Summary
➡ The speaker discusses the challenges and strategies of monetizing creative content, particularly comic books, on various platforms like Twitter, Etsy, Indiegogo, and YouTube. They share their experience of gaining traction through a comic series that was initially created out of frustration, which ironically became popular. They advise aspiring comic creators to post their work on multiple platforms, develop a unique style, and aim for consistency and quality. The speaker also mentions the importance of being remembered by the audience, which can be achieved through controversial content, but warns about the potential backlash.
➡ This text is a conversation and promotion for various products and websites. The speaker talks with George about his work and where to find him online. They also promote ‘paranoid propaganda packs’ and ‘paranoid american sticker sheets’ from paranoidamerican.com, which are products related to conspiracy theories. Lastly, they mention a comic about Stanley Kubrick and the Apollo space missions available at nasacomic.com.
➡ The speaker discusses their experience as a comic creator, highlighting the balance between creating engaging content and not upsetting people. They mention a regrettable instance where they made fun of a woman’s financial habits. They also discuss the importance of timing in creating comics about current events, noting that jokes often have a short lifespan due to the fast-paced nature of news. The speaker also talks about the unpredictability of audience reactions to their comics, stating that they can’t always predict which ones will be popular or not.
➡ The speaker discusses their experiences as a comic artist, focusing on the balance between creating content that amuses them and content that appeals to their audience. They mention the importance of staying informed about current events to create relevant content. They also touch on the potential pitfalls of specializing in a specific audience, using the example of Penny Arcade, a webcomic that lost popularity after offending a large portion of its audience. The speaker also expresses their willingness to challenge conservative views on video games and comics, arguing that these forms of media are valid forms of culture and not just for children.
➡ The text discusses the influence of media and entertainment on individuals, suggesting that while it can be enjoyable and valuable, it can also lead to overconsumption and distraction from real life. It also explores the idea that interpretations of art and media can vary greatly, with both the creator’s intent and the audience’s perception being valid. The text further debates whether artificial intelligence can be considered a medium of art, arguing that while it can produce images based on prompts, it lacks the human agency that is essential in the creation of art.
➡ The speaker debates the value of AI-generated art, comparing it to a shortcut that bypasses the journey of learning and growth in creating art. They argue that art is a human endeavor, a way to learn about oneself and others, and that AI, while it can mimic and remix, cannot truly create or add new information. They express a preference for human-made art, even if imperfect, over a perfectly rendered AI image, as they believe the process of creation is as important as the end result.
➡ The speaker discusses the impact of AI on future generations, suggesting that kids growing up will be surrounded by AI-generated content, from writing to artwork. They also touch on their personal influences and journey as an artist, mentioning their love for anime, video games, and various art movements. The speaker also discusses the potential influence of their Christian background on their work and shares their experiences with different communities, such as gamers and comic fans. Lastly, they express concern about the left’s dominance in various forms of media and storytelling.
➡ The speaker believes that art and storytelling can be used to influence people’s thoughts and behaviors, including their political views. They suggest that this has been used by the left to control narratives and influence society. The speaker hopes that more conservatives will start creating art to counter this. They also discuss various conspiracy theories, rating their likelihood on a scale of one to ten.
➡ The speaker discusses various conspiracy theories and supernatural beliefs, expressing skepticism about the flat Earth theory and the authenticity of the moon landing footage. They also mention the theory of Tartaria, a supposed ancient global empire, and express uncertainty about the 9/11 attacks being an inside job. The speaker also contemplates the existence of angels, demons, and ghosts, stating they are open-minded but currently agnostic.
➡ The speaker discusses their thoughts on various topics, including the credibility of dinosaurs, the existence of dragons, and the power of art as a communication tool. They also share their experiences with lucid dreaming and the impact of certain paintings on them. The speaker also talks about their work as a comic artist, mentioning their favorite pieces and the reactions they’ve received.
Transcript
Good evening, listeners, brave navigators of the enigmatic and the concealed. Have you ever felt the pull of the unanswered, the allure of the mysteries that shroud our existence? For more than a decade, a unique comic publisher has dared to dive into these mysteries, unafraid of the secrets they might uncover. This audacious entity is paranoid American. Welcome to the mystifying universe of the paranoid american podcast. Launched in the year 2012, paranoid American has been on a mission to decipher the encrypted secrets of our world. From the unnerving enigma of mkultra mind control, to the clandestine assemblies of secret societies, from the awe inspiring frontiers of forbidden technology, to the arcane patterns of occult symbols in our very own pop culture, they have committed to unveiling the concealed realities that lie just beneath the surface.
Join us as we navigate these intricate landscapes, decoding the hidden scripts of our society and challenging the accepted perceptions of reality. Folks, I’ve got a big problem on my hands. There’s a company called Paranoid American making all these funny memes and comics. Now, I’m a fair guy. I believe in free speech as long as it doesn’t cross the line. And if these AI generated memes dare to make fun of me, they’re crossing the line. This is your expedition into the realm of the extraordinary, the secret the shrouded. Come with us as we sift through the world’s grand mysteries, question the standardized narratives, and brave the cryptic labyrinth of the concealed truth.
So strap yourselves in, broaden your horizons, and steal yourselves for a voyage into the enigmatic heart of the paranoid american podcast, where each story, every image, every revelation brings us one step closer to the elusive truth. I’m freaking excited because we’re going to be talking to a comic legend. At least in my world, it’s George Alexopoulos. And if you don’t know who he is yet, maybe through G Prime. But I. Hopefully you’ll know who he is by the end of this interview, and you’ll be going and scooping up his comics and retweeting them and sharing them.
But first of all, thank you for your time for coming on here, and welcome to the show. You’re nodding your head. Are you ashamed already? No, I just get embarrassed when people say nice things about me. Thank you for the invite, though. It’s a fair point, man. Well deserved credit. So I guess right off the bat, housekeeping tell people where they can find you, where to follow you, any money they should send. I’m just on Twitter and Instagram. G prime 85. I’m also on YouTube, but I don’t use it very much. So if you search for the 85, if you should find me pretty much on those three main websites, I guess.
Where do you post your spiciest stuff? Probably x. That’s where they censor us the least, right? I do censor my comics and post them on Instagram, and I haven’t been banned in a while, so that’s good. What exactly are you censoring? To skate by the sensors on Instagram. The past two, three strips I posted are about the. Can I say. I don’t want to say anything you want, man. If I have to put this on YouTube, I’ll just censor it anyways. Okay, well, then the stabbings in England, you know, there’s, like, every time a character gets stabbed, when I post it on Instagram, I’ll just post, like, Zuckerberg’s face over it.
And so that’s the Zucker version, the Instagram version. And the uncensored stuff is on and X for now. How so? Musk, I guess it was more than a year ago. I don’t know. But he bought Twitter, and before that, it almost seemed like the exact same amount of censorship applied to every single social media network. Do you think that’s the case at all? Do you experience anything different before the musk takeover? Before the Musk takeover, I was getting week long bans on then Twitter for various strips. I know. I’m pretty sure can’t prove it, but we were getting, like, what do they call it? Not demoted? Shadow ban.
Shadow ban. Sort of like, you’ll post and not as many people algorithmically can see it. I know that was happening. So just little, like, back room nerfing of certain accounts. But I think I’m the least nerfed now on Twitter, my stuff is. Well, xdevdehe. My stuff is fairly. It’s getting a decent amount of reach now, whereas I don’t know. A year and a half ago, I would post on X and Instagram at the same time, and my stuff would get more notice on Instagram, even though I had, like, twice or three times the amount of people on Twitter.
But now the ratio seems to make sense. I get more engagement on Twitter, which. That’s where the numbers are, so it’s healthier there. Less censorship. And I guess speaking of that censorship and putting, like, Mark Zuckerberg’s face on Instagram posts and stuff to kind of skate by, wouldn’t it just be easier to stop making controversial content? Like, what are you not learning from all of the negative reinforcement that they’re applying to you? Like, what don’t you get, bud? I haven’t been sent to a struggle session yet, but maybe. Maybe someday. You never know. There were those threats, right? That Britain was like, we’re going to execute extradite Americans.
And I’m just trying to rack my head, like, has that ever happened? How can that happen? I guess it can happen. So at which time, I do plan to get famous for getting in trouble for comics. That’s not a. That’s not a badge that a lot of cartoonists can brag about. There were a couple in France that got, like, murdered. That’s so french. Just. Just that statement is so french. And what, getting murdered for cartoons, for comics? Yeah. That just sounds like a uniquely european thing. Well, you remember the Charlie Hebdo thing, right? One of my favorites.
Yeah. I’m not ready to die for comics yet, but you never know. Who knows? I wouldn’t have expected that they would threaten extradition for comics. I would like to see how they would attempt that. And, you know, depending on what happens in November, who knows? But if I survive that prison experience, I will come back a hero, I imagine. I hope so. I would like to keep posting spicy stuff. It’d be nice to. I don’t know. Not a lot of cartoonists can brag about that. Like, I was sent to prison in Britain for comics that were offensive.
