➡ The Paranoid American podcast, launched in 2012, explores hidden truths and mysteries of the world, from secret societies to forbidden technology. The podcast challenges accepted perceptions of reality and encourages listeners to question standardized narratives. In a recent episode, the host interviews Nina Paley, a controversial figure known for her unapologetic stance on free speech and reality, including her belief that women don’t have penises. The discussion delves into the importance of naming reality, the battle over public perception, and the blurred lines between facts and feelings in today’s society.
➡ The speaker discusses their experience with political and cultural divisions, particularly in relation to their views on sex and gender. They express frustration at being ostracized by their former liberal tribe for their beliefs, leading to a loss of career opportunities. They also discuss their past involvement with the sex-positive and queer communities, and their current disillusionment with the trans movement, which they now view as a trend or cult. The speaker also explores the concept of gender critical feminism and its limitations when applied to individuals.
➡ The speaker discusses their passion for creating art not for monetary gain, but for the satisfaction of bringing their ideas to life. They believe that art created for money tends to be less impactful than art created out of a genuine need for it to exist. They also engage in a playful rating game, giving their opinions on various topics ranging from the existence of Bigfoot to the possibility of human clones.
➡ The speaker discusses their fascination with conspiracy theories and the potential of human cloning. They also mention their work, including comics influenced by these theories, and encourage listeners to support them through donations or purchasing merchandise. The speaker hints at a future discussion about artificial intelligence and its impact on creativity. They conclude by promoting various products and projects, including a comic about Stanley Kubrick and the Apollo space missions.
➡ The text discusses a podcast called Heterodorx, hosted by the speaker and Corinna Cohn, a transsexual male. They often discuss topics like gender pronouns, diet differences, and political views, including the Second Amendment. The speaker also talks about their personal journey with a skin-picking disorder and their involvement in a twelve-step recovery program, emphasizing the importance of both faith and doubt in their recovery process.
➡ The speaker discusses creating gloves for people recovering from trichotillomania, a condition where people compulsively pull out their hair. They also talk about their upbringing as an atheist and their struggle to understand religious faith. Despite their efforts to embrace religion, they find it difficult to fully accept it. They also mention their involvement in a twelve-step program and their desire to have the kind of faith that religious people have.
➡ The speaker discusses their struggle with faith and self-acceptance, their interest in psychedelic art and experiences, and their skepticism towards Scientology. They also share their experiences with twelve-step programs for behavioral issues, not substance abuse, and express concerns about the therapy industry. They believe in the potential of mind-altering experiences without drugs and the importance of a safe, professional environment for such experiences.
➡ The speaker discusses the differences between extroverted and introverted alcoholics, noting that while extroverts may have to make amends with many people, introverts may struggle to reconnect with even a few. They also touch on the concept of copyright culture, arguing that cultural elements like music or celebrity images, which are often forced upon us, should be considered shared property. They suggest that copyright laws restrict our ability to express our culture and communicate with others, and that these laws are ultimately enforced through the threat of violence.
➡ The text discusses the origins and implications of copyright and intellectual property laws. It suggests that these laws were initially created to control the spread of information and not necessarily to protect the creators. The text also explores the idea that these laws can infringe on actual property rights, using examples like books and software. Finally, it debates the impact of these laws on the distribution and profitability of creative works, suggesting that removing these laws could potentially lead to wider dissemination and recognition of an artist’s work.
➡ The text discusses the complexities of copyright and plagiarism in the world of art and content creation. It highlights how copyright can sometimes hinder artists, especially smaller ones, from getting their work seen and making money. The text also explores the idea of an honor system where credit is given where it’s due, but acknowledges that this system only works if all parties involved care about being fair. Lastly, it mentions a real-life example of a T-shirt design being sold by someone else without the original artist’s permission, illustrating the challenges artists face in protecting their work.
➡ The speaker discusses their experiences with online censorship, false accusations, and the impact on their reputation. They express frustration with the lack of accountability on social media platforms, particularly when it comes to false reports and copyright claims. They also highlight the challenges of being deplatformed and the lack of transparency from companies. The speaker suggests that platforms should examine reports more thoroughly and allow for appeals, to address the issue of ‘cancel culture’.
➡ The text discusses the evolution of crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, comparing them to shopping malls due to their high foot traffic. It also touches on societal changes, including the loss of humor and the shift in attitudes towards gender and sexuality. The conversation then moves to controversial topics like abortion, suggesting unconventional ideas like a ‘frequent flyers card’ for the procedure. Finally, it delves into the creation of lenticular cards and the animation of the Book of Revelation, highlighting the importance of creativity and individual interpretation.

It was the statute of Anne, and it was to control the dissemination of information with the printing press, because the crown did not want seditious materials printed. So the crown needed a relationship with the publishers, or the stationers, as they were called. 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 steel 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.

Elusive truth. Paranoid american podcast today. And don’t take this to mean it’s like it’s so serious, but I get to interview a little bit of a hero, and I don’t mean a hero in that. Like, I grew up worshiping Nina Paley. In fact, I don’t even think I was familiar with Nina’s work until very recently on sing tank. She came on with Andreas and David. Charles Plate was, like, a huge fan and totally turned me onto the work. But I’ve got some interesting questions. I think a lot of devil’s advocate stuff. Before I get into all of this, I want you to pause what you’re doing, or at least make a note to later on, go watch Seder masochism, copy it, distribute it.

I think. I think that’s what we’re going to try to. Okay, I’m getting a nod. Yes. So without too much further ado, I want to let Nina Paley introduce herself, tell you where you can find her work. And then we’re going to get into some, I think, a really good discussion. Okay, well, thank you for having me on your podcast. How big is your audience? How many listeners do you have? Good question. I think that we’re nearing around 7000 subscribers on YouTube, but we’re also up to 1500 unique plays a day on the audio podcast. And then I just realized I had all my videos on private on Rumble, and I made them all visible yesterday.

And, like, the subscribers jumped by like 400. So I guess I get there’s people actually listening to this at some sort of level. I wouldn’t consider it big. Not like those huge heavy hitters with like 50,000 or Andreas with his hundred thousand, but we’re getting there. Wow, that’s amazing. So, yeah, I do a podcast with Corinna Cohn and we have 18 listeners, but that we built it up from six. So that doesn’t reflect, in my experience, the quality of the content at all. In fact, there’s almost an inverse relationship between the amount of listeners and. You know what? It’s not going to be too surprising, though, because I hate to break this news to you, Nina, but you’re absolutely toxic.

Like, anything that gets near you. And in fact, I can almost imagine this video maybe getting taken down or having to re edit a few times. And with that mind, don’t self censor whatsoever. So I don’t know, why are you so controversial? Can we just throw, like, a dart at a board and just hit, like a million different controversial topics and we could be like, oh, yeah, I needed to that. Oh, yeah, I needed that, too. I’m a radioactive. Radioactive. I guess to preface that as a question, what is the most radioactive take that you’ve got right now? Oh, well, it’s been my most radioactive take for the last eight years.

It’s been eight years? Yeah. It started in 2017. I said, women don’t have penises. So. And I never apologized for it. Like, I said it or whatever. I wrote it on Facebook. And then when people told me how hurtful that was, I did nothing. Hold on, hold on. Did you. Did you get that, guys? Okay, they’re moving in. Sorry, Nina, this is actually operation. No, I know you’ve been very unapologetic. And I guess that the unapologetic part almost seems like it’s the worst part of it all. Everyone’s allowed to make the mistake as long as they learn from it and they are now listening and learning, then it’s almost like this public castration.

It’s almost part of the formula is that you’re supposed to make the mistake and then you’re supposed to publicly flagellate yourself over the mistake as this, like, going example. So that becomes the trend, I guess, right? It wasn’t a mistake. The whole thing is, it was not a mistake. And I only. I do apologize when I do things wrong, but I have to actually do something wrong. I do lots of things. This just wasn’t one of the things I did wrong. Plenty of things I’ve gotten wrong. I’m. I’m curious how much, and I don’t know the best, the better way to ask this question, but, like, not how much of your identity, but, like, how passionate are you about that topic? Or was it just like a flippant? Like, this doesn’t, like, I just believe this.

It doesn’t mean that much to me. I’m going to post it. Or is it part of, you know, your culture war against decent standards? I am passionate about being able to name reality. I’m passionate about free speech. And I would say, you know, my previous controversial positions were about copyright, and that was also a very strong pro free speech position. I think people are free to say things that are wrong. I think you need to discuss things. I had lots of criticisms of America in my youth, but I have loved the First Amendment and thought that is a great thing about american culture.

I grew up on a university campus, and we were supposed to be able to discuss controversial ideas. The ideas that I talk about aren’t even controversial. I mean, copyright, I could understand being controversial because it’s sort of a different thing, but the whole thing where all of a sudden you’re not supposed to know that sex exists, that’s a new thing. Like saying women don’t have penises is not controversial until ten years ago, maybe. So. Yeah. Really? I’m in this because I think it’s really important to be able to name reality and talk about things and not get canceled for having a different idea or different take or I don’t even want to say opinion because we’re talking about facts.

I should be able to say, you know, you’re just feeding into the narrative the second you consider an opinion. Right. Biological facts exist and, yeah, feelings aren’t facts. And we can talk about feelings and how important they are, but they are not facts. Isn’t reality losing this war? Oh, I mean, reality can’t lose. Reality’s gonna be doing reality regardless. Okay, well, okay, let’s. Let’s define the battlefield. If the battlefield is public perception or just the individual human mind that’s surrounded by pop culture, what have you, it almost seems like if you’re saying that, you know, I’m on the side of reality, it almost seems that right now, reality is not having a decisive victory.

At least, I don’t know if it’s losing, but it seems like there’s an actual battle going on that is trying to define what constitutes reality and what doesn’t. And it goes way beyond the gender aspect of, you know, which we all learn in kindergarten cop. At least that was my, the first time that I really had that delivered that men have penises and women have vaginas. That controversial statement in that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. But, like, that, you’re saying a couple decades ago, that was just. And moving on. It was just an accepted little chuckle, but now you’re trying to redefine reality.

But there’s also, like, a huge resurgence in questioning. If there’s clones out there and aliens and crystal magic, and, I don’t know, like, a lot of that seems to blur the lines of what we conventionally believe as things. And you get into this in your copyright stuff, too. But I’m just wondering, is there even any hope? Because it almost feels to me, and I guess it sounds blackfilled a little bit, but reality is kind of losing the war if there is one going on. Well, there’s a substat called reality’s last stand by a biologist, Colin Wright, who’s in this culture war.

