somewhat and a smattering of others like nathan and some other people i had a talk just the other night with converse what's his name reverse contender converse contender yeah we had a discussion with um and i don't have an awful lot of discussions because quite often i have reading to do yeah so i i have not been participating very much in discord online debates and forums where people sit for an hour and talk about and i i get into it and then i think well i i have to read this um chapter by tomorrow so i i better get to it so that's what i have to do um but occasionally i get a chance like you know today's friday so i get to do that yeah and so i'm not aware that um matt dillahunty is just his usual self okay right um canadian catholic has been trying to stir uh dissent and and drama a uh uh we'll use polite words we'll say he he's a a poopster do you know if i've interviewed him it sounds familiar i wonder if i've interviewed him i don't know he's not terribly i i don't know he canadian catholic because i'm canadian and i'm catholic i wonder if i've met him but maybe not yeah i might i might have interviewed him i i don't know why why is he attacking is he attacking experience he's basically a drama he's basically interested in stirring drama to get attention for his uh discord server and his website that's my that's my um a take on it maybe that's your abduction maybe he feels differently i don't know and you recently chatted with him or no no i've cut myself off from them because it's just too much drama too much uh chaos too much chaos i enjoyed um who's that guy that's always in trouble about uh atheist with the definition of atheism he's always getting in trouble okay yeah how is he doing do you have any news about him i haven't paid any attention to him is he i don't know if i'm back his channel but i don't know i just it's a lot of there are a lot of a lot of youtube channels a lot of people a lot of different debate channels where it's really about interpersonal relationships and interpersonal conflicts and drama and those things don't interest me no i don't have a great deal of interest in those no no you like ideas and pursuing the truth and uh reasoning and stuff like that well i have a group of people that i can sort of touch base with that sort of like my homies my homies you know that i can i can touch base with them um and and uh and so that's sort of a place to go when i'm feeling overwhelmed but um normally i'm not seeking out um a lot of drama and stuff i don't have time on my hands and i have things to do yeah other places to go what about what about the um what about youtube because it seems like uh some people this past year have been talking about moving away from youtube onto some alternative media and stuff like that is that happening do you think or is egypt still the number one big shoot for conspiracy theorists because um they're getting shut down youtube's content rules are really difficult for people people get their channels shut down and it doesn't seem from my second-hand point of view that they understand why people attribute it to youtube being anti-free speech but i think it's really just youtube wanting a safe place for their advertisers using uh slurs or racist um slurs in there and and there's quite a lot of people on youtube who don't understand why that's not cool um and and so then their channels get shut down and then they then they cry about it because they don't understand yeah yeah i this past year i dabbled with bit shoot just in terms of uh consuming content and uh it's a dark place there's a lot of anti-semitism a lot of anti-semitism a lot of uh gay bashing i guess you could call it i don't know what the problem conspiracy theory is a lot of a lot of really wacky conspiracy theories that are so wacky it's it's mildly entertaining i did get sucked into watching them because they're so mildly entertaining but uh the thing with those is it can be hard to tell you know is the person really believe this or are they just spinning this this bizarre story to get clicks looks because i think so there are portals in in the vatican's videos feed and let me point out there here's this anomaly on there on their video camera that's a portal to another dimension and i thought i could get a lot of viewers that way yeah for sure i mean the problem the problem with going down that path is that you might start to believe your own lies and then uh you can start to get paranoid and go crazy i i do know a friend uh from back in the day here in montreal that went on to become quite big uh with the flat earth movement and he claims he started it he started the movement as a joke but he i think unless he's just portraying his persona but i think he went a little bit crazy doing that um because you just you just dive into persona and a bunch of lies and then i think it messes a little bit with your uh with your head i could be wrong but that's the yeah um i i understand that and i i have heard elsewhere that that is one of the risks of being a con artist is that you can believe the con yeah you can right you if you're selling you're selling a pyramid scheme even pre pre-internet days you can start to and then you can get then you can get yeah that's possible i did i've mentioned this before on my podcast years ago but i did pretend i did pretend like play acting just on my own in private as i walked along a noisy highway to work to and from work every day i took the opportunity because i knew that it was the cars couldn't hear me so i was just yelling and screaming and making jokes and talking nonsense but after a few months of doing that i actually started to go insane and i as my listeners know i'm not too far from the edge anyway i'm a little bit kooky and i've got some mental health issues in my family and it wouldn't take much to push me over the edge so i pushed myself over the edge and i remember sitting in a diner in a small town where i lived at the time and i was working at the canadian space agency of all places at the time very nice sort of country club atmosphere lots of right people there and i was just driving myself crazy and i remember finding myself in a cafe talking to myself and making jokes to myself and laughing out loud in a public space and sort of seeing people looking at me and thinking how hilarious it is that they think that i'm crazy and i was crazy at that at that time so i i sort of sobered up and i said i'm gonna stop doing that and uh i regained my senses to the extent that i have control of my senses