He Built FreedomToons. Now He’s Coming for Hollywood - Seamus Coughlin

All right, welcome back to the LOOPcast. Today, I am joined by Seamus Coughlin, creator of Freedom Tunes, maybe the funniest guest or recurring guest at this point. Oh, thank you. Second funniest, Josh pays me to say that he is the funniest.

Why does he have to pay you to say that? Oh, it is because I am the funniest? There you go. There you go. Ladies and gentlemen, you heard it here. Awesome. So, you know what is funny, Seamus? I went back into the catalogs, and I saw 11 years ago you posted your first animated video on your channel. Do you know the name of that video? How government works.

Absolutely. Yeah. I could not believe how long you've been at this. I've done this a couple of years now, and I'm exhausted, as is. You've done it for 11, and you're still going. Just take me to the beginning. Expanding, yeah. What was the thought process in the beginning?

How did you settle on the medium? What was your inspiration? Why did you start? I was young and foolish, and I said, I'm going to change the world. No, I was actually... Listen, I was someone who always knew what he wanted to do. I'm just very blessed. I always knew I wanted to go into animation. I always knew I wanted to be a comedy writer, and I always knew that I wanted to change the culture. I remember being in high school and seeing the kind of stuff that was put in front of us, not only by educators, but by the dominant media culture, the kinds of shows they had on MTV depicting teen life, and all the degeneracy it promoted.

I remember sitting there rolling my eyes, because there I was as a 15-year-old thinking, I know the only reason that these teenagers are engaged in this is because some creepy 40-year-old who was writing this wanted to see that.

I think I've always been very skeptical of media, and I've always thought about who's making this, why are they making it, what are they trying to sell me? And so, when I was... When I was 16, well, really when I was like 14, actually, I started freelancing in animation. I started teaching myself when I was 12, 13, and when I graduated high school at the age of 18, I saw that the demand for animators had risen like 30%, and I knew that this is what I wanted to do, so I thought, I'm just going to start my own business, and that's what I did.

I started my own business, and... When I was 19, back in 2014, when I uploaded that video, I thought, in my spare time, I'm just going to make little political cartoons in a very rough, easy-to-do style so I can get them out quickly and just put them on my channel as a way to vent and express my beliefs. And then that actually ended up being the thing that took off. And so... You know, I say, as sort of an easy style, that's kind of a loaded term, because animation takes days and days and days to make, even like the simplest animation.

What people don't realize is, for Freedom Toots, in order to get a video out each week, we've got, like, it's several people who have to work for several days straight, sometimes a week or two straight, in order to get the thing out. Animation is super, super time-consuming, but I'm really blessed that what I was doing took off, because by the time I was finished with college...

It was making enough money for me to support myself, and then it was making enough money for me to support myself and bring extra help on, and now, thank God, we're at the point where we have a small team of people who I'm able to work with in order to continually churn this stuff out. So, where I started was essentially doing this by myself with maybe a friend or two chipping in to help on occasion, and I wanted to spread my values.

I wanted to spread a positive message. I wanted to change the culture, and then it exploded. I mean, now we have over a million subscribers. We have... About 290 million views. It's nuts, yeah. Zero dollars spent on marketing, too. All word of mouth. Our average video view is like 450,000, and that's across 600 plus videos. Yeah, the reach of it is crazy, and I have to ask you to start off. Did you have a video in particular where you're like, whoa, this hit critical mass, or was it a slow burn over time?

When did you realize, oh, I got something here? It was both. I mean, it was both. Some of it was just kind of the day-to-day and things slowly building over time, but then there were a few videos that hit here and there that made it really, really clear that this channel had staying power and had a lot of potential.

When I was 25 years old, a friend of mine posted a St. Joseph novena to... Facebook, which is what we used at the time, and she said, I've seen miracles from this novena, you know, be careful. And I thought, if I wanted a miracle, what would I ask for? If I could just have one clear sign from God, more or less. If I could just know. Before we get back to Seamus, I want to tell you about an organization that's equipping nonprofits and accelerating their impact.

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Let's get back to Seamus. And at that time, I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to be... A priest or get married? And I should word that differently. I knew I wanted to be married. I didn't know if that was what God wanted for me. I thought, maybe God wants me to be a priest. And so, at this point, Freedom Tunes had probably about 300-something thousand subscribers, but our views weren't doing very well. We were kind of bleeding subscribers. We were losing subscribers some months.

Instead of gaining, the channel was starting to shrink, and I thought, maybe this is God telling me that I'm not supposed to do this. Maybe this is God telling me that He wants me to leave this behind, and focus on something else, and possibly the priesthood. So, I was like, I'm going to pray this novena, and I'm going to ask some questions about this to God. And so, I pray this novena, and I just say, you know, please let me know for sure what you want for me, if you want me to be a priest, or if you want me to get married.

And if you do want me to get married, please just help the business do better, so I can support a family. So, I finish this novena, and like three days later, almost immediately after, I upload this video that just goes explosively viral.

And people start messaging me who I've never spoken to, asking me to do client work for them, including people who didn't even see that video. Like, it wasn't even related. It was totally random. Tim Poole reached out to me. We had spoken before, but I'd never worked with him. Like, Tim Poole reached out to me that week and asked me to help him with a project, and that was when I basically started doing his show.

So, even though it was a slow build over time, and generally is a slow build, That was one initial explosion that made it clear to me, like, okay, this is my vocation. This is what God wants me to do. When I said, if I'm supposed to have a family, please help my business to improve, I wasn't actually seeking a sign there. That was kind of an afterthought. But it occurred to me when my business immediately exploded after finishing the Novena that this was a sign and that this was my answer.

And so I continued doing it, eventually got married. We're still churning cartoons out to this day, and we're actually expanding out into making a full-length show. So, God's been really good. Yeah, God has been really good, and he's laid a clear path, and... I feel like it's kind of one of those things, too, like...

One of the things that I love about the internet is that you can have a good idea. You can pretty much just start from your, you know, spare bedroom or whatever, and if your message is good enough, if your content is good enough, it can just reach this broad audience, and two things come to mind. In that story you've revealed, you have sincere religious conviction, like you take prayer seriously. I think of all of the mainstream comedy, kind of from what you were coming up in a little bit before that, basically making fun of people like you.

Always, yeah. You are the butt of that joke for... You know, the majority of comedy, I think like Jon Stewart or whatever, and so two things. What were your early comedic influences? And I have seen a lot of attempts at kind of conservative, or for that matter, liberal humor just be terrible, right? Not funny at all. They do not land. So, how were you able to think about, I have this message I feel very convicted in, but I also wanted to be funny.

So, how did you make it actually funny, and what were your influences? Oh, that is a really good question, actually. So, firstly, as far as influences go. I came from a Catholic family. We were not allowed to watch The Simpsons, and, you know, that seems like a tame show by our standards today. Yeah, seriously. At the time, it wasn't, and I think, really importantly, the kids talked back to the parents a lot, and so my parents didn't want us to see that.