Also, I don’t think reality is losing. I think that political, cultural divisions are increasing. And all of a sudden, if you’re someone like me who says sex is real, suddenly the people that back you up or don’t cancel you for that are conservatives. And that’s not the tribe that I came from. I got canceled from my tribe, which I now call the tribe of libtard, which I realize is offensive. But I can’t help it. I mean, these people canceled me. They lied about me. This was my. These were my people, and they treated me horribly. And I lost all of my speaking engagements and career, and my work has been kept out of film festivals for a long time.

I lost everything under the flag of the liberals, which I was one of. So, yeah, having the political poles switch, like, the earth’s magnetic poles apparently switch every few hundred million years. And I feel like that’s what’s happened with America’s political poles. I mean, democrats used to be pro slavery, and somehow that switched before I was born, and. And now something weird is happening again. But, yeah, reality is just reality, and it’s, you know, whatever the democrats, liberals used to be like, we are the smart people who believe in science and scientific evidence, and conservatives are the crazy creationists who are anti science.

And it’s like, well, you’re anti science now if you’re. And I guess the point being made a little bit there is that now there isn’t a party of objective science anymore. It seemed like there used to be one, or at least pretended to be one, but now you kind of. You’re in a no man’s land, which I guess leads me to another question for you. Do you trust any tribes at all now? Are you just anti tribe? Yeah, I’ve never really been big on tribe. I didn’t really realize how I can say that I’m like that.

But there’s a lot of structures that underlie my identity and my sense of security, unconsciously. Like, I didn’t really think being a liberal or being a democrat or being lefty was gonna. I didn’t think that rug was gonna get pulled out from under me. There are undoubtedly still structures that I rely on that I’m not cognizant of that could go at any time. Yeah, I mean, I. I am more of an outsider than many people, but I’m still a human. I’m still a primate. I’m still social. I am, I think, a lot more aware of online mobbish behavior.

So there are people in my side of this culture war, the rad femmes, the gender criticals. And like, a year ago, maybe even more than a year ago, there started being splits and rifts in my side. And some of the gender criticals have been behaving as badly as the trans activists in terms of purity demands, purity spirals, trying to cancel people. So those sorts of behaviors I’m very sensitive to, regardless of whether people are supposedly on my team or not, I don’t like those kinds of behaviors you were kind of mentioning to the people. Find one particular opinion that you’ve got, and then it’s like, oh, she’s on my team now.

She’s on team conservative or whatever, because she has this one particular opinion. And I’m just. I wonder about, do you have any sort of affiliation or affinity towards any, like, anarchists, libertarians, you know, any sort of defined label? Do you find any of those that’s, like, more cozy than the others to you? Well, back in the day, I called myself an anarchist a long time ago. I don’t now. It was, you know, one of those things that someone in their teens and twenties could be into. It’s a glorious ideal. But if you live long enough and you have enough experience with actual human beings, you acknowledge that humans are inherently hierarchical.

We’re animals. We just make hierarchies. And anarchist groups tend to create covert hierarchies instead of overt hierarchies, which are harder to deal with. Do you think that’s just because of the inherent contradiction and having a hierarchy under anarchy? Yeah, they’re just in denial of the hierarchies that they’re creating. What else? I mean, I like the metaphor of lenses that you can look at the world through these different lenses, but you need to take them off sometimes or replace them sometimes. I think gender critical feminism is a really useful lens, but you can’t analyze everything with it, because gender critical feminism is class analysis.

It’s class analysis using sex classes. And class analysis can be useful, but not everything is a class all the time. You deal with individuals a lot, so if you’re applying your class analysis to individuals, it’s not going to work out real well. It’s sort of like light as a particle and a wave, and sometimes it’s good to look at it as a particle, and sometimes it’s good to look at it as a wave, and who knows what else it is? And I’m talking out my butt a little bit because I’m not actually a physicist, but, you know, social things, it is good to look at things as class sometimes, but you’re also dealing with individuals, and individuals don’t conform to class all that well.

What? Just to save me from misspeaking, what is being gender critical? Is that just saying, like, women are better than men or something? Or is it, like, what’s the actual definition in layman’s terms? Oh, boy. Well, it’s. It’s chase. So when I got back in the day in 2017 when there were men and women were women, gender critical feminism was a extension of. It was part of an aspect of radical feminism as opposed to liberal feminism. Radical feminism is called radical because it goes to the root, whatever that means. Can I even define radical feminism? Probably not.

But I’ll say this, when I started getting called a terf in 2017, and people were saying, educate yourself. And since I had already spent all this time with trannies and had this, like, super liberal sex education from San Francisco and was totally down with everything queer, I was like, well, you know, I guess I’m going to have to read some radical feminism and educate myself that way. So I did. I started with Andrea Dworkin, and then, well, when you heard that, before we get into Andrea Dorkin, when you heard that for the first time, educate yourself, did you have an initial reaction of, like, screw you, educate myself? Or were you like, oh, wow, maybe I am out of touch, or was it like a combination of those? No, I have quite a background in terms of sex positivity and queerness and all that shiz.

I lived in San Francisco in the nineties. I was part of something called San Francisco sex information, which was a hotline because this was pre everyone having Internet days. It was super sex pause y. I had to do like 50 some hours of sex education with trainers, some of whom were trans. I was just all about the sex positive stuff. I was a monitor at sex parties with gender diverse everything. Monitor what is like a referee or like, yeah, well, they had these two break it up. They had these sex parties, and they had monitors who would, like, go around with barriers and condoms and things like that.

And we’d just be like, offering, you know, like, make sure you have a condom. Here’s a barrier. Here’s some nun oxen. All mine. Is that a volunteer role or is that a page role? That’s a volunteer role. I will say that San Francisco sex parties were like the most unsexy place for me on earth. I always hoped it would be different, but, yeah, not my scene. I wrote an article about this. It’s on four w pub. It’s called my sex positive memoirs. But I’ve had trans lovers. It’s like, I’ve been into this before you assholes were born.

I was totally down with this. And I think that’s one of the reasons I became outspoken, is when this started happening, I think a lot of people were worried, like, oh, maybe I’m transphobic. Oh, I don’t know any trans people. And it’s like, I have, you know, I’m not like that. Like, I’ve been very close to a lot of trans people and was very trans positive and was being a jerk about this long before today’s crop was. So what I ended up doing when I educated myself is rethinking all of that. And I was wrong about some things.

Like, you know, back in the day, I probably, you know, when there was just a handful of weirdos who said they were trans women, I would call them she, but it’s a. It’s a fad now. It’s a trend. It’s a cult now. And I don’t do that anymore. Do they have to earn it? Is there like a litmus test before you’ll give a she out? Or is it like a blanket? Like, nobody gets she’s anymore? Oh, nobody gets she’s anymore. Now, I only use sex based pronouns now, so that’s one of the ongoing things on the Heterodorx podcast that I do with Corinna Cohn, who is a.

He’s a transsexual. He’s a male who. He looks pretty androgynous. Many people read him as female. He had what was called sex change surgery. Now it’s called gender reassignment surgery when he was 18. So he got castrated, basically, and surgically permanently altered. And he now does a lot of testifying in courthouses, trying to. Not courthouses, statehouses, supporting laws that prevent people from doing this to kids. But, yeah, our running gag on heterodorks is that I’m trying to genocide him by using male pronouns for him, but he is male, and he keeps living. He keeps not being genocided.

So I’m trying to show where it’s like, look, he hasn’t died yet, but when he does, it could be attributed to all your misgendering. Right? Yeah. I don’t think he’s going to die for a while. I think he’s going to go for quite a long time, but I’m not giving up. So this is. You’re referring to your Heterodox podcast, and you were describing this to me before we started recording, but I didn’t realize the whole dynamic here. Is there any contention between the two of you, or are you fully on the same page or. Well, there’s some contention because he’s keto and I’m a vegetarian.

I mean, I eat some fish now, so that’s pretty hard to resolve. He is pretty hardcore libertarian, and I have some more. Well, I’ve been. I’ve been influenced by him for sure, and just by life, but he has, like, a very standard, principled libertarian worldview. He likes guns more than I do. Yeah. Where are you at on second amendment? I know you’re a fan of the first, so where are you at on second? Low confidence is where I am. So it’s one of these things where nothing has really made a great deal of sense to me, but I, people who I respect take a strong stand on it, and I is not something that I believe that I fully understand.

Maybe I’m missing something. I’d love to go on a small tangent if I can even in some way sway you, if you’ve got any questions from like, a new party has entered. Right. Because, I mean, I’ve heard lots of stuff about it and I’m just like, I mean, so I like rate these things as there are some things I’m really confident about with myself. Like I have firsthand experience. It makes sense to me. Something’s real. There’s other things that I just have low confidence about. For example, how to resolve crisis in the Middle east or guns in the US.

Yeah. So by all means, yes, I guess I would consider this my one issue if someone were to force me to be a single issue voter. I do think that this might be one of the issues that came up. If it were. So if you really believe in the first amendment, I guess I’m one of those wackos that thinks that there is no first amendment without the Second Amendment standing right behind it to back it up. And the other, I guess, maybe even more radical approach is that I don’t think the Second Amendment is about hunting or about just like straight up rights.

I think its literally about having the ability to arm yourself against the government that turns tyrannical and without having that codified into law so high up that its ingrained in the DNA of the whole nation, even if its being eroded. But thats a requirement to just keep the government in check, even though I fully submit that were so far away from when it was originally drafted, so that the meeting is almost symbolic. But I feel that the symbolism alone is worth fighting for. So I guess that I don’t have a compelling case to really present. But if you’re on the fence on some aspects of it, I’d like to hear, because I’m a good devil’s advocate, I think I’m not on the fence.

I have low confidence in my stance. It’s just not something that, it’s not something that activates me. So how about I guess it used to. It used to because like, the, the idea of taking away everybody’s guns, like, it would be great if we could make guns disappear, right. And then just live in some happy fantasyland. That would be really great. But I acknowledge that I really don’t understand enough to back that position. Same thing with war, like I used to be just very simplistically pacifistic, anti war. Like, war is always bad and then borders are bad, right? This is when I was very young, because clearly all sorts of human suffering comes from borders and war.