But, I mean, look, realistically speaking, like, I don’t post anything that they don’t do on South park regularly. So, like, I, granted, I don’t have comedy central lawyers to help me, but you’re not selling Hyundai and Coca Cola between your comics either, right? So there’s a little bit of a difference. No, the monetization thing is a puzzle that I’m still trying to solve, but the shitpost levels are adequate. I’m satisfied with that. We’ll figure out the rest later is the, I mean, because I feel like you’re almost in a unique space, especially within comics wherever there.
And I don’t know, I’m asking you on this because I’m still teeny tiny in this world, but is there more potential to monetize through just sheer numbers and impressions on posting comics on social media versus compiling all your comics and selling them printed like a traditional comic? Because I know you had an etsy shop and you’ve kind of got like volumes of your comics that you sell printed, but does that get dwarfed by just people hate sharing your stuff. I guess the best return on investment would be if you just get paid on something like a Patreon or X monetization through subscriptions.
Unfortunately, I got kicked off Patreon and I still waiting just to warn me, how can I learn from your mistakes how to get busted off Patreon? I think they were saying certain comics that I was posting there were, you know, Haram, whatever. And they were saying that I have to not post that stuff, not only there, but also on other social media, which I didn’t agree to. So basically they froze my account and I never unfroze it. But I imagine that people can get subscriptions on x depending on the. I’m going to assume because I caught two suspensions like years ago, a year and a half or something like that, my account’s just been like marked with something that they have to manually override.
Like, I can’t just apply for a subscription. They have to code in there. That’s like you got to jump through all these hoops in order to unshut it. Yeah. So according to like Twitter 1.0, I’m still a thought criminal and I guess I’m still in line waiting for approval. But as for physical media and stuff, you have to consider things like printing costs, which will like eat up printing and shipping and Etsy or Indiegogo takes a cut, Uncle Sam takes a cut of no matter what. But your profit margins are way lower. So if I sell a book, a comic book for $8 or something, maybe I’ll be happy if I earn $4 profit on it.
So after all that trouble to print a book, I don’t know if it’s worth it. Obviously it’s cool to sell a book and people want physical editions. That’s cool. We’ll figure it out. I mean, it’s, I’m not, I’m in no rush, but yeah, I can’t advise on how to monetize this stuff. I hear YouTube pays decently. I have a channel, I just don’t use it. As long as you stay in their good graces, because it’s real easy to have that rug pulled out from under you, too. It is no x, I’ll say that. Well, I mean, you could easily post this stuff on X, right? Absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah. So X is probably going to eventually turn into, Elon said he’s going to turn it into the everything app, so it may eclipse YouTube in terms of content like this someday. So I’m already in a decent position on X anyway. So if I make content like this or anything that I would put on YouTube, just cross posted on x two, who cares? Yeah, I like that. It’s, the landscape is kind of shifting constantly on this. And I went to look and see where some of your roots lay. And there’s this one comic in particular.
It was just, like one of these four panel comics, and it’s just called computer do the thing. And I found an old Reddit thread where you were even kind of commenting on how it was blowing up, and it almost sounded because I wasn’t there, like, at the time when this was all blowing up to, like, follow the trajectory. But it almost seemed like this was a comic made out of frustration. Like, you know, if I just did something stupid and silly, I bet that would get more traction. And you making a comic about doing that ends up proving itself.
Right. And it did get more traction. Is that somewhat accurate? I would say that is the comic where everything changed for me. So your research is very good. That was the most noticed comic that I put up on Reddit, maybe a couple of others before that, but that’s where I started focusing on strips as a tool for growth, let’s say. So Reddit loved that one. And then I did a whole series out of that, and then they canceled me, like, three days later. But, yeah, that was a big one. Yeah, well, it was. It was computer do the thing.
And the comic was just about someone posting something random and getting all these upvotes. It’s just a computer. And then you had a follow up called Chicken Souvlaki on a plate of nuggets. And this was like a meta comic that referred to the previous one. And it feels like this was your inner thoughts where the guy is basically saying, like, my comics don’t get any traction. No one’s even looking at this. You know what? What if I just intentionally draw the crappiest thing possible and post that and it blows up? And then the comic about you making a crappy comic that itself blows up, too.
Right? So that was that. Like, number two. Some was there. How much frustration was behind that? And what were you posting before these that weren’t getting traction? All right, so that was a series that gained more and more traction as the series went on, until I basically kicked them in the nuts. And then they kicked me in the nuts. But before that, I was doing a four panel series called Bite Size at the time, which turned into problematic, which was like a Charlie Brownish, sort of black and white four panel strip that was just a silly emo.
You might even say, like 20 somethings, rantings about life and being single and all that stupid crap. And it was getting some traction. Autobiographical. I used my life as inspiration, let’s say. I always said it was, you know, how Charlie Brown was Charles Schultz, but I, you know, not. So I just, you know, you use your life as inspiration for a strip, and you take it from there. And that strip did. Okay, got some attention. But I was seeing a lot of web cartoonists at the time. This was, what, 2016 ish? 2017. They were getting a ton of traction for what I thought was basically like, you’re posting next to nothing is junk.
And so I said, why don’t I post some junk in a satirical way? And then they praised it, and I said, oh, okay, so you guys want trash? I’ll feed you trash. And they kept praising it. And then, because I can’t help myself, I guess I decided to kick them in the nuts to punish them for. For giving me what? I don’t even know how to describe it. I’m an asshole, I guess I’m trying to say. So I couldn’t have. I couldn’t let them get away with it. What was the kick to the nuts? What was that particular comic about? I think the strip, two strips after the one you described, where I got pissed off that they praised that strip, I said, here’s your previous king.
And it was a guy named Shen, and he was their king. And I told Reddit, this is how you treat your cartoonists. And, well, basically, in the strip, they were saying to me, hey, come be our new kingdom, our new top rated cartoonist. And then on the throne was Shen’s body with Spears through it. And they had recently given him a hard time about some Strip. And so it’s like, oh, come sit on the throne. We killed our last King. Come be our new king. And then the Punchline is, I’m scared of them. And then the next strip after that is like, hey, entertain us.
What are you going to do next? And so I did a stupid hand signal that they thought was an Alt right Symbol, and then they put Spears through me and murdered me the next day. So it was like a self fulfilling prophecy kind of thing. I told them exactly what they were going to do a day before they did it, and then they did it. And then I was run off the website. So I had my little 15 minutes of Fame. That was fun. It was that the trajectory starter was blowing up on those first two on Reddit or Washington.
Were you finding a following despite that? I had a small following. I had been on, like the front page of Reddit in the previously, like, I did. Do you know the game Dark Souls? Incredibly hard to play, Dark Souls. Yeah. Well, anyway, yeah, I had done a couple of strips like that about dark souls, and it hit the front page of Reddit and stuff, but my name wasn’t known. I was just one of many cartoonists trying to get my name known. It’s not enough to just be on the front page. People have to remember your name.
So I had had some success, moderate success. Like before that, I had won some award for manga, like actual comics, real comics, like a graphic novel sort of thing, but it was not viral. So I won an award and that was great. And I got a couple bucks and a free trip to Japan. But it didn’t lead to any career growth. It’s only the viral stuff that will cause people to remember your name. I would say that’s the holy grail of growth. If someone was talking to you and they’re like, I want to start doing comics, would you say, go to Reddit, cut your teeth at Reddit? Or would you just say, go straight to x? Or what would your advice be? I would say post everywhere.
Don’t hyper specialize on any one website. So if they cancel you on one place or another, like, your name should be everywhere and your work should be recognizable. Like, at this point, even if people take my signature off my work, a lot of people still recognize it. So I would say develop a style that is yours, that is easy to spot. Cross post everywhere. My advice, what else is my advice as far as growth goes? Consistency. Post as much as you can. It has to be high quality and your goal is to be remembered. So I guess you can flick people’s balls, but you have to be careful.
Like if you’re doing it on purpose, like to get attention, it’s different than if you’re just being yourself and you get punished for being yourself. If that makes sense. Which is better? Is it better to intentionally piss people off or unintentionally piss them off? I mean, it’s a gray area, but, like, I know I can piss off the left by doing strips about certain subjects, but I actually do believe in those jokes, let’s say. So I’m not doing it just for attention, if that makes sense. But there’s a certain balance between sincerity and virality, I guess.
You can intentionally piss off people like drama farming, let’s say. But eventually that gets very tiresome. I would say, as a watcher of drama, sometimes I see it. I’m like, okay, guys, enough. It’s over. Stop fighting. This is. You’re just trying to get my attention now, and it’s annoying. So I guess you have to develop your own personal style of how to get attention without pissing people off too much. I mean, you can be hated and famous, but I don’t see that as long a good long term strategy. Are there any comics with topics or subjects or anything that you did that had such a negative reaction that you kind of wish that you hadn’t released those or that you would have tweaked before putting them out? That’s a great question.