Totally understand. But, you know, probably by the time I was 10, 11 years old, that rule relaxed. I was the youngest, so that's just sort of how it goes. Oh, yeah, for sure. Parents just start forgetting that they had rules slowly, and so I watched The Simpsons, and... This is in the 2000s, way after The Simpsons was this smash-hit phenomenon, so I was sort of late to the party, but I thought it was hilarious.

Don't tell my parents. Hopefully, they never listen to this, and I never get caught, but my brothers used to watch it anyway when they weren't at home sometimes, and it was the funniest thing in the world. So, The Simpsons was a huge, huge, huge influence in my writing style, I think, and even in my drawing style, probably. And so...

You're right that a lot of what media has done, especially when it's come to religion, is it's made jokes about it, and it always made me angry. It's funny, because I knew I wasn't supposed to watch some of these shows, and I would sneak watch them, but I wasn't going like, aha, mom and dad would be so mad if they knew I was laughing at this joke about Catholicism. They actually made me angry. I was sitting there as a 10-year-old, and I was pretty mad about this, and it was funny because I remember my brothers and cousins basically saying the same thing.

When we watch some of these shows, I hated that. That really made me mad. And so, I remember also feeling like it wasn't just that it was sacrilegious. That was obviously the worst part of it when they were making fun of the faith. And to be clear, I've never really had an issue with making fun of Catholics. It's just making fun of Catholicism. When you actually make fun of the beliefs, when you make fun of Jesus, when you make fun of Mary, that's when I get angry.

That's the stuff I don't like. If you're poking fun at a Catholic figure or saying like, oh, Some Catholics are hypocrites. Whatever. Fine. That is funny. That can work, but when you are actually making fun of Jesus, when you are actually making fun of Mary, that was what I really hated. And so, I also, at the same time...

I didn't like the way that priests were depicted, because it wasn't just that they were depicted with contempt. It was clear that the people writing this stuff didn't really know about the faith and didn't even know any priests. There's a phenomenon that happens in comedy where a person parodies something because they've actually experienced it, and then younger comedians like that parody, so they adopt it as a trope, and they do it themselves, but they never actually interacted with the subject matter.

You know, when the baby boomers were writing comedy, yeah, sure, some large number of them did go to Catholic school, and fairly or unfairly, they were making fun of priests and nuns who they knew, but they actually knew those people. Right. I think by the time Gen X... ...was dominating the television rooms. They were just writing jokes that they saw boomers tell. They had never interacted with a priest. They had never interacted with a nun, and so the jokes just weren't true to life anyway.

You'll notice this. Whenever you see a priest on television, he says, my child, probably every other word. He's like, yes, my child, no, my child. Have you ever had a priest say that to you your entire life? I've never had a priest say that, but some millennial or Gen Xer... Saw a show written by a baby boomer where, you know, he was parodying one priest he might have known who said, my child, and so, like, now every priest on television talks that way all the time.

And if you ever see a priest, they're always either, if I see a priest in a show today, they are the villain or they are a pedophile of some kind. You know what I mean? They're the villain. There's no space for them to be anything more dynamic than those two things. There's one exception, which is if they're a bad priest, we're told they're a good priest. Ah, good point. Every now and again. They'll have a priest who's a good guy, but it's like, because he says abortion is good, and sodomy isn't a sin, right?

But all the rest of the priests are evil, evil people. Right, and they're 2D. They're totally two-dimensional. To your point, like, they have no, well, they've never interacted with a real priest, so you can't say anything actually insightful or funny about them, because you have no respect for the subject matter. So, it's just kind of a 2D, I get to make fun of them. And, of course, then, but the ultimate nuance is applied to just about everything else of people that they.

actually know and actually sympathize with so you're right in that the the um the instincts of the writer in their experience but also somewhat in activism of like what they have been told is bad even if they don't know it is comes across in the storytelling and i think the biggest thing is like what's funny about yours is like the voices are funny which i do want to get into i recognize a lot of them they're you but the writing is actually good and i feel like even pulling off writing to be good in small bursts as you said in your small you know two and a half minute Whatever is genuinely a challenge, and I just see kind of lacking.

Like, if you just scroll through Netflix now, I almost immediately go to Rotten Tomatoes and be like, is this actually good? And pretty much none of it is. It always isn't. Yeah, it always isn't. You're right. Well, yeah, Netflix is a sad situation, and in the streaming economy, shows are actually written to be listened to in the background while you do other things and not to actually be watching. I'm not saying that as scathing commentary. That's actually part of the goal, because they want to maximize your time on their platform.

They know you're not. necessarily going to have time to sit on the couch all day, so they make it so that you're able to watch their shows without actually even watching them. I mean, what do you think that does for quality? The dialogue's awful. How much exposition are you going to have to have when everyone has to articulate everything they're doing out loud so that someone who's doing the laundry can follow the story in the other room?

Yeah, and I also heard the other thing, too, is a lot of people pitch a script, say, for an eight-episode extended series, or limited series, rather, and then the executives will get in the room, like, we actually need four more episodes in here, and so in just about every limited series now, you can kind of tell in the middle, there's like a two, three-episode thing that feels kind of off and extended for some reason, which had no, doesn't push the plot along, it's like a weird expository, like.

We're going to do something experimental with the characters, and then they kind of get back to the actual story like two episodes later. Yeah, that happens a lot. So, this is part of why I'm really excited about the project we're working on right now, Twisted Plots, because we're going to be doing television-length episodes. Our pilot's 25 minutes long, and the first season is going to have five episodes total, including the episode we already produced, and part of that is because, A, I know that if we did more than that, it would just cost, it would cost a lot, and it costs, you know, animation's really expensive, and so I'm considering like, A, how much can we realistically produce right now, but B, what are the stories that I know that I want to tell?

I think one issue that does happen in television and with streaming is these services will ask you to produce extra episodes, or they'll tell you your season has to be 10 episodes long, 15 episodes long. In the days of television, it was like 22 episodes long. And a lot of it ends up becoming disposable. I think having fewer but more intentionally told stories makes it more precious. It makes it more rewatchable. It makes it more interesting. You don't end up feeling like it's white noise.

I mentioned The Simpsons earlier. They're on season 37, and they have over 800 episodes, and at some point, it does all just start to blur together, in my opinion. Yeah. So, well, take me to the beginning. You do these, that's what ends up taking off is the short videos, political, sad, sorry, comedy, which are very funny.

Thank you. What was the story in your head that made you say, okay, I need to do something longer than this? Has that always been the goal, and what is the heart of that story that you want to tell in a longer form? Absolutely. So, I've always wanted to make film and television, or at least television length programming. I love doing the short cartoons. I think they're important, and we don't have any plans to stop doing. But, I've wanted to expand for a while, and it was just about figuring out the right project.

So, I don't want to say too much, but there's a lot of really cool stuff we've been working on in the background, aside from just this. I want to make films, I have screenplays written, I want to do other shows, but to me, this felt like our next logical step. It's an anthology series, so each episode is totally different. Like, each episode is a completely unique story that communicates some kind of moral value without beating you over the head with it, without coming off like an after-school special, without these ham-fisted monologues.