today and that i'm the measure the measure among the psychologists i've had plenty of therapists and them what makes something um they wouldn't like hear the word crazy but they would say that if you can't order your life and function normally then then x behavior is a problem that you should address yeah right that's that they would put it in that kind of pragmatic way that you know it isn't bad if you masturbate 10 times an hour it's it's just bad because you're getting blisters and you can't function anymore that was an odd sort of example you think of better washing your hands there you go yeah wash it you know compulsive washing your hands it's it's if it really interferes with you being able to function normally if you can't function without washing your hands and you get raw shaped hands from from constantly washing them then then it's time to see a therapist especially if you think if you think a certain part of your anatomy is a bar of well yeah i don't know people people have people have different um dysphoria ideas about people have different ideas about what is normal sex and so for some people maybe two or three times a day is perfectly normal and for others two or three times a month yeah and and on that it's a big deal it's a big very big deal sex and this is another this is another thing about the internet is there's so much sex sexual content on the internet i don't i try not to look at it i mean i can't help it sometimes you see even ads you know even advertisements sometimes i don't i use ad blockers and i don't i don't have an interest in porn so i don't go to those sites and i don't see a great deal of explicit stuff that's good i watch i watch either netflix or youtube and youtube has a fair number i i've been into uh classic black and white movies and you've got quite a lot of them off of youtube yeah perfectly free perfectly free and they're they're good old classic movies that are very entertaining they're you know my wife and i have been watching a nice series i think you'd really enjoy it i think everyone would enjoy it it's it's about the silent film era and it's a documentary multi-part documentary series so one of the episodes was about the stunt men of the silent era it's unbelievable you know the stunts that these men and women would do uh i mean i don't i don't want to glorify it because i think it's i think it's not good to be promoting that sort of risk-taking that these people uh a lot of people died i don't know if it's the case today in hollywood i don't think people are dying as stunt men and stunt women today in hollywood it's probably it's probably very rare but back then yeah cecil you know cecil b demille is that his name yeah he in my opinion he was reckless and greedy and i'm just not mentioning him because they mentioned him in the documentary but he was pushing people even extras like crowds of thousands of people and he was uh he made a movie about noah's flood and uh there were people injured a lot of people injured and a couple people died and uh a lot of the adventure movies people died versus died stagecoach that movie horses died it's sad it's sad to see you see horses being injured and dying in a lot of the old films and i don't i don't think there's any excuse for that i think it's greedy uh there's no need to cause suffering to uh animals much less humans are you are you vegetarian or vegan no i don't eat i don't eat much meat i'm not eating any meat right now uh these days but uh i mean i don't have a problem with eating meat in moderation if uh you know if you're so inclined but uh that's not that's not the point the point is uh i don't think we should be causing suffering uh unnecessarily and hopefully if you're slaughtering a chicken for dinner it's it's not gonna be a torture session it's just going to be a quick chop of the head or whatever it is but uh i i'm probably too squeamish to kill my own meat like if i had to kill a chicken i'd probably feel too bad and i wouldn't do it but i don't eat very much meat anyway i never have i don't digest especially red meat i don't digest it so but i don't have a problem with meat eating and i i do occasionally eat chicken or fish or whatever what about yourself um i will eat uh meat i wish that um if i had a choice and if i could afford it if i had a choice and if i could afford it i would eat it where do you buy it where can we buy i don't even know if you can okay but presumably they're working on it presumably in the future it could be available and then i would make use of it if it was cost effective for me but for me the cost is the biggest factor because i'm not very wealthy so yeah the cost of food is is is my concern so but i try to stay away from um carbs because um yeah they are yeah they are they're cheap but they're fattening they taste good they're addictive yeah yeah so i i don't have um any moral problems i would like it if animals didn't suffer so much so i think that there are a lot of animals that i think that it's immoral what we do with them things like the more intelligent um animals like porpoises and and or currencies gorillas orangutans um certain other animals i think that there there are many of them that are conscious and they shouldn't be suffering however other animals like ants and cockroaches can suffer in hell for i have no qualms about squishing bugs if they're infesting my living space i wouldn't have any problem with getting rid of them i don't have any feelings towards insects i don't think ins i think insects are just autonomous yeah yeah yeah all instinct uh before we wrap it up and i let you go because i only have an hour tonight um could you give me some tips and hints about some good old classic black and white movies i like the movies from the 40s in particular 40s and 50s i like the fashion do you like fashion because i like the fashion of the 40s and the hairstyles of the 40s on women particularly are you into fashion at all i've never been a big a one big for fashion and stuff like that i don't know what to say right now you don't have any favorites off the top of did you enjoy hitchcock's films yeah vertigo was the best huh vertigo north by northwest uh rear did you like rear window rear window it's extremely good those are all very good yeah rear windows is extremely good vertical north by northwest the lady vanishes i haven't seen that one the 40 you should watch that you should watch the 49 steps that's a black and white one set in scotland among other places yeah i'm a big fan a big fan of hitchcock oh yes