No, I don’t often regret putting up a strip. One time I teased, not teased, but there was some viral instance. A woman who lived in Brooklyn was saying something about, like, I feel so poor and she can’t make rent or something. And the joke was that she had a very fancy apartment and ate doordash and fancy food every night. So the reason she was broke was because she spent too much, and so I poked fun at her, and then she got in touch with me and basically, like, just said, oh, that was very funny. You got me.
And then I felt like shit afterwards. I was like, I just. I dunked on a total stranger for no reason aside from I just felt bad after. So anyway, that was, like, one instance where I just felt bad picking on someone who just wasn’t exercising good restraint financially. Like, did they deserve to get punished? I don’t know. So do you feel bad about that, or was that like. Like an in the moment thing because there was a personal connection to it? I do still look back on it and feel bad for her specifically. But then there’s assholes like Harry Sisson, where, like, he’s.
He’s the kid who’s being, like, paid by the DNC to, like, pretend he cares about Biden Harris. He’s just an asshole. He’s a show sponsor, by the way, so let’s tread carefully, okay? Just. I hope you’re kidding, but he’s, you know, people like that I’ll pick on, but it’s hard. Like, every strip is its own. You have to ask yourself, am I sure that I want to sign my name to this? I don’t often regret a strip, aside from, like, oh, I wish I drew that better, or my. The point was not made clearly, so I wish I had.
Oh, I should have thought of a different punchline. That’s. That’s where I’ll regret something, maybe. How much do you care about, like, like, chasing the current thing, like, Olympics? Recently, everyone was making fun of. So is there, like, a South park esque kind of rush to make a comic about current thing before it goes stale? That’s a very good question. I would say most jokes only last, like, one to two days after the event because the news happens so fast, so the Olympics are no longer relevant. So if I made a joke about the Olympics now, I don’t think it would hit as hard as if I had done it during the Olympics.
So there is, timing is a huge factor in this. How fast you could put together a cartoon determines, I don’t know, you could call it the collective subconscious, perhaps, or just the zeitgeist. Maybe that’s a better word of whatever everyone’s talking about. There’s an aha. Oh, that’s the thing I heard about on the news. Oh, that’s relevant. Oh, that’s a funny joke. Whereas five years from now, if someone read the same joke, they wouldn’t even know what I was talking about. It wouldn’t be funny anymore. So it’s like, yeah, you have maybe a 48 hours window to tell a joke, and then it closes.
So go ahead. Unless it’s, like, a persistent topic, like, say, Biden has Alzheimer’s or something, that is still actually, it’s not relevant anymore. As of two months ago, it was still relevant when he was still running. So now Harris is the presumptive frontrunner and will be focusing jokes on that subject, assuming something doesn’t change in, what, less than a month, they’re going to do the debate. Who knows what’ll happen after that? I mean, October surprise, right? So you can plan on maybe something happen in October, at least statistically. Yeah. So all I can do is keep my schedule open and my hand warmed up, ready to draw anything and.
But, you know, it’s. I don’t force it. That’s probably the other half of the question is if something pops out at me, like, I’ll be asleep in the morning. You know, I’ll wake up at four or five in the morning, I’m looking at my phone, looking at the news, if something pops out and then a joke hits me, or I’ll go to bed one night thinking about a joke, and I’ll wake up with a punchline, okay, I’ll get up and quickly go draw it and hopefully post it before, like, nine or ten in the morning if it comes to me.
I find that I can’t make jokes happen. I don’t, I don’t know if my jokes, I don’t know if my comics are even funny most of the time, but relevant, maybe. So, yeah, I’ll try to read the news and if something stands out, we can draw a little strip. You mentioned trying to. If you can get it done by, like, nine or ten in the morning, is there, like, a sweet spot you found on, like, when to post your comics that have the better response? I used to think it was 910 o’clock eastern because I would have assumed that Europe is already awake, New York is already awake, and LA is waking up.
So that’s like three good english speaking time zones where they might all respond at once and then it’ll elevate the engagement. But then I started experimenting, posting at different times, and I found, like, I think it was during a debate last week or something. There was something going on in the news. Everyone was. It wasn’t trump getting shot, it was something else. Everyone was online, and I posted something at, like, 06:00 in the evening on a Sunday, which I assumed nobody would respond, but everyone was on x that day, and that blew up, like, more than I could have anticipated.
And I don’t know if the content was better or if it was just timing. So I’m still experimenting. That’s actually a good way of thinking about it. There might not be, like, a static schedule, but if there’s just activity, like go, when there’s activity, like, go and get the billboard where all the traffic’s at. Maybe in some cases, yeah. I mean, say, like, you’re a hot dog seller on the street. You’re not going to pick some alleyway where nobody’s walking by. You want to be in the middle of, like, Times Square on New Year’s Eve when everyone’s there.
And then there’s the question of, are my hot dogs good? Am I not selling hot dogs because they suck? Do you know what I mean? So it’s a quality question. And then it’s, do I have enough eyes on the work. And when both of those things come together, you get engagement. Well, I mean, speaking of, do my hot dogs suck? You just kind of, like, maybe self deprecatingly, but you’re like, I don’t even know if my comics are even funny. Do you have any that you dropped and you were like, this is hilarious, and it just didn’t land, and you never understood why.
Like, are there any that you. That, like, you were hoping did way better? Like, personal favorites that no one appreciated? I could look through the archive here. It might take time, though, but there were some instances where. Let’s see. Oh, I don’t know. Or if it’s. If it’s easier to start with as you, as you noodle that one. Were there any that, like, took off that you never expected? You were like, this is just a throwaway. And then all of a sudden, it became wildly popular. That does happen, too, you know, I can’t predict how others are going to react.
It’s just, it has to be something that makes me laugh or at least gets me, gets a reaction out of me. If it’s something that would make me feel something, I assume it’s worth drawing, spending two, 3 hours on, and then you upload it, and whatever happens, happens. It’s kind of a roll of the dice every time, but you can’t win unless you roll the dice. So just do the best you can within the time window, upload, and hopefully, hopefully it gets responses. If not, try again tomorrow. There have been instances where I would, like, piss myself laughing at a strip, but maybe I didn’t draw it right or the punchline was wrong or the wording was wrong, because every word matters.
Looks stupid. Anything can go wrong. But then there’s beautiful moments where, like, I recently did one with Kamala Harris talking to Harry Sisson about, oh, I can’t even describe it on air. I feel embarrassed. But she has a certain interaction with the Washington monument that is very funny to me. It was funny enough to make me cry laughing, and I was, like, about to pass out on the floor when I thought of it. And then I said, I have to draw that. It’s horrible. And I show it to my wife, and she laughed at it. Like, it’s the kind of laugh that makes you go like, you know, like this spit take.
You see it? And I said, okay, we have some gold here. I finished it, I upload it, and it did good. So I’m always happy to get those kinds of days. You can’t engineer it, though. You get the idea. Draw it the best you can and just throw, throw the football and see if people catch it. Well, I do wonder if there’s any part that you can engineer. For example, do you ever find yourself steering something to be less niche and more towards normies or, or vice versa? Like is there ever like a joke where you’re like, I know I’d get it.
And I know like a tiny little pocket of people would get it, but unless you had a all this extra context and insight so that you like generalize it or, or do you just let it fly on exactly how you think it the first time? I mean there’s like I’m a. As a hobby, I play video games. So I’ll make a comic about video games once in a while. But I think most of my people on x at least are political types. They don’t play video games, so they don’t know what I’m talking about. But I’ll still do the strip just because it made me laugh.
And maybe like a few thousand people might get the joke and that’s fine. I think if it entertains me, that’s probably the criteria. But luckily for me, politics is like a thing that I not obsessed with. But I’ll read the news constantly just because I want to know what’s going on. And I happen to be osmosing what’s going on in the world. And so that aligns with a lot of other people who are interacting with that sort of content as well. If I was just a video game. Like if you ever heard of Penny Arcade back in the day.
Oh, yeah, yeah. And they used to do like conventions too. Yeah. So at that time, I don’t know. What year was it? Two thousands, mid. Two thousands to who knows? Let’s say early two thousands to mid. We’re talking Fez era, right? Yeah. And I remember exactly when Penny Arcade broke a fellow fell off. But until that point, they were like the kings of video game cartooning. And they were making all kinds of web series, like actual film series. And they were really kicking a lot of ass. But they specialized in video game content and their audience was specialized in video game content.
So if something happened that caused offense, let’s say politically, they got canceled a couple of times because they would make jokes about the rape wolves. I don’t know if you remember that. I don’t. What’s this in reference to? Yeah, you’ll have to look it up because I don’t remember much of it. But there was two instances where Mike Krahulik the artist? No, it was both Jerry and Mike. They did a joke about, quote, the rape wolves. It had to do with World of Warcraft, how, like, some warrior would go into a cave, and he picks up some quest item that says, oh, man.
Oh. Something about, like, the rape wolves, like werewolves, except they rape you. And a lot of people on the left in the gaming industry were like, oh, that’s very offensive. Rape is not something to make jokes about. And so they had to do an apology, and they took down the strip or something like that. And then there was another instance where Krahulik and his wife were talking about, like, you know that joke from kindergarten cop? Men have penises, women have vaginas. And so that’s hate speech, sir, I’ll have you know. Yes. And I remember. I don’t remember what day it was, specifically, like the date, but he posted something like that.