Part of why the left has been so successful with their propaganda and at chipping away at our culture is because when they... Go and make something entertaining, like a film or a movie. They write what they believe is true.

And what comes out on the paper, when pushed through the infrastructure of mass media, ends up changing the perspective, even ever so slightly, of millions of people at a time. So, one example I like to bring up a lot is Titanic. Okay, why do I bring this up? Well, it was like the highest grossing romance film of all time, and for a while, it was the highest grossing film ever.

And that's a highly entertaining movie. James Cameron's a master of his craft. Special effects are incredible. The acting is phenomenal. The music is great, and the story is told in a way that really draws you in, but when you look on paper, it's like, okay, this is a movie about a woman cheating on her fiancé and fornicating with a homeless drifter that she just met, and also having a nude image of herself drawn, wearing her engagement gift, and then putting that in her fiancé's safe to torture him.

It's like, this is a... I'm a bad person, but when you're watching that, you're taken in by the story. You're like, are Jack and Rose going to get together? It sucks you in because the story is well told.

Well, regardless of whether there's room in the raft, she was on a lifeboat, and she got off. So, there didn't even need to be room on the raft. She could have just stayed on the lifeboat, and they could have lived happily ever after, right? But the reason I bring this up is because I don't think James Cameron sat down and said, I'm going to write this film, and I'm going to convince everyone that adultery is good, and you should cheat on your fiance.

I think he just told a story from his heart, and that happened to be the story. That happened to be what he thought was the best and most interesting story that he could tell. Now, this is part of why it's important to have media which is written and produced by people who are Catholic.

Because, even though I don't think James Cameron is trying to propagandize you into seeing the world in a specific way, the effect is still the same. I mean, that movie was a cultural phenomena, and it made people more sympathetic towards cheating in certain circumstances, towards having sex outside of marriage.

The reality is... Could you flip that on your head really quick? So, you would say that's an example of good art, you could argue good art, that had the effect of propagandizing people, just like anything would. But what would be the inverse? Like, say, what was a piece of art that you consumed, and you're like, wow, this was incredible, and it also pointed me towards, say, a more virtuous life or perception of the world? I'm happy... There's actually one that I was just thinking about.

And it was done unintentionally. There is a movie that is based on a book, on a novella, written by a liberal man who's not friendly towards Christianity, and it was directed by someone who was not trying to make a film with Christian allegory, but it is unintentionally so, still a very beautiful Christian story. It's a movie called The Shawshank Redemption. Now, for those who haven't seen it, spoiler alert, right? Well, it's been a while. I think statute of limitations has applied.

It's like a 30-year-old. film right it's like number one and best movie of all time like if you haven't heard about it now when you think about the actual subject matter of the film you think about the plot okay there is a innocent man wrongly condemned who enters into the realm of the guilty everyone within that realm is sort of mesmerized by him confused by him trying to size him up trying to figure out who this guy is what his deal is is he who he says he is etc is he really innocent And he's doing all sorts of things to help the inmates there.

So, for example, he builds out this library, and he's advocating for them in other ways. And so, at first, maybe you think, oh, well, this is kind of like a social justice story. He's helping the people in prison improve their lives and get their GED and become literate. But then, as the film goes on, You realize, at the end, his true masterwork was what he was doing behind the scenes to provide salvation. He literally tunnels out of the jail, through the narrow gate, in the truest possible sense.

He squeezes out to freedom through this pipe, and the only other person who's able to join him is Red, his best friend, who he ends up taking with him, and Red Red famously is the, quote, only guilty man in Shawshank. One of the running themes throughout the film is no one admits that they're guilty in prison. They all say that they were wrongly convicted. Red is the only guy who says, I am guilty.

And he's the only guy who gets saved at the end of the film. There's a profound Christian allegory, and also Andy, through all of his suffering, he stores up a wealth outside of the place that he's trapped in. I mean, there's a lot there, which is really profound, and so that film, it touches us in a way, and it's a very beautiful story, and I don't think that's a coincidence. I don't think that's a coincidence that there's so much unintentional Christian truth.

In that story, and that... It's a beautiful story to us. It really strikes a specific way. It's a very special movie, and it wasn't because the writers sat down and said, we're going to make a Christian film. In fact, I don't think they did at all. And Stephen King, you know his politics, you know some of the other things he's written. Unfortunately, I do. I mean, social media has kind of ruined a lot of these creatives because you realize that they're just kind of shallow and vapid.

Exactly, and even in Shawshank, right, they have the trope of the evil Christian character. He puts this type of character in a lot of his movies and a lot of the stuff that he writes, but again, because the film has truth, beauty, and goodness in it, we can point to clear Christian truths, because Jesus Christ is the truth. He didn't just have the truth. He is the way, he is the truth, he is the life. The truth is a person. That person is Jesus Christ.

Anything that communicates truth honestly is telling you something about him. So, interesting point you say, communicating truth honestly, because we've just brought up two examples of what I would argue are just good films. They're entertaining, they're compelling, they deal with a lot of... Complex themes in some ways. Shawshank Redemption, arguably one of the best movies of all time. Films for the real film heads here. I kind of have a personal rule. Basically, anything made, I think after 2016, I almost intentionally do not watch, because it feels like even by accident, people aren't creating stories that are compelling or dynamic.

I'd say post that 2016 time. Have you noticed the same thing? Have you been able to find gems outside of the... The mainstream, or why do you think that phenomenon has happened, where I could go watch a movie in, like, the 2000s, and be like, okay, this is actually a really good movie, it's entertaining, and I was sucked into it, even if it didn't have, say, like, Christian allegories, but just everything, it feels like, is kind of tough now. Well, it's even worse than that, Tom.

You can watch a bad movie from the early 2000s and go, this is excellent compared to what they're making now. This is kind of something my wife and I have been doing, where we'll watch an old movie or show, something that's, you know, from the 2000s, and we'll go, this is... Remarkably good for what it is. This did not seem that good at the time, but because quality has declined.

It seems like it is, and so I think there's a few reasons. Firstly, as our society has slowly eroded over time, and people have been less interested in producing something of lasting value, and everyone's looking for ways to escape work, to escape their duties, to escape their responsibilities, that's obviously going to characterize the work that they produce on an artistic level as well. There's just not that much effort put into it. Also, look, these relationships feed off of one another.

Inattentive filmmakers are going to make inattentive audiences, and inattentive audiences are going to make inattentive filmmakers, like we were discussing with Netflix earlier. If you're doing other things with the TV playing in the background, and the people producing the media you're consuming know that, they're just not going to put the same effort into it. There are films, obviously made after 2017, that are really good. One I'll point out, I thought the film 1917 was excellent.

Really love that movie. There are gems here and there, but you're right. For the most part, this stuff's not very good. I think one reason is... People who are making films in years past, they were probably reading more. They were more familiar with stage plays. They were probably a bit more cultured. I think this goes along with something you can actually say about the baby boomer generation, which is really positive. I think the baby boomer generation, unfortunately, and this is not true of all boomers.

