I thought that was the coolest thing in the world, the idea of somebody trying to solve mysteries. I would see conspiracies in everything. I think I believed in leprechauns longer than any of my fellow classmates because I tried to catch them.

When I was 12 years old, I was obsessed with codes, conspiracies, and secret messages. I would record TV commercials with SoundRecorder.exe on Windows 95 and reverse them to see if I was being subliminally influenced to watch Pokémon by Japanese spies.

Gravity Falls is a show about mysteries and magic but first and foremost it's a show about characters.

A sibling is a friend for life, but they are a friend for life that you are forced to have. And like anything that you are forced to do, occasionally people will drive you crazy.

Everyone has days where they don't get their way, where you have to go to bed early or you have too much homework to do or you can't eat the candy that you want or you miss your favorite TV show and, in those moments, you just want to tear the whole world down.

I built a leprechaun trap that was made to look like a tiny hotel. There was a ramp where the leprechaun could walk into the hotel, see a Lego pot of gold on the other side, try to reach it, fall through a trap door, go through a tube, wind up in a biscuit tin, and be trapped. My mom, encouraging my madness, told me that the leprechaun might escape and that I needed a shot glass of whiskey down there to keep him occupied while he was in there.

Once you train an audience to look for significance, they start to find it everywhere.