Like, he had an argument during their podcast or something, and he basically said, or his wife said, men have penises, women have vaginas, and the whole gaming industry just blew them up. Like, you can’t say that that’s wrong. Forcing Krahulik to make an apology, if I remember something like that. And then he donated a bunch of money to the LGBT. Something like, because they live out in Seattle. Did it work? Usually it doesn’t work. Look, man, in my opinion, I may be wrong. I wish I could talk to them. I think Penny Arcade’s dead. And it was around this time that was the death blow.
They were kicking so much ass and then suddenly flatlined. And I don’t know if that was that specific thing that did it, but it was around that time people just stopped reading Penny Arcade. People still interact with PaX, the gaming convention, but they wanted to make that a separate entity than Penny Arcade. Penny Arcade still running, but it doesn’t get nearly the engagement that it used to. But anyway, so they hyper specialized in a specific audience, gamers. And then they did a joke that pissed off a huge subsection of gamers, which is, you know, the Rainbow gamers or something like that.
And the games industry and the media. Games media are very left leaning anyway, so that was extremely offensive to most of their audience, and that caused most of their audience to just leave and stop and never come back. Whereas if I make a comic about video games, I actually want to fight with people like Matt Walsh, for instance, who says video games are for children or something like that. I like fighting with conservative types who are. Who don’t appreciate culture, let’s say. And I don’t see them coming after me and saying, look, he’s not a real conservative because I am, but, and he can’t say I’m, you know what? I play video games.
So what? I don’t mind picking that fight, because I know I am correct and he’s wrong. So I don’t see anyone getting mad at me for picking fights with a Matt Walsh, for instance. But that’s another topic. I’m sure they’re out there. Do I want them as readers, though? Like, I don’t, I don’t need him. People like him who say, like, even comics, right? Comics are for kids. Video games are for kids. Movies. It’s immature. Adult men shouldn’t be wasting their time on this stuff. You should just be writing, reading Walden every day, start to finish reading, reading the Bible only and eating dry crackers, waiting for Jesus to come back.
And, like, I can, I can welcome you to the audience, but I have nothing to say to you. Like, I make comics. I’ve spent my whole life learning to draw them. You’re insulting my profession. I want to make video games. Adults make video games. They are culture. It’s the new film. 50 years ago, 100 years ago, would they have said film and cinema is a waste of time? I know they couldn’t say that without being hypocritical. So I would love to debate these people. Of course they won’t talk to me because they know they’re wrong. They’re, they’re these old church moms who are like, I don’t know if you have a christian background or something like that, but, like, Roman Catholic, like, the best kind.
Okay, so I don’t know how the culture was with you guys around the nineties, let’s say. But it’s like, all media is a waste of time. We have to just be the most boring people and disengage from culture and just let the world fall apart as we wait for Jesus to come back. And do I have anything to say to those people? I don’t know. I could argue with them all day, but they’re never going to agree with me. So I guess on that topic, maybe diverging a little away from comics, but I kind of feel the same way.
I think it’s in the same category, but I kind of specialize in conspiracy area and, like, mind control and secret societies and all this. And there does seem to be a large aspect of, I would strain to say the word community here, but if they were, like, a conspiracy community or like, a truth community, it’s also like, how dare you enjoy movies from the nineties and cartoons and television shows. That’s all mkultra mind control programming, and you’re just either a slave to the state or a slave to Lucifer. It sort of dovetails a little bit with, like, the upbringing you were talking about, about, you know, eat unsalted crackers and wait for a Jesus to come back and don’t do anything fun in between.
And I guess I have an affinity to that programming. Like, I liked being sold GI Joe figures after I saw a GI Joe cartoon eating GI Joe cereal and my GI Joe jammies, you know what I mean? And looking from the outside in at that, like, a third person perspective, it’s like, okay, yeah, that’s just absolute programming. Like, I was completely commercialized and, like, turned into the ultimate consumer for this property and brand loyalty and all that. And even knowing that, I still like, yeah, but I liked it. You know what I mean? Like, I still enjoyed it.
And I sometimes I can’t separate the programming, but it almost reminds me of what you’re talking about. Like, you actually enjoyed the culture and there’s people out there that just criticize it, and it’s like you have nothing to say to them because they just don’t want to have fun to give. Let’s say I’m playing Devil’s advocate on their side. What they would argue is that these things are so much fun that it distracts you from what matters in life. And I would agree with that, except you can’t define the value of something by its abuses. So I could drive a car.
I can drive my car too much, waste a lot of money. And this is a stupid example. Maybe what I’m saying is moderation. Basically, you could watch too many movies to the point where you don’t value real life. You live in a fantasy world. You could play too many video games to the point where you’re rotting as a person. Everybody knows video game addiction is a yeah. Thing. So the Matt Walsh types might argue that the games are addictive, movies are addictive, books and such, but he can’t argue that something like Lord of the Rings doesn’t have value.
We keep talking about Lord of the Rings even today it was written, what, in the sixties, maybe the fifties? Yeah, I could agree with them in the sense that, yeah, those things can be abused. And it’s possible that there is, like, mind control factors to a certain media. It’s not impossible because to reprogram a person’s mind, you have to bypass their firewalls and one of the ways to do that is to put some sugar in the medicine. What do they say? A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Mary Poppins classic mkultra programming. It may be, but, like, if I want to incept someone’s mind with a certain value, like, I don’t know, some movie.
The Matrix has you, whatever. So now we’re using the Matrix, and they. They impose their values into the movie. You didn’t even know you were consuming them. I’m sure I’m preaching to the converted here. So you could do that through media. That doesn’t mean all media happens to do that. I happen to just like movies. I don’t watch every movie thinking, what message am I trying to consume out of this? Although that could be fun, too. But I’m not going to throw the baby back, throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, all movies are bad.
Many movies can be good. The abuses can be bad. You can even take. Take a movie that was made with malicious intent and then have a good interpretation. Like, I was watching a movie called Black Narcissist the other day about these nuns who go to India and basically go crazy and they have to leave. Awesome movie. And one of the theses of the movie is that nuns were sexually repressed, and therefore, when they were exposed to, like, a harem in India and the worldly barbarians, they were unable to withstand the carnal madness that was surrounding them, so they had to flee.
But artistically speaking, the movie was gorgeous. It was amazing. I learned so much about the craft of filmmaking. It. I also saw the red shoes. Same filmmakers. Anyway, the point being, these are these amazing works of art that even though the. The point of the movie might not align with my beliefs, they’re still excellent and worth studying. I’m way off base, so. Well, I don’t think so, because that actually reminds me something I bring up maybe more often than I need to. But there was a. An essay. I think it was like a french philosopher name escapes me, but it was an essay called the death of an author.
And the very premise of this was that once someone creates a book, a movie, comic book, whatever, and puts it out into the world, and people start interpreting it in different ways than it was intended, that the interpretations of it are in some ways more accurate than the person that was creating it. Like they. Like they were just a vehicle to put this thing down. And they might have had their own intentions, but if everyone, or even if some people take away a completely different lesson from it or a different interpretation, that. That mistaken interpretation or misinterpretation is no more or less valid than, like, your intent going in.
I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s a. I kind of think that is, like, a fascinating concept where, you know, if I find value in something in a different way than you intended, it doesn’t like it can’t invalidate my experience from it. Or maybe that’s too post modernist to be comfortable. No, I think there’s value in the argument, but I would say there’s more to it than just that. There’s a reason they call the arts. Like, we use a medium. I’m going to use the medium of painting or film or music. That means I’m going to pitch an idea to you, and you receive it, and we use this medium to communicate my ideas or visions to you.
And then you might communicate your response to me or to other audience members as a critic or just as an exercise. So if I make a painting that has a certain ambiguity as to what does it mean, I, the artist, may have had intent in creating it. And then you, when you see the painting, might be imposing your own imagination or experiences onto the painting, and it’s speaking to you in ways that I didn’t intend, and that’s also valid as you the recipient of the piece. But that doesn’t invalidate what my intent was. So I think there’s value in both the viewer and the creator having an intent and using the medium as a sort of water cooler conversation, perhaps.
Again, we’re talking about memes, like before. Like, the part of virality is what’s in the zeitgeist right now. Like, I may make a painting. No, there’s. There’s cartoons go back way to the 18 hundreds or something. A cartoon that’s like, I’m gonna criticize Abraham Lincoln or something. And to those people, that’s really relevant. It’s hot. It’s. Oh, he’s. He drew Abraham Lincoln, you know, pooping his pants, and we’re gonna make fun of him or something to us now, that has an irrelevancy. But a painting of, I don’t know, the Mona Lisa or the girl with the pearl earring is still compelling to us now.
It’s mysterious. A van Gogh is still interesting and has memetic juice that us as the viewers, even though we can’t ask van Gogh, what did he mean by this? We could still impose and imagine value in the piece and give it value. So it keeps speaking to future generations, even through language, time, and space. A piece can still speak to humans a thousand years from now, 10,000 years from now. That’s why art’s cool. I forgot the question. Well, you were talking about the medium, and I was basically. It wasn’t really a question. It was just throwing out the concept of the death of an.