My parents are boomers. There's many cool boomers. They squandered the inheritance of their faith, basically. I mean, this was the hippie generation with Woodstock. Again, not all of them went, not all of them did that, but the baby boomer generation was probably the best formally educated generation in all of history, at least in the United States. Catholic schools were incredibly cheap, and you had priests and nuns who were educating them, and they were immensely cultured. And so, when they wrote film and television, They were slipping a lot of that culture in.

They understood story better. They were made to read the classics in school. Well, over time, that slowly started to slip away, and now in school, we're reading political propaganda or postmodern literature that sort of lines up with the values of our professors and teachers, and you can't give what you don't have. If you don't know good story because you haven't read good books or you haven't even seen good films, you're not really going to make Films and stories that are that good when it's your turn to produce something.

I mean, even like Star Trek in the 90s, Star Trek Next Gen, would have references to classic literature that, I mean, like, you would not expect a science fiction show to have today, that's for sure. I do think a lot of it is because writers are not— Yeah, so to stop you, because I get on this a lot, and I feel like a lot of people in my generation at least feel like they went to college and missed out on this.

I think the one positive is that the classics still exist, and they're kind of gems to be discovered, and in a way can give you a huge leg up if you start classically educating yourself if you want to be a creative. So, do you have any... Like, if you had to give three off the top of your head, hey, start your journey, this is going to be a huge leg up for understanding story, it's going to be enjoyable, you could probably digest it, just to get you started.

Do you have any recs? It's difficult to point to anything specific because people are going to be inspired by different things, but if I'm totally honest, obviously, I'm going to point to the Bible, and this is something that Dostoevsky used to do. He would read the Bible, and he would read the newspaper, and then he would try to retell things from the newspaper in a biblical style, basically, and there's stuff in the Bible. You look at Tobit.

That's an awesome story, and there's a lot of comedic value in it, too. There's lines in there where you go like, oh my gosh, there's something so funny about the visual of the daughter getting married, and then the dad is literally digging a grave in back for the groom, but that's all lost.

People don't read these things anymore. People don't teach their kids about these things. There's also a great line where he's talking to his wife, and their son is gone, and he's not back yet, and he says to his wife, I'm going to paraphrase this, but He says, like, he's fine, stop worrying, and she says, my son is dead, stop deceiving me, which you're like, this so perfectly maps onto the way that people still are, and I think that's actually the value in reading classic literature, and that's also the value, and again, reading the Bible, among many other things, is You see the common thread.

This is just how people are, man. If people were talking this way 2,000, 3,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, it's probably just baked into us. And so, if you're writing comedy especially, it's really important to have an understanding of what the human person is. Part of how you can have an understanding of what the human person is, is understanding how we behaved 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, because That stuff's always going to be funny to us. Like, again, the idea of the wife worrying about her children and the husband going, no, they're fine, like, that's hilarious because we still encounter that on a day-to-day basis.

Well, and even, it's also a matter of interpretation, too. I think even when we read things, the interpretation is bad, so one classic we can point to, right, is... Is the Odyssey, when I was in school, and we read the Odyssey, it was a classic, but the way they taught it was not conducive to actually understanding it in a robust way, because the way they taught it was, well, the reason Odysseus gets to run around and do whatever he wants is because they were all just a bunch of chauvinists back then, and they didn't care about women, and he's allowed to be sexist.

In my father, you know, born in 1952, educated by the Catholic school system through the 50s and 60s, he says to me, well, hold on a second. Odysseus is off doing these things. He's with Calypso. He's indulging in his lusts, in what happens to his family, what happens to his country. It all falls apart. So, you know, in...

Basically, what my dad was getting at and what he said is, if you don't take care of your children, you're a bad person and your society is going to collapse. That's not how we were taught it. We were taught it as like, oh, well, the reason the Odyssey describes this kind of behavior is because it's promoting it.

Whereas, I think my father's interpretation, what he was taught growing up, A, it gives more dignity to the authors, actually, as well as the people who maintained the history and the canon, because it says, no, they were sophisticated, right? This chronological snobbery that tells us that only we're capable of writing things with some degree of detached irony, where we can have our protagonists behave in ways that we aren't recommending to our audience, it's snobbish. And it puts us above our forefathers in a really inappropriate way.

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Let's get back to the show. Two things on that really quick, because I've thought this myself. I have my own radicalization moment. I feel like one lie that was propagated to me was that, oh, our founding fathers, or I can't remember who it was, thought the earth was flat. They thought the earth was flat. I can't remember who this was. Who said that? They were attributing this lie to. I didn't know the founders were so based.

I had no idea. Or maybe it was Christopher Columbus, or there was someone... They say Columbus, and I don't even think that people in Columbus's time actually thought the Earth was flat, if I'm not mistaken. I think that's kind of one of those busted myths. But that's the thing. It's a busted myth, and they didn't, verifiably so. I think it's something about the horizon. I can't remember. I'd have to go back through all of it. But then I realized, I read, and I'm like, oh no, they actually didn't think that.

And I was like, okay, well, why was that lie planted about them? And then if you think for a little bit, it's like... Oh, it was actually an attempt to discredit them as unserious, unscientific, unsophisticated people, so that, you know, you get someone, whoever's interpretation of the Odyssey comes up, actually, that I'm cultured, and I'm smart, and we have modern technology. I'm much smarter and know what's best for you. And I feel like that is a really insidious plot to kind of, like, what does that, it like cuts you off from your roots.

Exactly. Of people that came before you and doesn't give you the opportunity to get that wisdom, or to think that, like, I don't know, those Greek guys philosophizing back in the day, they were actually idiots, and they just You know, they were around young boys, and that is basically what gets propped up. They had no serious ideas to contribute, and so that is the first part. The second part is you mentioned irony, and I feel like I am seeing a rise to this, which I am really happy about.

I think there is more of a desire to treat ideas with sincerity and gravitas, whereas there was a period of time, and you probably recognize this too, like satire has its place, but almost everything you had to see in this very millennial, I feel like you have to be sarcastic, you have to be ironic. And it was kind of funny and cute for a little while, but then it just seeped into everything. Like, you can't take anything seriously. Nothing has weight.

Everything's kind of a joke, and there's a nihilism that sprung up from that. Yep. So, I'm encouraged to see this kind of, even if they don't know where to go, I feel like people, my comrades or whatever, like, actually, I do want ideas to take seriously and things to base my life around. Where is it? So, there's this opportunity springing up to present that to people. So, I guess, how do you think about that? Have you observed the same trends, and how would you like to approach someone in that position?

Absolutely. Well, and I have been trying to approach it through story, and what we're doing with Twisted Plots is actually trying to tell a series of stories which, at their core, say life matters, your decisions matter, you matter. I think one of the issues with a lot of anthology series, and one of the issues with dark comedy especially, is...