And now I’m like, the world is a lot more complicated than I accepted when I was young. And there’s, like, a bunch of stuff that I don’t understand and I’m not going to understand. But big groups of humans make complex societies. They seem to need borders. You can take this stuff away. You’ll have a bigger mess than you have now. Like, the stuff doesn’t. What is it? Somebody’s fence? Chesterton’s fence? It’s like the Overton window. And is it Chesterton? The idea that there’s a fence there. It’s there for a reason. If you don’t know why, you take it away and you make a bigger mess.

I’ve been seeing liberals and democrats making much, much bigger messes out of things, out of the best intentions. And I have that impulse as well. And now I’m just like, yeah, okay. I really don’t get everything. So I’m not gonna think that I have the answers to this. Well, I think you kind of have maybe not a definitive answer, but you present, like, a brilliant way of describing, I guess, war in itself. And that’s the final scene in satyr. Masochism, I believe. Right, I’m getting this. Right. And you basically have the song, this is my land, this land is mine.

This is land is mine, written by Pat Boone and performed by Andy so and so you probably know the credits. Andy Williams? Yeah. And actually the lyrics were by Pat Boone. The melody was by. Is it Ernest Gold? Is that his name? It was the soundtrack for the movie exodus. And then Pat Boone wrote lyrics and it was sung by a whole bunch of different people, including Andy Williams. I used the Andy Williams version. Okay, so your version of this with Andy Williams singing. But it basically just shows the entire evolution of human culture and all the different regimes and dynasties that have existed.

A little simplified because it’s an animation, but it’s just one dude stabbing another dude and another dude stabs that dude. And they just, like, keep stacking on bodies until you get to modern day and they’re throwing grenades and they’re using tanks and stuff, but. And they’re all just singing this, you know, the same lyrics over and over and taking ownership of this land. And I guess it doesn’t really say, like, which side is right or wrong. It’s just that there’s this perpetual? Like, the left takes over, the right takes over. Left takes over, the right takes over forever? And does that ever end in the mind of Nina Bailey after everything you’ve learned? Or is that just a known constant that we all have to work around? Well, nukes could end it well, okay.

The ultimate ending. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I did show that. Is that the only way out, you think? Yeah. I don’t think humans are gonna live in peaceful harmony. We’re the wrong species. It’s the same reason that we’re not gonna. It’s the same reason anarchism’s not gonna work so great. Well, I gotta. I guess I wanna understand a little bit more about the thinking behind all this. So where are you at spiritually? I’m guessing you’re a Mormon. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. Where am I at? Well, funny you should ask. So I am currently active in a twelve step recovery thing.

So you had to acknowledge some sort of greater creator, right? Oh, there’s a power greater than myself, for sure. Although I think reality, like reality, is a power greater than myself. Right. Like reality is that which exists when we stop believing in it. But actually, I’m wearing my gloves since we were talking about illuminati. Show those puppies off. What are we even looking at? Is this Illuminati confirmed material? This is actually. I call these recovery gloves. So, you see, one is I have the doubt glove and the faith glove. I realize I need doubt and faith.

And the twelve step stuff is all about the faith, but it can get a little cultish. And I realize I needed doubt also. I guess I’ll just say it. I’m going to say this at some point. These gloves are because I have derma telomania. And there are. Sounds kind of fun. It almost sounds like wrestlemania. It is. Mania is fun. But dermatology mania is. It’s compulsive skin picking. And a lot of people that are recovering from that. It’s really quite a heinous obsession. And I think a lot more people have it than is commonly realized. But many people who are recovering from it wear gloves.

And I just thought, like, these plain white gloves, they’re boring. We need cooler gloves. So I don’t actually. I haven’t actually been using these to be abstinent. I was fortunate, but I just thought, like, gloves like this have to exist. So I made them. I have a whole pile of gloves here. Are these available on ninapelli.com? no, not yet. These are prototypes. And I’m making other prototypes. Consider me in line. Seriously? Really? Yeah. I mean, I’m not a picker, but I know pickers. Yeah. And they’re good for trichotillomania. Also hair. Hair pulling. Yeah. I’ve got. I’ve got lots of them in progress.

I I just sent out for my next batch of prototype fabric, but I’ve color ones, too. I’ll put on a color one. And I don’t, like, I don’t really want to be sewing gloves because they’re a total pain in the butt to sew. Are these all handmade, too? Yeah. Well. What? I designed them, and I had the fabric printed. These have little snakes on the fingers and eyes. Oh, wait, this was on backwards. Yeah, I had the fabric printed, and then I had to sew each one myself again, just to do prototypes. But I don’t know if anyone out there wants to, you know, get these puppies made in China or something and sell them.

That’s not really a business I want to be in, but they’re. They’re tricky. They’re just, they’re tricky to make for me, I think that’s awesome. I wasn’t expecting that whatsoever. Yeah, this is my only. Yeah, I’ve got, like, way more. We started here at what? Okay. We got a giro del toro labyrinth. Exactly. Thing going on. Yeah, well, these are called hamsas. Like, and I, when I was doing research for this, I was like, why are there not hamsa gloves? There are. I couldn’t find any. Not any good ones. They’re called hamsa. Yeah. A hamsa is a traditional symbol of, like, a hand with an eye in the palm.

And then I also put little eyes on the finger because we trichotillomaniacs and dermatolomaniacs, we do with our fingertips what’s called scanning. So it’s like we have little eyes. Always looking. Looking for something to pick. That’s very creepy. Is there any good horror movies about this? It seems like there should be. If there’s not. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s for someone else to do, but, yeah. You horror movie writers make a dermatollomania. Horror. That would be a. That would be a very disturbing one. Yes. So we started here with, like, what do you find yourself spiritually? And it sounds like reality.

Is your God currently, or is there something more, more to it? Have you transitioned from something else into this? No, I was raised atheist intentionally. I was raised atheist intentionally by, well, that’s sort of what Seder masochism was about. My father was an atheist from a religious jewish family. So he. We didn’t have any religious practice. We didn’t have God. He really. He was an atheist the way only someone from a religious background can be an atheist. And isn’t it just mandated by law in San Francisco now? Atheism? Yeah. I don’t know. I haven’t heard about that.

But I didn’t grow up in San Francisco. I grew up in Urbana, Illinois. Well, that definitely doesn’t sound like a place where atheism would be enforced by law. No, it was. We were full of christians. It was, where I grew up was a magnet for, like, christian camps and born again christians. So we were a very tiny minority. We were very different. And then the fact that my father wasn’t religious meant that we didn’t have any jewish community. So when I was a kid and my parents said, you don’t have to do the Christmas project at school.

Just tell the teacher you’re jewish. I thought that Jewish meant you don’t believe in God, because they weren’t saying, tell the teacher you’re an atheist. They said, tell the teacher you’re jewish. But we were actually atheists. But we did Passover. Is there some special benefit to telling teachers that you’re jewish? Do you just get extra points or extra days off or something? You don’t have to do the Christmas project. So when they’re all making, like, cardboard Christmas things or construction paper Christmas things, you don’t have to do it. But the thing is, I did want to do it because they’re crafts projects, and I liked those.

So my parents just said, if you don’t want to do that, tell the teacher you’re jewish. But I did it anyway. I made, like, a wreath, but it was like, the construction paper Holly wreath. And I was scared of having, like, red and green together because I thought, well, red and green really symbolize Christmas. So if I just do the green part and make the wreath and don’t put the little red paper punch dots on it, then when you say scared, like, of being reprimanded by, you know, your atheist father or, like, what’s the risk in having green and red together and being perceived as celebrating Christmas? I was freaked out by religion.

People who believed in God seemed like pod people to me when I was a kid. They just like, you know, I’d be having a normal interaction with someone, and then they’d be like, let’s pray, or, you know, let’s talk to God. And I was like, all right, we’ve just gone to crazy town. They’re not. And so I didn’t want to get. I didn’t want to lose control of my mind. It just seemed like it was some sort of cult thing happening where people were irrational and creepy, and I didn’t want that mind virus. So I think I just thought that if I did anything that was too religious seeming, then I was going to lose my mind and have a mind parasite take over.

And I think this is where the complexity of Nina Paley comes into play. Just a little, little tiny bit. Just because now if. And I’m gonna oversimplify stuff, because that’s what I do. You know, I like to categorize things. I’m a human being. But it almost seems that the people that would be most on your side about men and women and gender definitions also tend to be very much in, like, and now let’s pray. Like, that’s, like, that’s a. If it’s a Venn diagram. It’s not exactly a circle, but it’s damn close to a circle in a lot of ways.

So now it almost feels that you’ve got one side of a group that’s like, yeah, we’re on board. But then it’s for different reasons than why you’re on board. Like, you guys are on the same ship. You boarded for totally different reasons. Yeah. And that’s fine. So when I was. I went to my first twelve step program when I was 19 years old, and that changed my attitude towards religion. That was when I learned that religious people weren’t all crazy and that there was a benefit to it. And as I age, I see more and more benefit of religion.

I do think that there’s a minority of people for whom religion just doesn’t take. Like, there’s a minority of people who really are natural atheists. It’s a small minority. Just some people are naturally gay. So more recently, I have been so open to religion that I have really wanted to have that kind of faith that religious people have. And it just doesn’t take. I have to accept my doubt, my God given doubt. Like, God made me an atheist. If there is a goddess. I know this might sound like a weird question, so if you’ve got a weird answer, that’s fine.

But, like, what’s. What’s the hardest you’ve tried? Like, what was. What was your peak of, all right. Jesus coming to my heart. And I assume it just. It didn’t take, but, like, what was. Did you read the Bible back to back? Did you start going to church? Did you, like, you know, force yourself to pray before every meal. Like, what was the main. What was peak Christian? Nina Paley, assuming that. You assume it’s Christian, right, I do. I mean, this is America, so I have to reference the winners. Yeah, I mean, this is sort of like vague Judeo Christian.

No, it’s. So I did this workshop this year called, it’s like abrahamic big book Awakening Workshop, which is a deep dive into the twelve steps. And I really wanted to do this twelve step work and I did a lot of it, but there was a degree of religiosity which was so. It was so enviable. It’s like, yeah, I would love to have that kind of faith. I would love step one. Like, they don’t wait until you get to like the later steps to drop that one. Usually that’s that ten. No, no, that’s step two. Step two? Step two? Step one is you admit you’re powerless over whatever step two is.