Oh, right. And people assign their own meaning to everything. Yeah, it’s both valid. Well, so I would like, I mean, maybe stretching the definition of this a little bit. And you mentioned that you, like, spent a lifetime of developing your craft as an artist to kind of communicate this. What about the medium of artificial intelligence? Or is that even a medium? Is that not even allowed to be called a medium? It could be called. It is a medium because a person writes a prompt and an image comes out through a third party that the author cannot control.
So I say AI is not art because it is filtered through a machine that cannot. It can be guided, but it’s not. How do I put it? It will output a jpeg based on a prompt. But not all jpegs are art. That’s what I used to say. So it is an image. It is an image that maybe is very close to what the original prompt writer had their intent. Like, this is exactly what I had in my mind. But to me, it, the creation of art requires what I say is like agency. It needs the human hand to be directly causing the image to take shape and exist.
Now, you could say by writing a prompt, are not my fingers creating the image? But I say it’s like a game of hot potato. Now you’re handing the hot potato to a machine that is now rendering it outside of your control. You can try to control it, but you’re not making the image anymore. So as a crafts person, let’s say my snooty elitist, I’ve been called side, can come out and be like, no, you’re not one of us. You’re not an artist. You can generate an image. I don’t see it as art. I say it is not art.
It does not meet my criteria for art. But am I going to argue with. You can’t say AI. Art shouldn’t exist. Some of it’s funny, some of it’s cool. Like, I was just watching a trailer for the two towers, and they rendered it real cool looking like it was in the eighties, shot in the eighties. And I look at it and say, that’s cool. Is it art? I’m not the person to ask anymore. I realized that culture is going to move on whether I want it to or not. People can just call me names and, okay, we’re going to go have our AI.
Go, go have fun. I will not call it art, though. Would you? This is hypothetical, but you come across an art piece or something, like a painting of the twin towers or whatever, fill in the blank. You see this painting and you get swindled. Like, the person says that they made it, and it looks like art, and it feels like art, and it smells like art, and you’re like, okay, that’s this art. And you find out a year later, oh, that was actually AI generated in your mind. Do you, like, go back and unlike it, or do you feel assaulted in some way? Does it make you second look at every other art you see afterwards? And you’re like, I don’t know if I want to like this yet until I know whether or not a human had a hand in making it.
Good question. I think if you trick someone, and it is becoming increasingly possible to trick people, including, like they were recently saying, like, Kamala’s crowds outside of her plane were fake, we don’t even know anymore. In five years, rally on the moon. I saw, like millions of people. So it is going to become increasingly impossible to tell what’s the difference anymore. I still value the human hand in the creation of art because I want a back and forth between the person who creates it. I want to know that a human made it because it inspires me.
Let’s say I read a manga and then I see that someone made it with their bare hands. And then as a young man, I would say, wow, so if I train hard enough, I could learn to make manga too. And so I spent my whole life learning this discipline, and I don’t want it to see just get evaporated. But it is getting evaporated. I can’t draw a strip as fast as someone who can generate a strip. And I’m sure that’ll happen in a few years. So fuck me, but what am I going to do about that? Cursive is going away too, right? Like, a lot of people just don’t even know how to do it and it loses its.
And I guess the relation here to turn it into a question, could you ever see a future version of yourself training your own custom AI model on your own artwork so that you can prompt your own stuff? Or is that sacrilege? It is sacrilege. To me, it is. There are tools like, I’ll use 3d models, but I have to sculpt them myself. I have a certain rule set for myself, where I taught myself how to make things in three d to help me draw better, to understand and rotate things in my head and shape them. And I just think 3D is cool.
It’s an art form in itself. But if I’m using AI based on my talents alone, if that was even possible, like training it on just my style and not the bazillions of other artists who it scrapes from, I would still not use it, because it is. I see it as, it’s like hiking up a mountain. I’m hiking up the mountain with my bare feet, and I want to say I reached the summit using my own strength. You can use tools. And then there’s the discussion of, is AI a tool? No, I see it as a helicopter that you get on and it takes you to the summit and then it drops you off and then you say, oh, I made it to the summit, but it’s like you didn’t walk up step by step, the whole point of the arts, to me.
And I’ve had nasty debates about this in the past, and I will again in the future, probably I don’t respect, put it this way. In MMA, if I’m wrestling, fighting with some dude who’s been training for 20 years, and I managed to kick his ass somehow because I was wearing a power suit that made me fight him and it was making all the decisions, even though I told it, yeah, punch him. Okay, now do this move. And then I’m like, oh, yeah, I told it to do those moves. Therefore, did I make those moves. Maybe it’s a stupid analogy, but I, as a practitioner of the visual arts, value the journey up the mountain as much as the summit, perhaps more.
I want to commune with other artists who have worked for 20 years or even one year. Maybe we have something to teach each other. I value. See, I’m all over the place. I’m sorry, but Miyamuro Musashi. No, you’d have to describe that to me. He’s a famous samurai, and there’s this amazing manga called Vagabond about him and movies and stuff. But his whole thing was, it’s the way of the sword and it’s not about killing your opponents. There’s something very Zen about it. It’s about the friends you make on the way. Well, it’s a, yeah, they impose, like, shinto beliefs and buddhist beliefs, but basically it’s about you’re improving upon and learning about yourself through the discipline of the sword.
So you want to, like, beat your opponents and slash them and kill them. Instead of you getting killed, fine. But really, the way of the sword. It’s an AI to make a piece. I wouldn’t call it art, though. Like, I can have it generate an image. Like, I saw a really cool thing in the sky the other day, and I got to describe it to you. I can’t paint it for you, but I’m going to just. I’m going to describe it to an AI. And then you can see what I meant. But in the same way I could use other artistic media, like language, prose, or the spoken word to communicate those exact things to you.
And then you paint it in your own imagination. Personally, I think that’s more human interaction. I think art requires consciousness. And that’s a whole other discussion of is AI conscious? I say no. So I don’t want the machine to be involved as much as possible. Is it a tool? Can I use tools to help me? God damn. Sorry. Put my phone on silent. Sorry. You can use a tool as a shortcut, but I value the craft as much, if not more, than the finished product. I can read a really rich description in a prose novel and then see the image that the author is painting, and that’s good.
And then lord of the Rings, for example, and then Alan Lee, the artist, will make an image of the same description, from the same description. The text that looks completely different than mine. And that’s really cool. And I want to see what other people have in their minds. And that just. It creates. It’s something. It’s very human. It’s. It’s. It celebrates the human spirit. That’s what the arts are about to me. Learning about myself and learning about others. What. What is our species? Why do we tell stories? Why do we share dreams with each other? I think that’s what storytelling is, is at the very bottom of it all.
I was listening to your channel, browsing through it, and you had the guy that was the psychologist talking about schizophrenia and Jerry Marzinski, Og. Very interesting. And then there’s psychological questions like, what is the subconscious? Is there something called the spirit? What is this common thing between all humans? Wherever I was even reading about people taking DMT trips and they see similar things, they take a drug and they see similar things during their trips. And I’m like, what is that? What is the common thing between us? Is it spirit? That’s one way to describe it. Is it just the way that our brains are architected? I don’t know.
I’m endlessly interested in learning about it and hearing about it. But a machine like, AI can only take what you give it and then remix it. It can’t give you new information as far as I’m concerned. So I don’t value it as much as if a person paints something badly. I think that’s infinitely more valuable than a beautifully rendered AI image. There’s a. We’re in an interesting spot here because the way that you feel about it and the way that I feel about it in a lot of regards are shaped by it never having been an option at any point.
Like, it always required merit and practice and time invested in order to get good at anything. And there’s an entire generation, the kids, that are going to be surrounded by AI generated everything. Writing, music, artwork, even probably lesson plans. Their teachers are printing out for them because they were up too late and didn’t get stuck. So they’re going to be fish, like fish in water that don’t even realize that this water is a thing to have an opinion about. So I think it’s going to change dramatically. Right. So with that, though, there will be people that are influenced by art styles and genres and aesthetics, where the source material is kind of like, washed over, because it’s just like an amalgamation of thousands of different things come together.
So that, I don’t know if it’s a pro or a con, but it definitely means that if I were to ask you, say when you were growing up, like, what were your favorite influences and comic books and art and everything, and I want to ask you that, but also that, like, kids growing up now that they’ll have to go through the 2ft of snow like we did, but kids growing up now, they might not actually have those references. It’s like, oh, I liked the generations that I saw from this person. Like, all of their references for, like, aesthetic quality and, like, motifs and stuff might just be amalgamations of AI generated stuff.
So, like, what, what are your, like, person influences you have, like, favorite comic books or favorite anything that kind of, like, speaks to where you developed some of your style around. I’ll write that down because you said something else interesting that I wanted to touch on to call myself out as well. Like, I criticize Matt Walsh for saying movies and video games aren’t real experiences. When then I would point to if I knew a young man who had a relationship with an AI girlfriend right now, let’s say he’s, you know, 16 or something, and I’ll tell him, hey, man, that’s not a real relationship.