The moral of the story ends up being life doesn't matter. Do whatever you want. You're going to fail either way, or even good people who do things the right way. We'll end up facing some kind of horrifying, terrible fate, so just kind of throw your hands up and do as thou wilt, essentially. What we're doing with Twisted Plots, every single story is a different, unique story, but at the end of the day, what each story is telling you, one way or the other, is like life does matter, your decisions do matter, morality is real.

Our first episode deals with the idea of nihilism in a more direct way, I think. But, and I don't want to spoil it too much, it's much sillier, it's much over the top, it's much goofier in terms of the comedic approach. Our second episode, which is written, and there's some storyboards in progress, that one is, it's much more dry. It's funny, but it's like much more comedically dry, and it has a bit of a different angle, but still at the heart of it is morality is real, life matters.

And this is one thing I realized, like... Going back to this idea of the classics, if you know Catholic morality decently well, if you're just aware, if you were raised in a Catholic household where your parents explained just human behavior to you, just sort of modeled behavior for you in a way that helped you understood what you were likely to encounter in the world, you can actually kind of work your way back to certain biblical narratives.

The second episode of our show, and I don't want to spoil it too much, but it's about guilt, and it's about how people deal with their conscience. And as I was working on it, after I finished, I think, the second or third draft, I realized that I had kind of retold the story of Cain and Abel in a certain way. Not exactly. It's definitely different. Again, it's like a science fiction concept, and it's funny and absurd and ridiculous, but I realized that at the core of that story, I actually kind of...

He retold the story of Cain and Abel in a certain way, but that is just to say, again, well, the Bible. And again, I do believe the Bible is literally true, but I think it was either Lewis or Chesterton who said that there are true myths. Maybe it was even Tolkien, actually. And to say there are myths is not to say they're not true or didn't literally happen. I believe that it did all literally happen, but that even so, there's a moral you can get from the story.

I think there's a reason Jesus used parables. I think there's a reason biblical history is told. As stories in certain areas of like stories of specific people, why we have the story of Cain and Abel or stories about Solomon or King David is because you learn about morality just by seeing how someone behaves and how it works out for them.

And that's what we're trying to do with Twisted Plots. We're just trying to tell good, entertaining, engaging stories, which you walk away from and go, okay, that's sort of the moral of the story. But again, it's not delivered in this preachy, ham-fisted way. It just tells a story, and you see who wins and who loses, and you see how their actions led to that. Yeah. I almost have to do this, and maybe this is a podcast or sin, but you keep saying anthology series, and does Black Mirror, like early Black Mirror, count as an anthology series?

I know this is edgy. Black Mirror is an anthology, yeah. So, when I was in college, I remember early Black Mirror episodes were coming out, and I remember watching it with roommates. I went to a Catholic college, I went to Ave, and we all sat in the room together, we would watch them, and some of them were pretty intense. Pretty intense, pretty gory.

But we would sit, and then what was presented was so compelling, and as you mentioned, it was in a story format. It wasn't like a dry documentary, and all of them were hypothetical, just like what could be presented by kind of a near dystopian, some type of technological advancement came forward. A good example would be like they created, someone's spouse died, and they created this organic-looking robot that you could use AI to put their personality in this robot. How would this interact with a widow who missed their husband?

And it was so compelling that we would sit and we would just break it apart for an hour afterwards. Were you ever, did you see any of these Black Mirror? I think as of lately, it's kind of gone downhill. Yeah, unfortunately it has. Unfortunately, because it was so compelling in the beginning.

In some parts, yeah. Yeah, what did you think? Here's what I would say. I also watched Black Mirror in college, and... The first episode I saw was not the first episode of the show. If I actually started with the first episode, I never would have watched it again. Totally. It was so disgusting. It was so vulgar. It was so horrifying. I was really angry. I was like, this is sickening. But that wasn't the episode I started with. I saw the first episode after I'd already seen a lot of the show.

So, just to be clear, don't even look up that first episode. It's disgusting and terrible. Black Mirror, initially, did have... I really enjoyed it. It had some interesting premises, and some of the episodes really did comment on our society in a way that didn't feel totally cliche, or at the very least, even if it was somewhat cliche, they did it in an interesting way or put their own spin on it.

And then it kind of devolved into, like... What would happen if a British person's brain was put in something a British person's brain shouldn't be inside? And then it's like, oh, no, me brain's in a toaster. Man, was it meant to live this way? And then, like, every episode just became, like, person's consciousness is uploaded into something consciousness shouldn't be in. And I'm like, dude, this is so boring. Well, that was also the least convincing one, too, because if... It happens a lot, though.

Yeah. They do that in a lot of episodes. Sorry. Because there's no weight. There's no weight if it's just your consciousness is some robot. It's like, what is consciousness? Like, it was supposed to be commentary on the soul, I think, but it never landed for me. Those were the least convincing. Well, because it's, it's, um, here's probably why I hated those episodes, generally, is because there's this, you know, the trope in media, the fate worse than death. Like, you're trapped in some kind of hellish scenario, and you can never die.

This comes up, this comes up a lot. Alright, this is my personal opinion, okay? And, again, I say this acknowledging that I think there were some episodes of Black Mirror that were excellent, but... When it falls into that category of, like, the fate worse than death, and the conscious mind being kept alive. On one hand, I recognize that there is truth in that, right? Because on a certain level, like, we know that hell is real. We know that we could end up with a fate worse than death, even if we want to deny it, even when we're secular people.

They're kind of recreating a hell narrative. Now, the problem is, It just happens to anyone for any reason. It's totally chaotic. Like, in Black Mirror, this kind of horrific fate could befall anyone, and it's not the product of, like, genuine sin or the person doesn't really deserve it.

I am a believer that horror or comedy or whatever you're writing, it should be harder to write than it is to read. And the thing is, if a horrifying idea pops into your head. Like, this idea of a fate worse than death. Your brain being trapped in the toaster forever, you know, whatever new Black Mirror episode they're coming out with. When that pops into your head, it's already popped into your head, so, like, it doesn't shock you. But when you say that out loud to another person, or put that in a story, like, that's gonna freak them out, right?

They're gonna be like, oh, man, I didn't want that in my head. Now I'm, like, empathizing with this character in this horrible scenario, and, like, I have this dark thought in my mind that I didn't really want there.

To me, that's... Making your job as a writer easier than your audience's job as a viewer, because now your audience is just suffering with your bizarre neuroticism, instead of getting some interesting, engaging, or edifying moral out of the story. That's what really bothers me about a lot of the more recent episodes of Black Mirror. Now, to be fair, I haven't watched it in a while. Maybe it's picked back up. Yeah, me neither. But where I left it off, that was kind of how I felt about it.

And the best episodes were, like you said, the what if. What would you do in this scenario? That is what we are doing with Twisted Plots. Again, it is comedy, so we get a bit zanier with it, and there is more emphasis put on comedy and absurd scenarios, but ultimately, the question is asked, like, what would you do in this situation? How would human beings respond to this technology? You know, where do we go from here as a society, I think, and what would you do in this situation?