Came to believe a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. And then it goes on from there. But there were, there were speakers who were, you know, devoutly Christian. I mean, there were others who were less devoutly christian, but I. This guy was speaking and he was like, I know God loves me. Like, I know that. Like, I was. It was a, what do you call, self defeating belief that God doesn’t love me. And he knows, like deep in his heart that God loves him, that God is his father, that God always has his back.

And it’s like, of course I want that. But there was just no, I wasn’t going to get that. And when I accepted that, I felt a lot better. It started to hurt. It started to hurt trying to believe as hard as I was trying to believe, because something bigger than myself, something bigger than my desires was not having it. And I made my peace with that. And I’m cool with myself the way that I am. It’s like, however I am. That’s why I say, like, well, however God made me. It says an atheist and that’s fine.

And that’s why I have one glove that says doubt and one glove that says faith. Have you ever dabbled in psychedelics? No, but a lot of people have assumed I have from quite an early age because of the art I was doing. I loved psychedelic art and I certainly went plenty crazy without psychedelics. I apparently thought differently. And yeah, when, in conversations from when I was a teenager onwards, people just assumed that I used a lot. So I naturally got some wacky brain experiences, I think. So you haven’t used a lot or you haven’t used any ever? I tried mushrooms once.

I don’t think I took enough to have, like, a profound experience. I had a good afternoon. My friend that I took the mushrooms with said he was getting effects. And so that experience was like, yeah, maybe I had effects. It was subtle. Okay. You had to, like, convince yourself that you were having effects, which usually means maybe it wasn’t the. And the main reason that I even asked that is because I’ve got a very particular fascination with alcoholics Anonymous and narcotics anonymous and all the twelve step programs, because my understanding of them is that they were born out of a psychedelic, like a strong LSD experience that completely changed the way that the original founders minds worked.

But that obviously, if you’re talking about people that are in recovery from a substance, it’s usually not advantageous to then advocate, like, illegal drug use and psychedelics as part of the initial thing. But it really feels to me the same way that religion might have, like, censored itself out of relevance and some of the early practices that it’s almost like the twelve step programs, it was centered around a psychedelic experience, and then they took that part away, which was maybe the biggest ingredient. And now when you get to step two, the onus is on you to figure out what the hell this higher power is.

But. But once they got you to step two and they were like, and lick this stamp, and then it was like. It almost feels that even if you were atheist, you’d come back like, okay, okay, there’s something else out there. I don’t know what the name is, but we’re ready for step three now. So I just wanted to inject that because I find this really interesting thread where it’s. It’s no longer part of the twelve steps, for obvious reason, but it feels like that was the whole point. Like, there are no twelve steps without that. Huh.

My understanding was that after AA was established, some of the founders got interested in that, but that wasn’t its advent. Like, its advent was 1939, I think. So I can believe there was crossover, but I don’t think that was the source. But my own experience is that you can have, you know, mind blowing experiences without actually using psychedelics. But also my understanding is that psychedelics bring some people to those mind blowing experiences. I don’t know. I read this. I read this article about mescaline used in terminal patients that are freaking out about death. And I was like, boy, would I like to do that.

Boy, would I like to have access to regulated, high quality mescaline with an experienced, actual therapist, just like Uncle Rockefeller used to make. So maybe someday I’ll do that, but also because I’ve had so much mental instability when I was young, I really did not want to mess with this stuff, like, because I might need medical help if something goes wrong. And I just don’t want to do that with a hippie spirit guide. I want to do that with medical professionals. I guess that’s also something that I find is controversial about my takes that I didn’t realize until I started saying them out loud.

But I don’t know if I trust spirit guides to guide me through anything, you know, like. And I wouldn’t say that I’d rather go into a clinical environment and put on a gowndhead and sit on the wax paper and then have doctors watch me as I, like, dose myself. Well, no, I wouldn’t want that either. But what I read is just, like, if I had a, you know, a therapist that was experienced in this, that had, you know, that was sober while I was doing it, that, you know, was actually a good therapist that I trusted, because, actually, I have real issues with the whole therapy industry.

I have. It’s a horrible industry, but I could imagine somebody being decent. But I just. I would want the whole thing to be clean, if that makes sense. Like, who knows what the. Have you considered Scientology? Never. Not even for a fraction of a second? No. What’s. What’s the main turn off? What could they get over that would start selling you on it? I mean, it’s just like, why? Why would I want to be a scientologist? Why? Like, they just seem, like, very culty. Well, I believe part of it is that they make promises that you can sort of get over the need for psychiatry or therapy or any sort of mental issues through just sheer studying and willpower and just leveling up.

This is all the different levels or degrees, I guess, if you wanted to equate it to, like, other mystery schools. I don’t believe random people’s bullshit. I mean, lots of people say all kinds of bullshit, and why would I believe that? I mean, everyone has to believe some kind of bullshit, right? Yeah. Yeah, but I didn’t have to believe that bullshit. Is there. Is there any bullshit that you opt in to voluntarily and, like, so, so give me your top three. What’s. What’s, like, the best bullshit to buy into twelve step bullshit? Okay. I mean, see, that’s one that never.

That one never took with me either. I’ve been to both of the programs for both mandated and voluntary. And that one never stuck either because it was just a bunch of druggies sharing druggie stories or people that were just like crying about stuff. And I guess it never sank in with me. Yeah, well, I can’t believe that they mandate it. It’s like that seems to be against the principles of it. And I know that they mandated a lot, and it seems like that’s a great, you know, forcing somebody to go to a twelve step program seems like a great way to ensure that they will never recover.

And to also equate it to your story earlier about you tell your teacher that you’re jewish so that you can, like, opt in to do. And it was like, but I did want to opt in because what if you didn’t cut out the little Santa clauses right out of the construction paper? Then you were just, what? Like twiddling your thumbs or reading a book. So it’s like you want to participate in this jail like environment in the one creative outlet that they offer you where you’re not doing wrote memorization, right? So you’re like, okay, fine, I’m Christian for the next 40 minutes because that’s fun.

And so even in the voluntary scenarios, a lot of the time when it’s like state sponsored or some kind of, like someone’s keeping track of it, it really does become that same scenario where it’s like, I guess I’ll go to Na because otherwise, what, I got to go out in the yard or I got to go and do KP duty or something. So then it almost is that same thing. Like, I guess if there’s an outlet where I can just talk about feelings and it has to take the form of Na or AA. Well, also note that I have never been a hard drug user ever, or an alcoholic.

So all of my, all my twelve step stuff has been for behavioral things and not, and hard drugs are different. Like, that’s my ignorance. I actually, until this moment, never considered that there was such thing as a twelve steps outside of alcohol and narcotics. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So eating disorders, really, they all follow the twelve step model. Eating disorders. And then Al Anon was a great one. Friends and family of alcoholics, which also follows the twelve steps. But they’re very, they’re very different. I think about the difference a lot. The steps themselves are different, or just the application of them.

The applications are different. AA was written by alcoholic men who had like, one thing that really struck me this last go round with the, with the big book was how these colossal fuck ups, I mean, these like, super messed up alcoholics. They had wives, they had bosses, they had employees, they had children. They were out in the world fucking up the world. Whereas people like me, we hide from the world. We’re very, like, inward. And I don’t have a boss. I don’t have employees. I don’t have children. I don’t have a spouse. And my issues, my problem of living looks a lot different from theirs.

You know, they’re talking about, like, well, we made a huge mess, and now we have to clean up our act and make amends to all these people that we screwed over. Whereas I’m like, okay, I have had so few. I have so few, like, relationships in the world. I have to start going back into the world, you know? Like, I have to. I have to go back in there and maybe fuck some things up. But does that make it harder or easier? Like, if. If you’re an extrovert and you’ve developed hundreds of thousands of relationships, and now you have to go and make amends with, you know, countless people versus you’re an introvert and, you know, like, six people, but it’s hard to even reach out to those six people.

Is it, like, is the volume scarier at, like, an extrovert level, or is it scarier as an introvert? Because now you have to go back out and open old wounds, or it’s just very different. Like, I think what a lot of these alcoholics have to do. Like, they’ve never cleaned up their act in their lives before, right? They’ve never looked at themselves critically in their lives before. They’ve never considered that they’ve done something wrong and have to change and do it differently, whereas people like me, the more al anonic sort of people, we’re just going like, oh, my God, I did this thing wrong, and I should apologize for that.

And, you know, how can I. How can I make things go smoother with other people? And how can I make other people like me more? And how can I hide things like that? So I think at the end of the day, when the alcoholic has to go like, okay, you know, how’d I fuck up today? And what do I have to make amends for? I think people like me have to go like, all right, you know, how did I show up in the world today? And, you know, did I do anything good today? Like, let’s try to remember that I was useful somehow in this world and just try to remember something good I did so I don’t go into a vortex of self loathing tonight.

Well, I want to. I mean, I know this might fall into deaf ears because you’re probably your biggest known critic, but I do think that you’re contributing in huge ways. And I theres one thing that we even bring up now. So ill bring it up now because I want to have plenty of time to talk about this. But I think the one place that me and you might have the most affinity is around this copyright culture. And there was an asset or permission culture, as you refer to it, which I think is way more appropriate, where youre constantly asking for permission or wondering, am I allowed to make this creative thing? Would someone come after me ultimately through threat of violence? But you make this one claim in this TED talk, and I recommend everyone go and search for Nina Paley.

TED Talk. But in your TEDx, you say that you were humming some Christmas song and you were making this case. And I guess I’ll paraphrase it horribly, but it was like you weren’t grown up Christian, so you didn’t really care about the Christmas song. You might not even necessarily like the Christmas music, but you were forced to endure it like it was. It surrounded you without your consent, and you have to ingest this Christmas music. And there was another slide. And this point you were making is that the human brain is like this filter device. It has input, and it has output.

So that Christmas music coming into your brain is the input. And then if you don’t have a way to output it now, all of a sudden it kind of, like, builds up and it turn. It creates an issue, and it also makes this huge, like, contradiction. And I think about the exact same way. And I know I’m like, I tend to put myself in, like, the weird niche corner on this, but it almost feels that I was forced to look at, say, we’re talking about Scientology. I was forced to look at Tom Cruise’s face my entire childhood and billboards and magazine ads and everything.