Why don’t you go meet a real woman? He’ll say, yeah, but it feels real. So is that what Matt Walsh thinks when I say I like video games? Am I going to turn into the curmudgeon when I’m 70, telling a young person, you’re not in a real relationship because you’re in love with a computer, and then you being a conspiracy enjoyer? Like, I dabble, but, like, what is the thing that he’s really talking to? Is it some mind control thing? It could become mind control. It’s not real. It’s real to him, but I see it as profane.
So that’s another rabbit trail we can go down. But as far as my influences as a young person, like, I enjoyed Charlie Brown comics, Calvin and Hobbes, that sort of thing. Anime, dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Ronin warriors, adult swim, toonami. I played video games. I just. I loved this media that was coming out of Japan, especially. And so I just. I absorbed anime and games and cartoons, and I just drew for fun. It was something I did in my free time. Like, I want to make this stuff. I enjoy reading it and playing it. I want to make it.
So in order to learn to do that, I have to learn to draw, right? So I drew and Drew, and ten years later, I started getting good at it. It took a long time, and then another ten years after I started doing it professionally. So it’s one of those things where you just keep. Keep finding things that interest you, or, I’m talking about myself. Art history, the impressionists, and all kinds of different art movements, like japanese prints, the Renaissance. And I’m now enjoying the Hudson river school as a specific, like, branch of art. They were in the Hudson river valley in New York in the mid 18 hundreds that they would make these.
They called them sublime paintings, like, heavenly paintings. This is where I grew up. So this is like the music always filled with. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but it was. It would always be like a. A shot out in the middle of the forest and just like. Like, God rays just beaming with, like, animals and everyone, like, in awe constantly. I really love the aesthetic. And it was an interesting time capsule, too, because that was when America was still being founded in the middle, like, what, early 18 hundreds, let’s say, to mid. So the industrial age was just starting to really pick up steam.
Not to want to joke, but they were. They were worried that the natural world, the virginal new world, this continent, was being ravaged by machines, and they wanted to preserve and dream. Like, what is. Is this the new heavens and the new earth that that was promised in the Bible. Are we living in it? Should we treat it like it’s virginal and not, and await Jesus’s return? So they would paint these paintings with heavenly motifs. And that was their memetic way of saying we wanted to preserve as much of this countryside as possible without marring it with machines and all these nightmare images coming from Europe.
So they migrated here from, say, you know, England or something, and they kept moving west. But they made these paintings saying, like, we just. We want to imagine what this country would look like if. If it was not tarnished by the industrial nightmare. That’s unstoppable. So they were painting nightmare scenarios and beautiful dreamland, sublime dream scenarios as well. And I just think that’s interesting. That’s what, almost 175 years ago? Something like that. I don’t live in an industrial hell yet, but I could see it getting there. They were basically writing the prequel to Fern Gully and Avatar.
It sounds like. Like the sublime version of Fern Gully. It was a non hippie christian version of it. I don’t know if they were protestant or Catholic specifically, but there was definitely religious christian element to what they were doing, at least some of them. Is there a religious christian element to the stuff that you do? Well, I have a background, protestant background. I am not practicing now, but I suppose my operating system is running on an old version of Christianity, if that makes sense. I never really uninstalled it, but I. What do they say? I live as if it’s true.
Even if I don’t necessarily believe it. I want to believe it. It’d be nice. But does it influence my art? Maybe it influences my conservative views. Although I lean. I think I lean middle, but the Overton window shifted so far left that I’m now conservative. So it may influence my stuff. It depends. You have to look at it piece by piece, I guess. What stories I tell. What are the morals? What are the hypotheses of each piece? It’s probably influenced by that stuff. If you had to pick one of these two options, Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis.
Well, I’m biased. I had a super Nintendo. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for your loss and your horrible upbringing. I hope that your parents are embarrassed that they put such an inferior console. For now. I’m just. I’m just kidding. I’m kidding. Well, I owned a genesis, I’ll correct myself. But I didn’t own any games, for. I would. I would rent games. Okay, second question, which is maybe related. Mortal Kombat or super street? Fighter. Oh, my goodness. Street fighter. Even if we’re talking street fighter one versus mortal Kombat two, well, street Fighter one sucked. Street fighter two is the big one.
Yeah, it’s true. We get to include street fighter one. No one means that when they say street Fighter. Yeah, I still play Street Fighter now, street Fighter six, I don’t play mortal Kombat. Is which. Which group of people that you interact with would you say is the most toxic? Is it politics, comics, or games? If you had to pick from those three categories, and by toxic, I mean which are the most temperamental in that? Like, I might not post that one there, because those people are just the worst. Gamers argue with me the most because they can be conservatives, and then I’ll say, like, I don’t like a certain game, and they’ll be like, oh, you’re wrong.
All your gaming takes suck, you know, and they’ll argue with me endlessly. But if I say something politically, the left will, like, ignore me. So I don’t. Even though I know that’s a big beehive to hit. We generally, on x, I think they have quarantined us from each other for the most part, so I don’t get bad interactions with them. As for comics, there can be insane levels of toxicity, but I don’t participate in it. Yeah. Why do you think comics is almost, like, a battleground of, like, political ideology? Do you think it’s always been like that? Do you think it’s ramped up? Do you think there’s, like, something to it? Well, we know that the left has taken over every major media.
It’s not just comics. It’s video games, music, movies, the colleges, liberal arts. You know, they call it liberal arts for some reason. So it’s not just comics, but they. They have taken over, I think, storytelling in general, because they know. I think this is me putting my tin foil hat on. I think they know that you can reprogram the human soul through the arts, and it’s one of the ways you can influence voting and philosophy. By creating beautiful art that speaks to people, whether it’s their carnal desires or their conscious desires. You can create a movie like Avatar.
And was that 2008? And then not long after, the trans movement exploded. And I don’t know if that’s a coincidence, because you get a movie. Movie is there tomorrow. The other transformers, the kind that goes into bathrooms that they don’t belong in, that’s the other decepticons. So, yeah, like Avatar, for instance. This is just my little theory. People saw that movie and think, wait, how nice would it be to reincarnate into another body, my real body? And that, obviously, that’s not a new idea in humanity, but it was the most recent idea, and it just made people think about, what if I could be reborn in a new body? That is what I want it to look like, how I feel on the inside.
So you can theoretically reprogram people through storytelling? It depends on how soft the person’s mind is. Anybody’s mind can be incepted this way. But I think the left knew this. It knows this. It has known this for a long time, since before the cold War probably even started. They infiltrated Hollywood. Razorfist did a great video about that called the Hollywood was always red, I think. And he talks about how they infiltrated Hollywood and storytelling. And the idea was that we can control or influence society by telling. By controlling the stories they tell. So comics is just a small battleground.
It happens to be my battleground, so I’m very passionate about it. But it’s one of the battlegrounds in a huge war, the culture war, that, unfortunately, I think conservatives have been not taking seriously. And it sucks to not be fighting alongside many more talented people. But hopefully, by the end of my career, I will have snapped enough people out of it that by the time I retire, conservatives will be creating as much art as the left and hopefully fighting back. Something like that. I mean, you kind of just answered what I guess one of my next questions was going to be.
But I want to make sure I’m not making assumptions on what you mean here. So do you think that there’s indeed hope that, like, the liberal or the left sort of monopoly over art, music, education, poetry, just every, like, all the creative and liberal arts. Do you think that there’s actual hope that, you know, conservative or other wing or someone else can usurp them? I would think there’s the hostile version of it, of usurping, like, doing it by force, like, somehow taking over all the companies that the left has taken. Just have Elon musk buy every other company.
I don’t know how possible that is. Like, if he takes over Disney, he owns Marvel and Star wars and Stan. Yeah, why not? That’s one way to do it. Another way is to create our own Star wars, our own Disney. But then probably it’ll get mismanaged and fall to pieces and, or get bought out by the left. Again, I like this is make your own bag. Make your own paypal. Yeah. I mean, I’m an indie cartoonist. You know, that’s one of my jobs. So I like the idea of, let’s just make our own comics, sell them to a few thousand people.
But you’re not going to change society by selling a few thousand books. There has to be some kind of critical mass that I can’t control. If there are more talented conservative creators who don’t sell out, which I don’t know how likely that is, it is possible that they will at least be able to create art that speaks to the masses in a way that satisfies them aesthetically and also shares the values of the, the times, the zeitgeist. But I don’t think the zeitgeist can be controlled by creating art. It’s not, I don’t think art is a persuasive tool like that.
It’s more of a, I agree with this. Therefore, I like the piece. Like, the piece will speak to us because of what’s already in our heart. So I think there’s a spiritual decline happening in America anyway. So nobody’s going to respond to, like, I mean, Mel Gibson’s making the passion of the Christ two, for instance. I don’t know what that’s going to do to the zeitgeist, if anything here. Other countries where they’re already christian and they already believe that stuff, it might explode over there or it might cause a temporary revival here. I don’t know. But I don’t know if a movie, a movie like that can really change the zeitgeist.