You're going to take a moral away from that. If you're like a complete nihilist, then the moral of the story is going to be, oh, well, there's nothing you could do anyway, and now your brain is trapped in a toaster, you poor British person. But if you do have, like, a genuine morality, it's just going to flow from you as you're writing this story, and then when a person watches it, they'll go, oh, okay. So, like, They might not consciously say this to themselves, but all right, this mode of behavior is a good one, this one's a bad one, or I think the most interesting thing is when you're able to go like, oh, you know what?

I do that sometimes when someone's doing something wrong. We're like, ah, I do that. I need to work on that, because as I'm writing these two, Because this is just coming from me, and I'm not trying to put any spin or agenda on it, I'll write in things, and it's like, you know what? I do notice I do this thing, and I do notice that this isn't a good thing, and I feel like it's probably a familiar experience. I think other people probably struggle with this attitude or this vice as well.

Let me explore this in the form of a story. Let me see where this thing, when taken to its most possible extreme, takes somebody or brings somebody. Yeah, dude, I got so many directions I could go here. I guess the reason I brought up Black Mirror in general was some of the early episodes I found really compelling. They were an anthology series.

Basically, I think you were mentioning, oh, it's not being told in a ham-fisted way, and I didn't feel like, at its best, Black Mirror did not do that. I agree. It literally just came, like, again, whether the moral was good or bad, whether it was nihilistic or genuine, the moral did just come from the story in that show. Yes, exactly, and so I think, like, what I'm saying is, when I, so someone told me, hey, you gotta watch this, and I sat down, and I made the conscious decision, I'm giving my attention, and my genuine, you know, I'm gonna come in this with an open mind.

To give my attention to the creator of this show, to really spend the time to think about what they presented, and I think part of the problem with the ham-fisted stuff, especially when it comes to politically motivated art or whatever, is that you already go in kind of knowing. You're like, ah, this is coming from a Christian. This is coming from someone with a motive beyond just telling a story or whatever, and I think a lot has changed since Black Mirror was on Netflix.

Even Netflix itself has come out, and so you're putting in a lot of time. And creative energy, and you've got to go around, you've got to do the rounds, you've got to do the circuits, you've got to raise money. I can't even imagine, and I want to hear more about what that even entails, to get something like this off the ground. But how do you plan on...

It's reaching the individual and convincing them to make that decision to, hey, I am requesting, I'm asking for your attention for 20 minutes, and I'm not going to, like, you don't want to be ham-fisted. You want to approach them in a way to, like, open the average person's mind, to get beyond, say, the people are going to support you anyway, right, because they're conservative and they're Catholic, whatever. I imagine your aspirations are broader than that. Like, you want to reach people that, you know, maybe aren't fully decided or kind of figuring out where they are in the world.

Like, how do you plan? Yeah. By literally just making the stories as engaging and interesting as possible and ensuring that the animation looks really sharp and that the characters are acted out very well, both by the voice actors and the animators, and ensuring that the story that we're telling is undeniable, you know, is something that you can watch as a right-winger or a left-winger and say, man, that really entertained me. So, there's... There's an art to it. We have our pilot finished.

It's 25 minutes long. It took several months to make. I remember as I was working on it, probably a couple months before we finished it, I watched a draft of it, and I said, we got to do some rewriting. I got to modify some things. I got to put this scene here. I've got to tweak that scene, because it's really important that you hook people in at the very beginning, and then that whatever you hook them in with is carried through the rest of the story by a very clear thread.

So, this is something that the creators of South Park actually talk about a bit, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and obviously, I don't love everything South Park has done. They're great storytellers, though. But they're good storytellers, exactly. Was it the speech that they gave on writing story? Yes. And then this is so good. Yeah, so one thing they say is, when you are writing a story, it can't just be, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens.

It has to be, so then this happens, so then this happens, so then this happens. In other words, your character makes a decision. So, then this happens. Their decision affects the story, though. Their behavior affects the story. The setup of the plot affects the story, and so you're carried from one plot point to another plot point by the logical connection of X caused Y, instead of them just throwing a million things at you. Because once a bunch of things get thrown at you, you stop caring, right?

You get hooked in at the beginning by this character or this premise. And you want to see that carried through to the end, and if the writer just starts lobbing random stuff at you, you're going to get distracted, and then you're not going to care as much, and you're not going to have faith that you will be able to see the final conclusion of the story that you actually bought into when you were hooked in the first 30 seconds or in the first minute.

Yeah, but what if we have The Rock in it, and we use tons of CGI? Well, then you're fine, yeah. Right. Then that's okay. Then you can do whatever you want, and your movie's going to crush the box office, and it's... Yeah, it's going to do well. So, I knew South Park would come up, and I'm not even someone that will deny South Park. Like, they're undeniably funny. Yeah. I think they were the original kind of... Using animation, I don't know original, to me at least, in my experience, they were making cultural commentary, whether or not you agree with it, making fun of everyone before anyone else.

Like, they've made more groups of people angry, and I certainly take issue with blasphemy for my sincerely held religious beliefs of what I believe is true. That being said, I've watched South Park stuff that I've just, like, I can't deny it. That's funny. Like, whatever they picked up on there is funny. They were able to tell in a certain way. So, what do you think is unique to animation to allow you to do that, and why did I have that experience with, I mean, I think they literally have examples of pure blasphemy in it, but then I've seen other stuff they've done, like, dang, like, I can't deny it.

That's funny. That was a clever parody or whatever, yeah, where you can go like, oh, they were able to map that onto reality in such a truthful yet comedic way. Yeah, I agree with you. There's some stuff that I'm like, I can't watch this show again, you know, after they did that, and then maybe at some point you'll see it again, and you're like, wow, I can't believe they pulled that off, and like, that other thing that wasn't horrible, like, was funny.

So, part of it is, again, them understanding story. Another part of it is, Trey Parker and Matt Stone are people who I genuinely believe are just trying to give us their perspective on things. I don't think that they're trying to say, like, we need to convince you one way or another, and it's funny, because you could argue that the show does get a little preachy at the end of each episode, like, you know, I've learned something today, and then you get the writer's morals, but I think that they're just trying to express how they believe about things, but with animation, this is part of why I really want to make twisted plots, and part of why we've been developing it the way we've been developing it is because You can get away with harsher subject matter in a friendly way.

So, I'm not saying we go anywhere near South Park territory. I think our show is like generally PG, maybe every once in a while PG-13, but it's generally pretty tame. And the only reason we even get up to PG-13 on things is because When you're exploring different moral issues, you know, you might have to point out, like, yeah, people are, like, wrestling with the guilt of their conscience because they're guilty of adultery or something like that. Again, you don't show it on screen, but just that being referenced, I think, could maybe bring you to a PG-13 level.

I don't know. Yeah. But when you tell these stories, like... If I tell a story about one guy killing another guy, that's going to be very different in animation than in live action, right? In live action, if you show anything, it's going to be, like, really, really gory. I think with animation, you can find very clever ways to communicate what's happening without actually even showing anything, ironically. So, like, this character kills this other character, and that ends up driving the plot, but you don't see some, like, horrifying, brutal death scene.