So, like, I’m inundated with Tom Cruise and enter any other celebrity name here, right? So now, as I’ve been in this world for over four decades, I feel a sense of ownership over these likenesses that have been, like, thrust on me. Like, I didn’t, I don’t want to know what Tom Cruise is by you just saying his name or Tom Hanks. Like, I didn’t decide to have their faces etched into my brain more than anyone else, but the fact that they’re in there now, I feel like, okay, I can use that likeness because it’s been taking up, you know, space in my brain and hasn’t paying rent.

So the way it’s going to pay rent now is now Tom Cruise is going to promote my comic, or Tom Cruise is going to, you know, sing a song for me unwillingly, and I can put that back out into the world. And I realized that that puts me in a very tiny minority of people that don’t believe in that sort of thing. So did I, have I accurately represented at all your Christmas story and your approach on this? Somewhat, yeah, I mean, you. So culture. Culture is not property. Culture gets its value from being shared. So the more it’s shared, the more minds it’s in, the more value it has.

And it has no value if it’s not in our heads. It does belong to you, it belongs to us, and they put it in there without our consent. Coca Cola is a great example. I feel like I should own part of the Coca Cola branding. Not that I can go and distribute it and bottle it, but I don’t know, it’s so like the colors and the theme songs and the aesthetics, like, all that is inseparable from the lens that are literally built into my mind’s eye. Yeah, it’s your culture. It’s the same as your language, it’s same as English that we’re speaking right now.

And there are just these arbitrary conditions around what they call intellectual property, which is a real misnomer. It’s artificial monopolies, you know, artificial monopolies around things that are not property, like images and sounds. What they do is they control the masses, they control you and I, because what those laws do is they prohibit your expression of your culture and your communication with other people. And you have touch points. Like there’s cultural touch points where you could sing a little jingle and somebody else would know what you’re singing because they are like your age and they know exactly what era you’re referring to.

And memes, basically, memes are. I think, in a way, it’s somewhat taking claim back to some of that, where someone will take a shot from a cartoon or a movie that we’ve all seen and then use it to put out, like, a completely different message. And that message only works if you identify like, oh, I’ve seen that, or you’ve seen the meme so many times that it becomes a thing. But that’s almost like one of these shared versions. But I think we’re still figuring out, like, the whole point of copyright. I guess it doesn’t matter at all until you start talking about money or threat of violence and I do love that you specifically state threat of violence because ultimately it’s like, okay, you get sued and then there’s a judgment, and now you owe money.

Well, you say, okay, I’m not going to pay that money. And then eventually the authorities show up and they say, okay, well, we’re going to repossess your car. And you go and sit in the car and you say, you know, you’re not taking it. And then they say, sir, get out of the car. They pull out their guns. And then. So at some point it does hit to that threat of violence. You know, if you take somebody else’s music or artwork or movie, if you bootleg movies, right. The FBI will come after you because you’re committing like, federal offenses and stuff.

So there’s always this, like, threat of violence aspect of it. But. But outside of that, there’s also the money aspect, right. Where you can create a sustenance for yourself. And I guess I’m still trying to wrap my head around the concept of, like, question copyright, where the. I guess the origins of copyright was originally for the distributor and for the creator. And it wasn’t necessarily for the author, it wasn’t for the creator, it was for publishers. It was the statute of Anne and it was to control the dissemination of information with the printing press because the crown did not want seditious materials printed.

So the crown needed a relationship with the publishers or the stationers, as they were called. And in order to control what was printed, they granted this monopoly to the stationers or the printers. And yeah, that’s the origins of it. So I strongly recommend this book called, oh, my gosh. The author is Stefan Kinsella. What is Stefan’s. Kinsella’s book? Watch me Google. We’ll post a link to the full PDF in the comments. So he’s a. That’s right. Stefan Kinsella. Intellectual property against intellectual property by Stefan Kinsella. So this one is still racking my brain a little bit.

I want to understand how this works. How what works? Basically the abolition of copyright and intellectual property laws under the context that it’s not for the creative, it’s for the distributor. Oh, well, okay, so all copyright is just an artificial monopoly. And Kinsella’s argument as a libertarian, hardcore mises institute libertarian, is that intellectual property laws, they violate actual property laws. As long as intellectual property exists, you don’t have a right to your actual property. Like, you know, a book. Like, you buy a book, that’s your property. Well, intellectual property says no, it’s not your property. You can’t do what you want with that book.

You know, you buy a computer, that’s your property. No intellectual property says you can’t do what you want with your computer. We used to be able to buy software. Well, we don’t anymore. That was giving too much ownership to people, and we need to give them as little rights in stuff that they actually buy. You don’t even buy anything, like sort of the end of property. Digital sales are the end of property because all of these platforms will take your property, which you supposedly bought. They’ll take it away from you. It happens all the time. So I want, I want to be a very, very annoying devil’s advocate, or at least like poke little holes and some of them will be, will be so obvious.

But I buy a car, I can’t do anything I want with my, I can’t run you over in my car because that would be committing a crime. So we take cars away from people, guns. If I, if I buy a gun, then all of a sudden like, oh, I can’t do what I want with my gun. I want to shoot you. Oh, you told me I can’t do it my own property. So I understand how, like, obvious those extremist examples are, but it almost feels in the same ballpark of just because the thing that you own, but if you use the thing you own to cause some sort of material harm to another person, and I guess in the devil’s advocate sense, if I buy a book from Nina Paley, but you spent the last 20 years putting together all your research and traveling the world and coming up with these really unique ideas.

You put them into a book and you say, hey, paranoid, I want you to take a look at this book, let me know what you think of it. And you’ve got 16 listeners, you’ve got 16 readers out there. And I say, oh, man, this actually looks pretty good. I got a buddy that’s got hundreds of thousands of followers and they’ve got access to printing press and all this. I just put my name on it and I make a deal with him and we start pushing it out. And by the time you even get wind of it, you know, there’s millions of copies sold.

People are already equating my name with this work. So then Nina Paley comes out and it’s like, oh, excuse me, you know, they’re liars, and you shouldn’t respect what they’re doing because. And they’re just like, sorry, we can’t hear you over the sound of the money counters, just like worrying and the printing press pumping out your material. So, yeah, okay, that scenario. So what you’re talking about isn’t actually protected by copyright. You’re talking about plagiarism. Plagiarism is something else. So a copyright violation is if you take my book and you print your own copies, like most of the time when people reproduce these things, they’re not plagiarizing.

Okay, yeah, let’s, let’s narrow the focus to that. And I’m bootlegging your movie and I’m distributing it at a scale before you have the chance. That would be awesome. That would be. I would love it so much. Like my hope, when I released Sita sings the blues, it was the year after finishing Sita sings the blues that I went on my copyright adventure and had my change, very radical change about my understanding of copyright. But all these people were saying like, oh my God, well, other people are going to sell your DVD’s. And I was like, that would be great.

And I would make all of the merch that I made around Sita sings the blues, all the t shirts, all of that stuff. Anybody could have made t shirts and sold them. Anybody could have made DVD’s and pressed them and sold them. It was this experiment of like, I welcomed people to do that. See, I’m trying to wrap my head around that. Almost no one did it. Almost no one did it. And the people that did do it, they didn’t get very far, but it would have been cool if they had, because my goal as the author of that movie was to have as many people see it as possible.

The more people saw it, the more people learned who I was, the more my status increased, the more power I got. Because the value of culture, like I said before, is in the people. The more people have it, the more valuable that culture is. So I went to all the trouble of making that movie. I wanted that movie to be valuable. The more people who see Sita sings the blues, by any means. And I did a whole bunch of experiments with it, including having conventional distributors who distributed it, sold plenty, had a contract with me to get money from that.

These people have been selling the movie for years and not sending me any money. And that’s the classic distributor scenario is like, good luck getting your money from the distributor. They sent me money the first year, but they haven’t done it for decades and they’re not going to. And it’s like, if that’s the case, I might as well have random people doing it. And it’s fine with me. If they make money, movie theaters could show it without giving me anything. I asked them to tell me if they were showing it so I could put them on the calendar I used to maintain, but they were under no obligation to send me money from that.

Why? I wanted people to be able to see it in the theater. Also, this idea that anybody that’s profiting off of the distribution of your work is stealing. That’s bullshit. They have expenses. People who are printing the stuff, they’re investing money in that. Like these gloves that I’m making. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to have to make these stinking gloves. I would be delighted if somebody that could make a profit would invest the money in making these gloves and make the damn gloves, and make them according to my precise design too. Like, but if somebody pirates this or steals this idea, whatever, if they copy it, what people usually do is they make a version of it.

They change it enough so that they don’t have to worry about copyright suit. But that will make the design worse. And it’s like, please put this out in the world the best way it can be. Use my design. My design is better than your knockoff design. So just make my design, because I am doing this to manifest the stuff in the world I want. And if I’m not doing art for that, why the heck am I even here? There’s no reason for me to do something to make art for any other reason than I think it should exist and spread and be out there to continue with the devil’s advocacy on this a little bit.

But is there a difference between Nina Paley puts out a movie and through the conventional way, and, you know, clear all your samples and everything’s fully licensed, and you ask permission, and you make 30 million versus you put out this thing and it slowly trickles in money, like, maybe like five digits at a time or something. It almost seems, and I’m making my own connections here, but it almost seems that you get that 30 million, you’re like, oh, hell yeah. Nina Paley productions are in full effect. Like, I’m going to go. And now we’re working on five movies to put out there.

And if one of those brings in gangbusters, now we’re putting out another ten movies. So now the world gets more Nina Paley, as opposed to, like, this one or two movies by Nina Paley. And it’s really comes down to, in an oversimplified world, but it just comes down to Nina Paley with 50 grand in her pocket versus Nina Paley with 5 million in her pocket are completely different Nina Paleys that are producing different volumes of stuff. Or is it the same one and you just happen to have more numbers in an account. Well, I think it’s very cute that you think that somehow I could get $30 million because think about all the creators that are out there more than ever before, even, whatever.

2008. How many years ago was that? That’s 16 years ago already. Damn. That’s when Sita was finished. There was still way more artists and filmmakers than there was attention to consume their stuff. And it’s just gotten more extreme exponentially. There is such a glut of content now. So it’s so cute and quaint that people think like, oh, copyright is what will get me $30 million. Like, there would be billionaires, billionaire artists all over the place if that were true. What actually happens with copyright is fewer people see your stuff and there’s tons of tiny artists who aren’t making money.