because he's six well he was another one he was kind of problematic though he was uh mean to his his actors yeah i think he was catholic if i'm not mistaken i don't know but a little bit uh i think he was a little bit sadistic sometimes i like cheesy old movies like godzilla ah okay some of the old monster movies some occasionally i like mothra i think mothra is cute godzilla so you don't mind you know sci-fi movies you don't mind like the horror movies or the dracula movies and those sorts of things too the older dracula movies are great yeah they're fine they scared me as a child i remember seeing a black and white one that really recently i watched uh it's been the series has been all our series that i like i like netflix and van helsing they have a series on on netflix called van helsing which is okay pretty pretty uh pretty bloody i don't know if that's your thing or not in places um um i like mind-bending ones like um what is it um dark it's the german one it's on netflix okay it's a time travel movie oh okay and there's another one called the travelers which is another time travel movie which is plot which i really like the plot of the time traveling is almost incidental to the plot i like those kinds of movies do you uh do you live alone yeah i do okay so you can watch whatever you want at any time there's no competition to pick a compromise or anything like that you don't have uh a lot of friends come over or one friend that comes over occasionally not really not particularly i i'm i'm sort of a a loner in that sense yeah i'm a loner in that sense you know got to keep i got to keep the garden in my backyard did you did you ever like the old black and white twilight zones or were they too uh creepy oh yes yes well yeah those are great yeah those are good and outer limits i'm not familiar with outer limits but outer limits predates the twilight zone oh really yeah who's the host on that oh i don't know not rods early i don't think so do you like uh when films transport your mind or do you like having your emotions um manipulated or both i like ones that are introspective and make me think more okay right so but i don't mind mindless escapism yeah but i get tired of things like the current um obsession with the dc marvel universe yeah yeah yeah it's not very interesting to me no because it's just there's there's not um much substance to it in my opinion and um i like ones where it gets it either way it gets into the character more um did you ever look did you ever like horror movie hereditary have you ever heard of hereditary uh no you might i don't know if you'll like that one is it a new one or an old one it's from about three years ago okay hereditary okay i'll check it out well it's about um some summoning somebody in the demon from hell oh okay i don't know if that's your cup of tea or not but yeah yeah whatever psychological it's psychological more than okay okay yeah i don't mind if there's demonic content explicitly uh it doesn't that doesn't bother me is that a famous one apparently it's a historical belief in one of the eight kings of hell okay it was time on time on was a one of them and they summoned him and um it gets it it gets pretty messy it's sort of a cup no it doesn't get too messy it gets pretty kind of explicit in parts but it's more psychological okay so you don't like to laugh a lot with uh comedies because there's some good comedies too i like comedies yeah like i'm talking about the old school ones black and white like we recently my wife and i watched um the celebrity roasts with uh dean martin as the host okay so they would roast uh you know uh all the old school actors uh you know don knotts or what's his name don rickles or those problems we were thinking of watching old tv shows so you can watch the old dick cavett or uh tonight show or other other um talk shows on on youtube you can watch those those are somewhat interesting to me they're interesting from culturally culturally culturally because they're horrible to the women and they're horrible kind of americans and they're like really sexist um and they smoke like chimneys and drink you know yeah they always have they always have a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other yeah it might be a schtick like i think dean martin was reputed to be sober most of the time when he was pretending to be drunk on camera but i'm not sure i'm not sure it was a stick schtick or if he was there's drunk mystique and some mystery i don't watch many comedies it has been a while since i've been seen a comedy that i like yeah i don't see too many of them it's the hardest i think it's the hardest hurt for i've been watching lately i've been watching the mandalorian um which is okay star wars mediocre it's mediocre star wars i think it's mediocre race by wolves is the latest one um that one's okayish we'll see if that pans out um and then others on uh the boys i've been watching the boys on on amazon okay which is a superhero take where what would really happen if somebody had the powers of superman and there was no consequences to anything yet yeah what would really happen yeah he would be a major flaming yes but she is in in the boys wow that sounds interesting yeah that sounds like something i'd like to watch it's pretty it can be pretty uh violent uh gore and blood yes yes and sex and that seems to be it not that much no it seems to be the thing you know the standards for um violence or show depicting like the consequences of violence somebody being blown up and things like that is different a lot different now than it used to be anything goes pretty much yeah so i do have to wrap things up here we're just coming up on one hour thanks uh for taking the time to talk to me tonight and uh we'll do it again uh in the future i've got a a few more interviews uh coming up this weekend i've got one tomorrow to the next day so it's uh it's always fun to chat with you appreciate i appreciate your calm demeanor and your affable conversations so uh well i aim for that i don't always achieve that there's times when i don't achieve that and i and i lose my cool um that has certainly happened in the past and i think it's you know the people people um want other people a lot of people online are there to go people provoke gold to get reactions out of people to basically to troll that and and to clean and people have been successful in that with me so yeah yeah i don't know if that's true for you too or not no i've never been or not no i've never been i've never really been goaded too much