And also, like, it was a cartoon character that got killed. It wasn't a real person, so it doesn't imprint the same, like, horrifying, gory image in your mind that something that's live action would. And part of the value of that is you can go to certain places with stories to help people understand a good moral at the end of the day without showing them some insane, gratuitous violence, right? And I understand that for certain stories, insane, gratuitous violence can kind of work or even be necessary.

So, for example, one film we all love, The Passion, very violent. But it's obviously in the service of appreciating Christ's death on the cross. It's not like exhibitionism. It's not like, oh, we were watching this because we love seeing blood and gore. But there are a lot of really gross horror movies that depict gore in that way. So, my point is just like there's a difference in terms of how violence is depicted in films. Like, you know, Saving Private Ryan has better reasons to show gore than some like disgusting slasher film.

But even so, I don't want to make super gory images, you know, like, I don't want to do that. And the cool thing about animation is, you can get away with plot points that involve people dying, for example, without getting explicit, without getting gross, you know, and with it just being a cartoon character. So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is, animation allows you to tell a very real story while softening the blow visually.

Yeah. And even hearing you say a lot of these things, I think if I were to start animating when I was 12 years old, the stories I would tell, the things I would animate are probably a lot different than I would when I turned 30. 100%. So, my question to you is, I mean, you've come a long way. How do you feel like you have... Does matured evolve change, or do you feel like you've stayed the same since when you first started to where you are now?

Oh, goodness. Yeah, definitely there's been growth and maturing, not just personally, but in terms of the actual art that we produce. I think early on, I was doing a lot more preaching, and this isn't the case with all the videos. So, I think our first video is actually probably a good example of just like...

I'm communicating the story through some silly visuals, or communicating a moral through some silly visuals in a silly story. But then I did other videos where it was like my little caricature kind of arguing with somebody and like owning the lib or whatever. And I don't, I don't do that anymore. I don't think that's helpful. I think that Even when I was doing it at the time, actually, I was still working hard to make sure I inserted other jokes, and I was still doing things to make myself look silly, because I just find it obnoxious when one character is the voice of reason, and they're always correct, and the rest of the characters are dumb.

I really hate that trope, and I think that makes the audience feel like, oh, that's the author's self-insert, and they're talking down to me. So, that's one thing we really try to avoid, is I just kind of try to have all the characters be a little bit ridiculous, but... Have the story communicate? Like, have the story communicate our values instead of, like, one specific character explicitly stating them? And I want to say, around 2020, I think my work improved a lot because...

I, again, moved away from being concerned about a message and towards just telling the funniest story I could about the current news cycle, which invariably ended up being a right-wing angle, because, again, I'm right-wing. Yeah. But— I also became less focused on, like, apologizing. I think in my early work, if you look at my stuff from, like, 2016, 2017, 2018, there's a lot more throat clearing about, like, well, of course we should condemn the bad people on the right, but if the left doesn't condemn their blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I think at some point, I just abandoned.

The desire to kind of play it safe in that way, because I realized that the only people who are going to misunderstand what I was saying are people who are going to misunderstand what I'm saying regardless. Like, if anyone wants to call me racist or sexist or whatever, they're going to do that regardless of whether I pad my video with these little caveats. And so, I was like, you know what? Yeah, who are you doing this to try to impress, right?

Exactly. I was like, I just need to focus on being funny and making good jokes, and if That offends someone, or they want to smear me or lie about me because of it. Whatever. Like, it happens. So, I want to say around 2020 is when I really evolved as a writer and started pushing more towards, like, just being silly, just being goofy, just making it fun, just having the moral come across through the video and the story, as opposed to, like, having a character explain everything.

Yeah. What's so fascinating to me about those videos, too, is the news cycle is so fast, and at least how it works. Analytics-wise, YouTube, to get it out there, you kind of have to hit what's relevant very quickly. So, what is your joke writing process, and when do you decide, like, I've identified something I want to write a video on, and how does that go from idea, okay, I got it, to finished product, upload on YouTube? Yeah, so we have to write a video, again, we release at least one cartoon per week, sometimes two, and yeah, the difficulty is coming up with the jokes in time.

Now... And you say we. Is this a team of people you're bouncing stuff off of, or is it just from your head? So, it's mostly from my head. I do most of the writing. That said, every now and again, someone else will chip in a script, or I'll bounce jokes off of the animation team to get their thoughts, because if I'm unsure whether a joke works or whether a premise works, usually they'll be good at identifying, like, no, that is pretty funny, or like, eh, that one's not my favorite, and then I'll go back to the drawing board.

But I write almost all the scripts with A few exceptions here and there. And so, I'll see something happening in the news. I'll write some jokes about it. I'll see if we can string it together and do a cohesive narrative, or I'll just be spitballing in the chat. I'm like, oh, wouldn't it be funny if this happened? Wouldn't it be funny if that happened? Every now and again, someone else will say, oh, and then what if this happened? And I'll include that in the script.

Another thing that I've done is sometimes if I'm really feeling inspired, I'll write a series of videos that are evergreen and can be enjoyed regardless of what news cycle we're in. So, Something that makes fun of a phenomenon that's witnessed broadly in modern times, as opposed to something that's happening this specific week on television, and I'll write a bunch of those, and then if there's a week where we can't really figure out how to attack the news cycle in a specific way, we'll work on one of these scripts that I wrote, which is more universally funny, regardless of the news cycle, and it balances out then because people come for the current event stuff, and that boosts our numbers.

But then, as they're going back through our catalog, they will watch the evergreen stuff more often, and it'll appeal to them in ways that, you know, something from a news cycle from like four years ago might not be able to. For sure. Yeah, so you take idea, and then how, I still can't believe you're able to do this this fast with all the animation. Thank you. Yeah, it's a lot. So, do you have a day of the week that you typically post, and then how long does it take?

So, you said idea. Okay, I got my script. The physical animation, how long does that take the review process, and how do you get it out the door? Yeah, I actually appreciate you saying that, because not a lot of people understand how long it takes to make animation. Yeah, and people will think like, oh, well, a video a week, that makes sense. One of the funny... One of the wildest comments I ever got, this was like in 2020, and someone said, I can't wait until this is Seamus' full-time job, and he can do a 22-minute episode every week.

And I already had like three employees, and we were working 60 hours a week to get one video done. I was like, I love y'all, but you have no idea this stuff. Oh, yeah, that's so funny. Just to give people an understanding, like...

Season 1 of South Park, you see how simple that animation style is? Each of those episodes cost $250,000, and that was back in 1997. Adjusted for inflation, each of those episodes would cost like around $500,000. Has the technology gotten a lot easier to animate, or is it still about the same?

It depends. In some ways, yes, but the big expense comes in... With all the manpower, you need a lot of people working on this stuff. So, for Twisted Plots, each episode is going to take between three and six months. We're shooting for three months. Ideally, I want to get each episode done over the course of three months, but it could end up taking longer than that. It could end up taking six, maybe a little longer.