I mean, that’s just not the way most artists make money. It’s very unrealistic to think that you’re going to hit the jackpot in this. Well, let’s, let me revisit when we originally I set the scope to copyright and not plagiarism. And I guess in my mind, the only real difference between copyright and plagiarism is like almost a self enforced morality slash honor system. And there was a video called credit is due that. Can I, can I play credit is due? Sure. All right. Let me, let me just play this. It’s a, if you’re listening to the audio podcast, I can sing it.

Always give credit where credit is due. If you didn’t write it, don’t say it’s by you. Just copy the credit along with the work or else you’ll come off as a something I forgot. Jerk. That’s great. I don’t even have to say it now. I’ll post a link to it, but. Okay, so that song very accurately, again, I’ve got my devil’s advocate hat on. You can see, but the horns are there, that this sounds like a honor system that only works if two different parties care about one party being a jerk. Again, if I’ve got 200,000 followers and I’ve got a printing press, or at least I’ve got credits for them.

So I’ve got the means and resources to take your stuff, put my name on it, and start blasting it out there. A what if. I don’t care if anyone thinks I’m a jerk. I’m making too much money to care about being a jerk. And then, bhdem there’s people out there like, okay, we could wait for Nina to put this out, or it’s already out and this guy’s selling it and it comes with a t shirt and a happy meal and a coupon for whatever. Then, like, yeah, I’m just going to get. And just kind of like you were saying, even when you give it out for free and say, hey, distribute this, make money off of it, do whatever you want.

And there’s like an underwhelming response. So it almost black pill devil’s advocate, the person taking your work, they don’t care if they’re a jerk. The people buying the stuff from the jerk, they don’t care that they’re a jerk. So now it just almost becomes a weird, like one person purity test. I mean, it’s not really because the thing is that people, well, so one thing about my work is that it would be almost impossible for you to successfully claim that you made my work. Like, I have a style you can try, but the thing is, you really will look like a jerk.

Like, it really will. It really, like, you can do it. It’s like, go for it. But no one’s gonna believe you. I mean, it just, but only because you’ve established your body of work already. But if I was able to swipe in right when you cut your very first demo, or like, you know, like your initial cut, and I took that and I just, I was like, ship it. And now it almost gets into that same area where the newspaper says, Nina Paley, bank robber, horrible person on top billing on the front page, big bold font.

And then three days later they post on page twelve under the fold and eight point font. Oh, by the way, we were wrong about Nina Paley. She’s not actually a monster. If you beat to the market and you get that first image in everyone’s head, you’re a bank robber for the rest of your life, no matter what you have to say about it, right? Well, that’s true. And that actually is. All right. How can I address in song form, please? If you’re in song form, you’ve established precedence. So one thing that is stupid to do is to publish something before you’re ready to publish it.

Because to publish something is to make it public. And what copyright does is it, it puts a monopoly on something that has been made public. So what you’re talking about is taking somebody’s demo, something that has not already spread that something that has not been published yet, and publishing it without the consent of the artist, which I don’t even think you need. I don’t think copyright even addresses that. Right. If anything, that copyright might actually help the aggressor in this situation. Because now when Nina Paley releases her version, but McDonald’s or Sony BMG files a copyright claim against you, the original author, they have the suite of lawyers that can just squat you out of existence.

I’ve had that happen, actually. So I’ve put my copyright free work out there. In fact, I think it was the song copying is not theft. When I released that, various other programs ran, it was like a news item, and one of them had this automatic thing that automatically copied its show. And I got a notice from YouTube saying that my copying is not theft was in violation of this other show that had included it in their show. So stuff like that happens. I consider that an argument against copyright. I consider that, like, the fact that that happens to is a reason to oppose copyright, and especially to oppose robot copyright, like content id systems, like on youtubes, which goes wrong all the time.

And it is the people that have the more resources and the more lawyers that win. That’s the whole point of copyright. And I’ve known artists, independent artists, whose work has been ripped off by big companies, like clearly and obviously, and they actually sued the companies and they lost because the big companies have way more lawyers. And you just can’t win if you’re a smaller person. Even if you’re totally right, even if, you know you’re exactly the sort of case that fans of copyright ideologically support, you’re still not going to win. It’s whoever has the biggest lawyers, and I think I’ve got blinders on here, but I want for you to help me understand where the line is between the cop using threat of violence to enforce copyright and using threat of violence to enforce plagiarism, or, you know, like maintaining credit.

Because in my mind, in the, the cartoon, basically someone prints out sheet music from Beethoven, like some symphony that Beethoven wrote, and they erase Beethoven’s name and they put their name in it. And again, that one might actually be okay because of cop like copyright law. It’s in the public domain. You can do anything you want, but you’re gonna look like an idiot? Well, let’s say it’s not public domain and it’s back into like this. Nobody. But is there a validity in using threat of violence to say, hey, no, you can’t put Eunice on that. That’s mine.

That’s Nina Paley’s. But you can still sell it. You can sell it as long as it’s got my name on it versus someone’s just out there copying it, putting your name on it, selling it, and making the exact same amount of money. It’s just that one of those cases you get credit for, I guess, exposure bucks. And the other one, you don’t get any exposure bucks, but in both scenarios, you get $0.00, actual rent money. This actually is happening right now. So there’s a t shirt that I designed called Pride restored. I made it because Corinna Cohn requested it.

So it’s the rainbow Pride flag. But you know how the progress Pride flag has this triangle going into it? It cuts the triangle out. So it’s like the original rainbow flag with this triangle cut out of it, and it hasn’t sold them. Whatever. I have it on Teespring, which is not. The profit margins on teespring are tiny. It’s just a platform that requires no investment except putting up the art. And somebody else is also selling this shirt, somebody that I didn’t know. So there’s somebody that I did know, and I was like, he’s in Canada. And I was like, yeah, go ahead, do it on your own platform in Canada.

And then some other random person noticed it was getting a little exposure, and whenever it was mentioned on Twitter, they would swoop in with a link to their shirt for sale. Perfect example. Here’s where you get the shirt. Yeah. And I was like, all right, here I am being confronted. And I was like, this is obnoxious. And so whatever. My response to it would just be like, this one isn’t mine. Here’s the link to mine if you want to support me. A lot of people think that they’re supporting me by buying these shirts, even from my site.

They don’t realize that I get, like, a dollar from it. And I don’t, like, if you want to support me, please support me some other way. But I’m just trying to get the work out there anyway. My response to it is like, here’s. Here’s the link that supports me if that’s what you’re interested in doing. But I wouldn’t have put this out in the world if I needed to control it. So, yeah, it’s obnoxious, and it’s like, whatever. It’s like, how much energy am I going to put into? This is the Internet. This is what happens.

The worst thing about the Internet is that, you know, we have these mobs that form all the time. And the worst thing is what’s just happened to my reputation, you know, like all these people saying that I’m a Nazi and a white supremacist eugenicist. Because I’m all sponsored of this program, coincidentally. What sponsor? Say that again. All those are all sponsors of this program. So you’re in great company. The mobs, Nazis and eugenicists. Well, the thing. Okay, sorry, sponsors. I’m not actually a Nazi or a eugenicist. I’m sorry to disappoint you. Sorry to disappoint everyone. But just because I say women don’t have penises does not actually make me any of those things.

So just, it’s, like, not true. These falsehoods about me were circulating and still are circulating, or that I’m a transphobe, given that my best friend is a tranny. Watch out, there’s one right behind you. A transphobe. Well, no, a trans. Right. Oh, a tranny. Yeah. Oh, no. Because you’re afraid of them. Yeah. It’s just not the case. So I don’t like falsehoods about me circulating, especially falsehoods that completely trash my reputation and deplatform me and make it impossible for me to make money the way that I used to. Well, how does that play into your. Your thoughts on free speech? Like, are you a free speech absolutionist? Like, should someone be able to make up salacious and libelous things about you? People get to lie.

I don’t have a solution to this. To this problem. I don’t. We’ll wrap it up here then. It was nice to have you on. Seriously. Yeah, no wonder. No, I don’t have a, like, as a free speech person. It’s like, yeah, people are free to lie. I do think that, like, one thing that really bothered me was this culture that developed on social media of reporting people. So back in the earlier Internet days, if you didn’t like what someone was saying, you blocked them, you kill filed them. But then these social media sites decided that people couldn’t be held responsible for just blocking out people they didn’t like, and they had to be able to report people.

And there were zero, and there are zero consequences for frivolous reports. There’s none. And of course, that’s going to activate mobs. So, yeah, these mobs love to, you know, form. Form gangs to attack someone with frivolous false reports, and that person gets banned. And the people doing the frivolous reporting have zero consequences. Same thing with these copyright takedowns. Like there’s no consequences for making, you know, for copy fraud, for claiming copyright on something you don’t actually have legitimate copyright to. All onus is on the person you attack. And that would have gone a long way to make things better for me.

That would go a long way to address cancel culture. Yeah. So I guess I do have some solutions. It’s like, yeah, people should be able to say whatever bullshit they want, but they shouldn’t be able to frivolously report people. And these platforms should not be set up to, you know, take these reports without examining them and not having any appeal. I think that’s a good thread here a little bit because there are copyright trolls which will, you know, intentionally, they basically have a monetary or other, some sort of legal incentive to have your stuff taken down over copyright.

Right now I’m not aware of any sort of incentive provided to people. They just get content taken down for saying it’s offensive or they made this getting a community note pulled up. The only incentive just seems to be like, ha ha, I took away some form of revenue or publicity from you and now you don’t get that thing. But there feels like on the horizon a scary reality where now there’s a real monetary incentive for every big account you get taken down that you report to the nanny, Facebook or Instagram or whatever. Now you get $5.

You know, if you take down an account that has 100,000 followers and you can spot some naughty thing that they said eight years ago, you get $5 and they get taken down. And all of a sudden, once that’s incentivized, it kind of changes the landscape to where people that were even on the fence about reporting stuff like, well, if I can make a, if I can make a, you know, living out of this, you don’t need a financial incentive for censorship, though. People love to censor fire. But, but you could fuel the fire, you know, wait, you could ten x it, you could order a magnitude it.

Oh, yeah, sure, right. I mean, any individual can do that right now. It’s like, report this person and I’ll give you $5. I’m reporting you right now as we’re talking. I mean, great sponsor, can I even take you down from any platform? Are there any platforms that you’re on that you’re still at risk of being taken off of? All of them. Okay, so you’re, so you’re still returning to the battlefield and putting stuff back up on places you get taken down from? Well, okay, so I was deplatformed from Indiegogo. Do you know them? I do know them.