It might be a flashpoint. I encourage them to try it. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think there just has to be a ton of conservative art that has to speak to people’s hearts. And a lot of the times, conservatives, when they make art, I don’t think most of it has lasting, has staying power. Maybe most of it will be remembered in its time. And I include my, like, four panel strips in this. I don’t think my stuff will be relevant in 510, 20 years. But for now, you know, I’m keeping the flame lit if, if you’re sort of, like, envisioning success, and, and I’ll acknowledge that, I guess.
I don’t think so. And I hope that you don’t think so. Like, you’ve got the ultimate prophetic vision. Like, you can actually see the future exactly as it’s going to play out. But, like, if you were to envision you hitting critical mass, like, what would be your avenue of getting there? Is it just like a set of viral things that then get covered on national media, and then people find you through that. Is it releasing a game? Do you make, like a movie or something? What do you think of in the back of your mind when you’re like, this is how I get to that change culture level.
Change culture? I don’t know, because I’m sort of. I try to be goal oriented, and then I make moves towards those goals. And I don’t think change culture is a realistic goal for me, knowing myself. My goals professionally are to earn a living and to have a career that I’m proud of by the time I retire. So whether or not I change culture, I don’t think is going to affect those. It may parallel them, but I wouldn’t consider that one of my goals personally. Okay, I want to get a little sampling of just your thoughts on a bunch of different topics.
So I’ve got a little segment. I’ve got, like, a little five second clip. I’m just going to play it and then I’ll explain how it works. Hey, conspiracy buffs, I double dare you to take some PCP, the paranormal conspiracy probe. On your marks, get set and go. Okay. Don’t feel like you need to fully explain any of these unless you want to. If you wanted to go on an explanation, that’s fine. But the general premise is I’m just going to mention a certain topic, and you’re going to rate it from one to ten on how much credit you give that topic.
So, for example, if I started with Bigfoot and I said, rate Bigfoot on one to ten on how much you believe he exists or ever existed, where would you, what number would you come up with? Two. As in not likely, right? Yeah. Like. Like a two in ten chance of him having ever existed at some point. I do think creatures have walked this earth that we don’t understand, but Bigfoot specifically. Yeah. We’re talking Harry and the Hendersons Bigfoot right now. Well, the only evidence that I’ve seen is those photos. So the Patterson gimlin footage from the seventies.
That evidence does not satisfy me, but I would not. I would leave room to say that it is possible something like Bigfoot has existed. I don’t know if it still does. How about aliens, like little grey men, Roswell style aliens, walking this earth right now, having ever walked the earth or even flown by it, and said, wow, look at that shithole. Let’s keep going. I would give that in terms of likelihood four out of ten. Okay, so twice as likely as Bigfoot. What about shape shifting reptilian humanoids on the earth somewhere right now, one out of ten.
But, yeah, I do think when we say shape shifting reptilians, that is shorthand for something else. And I do believe that what it represents, those people do exist, the reptilians. Metaphorically. There is, I think, a secret society of people who think they are more than human that look down on the commoners and they exist in, like, a world we can’t even perceive or touch, like, will never see their cities because they’re probably, like, underground and you need a pass to go and see them or something. All right. All right. Well, you’re reading ahead, so let me get, let me get some of these in granular detail.
Sure. Flat earth, one to ten. Flat earth, just pretty popular among the conservative conspiracy crowd. Flat earth tends to be. I enjoy the, I enjoy the image of flat Earth, but I think it’s a zero out of ten. What about, do you know what Tartaria is? Refresh me. Tartaria is one of the theories that there was a global empire almost like a more modern Atlantis, and that sometime in the maybe 18 hundreds, all of history was whitewashed. And one of the premises of Tartaria is like this old world technology in which the explorers came to America, found these elaborate cathedrals and buildings and, like, the world’s fair, and destroyed them to hide that there was, like, a superior race of people before us.
It’s, it’s fun to imagine. I’ve not seen or heard of this before, so I can’t rate it. I would say that’s fair. That’s fair. Yeah. It’s a fun idea. How about a human being has stepped foot on the moon in the last 100 years? And I didn’t mention when, I didn’t mention a country, just a human being is stepped foot on the moon. Well, space exists and the moon exists and planets exist and rockets exist. So it seems probable that we could have sent a thing to touch down on the moon. Whether that footage is what we saw, I can’t say.
I like to believe that it’s possible that let’s ignore the footage and just the premise of a human being being able to step foot on the moon, it strikes me as probable possible. So I would say more than 50%. I don’t know what number. We’ll say it’s conservatively a six out of ten. Then why not? What about the actual footage that was shown to people of the Apollo eleven missions on tv much? Do you think that was real footage of people on the moon? I don’t know, but I would say, that was around the time when they were seriously messing with people’s minds publicly.
So I would not be surprised to learn it was fake. Put it that way. Four out of ten, maybe. How about 911 was an inside job? That’s a tough one, because, like, I hear about, like, building seven and stuff. I live not. And the Pentagon and the NoraD stand down order. I’ll stop. Well, that’s the thing. Like, was it an inside job? We have to define inside job, and that would take forever. And I’m not. Well, there’s four categories. So there’s one is that the government had no idea anything was going. Like, just a straight up government explanation happened.
Then there’s the government knew and did nothing. Then there’s the government knew and helped facilitate. And then the final big daddy is like, the government did it from start to end. I don’t know how to answer that, but I would not say it’s impossible that they at least knew that it could have happened. I don’t know if they knew when it was going to happen. Could it have been stopped? I think it could have been stopped. I am very suspicious of the other coincidences happening at the same time. Like billions of dollars vanishing from the defense budget or something like that.
Like the day before, back when that was an anomaly. Now that just happens every other day. It’s not a big deal. Yeah, but, like, I look at things, like the way that the buildings fell and stuff, and I’m just like, what the hell is that? It doesn’t, it doesn’t. I’m not smart enough to say one way or another, but having known history that things like that can happen in order to facilitate future events, like invasions of other countries and stuff, I don’t think it’s impossible that a government could do something like that to make something else happen.
So I can’t dismiss the possibility that they knew. I don’t know if they did it because they use patchet men often, like the guy who shot Trump not long ago. I think he was trained. I think he was, what’s the word? Somebody. Somebody put him up to that. And we’ll never. He was also a sponsor of the show up until recently. Interesting. Top Patreon, actually. That’s really interesting. I don’t know what to say about that. Like, I don’t think he acted alone, let’s put it that way. The JFK thing. I don’t think he acted alone. So, no, I’m not stupid.
I think they do do stuff like that. Would they kill thousands of Americans? To what end? I don’t know. It’s not impossible. So I’m no fan of the government. No. Is this like a five that could go plus or minus five? I can’t put a number to it, but I really. I don’t think it was just a bunch of guys planning this on their own. No. Could you put a number to the statement? Osama bin Laden was buried at sea out of respect to his culture. Just like they cremated the Trump shooter. Right. Well, that was also part of his culture, was to be cremated before anyone could do any forensic analysis on.
Yeah, the clone body. Yeah, no, I don’t like that they do that. Or like, I mean, to bring up 911 again, too. They shipped out all that wrecked metal to China, like, within months. Right. And they did the same thing. Okay. Anyways, I won’t turn into that thing. It is extremely suspicious to me and I don’t know if we’ll ever find out. And I don’t know what I would do with myself if I knew the truth. Like, just live in a cabin somewhere and wait to die. Like, what? What am I supposed to do with that information? Start sending people exploding things in the mail? Uncle Ted.
I’m sure, yeah, they would do it and say, I sent. I sent it, but, like, no, I think, what is one citizen going to do at this point? If I know too much, I can’t do anything. Maybe I’d rather not know. I don’t know. How about. How about angels, one to ten? Like an actual angel guide or like your guardian angel? These are fun questions. I’m not prepared to answer them. But having been raised christian, I would have thought that it is possible that such things exist. And therefore, what we call aliens could be angels and demons.
And. And I’ll just jump to demons, too, because usually people tend to equate the same. So when you were talking about the reptilians and people might believe that there’s something like, I think that you were kind of insinuating, like, a demonic entity of some kind. Yeah. So if that were the case, like what? What would you rate that on your scale if you could? I can’t because I am agnostic right now. So I am of two minds if it is. If the Bible is true, then I see no reason to believe why that can’t be true as well.
There’s demonic influence that’s been happening for thousands of years. They’re all over the power structures in every human industry and government. They’re controlling everything. I would see, I would say that’s more than likely if the Bible is true. If a man 2000 years ago was killed on a cross and was resurrected, then I would say all bets are off as far as reality. If you can die and come back to life, all of that stuff is possible if that happened. But I don’t know. So the christian side of me says, of course that explains everything. Angels, demons.
Of course that explains everything. My rational, non theistic side says these entities are being described through. We’re using words like demon, which is a greek word for a power. Like powers. Yeah, it’s a jinn. I’ve heard it called as well, like in the muslim world. It is a spirit, a powerful spirit that influences you for good or evil. It has been described that way as well. But I think that’s also metaphorical. When someone is writing and they’re, quote, channeling something or acting, and they say the character. I was channeling the character through me, he was speaking through me.
