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.

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.

The concern about what's too violent or what's too scary is something that I just completely don't let enter into my creative process. I feel like, if I spend a lot of time trying to worry about whether it will appeal to everyone and who will like it and who won't, and I try to please everyone, I'll just spread myself too thin and lose my mind.

I've always loved The Simpsons, just because it was really, really funny. As a kid, you love the characters. You know that the dad is dumb and frustrated, and you know that the boy is smarter than everyone else around him and is constantly getting into mischief.

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 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.

My goal with Gravity Falls is to make people as paranoid and insane as I was as a child, and I'm delighted to see it's working!