I’ve got an active campaign shout out. Go to nasacomic.com, which is on Indiegogo, and it’s ironic. Indiegogo, because I’ve launched a couple books on Indiegogo, only because I was concerned that people would report it on Kickstarter and say, oh, this is hate speech, or, this is. So. Seeing that that was the route, I guess you went too, and then it still got taken down. I want to just pretend that that didn’t happen to you, because otherwise, I don’t know where else to turn with how I raise money for comics. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you’re. You know, you have an advantage over me, which is that you’re not female and not anymore.

Not anymore. Yeah, you pass. Great. Actually, you look like quite a few trans identified women. Cause they’re bald. I got sick of people always telling me how much I look like a dude, and I was just like, you know what? I’m. I could look like a trans man. Yeah, well, maybe Indiegogo will find out that you talked to me. Maybe they’ll deplatform you for that. There is a non zero chance that that’s a reality in their current timeline. Yeah, but I’ll release it after the campaign is over. There’s no accountability for the people that work at these companies.

They. They never gave me a reason why they deplatformed me. Really? You didn’t even get, like, here’s the thing that you said that we took offense with. It was just. It was just, you logged in, and it said, hey, we refunded all of your backers, and here’s a letter that just says, you violated terms of service, period. Yep. Yep. They don’t have to. They have. No, and that’s another thing. Like, these platforms, especially financial ones, should have some accountability, because they can just. I have to ask the most annoying question ever, and I. And I’m already.

It hurts me to say it, but I also love saying this. Why don’t you just create your own indiegogo? I don’t know. Cause I’m a girl. Cause I’m a dumb girl. I’m too dumb. Why don’t I create my own Internet? This Internet’s not why. That really tends to be the argument, though, in favor of, like, yeah, of course. Indiegogo should be able to completely censor your work and refund it and just banish all contact with you because you technically have the ability to create your own Indiegogo. Why even use their platform, it’s their world. They can decide on what their rules are.

And this extends to all of social media. So now we’re talking about why did my video got taken down off of TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. And that’s usually the defense was like, well, go make your own. Make your own Facebook. Yeah, yeah, get your own CIA. That was dumb even five years ago, and it’s even dumber now. But, I mean, it’s sort of like, you know, oh, you’re. You’re banished from the town. Make your own town. Put people in it somehow. I mean, these platforms are like, the network effects they’re made of. Us, like, these platforms only have value because people use them, and we’re only using them because they have lots of people.

And the fact that these platforms take credit, they sort of own us, right? They’re just like, no, no, this is our, our audience, our user base. We built this somehow. We belong to them. I mean, very much so. In fact, my understanding is, my limited understanding is that the reason you would even go to Indiegogo or Kickstarter, originally, it might have been, I don’t have the resources to put up payment processing and all the infrastructure and the UI and all that, so I’ll use this service that kind of does that for me. But then over time, it almost turns into a shopping mall where it’s like, okay, well, now I just want to have a store in the mall because they got foot traffic.

And I can just assume that enough people walk by or enough people are just going through Indiegogo on their own, that they’ll come across my thing. And that sort of became the new leverage for why you would even want to use crowdsourcing is because it’s a freaking shopping mall. Yeah, it’s not the Internet. It used to be. I miss the old Internet. I miss the old world. I miss the pre Internet world. Back when men were men, women were men, and women and trannies were trannies. I used to really like, I mean, I still do like my tranny friends, but I thought trannies were cool because they didn’t give a fuck what other people thought of them.

And now it’s like, oh, you know, if you use a sex based pronoun, they’re gonna die. It’s like, that’s aren’t the trannies I knew. They’re not making them like they used to. They’re not making trannies like they used to, literally. And also, people had a sense of humor before, and humor is just gone. That’s that’s a real shock. That’s problematic. That’s the problem is that humor is just too problematic now. Yeah, well, like the day I realized that the Babylon bee was funnier than the onion. That was a day of reckoning. Well, the onion and cracked and Mad magazine, they all seem to have gone down that same exact path as well.

It seems like all of those publications would say, no more Nina Paley. Like, they’re, they’re anti Nina Paley in some regards. Yeah. They’ve become scolds. And then, you know, Babylon be the conservative christian one’s actually funny. Like really funny. Laugh out loud funny. It’s like, are you sure you’re not christian? If you like Babylon B, that means you have to be christian. Right? I know. And I have to be anti abortion too. Are you pro abortion? You know, Jesus Christ. Is that a weird phrase to say? Okay, so I personally, I mean, I would say, yeah, so that’s why they call it pro choice.

I’m only in favor of abortion in cases where someone is pregnant. What do you feel about a three strike law? For what? Or like a, like a frequent flyers card for abortion as, like three abortions. You don’t get to have another abortion. Or the first three are on the house, and then the fourth ones, like, you’re paying us medical. Like, you’re paying, like, EMS charges $30,000 just to enter the door. I haven’t really thought about it. My concerns about abortion are that, like, when I was fertile back in those days, I did not want an abortion.

Because the reality of abortion is it’s quite invasive and it’s quite hard on a woman. So my thing was, I did not want to get pregnant, and I was very worried about it. And this is before, if you’re listening to this in the future, we don’t have nano laser robots that just go in and blast the fetus with, like, laser beams yet. We don’t have those yet. No. Yeah, it’s like, I don’t really want sharp implements. Put up my hoo ha, and going in there seems like it’s traumatic, and being pregnant would have been traumatic too.

So, I mean, I don’t know what’s going on with women. Like, I don’t want a woman to be put through that. Like, if a woman is getting, you know, she needs birth control, she needs birth control. It’s like, let’s give her some birth control. That seems like a terrible outcome for her if she’s getting multiple abortions. Something’s not working. On the other hand, people are stupid and irresponsible and do stupid stuff. And I don’t have answers for this, but the idea of the government monitoring how many abortions you’re getting, and that seems like overreach. Yeah. I mean, I’m just floating ideas out there.

I don’t have solutions either. Yeah, well, I haven’t thought about that particular one. I guess I could. I do know that subway cards where you keep clamping it and you get like a free sub at the end? Like, that’s a model that’s been proven and it works. So there’s nine abortions. Get one free. Get your 10th abortion free. Or the inversion of that. I don’t know how it works yet. It’s still an idiom process. I’m actually considering launching an Indiegogo campaign to sort of drum up some interest in this area. Well, the crowdfunding platform I ended up using for my apocalypse animated cards, which I should pull out of this drawer and show you because they’re cool.

These are lenticulars, right? Lenticulars, yeah. You are living the dream. I swear to you like that. Thank you. This is bucket list for me, is being able to make lenticulars at some point. Thank you. You understand when I. But this was part of my programming that I grew up with was having those sweet, like, it was almost as cool as the holograms that started coming out. Yeah. Here’s my lentil business card. But I’ll pull out the. It’s dancing. Look at that. That’s so cool. I will pull out the other cards because I love them. They’re the coolest merch I’ve ever made.

Let me have some in here. Oh, and I’m assuming that if they’re not already, they will soon be on ninapailey.com. for they are all over store. Dot ninapailey.com. they are all over it. Go to store. Yeah. So I’ve got the whole. There’s like a set. I don’t think I have all the cards in the set here. But now I assume you’re not worried about people copying your lenticulars. That would be something cool if everyone just started making their own lenticulars off of your work. Yeah. I say go for it. If you want to put that much money into something, you are welcome to it.

Great investment. I think better than bitcoin is. Put all your money into lenticulars. Actually, that one I just showed you has changed in the final version. This is a prototype version. This is the woman and the dragon. Yeah. I was very excited and I put a ton of money into these things, so I really need to sell them because that was quite an investment. But yeah, the crowdfunding platform I did for this was, I think it’s GoFundme, which is the christian one. And, you know, I’m not a Christian. Evidence is stocking up. Blasphemous jew. I think we might know that you’re christian before, you know, you’re Christiane.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, I live in Christendom. I’m part of western culture. You freaking animated the book of revelation. I can’t think of anything more christian in my life. Well, yes and no. Like, actual christians, people that I know that were raised Christian, a lot of them were really, they really were traumatized as children by the book of Revelation. So I think I made this the way only somebody that wasn’t raised with it. You mean the only part of the Bible where there’s actual action and, like, cool stuff happening? What, do they just go to the book of numbers and read about how long begat, begat, begat 8000 times? Well, that’s the Old Testament, but yeah, the book of Revelation is something.

I don’t think it would be good for children. It’s like a horror movie. And I was thinking when I read it, I was just like, there should be a really cool movie about this. Like, not a lame one. I’m sure there are lame ones, but someone should make a really, because it’s so visual. It’s like psychedelic. So, I mean, so, I mean, I’ve been playing devil’s advocate a lot on this, but I want to say I think we definitely have, like, mine because the same reason that I do my comics and I put out like an MK ultra pamphlet of like a little chick track style.

And I, again, I also leverage these, like, christian templates where, you know, I garner a certain type of audience and I don’t know if I fully equate myself to being where all my inspiration comes from. But my idea was how come there’s not like a really cool MK ultra comic or something? There’s just facts. It’s not building on top of it and turning into a fictionalized thing, but something that you would find at a gas station and be like, what the hell’s that? This can’t be real. Oh, my God. I just looked it up. This is real.

Like, that was the ultimate idea. And if someone wants to go and. And copy that and mass produce it and Sony or like Hooten Mifflin, hardcore wants to violate copyright laws and just distribute tens of millions of these mkultra pamphlets? Yes, please. There’s no part of me that would be angry that someone else was making Buka bucks off of this thing that I made as long as people were actually reading it and looking up mkultra and stuff. That was like the original nugget of all this. But it also feels like a very niche minority. Like, there’s something broken in both of our brains that we both need to get fixed, that we both think this way, because it’s very.

It’s totally not normal to think I’m going to devote years of my life and money and all sorts of resources and not expect any payoff other than other people benefit from it. Like, there’s a weird, like, unhealthy altruism baked into that. No, it’s healthy. Read the book. Not the book. Read the gift by Lewis Hyde. You will feel better about this. This is a good impulse for artists. And really, art that is created for money tends to be lame. And art that is created because somebody just really needed this to exist. I mean, when I get.