It’s as if they were possessed by a character. They can be speaking metaphorically or literally. I would not dismiss either because I try to be open minded and I am open to being persuaded either way. So I guess 50 50 is my answer. I would be. I would be delighted if it was either. The world is more interesting if spirits exist and God exists. In fact, I would be very. I would feel very relieved if God existed. This might sound like the same question, but sometimes I get different answers. So what about rating a ghost, like victorian style ghost or an orb in a photo? Or would that fall under the same rating as your angels and demons? Or would ghost have a separate rating? Probably.
I would say it’s unlikely. My non theistic side, if ghosts exist, then all bets are off again. I do think people can be mind affected mentally to a point where they think they’ve seen one, or can hallucinate and see one, or hear strange sounds and not be able to explain them. I’ve never seen one, but if people tell me they’ve seen one, I’m very interested in hearing the stories. Like if you. If you say you’ve seen one, I would like to hear that story because it would affect my. Maybe it is real. I’m going to listen to this story.
Maybe there’s something I don’t know about the reality of the world. I’m open to it. All right, I’ll start slowly backing away from the spiritual questions here. A couple more. A little bit more mundane. So if you had to rate one to ten, the credibility of conventional dinosaurs like you go to the Natural Museum of History, and you see a big Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton there. How accurate do you think? And I don’t mean, like, did they misplace a bone, but I mean, like, did they just find a bunch of random parts and say, hey, it would be cool if we stack these together and call this thing a big reptile? Like, how accurate do you think dinosaurs as a concept are? No idea.
It. If you look at biblical, the biblical side of me says giants existed. The rational side of me says if evolution is true, then of course giant creatures existed, so it would make sense to find their bones. So I would say it’s likely on both ends of that argument if I’m being theistic. The Bible says that those types of creatures walked the earth, so that would satisfy me. Although I knew people in church who said the dinosaur bones were placed there to test your faith. Also a great Bill Hicks routine as well. Yeah. So I would say both sides of me say that it’s possible, if not likely.
I’m not a carbon dater. I don’t know if those bones are real, but I have no reason to doubt it. So I’m sensing a six or higher. And on the scale. Yeah, I’m a fence sitter, I guess. Okay. I know it’s hard sometimes to boil the numbers down, which is what makes this. This exercise kind of fun, is because sometimes you’re, like, forced to. Because there’s a world of difference between a five and a six and a four in this case. Right, because one’s, like, you’re leaning. So how about fire breathing, flying dragons having existed at any point in history? I have no idea.
A question mark out of ten. It’s fair. That’s all I got, man. This was actually fun. We got to talk about AI and memes and dragons and demons and aliens. Is there anything that I kind of left that I should have asked you about that would have went into a really cool conversation? I mean, I’m not an expert on any of those things, aside from art and how it relates to psychology. Like, I think about the kind of dreams that people have, and then they learn a art, like writing, music, painting, to communicate their visions and dreams with others.
So I don’t know how qualified I am to talk about that, but I think it is an interesting subject. Do you. Do you practice lucid dreaming at all? No, but I was thinking about this the other. I mean, I’ll daydream all the time, but, like, intentionally, like, plan and practice to do lucid dreaming? Nothing. Nothing formal. No. There will be times where, like, I’m really hyper aware of the moment, and then, like, you know, they talk about getting in the zone where you’re kind of having an out of body experience as you’re painting something or just daydreaming.
Those are fun. In fact, I would say those are the most fun I would have during. I don’t even have to be painting to have those, but they’re kind of not supernatural. But, like, you know, I would describe them as you’re living in a vision, and you’re not necessarily feeling your senses. You’re feeling something outside of yourself. Like, when I was a kid, I would look at certain paintings, like heavenly paintings, and I remember it so vividly, as if I saw heaven itself. And I was just a little kid, you know? But I’m staring at this painting, and I’m like, it’s so vivid.
It’s as if it’s more real than the room I’m sitting in. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don’t know. I know what you mean. Although my frame of reference when I was a kid and I thought I saw heaven, it was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade machine and a Chuck E. Cheese. But I honestly like what as you were describing that, I was like, man, I know exactly what he means. But I’m maybe in a different building as you, but it’s as much as real an experience as someone who takes a drug and says, I saw visions.
It’s like, did I really have a spiritual experience, or did my mind play tricks on me? I don’t know, but I think it’s cool. Art as a communicative tool to share a dream with someone else. I can make a movie, put music to it, photograph it a certain way, use actors, choose camera angles, and then we’re both sharing the dream at the same time. Short of plugging our heads into each other like the matrix, that’s probably the closest we can get right now to having a shared dream. And humanity has always wanted to do that. And it has used the arts as a tool to have two brains interface as intimately as possible.
So as technology develops, I can see us making moves in that direction, which frightens me. But it’s also interesting. I don’t really have anything interesting to say about it. I’m just an observer. But, yeah, I’m scared and interested at the same time, I guess. I want to leave this off with my favorite comic of yours, and I want you to maybe suggest what your favorite is or which one you would suggest if no one’s ever heard of you before? Which one you think would really snag them but mine? And forgive me, because I don’t have all the panel dialogue memorized, but it was essentially, like the shakespearean hunter Biden panel.
And I guess he gets, like, caught, or there’s, like, pictures of him, you know, like, the laptop pictures get leaked, and it basically shows all of the social media kind of playing cleanup form. And it’s like, thou hast not. Or you might be able to describe it better because you probably remember all the actual words better than I do. It was something like, the archduke’s son has been caught with yon wench or something, smoketh crack. And then Mike Mark Zuckerberg, like, stabs the jester, who’s trying to tell everyone, and they say these tidings transpired, not something, dude.
But it’s just, I mean, I know. I know that you’re uncomfortable when people, like, praise you. You can, like, close your eyes and turn, like I’m giving you, like, a vaccine or something. I agree. That was a funny one. I was lucky that one was so. Man, it’s. It just hit on so many freaking levels, man. Just. Well done, bro. Well done. So what, aside from that one, I don’t even know if that’s one of your personal favorites, but, like, which one are you? Like, this is the one. If you. If you want to walk away with an impression of what my artwork is about, go and look at this one first.
I don’t know if I would describe it that way, but I had the most fun with the audience reactions when I pretended to draw a leftist newspaper strip of. There was these canadian truckers who were protesting the COVID response or something like that. I would say two years ago, and I drew a bunch of trucks wearing Klan hoods, and it said something like this way to fascism. And they were driving. And I drew it as if I was a leftist cartoonist. And I tricked a lot of people into thinking that this was real. And then I also drew a strip that same day.
It was so funny when I thought of it that I woke up laughing. I was. I was sleeping, and I thought of it as I was sleeping, and I woke up pissing myself. There was the twin towers, planes. Planes going into the towers. And one of them, the towers, said something like free speech and values or something. It was the most retarded thing that I told myself, like, what would the New Yorker publish about this? And I think it was in response to the COVID stuff of, like, it’s more important to get the shots. I’m very anti vax.
Whatever. We don’t have to talk about that. But please don’t. Another show sponsor. All right. So anyway, the reaction to, they thought it was real. A lot of people thought I, I was so tickled that, I don’t know, like leftists were sharing it like, oh, this is a good comic. I’m like, oh my God, I’m trolling you. Do you not understand? And I was so tickled by that. And I’ve never been able to replicate that. There are other strips like the dancing nurses. I think my more famous one is when Joe Biden sucking the black out of a woman, says, you ain’t black.
But you know, those are, those are popular ones. I don’t know if the popular ones are necessarily my best ones, but sometimes you get lucky. I try as hard on the hunter Biden one as I do with any strip I draw. So it’s just luck and timing and sometimes inspiration. I can’t control any of that stuff. Well, I’ll try and add links to all the comics that we talked about in this episode. So if anyone’s watching or listening, you can go to the show notes and click and actually see these things in person. So, George, I appreciate your time talking with me today.
Can you give one more chance to tell people where they can find you and where to send their money? Well, money is not possible at this time, but someday maybe I can get subs on X. My handle is 85 on xDev Instagram and here on YouTube. Awesome, man. Thanks again for your time and I wish you all the best. I’m a lifelong fan. Until you make fun of the thing that I hold sacred. And I’m not going to tell you what that is, so you’re just going to have to dance around it. Well, I hope you’ll forgive me if I do.
I’m sure to piss everyone off at some point. But thank you for the invite. It was a lot of fun. I hope I wasn’t boring. I look forward to being pissed off. Spread the word with propaganda packs, all for just $40 shipped@paranoidamerican.com. dot paranoid propaganda packs we got facts on these speaker slaps, so grab yourself a stack and go attack with these paranoid propaganda packs. These huge all weather slaps will last in public for years to come. Remind citizens that birds are not real. Self immolation is an option and might make you magnetic. Do your part and get a propaganda pack today from paranoidamerican.com.
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