I don’t get that many compelling ideas anymore. I mean, I have lots of ideas, whatever, but one that’s compelling enough for me to actually put the work into it, I have to really want that thing to exist. And when I get an idea like that, the first thing I do is just go, please let someone else have made this. I don’t want to make this. Like, this is going to be a lot of work. Just let this thing exist from someone else. And, like, with these gloves, it’s just like, why are there not hamsa gloves? This makes no sense.

All right, I have to do it. It’s a big pain in the butt. Like, I don’t. This is not even my wheelhouse. But, yeah, I’m gonna do it. The apocalypse. Apocalypse thing, it was like, no, there is no, like, super cool movie. Not that I made a movie. I didn’t make a movie, but there just wasn’t the thing I wanted, and I wanted that thing to be in the world. And that’s a good impulse for artists. Not, I want this money. I’m going to. We’ll start wrapping this, but I’ve got a little segment that I want to get, just like, a random smattering of your opinions on a wide variety of stuff.

So let me just play a little ten second intro, and I’ll explain the rules to you. Hey, conspiracy buffs, I double dare you to take some PCP. The paranormal conspiracy probe. On your marks. Get set and go. Okay, before I explain the rules, two really important questions. One, would you download a car? Yes. And two, are you a cop? Because if you’re a cop, you do have to tell me. I know the law. I’m not a cop. Okay, so here’s the rules. I’m just going to mention a certain topic, and I just want you to give it a one to ten rating.

And meaning you give it credit. You want to give it credit. You believe in it. One, meaning you don’t believe in it at all. Five, you’re on the fence. You don’t care. Whatever. So, for example, if I said bigfoot, where would you rate bigfoot? From one to ten as neutrally as possible. Five. Was five neutral? Five will be neutral. Yeah, totally. Okay, five. Is this an apathetic five, or is this like a. Okay, very apathetic about Bigfoot. If this is all fives, that would be fine, too. Don’t feel pressured to take a stance on any of these flat earth.

I mean, nine for entertainment value and zero for anything else. How about the phrase, a human being has stepped foot on the moon in the last hundred years, full stop. I actually believe that, yes. I’d give that a nine. How about the Apollo eleven footage that was shown on tv? One to ten. I bet it was real. That it was real. People standing on the moon, talking to the president on a moon phone. I’m going to go with nine for that, just because I haven’t thought about it much, but, yeah, that’s a rabbit hole. I’ve passed the rabbit hole with the sign on it, and I’m just like, oh, my God.

Like, maybe next time I gotta get to where I’m going first. Yeah. Okay, then how about one to ten? The reality or the potential reality of the government getting Stanley Kubrick on their payroll as a backup plan? Five, how about the existence of demons? And I guess I’m going to specify this in some sort of a Judeo Christianity demon and that, like, they’re the bad boys. Wait, the existence of Judeo christian demons demons, as opposed to, say, great greek daemons, which would be some sort of ongoing process that may or may not be sentient. I want.

I’m talking about fallen angels, gnashing of teeth, making bad things happen. Like, christian style demons. Oh. I don’t even feel like I’m qualified for that, because I’m just nothing christian. I just. Five. I mean, I’m gonna have to be, like, just neutral on that, because I don’t. Because neutral almost feels away from atheism. Like, if you give a fuck. Agnostic. I’m agnostic. Okay, fair point, fair point. Would you rate angels the same? Would angels get a five? Yeah, well, except I have cats. So honestly, every time I literally get on my knees to pray with the faith glove, like, I still have doubt, but I also have, you know, at least do the actions of faith.

My cats come up to me and I’m just like, oh, you angels. So I’ll give that an eight. How about dinosaurs? Conventional. Like the way that you learned about dinosaurs in school? Yeah, I’ll give that a nine. But these are beliefs, right? I have no direct experience of any of this, which is why I’m not going to give anything a ten. This is just unexamined beliefs. But there’s stuff I was raised with and it’s like, yeah, sure, yeah, what about fire breathing, flying dragons? Having existed at any point in history, that would be like close to a zero.

That would be a zero or one. Yeah. 911 was an inside job. Oh, my gosh. Six celebrity clones or any political clones. Just clones. You mean human clones? Yeah. And I don’t mean like someone grew in a lab and then they squashed it out and they were like, okay, we know how to do it. But I mean that, that at some point we’ve all seen a movie or a news report or a, you know, addressed to the nation by a politician, and it was a literal clone. Not a lookalike, not a mask, but an actual clone.

0.5. Okay, how about human clones existing in any capacity at this moment in time? 0.5. Really? Okay. Yeah, I just. What I know about, again, I don’t have direct experience. Right, like, this. This, all this shows just how social knowledge is, how. How much we rely on huge groups of people because we just do not have direct access to so much stuff that we believe. And this is, this is the power of humans is that we can think in huge groups. It makes us very powerful. But then you ask questions like this and it’s like, oh, I have very little direct experience with a bunch of stuff I believe.

And that is why I have high confidence when I talk about sex, because I do have direct experience with sex. Like, I. Apart from what other people have said, I have lived experience there, but I have no lived experience of going to the moon. No lived experience. The clones, I take it on faith that the earth is round. I. I mean, it seems really. It works like it works with everything else. I think about the world because they’re all in on it. The whole world’s in on it. We’re all in on it. But, yeah. Like, for me to get personal verification for this stuff, it’s like, no.

So I just, you know, I’m part of my culture, and these things might be wrong, but I believe them. Okay, final one that I think encapsulates a lot of what we were talking about. And I guess I hate qualifiers, but this one kind of needs a little bit of a qualifier. I’m going to say, like the year 2000 and before. But if you look at Disney animated feature length movies, year 2000 before, do you believe that someone was intentionally putting sexual, subliminal images into these movies in order to, like, sexually rationalize, you know, do you understand the.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Subliminal, like, in the smoke, like a shape of a naked smoke or, you know, showing boobs and, you know, the rescuers or all this one to ten that. That Disney’s like, we’re gonna just make a bunch of sex crazed nymphomaniacs with these movies. One, okay, that’s on zero. That’s on zero to ten, but, yeah, well, whatever. Yeah, okay. Okay. So two of it were on one to ten. Yeah, I get. I get the sentiment there. Yeah. Low, low. Not. Not hundred percent. I’m not 100% confident about any of this, so I’m trying to.

Trying to avoid the very, very. I think we’re very, very of like minds. Except I’ve. I don’t want to go on a whole different tangent. We’re winding down. But I do think that the potential of someone having real human clones existing, even just for scientific experiments sake, feels like a eleven on my scale. Like, of course somebody’s out there doing it, because why wouldn’t they? But also, I don’t have any direct experience. Wink, wink. So. Yeah, yeah. Well, there was that movie the boys from Brazil. Did you see that? Yeah. And that was actually. I mean, did I see it? It influenced one of my comics that I wrote on project Monarch that derived from the nazi ratlines that.

That went into Brazil. And there’s a whole place called dignity colony. It’s literally just a bunch of straight, like, eugenics superstars with blonde hair and blue eyes and, like, germanic features in the middle of Chile that also might have been run by the daughter of Joseph Mengele. And the lore of it is where I think I find most of my interest at a certain point, once someone starts the fire, like, I’m more interested in, like, let’s see what happens out of all this. You’re like, what happens when fire catches on this thing. It’s more boring to me to figure out, like, okay, well, who started it and why did they start it? I don’t really care about intent as much, so I fascinate over the conspiratorial angles of all this stuff, which influences some of my own scoring.

But we’ll save all that for another day because this has been an amazing discussion, and I think we can go on a million different tangents, but we’ll end it here for the sake of everybody involved. Well, leave a little bit of cream for the next time. Tell people one more time where they can go and copy and profit off of your work. Well, you can buy merch at store dot ninapailey.com. you can watch Sita sings the blues from going to sitasingstheblues.com. you can see Satyr masochism by going to the download page@sedermasochism.com. i have a blog that I don’t upkeep too well, which is ninapaley.com.

and you should listen to the podcast@heterodorx.com. dot. We will absolutely get you some more listeners on heterodorx. I’ll make a personal mission to pump that so we can at least double your numbers. Actually, our episode that’s up right now is really good. It’s called the age of bourgeois guilt, and it’s about the gulag archipelago. So shout out. I know if Danny’s listening. You don’t know Danny. I know Danny. Check out heterodorex. I think you’d like it, Danny. So let’s, let’s get some more traction. One more listener we’re going to get up to. Yeah, we’ll get you 119 listeners.

If. If you could pick one way that people could support you the best. Like, what’s the like, what gets you the most bang for your bug? Just a straight up donation or straight up donation. If you go to ninapailey.com, there’s a, you can donate PayPal or, I think, credit card via PayPal. And there’s a bitcoin thing. You could buy me a house, buy me a yacht. Are those options on the website or. No, no, but just, you know, send a donation. You’ll get my email and we can talk if you want to do the house or yacht thing.

All right, well, huge supporters here, and actually, we didn’t even get into AI. We’ll talk about AI on the next. Oh, my God. But I feel like that, that’s the Frankenstein’s monster, where all these copyright and IP things come together and transform into a new landscape. Just last night, I did a rare blog post. I wrote a thing about feeling creatively blocked, partly because of the advent of AI. And then I asked AI to write the essay for me. There’s my essay, and then there’s chat GPTs essay, and I shared it on Facebook, and people are quoting the chat GPT part.

So I’m just like, yeah, I’m. They like, they like, AI does better work than we do. What are we even for? Consider that a teaser for the next time that we get together and talk, because I think that that would be its own episode. I’ve got. I’ve got the hottest takes. I have, I think, are all around AI at this point, and I don’t know that until people start telling me how wrong I am. All right, I look forward to it. This was really fun. Thank you so much. Thank you, Nina. And, yeah, I’ll play a couple ads.

Go and get the NASA comic. Go and get a bunch of stuff. Hell, if you want to download and print the mkultra pamphlet, you’ve got my permission to do it. I won’t come after you legally. And I’m saying that to anyone listening. If you go and you download it, you can get it for free on Patreon. I guess that’s free. Asterisk. Also, if you signed up for the Maritime American newsletter, which is free, I did include an absolutely free copy of that in the last newsletter. I don’t know if I’ll do that again, but there was a link to it.

And so if anyone’s got it, go to Kinko’s or print it out on your own or just whatever. Just get it out there. The original goal was to just make normies, force feed them mkultra information. So let’s. Let’s keep doing that. Put it in gas stations. Put it in gas tanks. Spread the word with propaganda packs, all for just $40 shipped@paranoidamerican.com. dot. 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 paranoid american.

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