Our first episode took like eight months, but... It was not our primary focus, basically, so that is why I am confident that once we crowdfund the money for the subsequent episodes, and we are able to invest more in it, and it is not a side project the way the pilot was, we will be able to make it a lot more quickly than we made the pilot. But, yeah, animation takes a long time. Like, each Freedom Tunes video, you know, a two to three minute video, it takes like several people, like three, four, sometimes five of us, working the entire week to get...

The little thing done, and that's for like a two and a half minute video, and people go like, how can it take that long? And it's just because every single thing that happens on camera has to be done with intention. Every single thing that happens on camera has to be drawn, even though we are using rigged animation, like every little movement. The character's arm moves a little bit. Okay, someone had to click that arm. Someone had to insert a keyframe. Then someone had to insert another keyframe.

Then they had to move that arm. Then they had to create the motion tween. Then they had to tweak it, then they had to make sure the rest of the body moved in accordance with it. This stuff takes a long time to do, but with really efficient budgeting and the pipeline that I've developed over the 11 years that I've been doing this, we're going to be able to get our whole season done.

For basically the cost of one episode of South Park in Season 1, adjusted for inflation. Yeah. So, we are very efficient. We are able to get the cost down, but it's still really expensive. And the fact that it's so expensive is part of why animation has generally been something that only large corporations have done. Right. You'll notice that there are not that many other people on YouTube doing animation once a week or twice a week. And if they are, they're doing tiny, 15-second...

YouTube shorts, right? Because it's really expensive with very clever budgeting and a very dedicated team and great sponsors and an awesome audience that supports us. We have been able to continue to make Freedom Tunes, but to be clear, it's an uphill battle to be able to continually produce animation on a budget and on a short timeframe, but that's also part of why I'm confident that we're going to be able to make Twisted Plots and that it's going to be really good because we've already, again, I have 11 years of experience creating stuff for YouTube that gets good views and that the audience likes, and myself and my team are a very well-oiled machine at this point, and I know that we could be making something much larger and much more impactful than we currently are, and that is what Twisted Plots is going to be.

That is the vision for it. Exactly. You took the words right out of my mouth, because I was about to say, I do not see other animated, fully animated things at this regular volume that do this well. You know what I mean? So, the interesting thing, I got the chance to go see the people from The Chosen, and they were this kind of recent crowdfunding smash success, just reached critical mass after that first season. Very compelling, really well acted, good job, so I was really impressed with those people.

And so, it seems like they used that crowd, because in this conversation with you, and just kind of knowing you, I feel like you'd have a hard time going through the traditional animation pipeline where you have to work for a big studio, and then you get like... You know, three, four producers at the top, they're like, I don't like how you said this, Seamus. Like, you need to go do this and that. I think he needs a catchphrase. I think there needs to be a catchphrase that we can put on some merchandise.

Right, yeah, a little scrap that character, scrap this. Like, you don't play ball with that. Like, you clearly have, you're convicted, you have a creative vision, and so I guess the one thing I noticed with the chosen people is when I was interacting with some of the actors. They had, um...

A different awareness and appreciation for the fact that they were able to have a full-time job and work as real actors and do what they do is because there was real individuals behind it, and I felt like that really shined in how they interacted, but also in what they ended up creating, because the feedback they received wasn't filtered through, hey, did this make the studio happy? A great example would be, what was the most recent flop? Like Tron? Like Tron cost like, you know.

Billion dollars or whatever, a zillion dollars. I'm using that hyperbolically, but a ton of money, and it didn't make what it had back, and so it just feels like this odd money laundering operation where people are putting out stuff that does not recoup what it costs, and they just keep doing it over and over and over and over again, and so how do we continue at this point? I think what you're doing is really smart because you're like, well, I have this relationship.

I've built over 11 years and a lot of hard work. I know what people want. I know what my audience wants. Help us generate something that can Even get broader than what we do on the current capacity, and something that can kind of be passed down beyond, say, a week of the cycle, right? Like a week of the new cycle. I want something that's going to last, and I can always show to people something they can hang up, be proud of.

And if that does reach that mass, you now enable, hey, maybe we hire a few more team members. Hey, maybe we can expand and do more projects because it's worked. Exactly. I guess maybe I just answered it, unfortunately, but how do you think about this crowdfunding model in this moment we're in now where you see the big budget stop flopping? I want to be really scrappy. I want to do something at last. How are you taking advantage of where we are, I guess?

That's a great question. So, crowdfunding is phenomenal. It's an amazing tool that exists for artists today, and also for audiences, because in the same way that in the past, I would have to go to some large corporation and pitch a show to get it made, you as an audience member would have to go to a large corporation and ask them to make the kind of thing that you want made. And, like, unfortunately, you can write a lot of letters, but they probably wouldn't listen to you.

With crowdfunding... What I'm able to do is get in touch with my audience who have enjoyed my work for many years and say, we want to make something bigger. And, you know, what would you rather see? The next Netflix reboot? Or would you like to see myself and my team expand into something larger and make a show that is going to have the brand of humor that you've come to love from Freedom Tunes while also having a bit more depth in it because we're able to do 22-minute long episodes that explore broader issues?

That we can give more focus to the animation on to make it nicer looking. The incredible thing is, I mean, our audience has just poured out support in a beautiful way. We're already halfway funded, which is incredible. We're like 51% of the way there, and we're not halfway done with the campaign either. Like, we're not halfway done with our timeline, so the fact that we're halfway funded is really an incredible gift, and the audience has come out for us, and it sent the message that people Want grassroots content.

They want conservative content, but they also don't want conservative content that's cynically created by people who know that this stuff is hot right now. They want it to be produced by people who they know have been part of the cause for a long time, and were saying these things before it became more socially acceptable, before woke was dead, for example. And so, what I would say is... We cannot win the culture war unless we're making culture, and the left knows this, and that's why, even though some of these studios take a bath producing some of these reboots, I believe it's still important to them to make those, because the point is about humiliating you.

We're going to take a property that you used to love, that you feel belongs to you, and we're going to denigrate it. We're going to make it bad, because we want you to know that we are the ones who own story. We're in control of it. We're the ones who decide what the prevailing narrative is, and what you will be entertained by, and you're going to sit down, and you're going to listen.

Star Wars, Indiana Jones, the Joker. I never felt more like someone hated me after people accidentally fell in love with the Joker film. This is at least interesting, right? And be like, no, no, no, you're taking the wrong message from this. Let's destroy it in the second one and just throw a middle finger at you and everyone that thought that was compelling. I thought that was the most egregious example in recent history. And when you... Give to help us produce this show.

When you go to twistedplots.com and you support us and help us make this show, what you're saying is, no, Hollywood doesn't own story. We own story, and we're going to come together, and we're going to create something incredible. That's the other beautiful part about crowdfunding is it allows me to welcome my audience into this and into the process in a way that historically just was not possible. It's the dollar democracy. People are able to say, this is what I want, and we don't need some rich executive as a middleman telling us what we can and can't see, telling us what stories should and shouldn't be told.

But again, I can't do it without your help. I can't do it without the audience's help. I'm incredibly grateful to everything the audience has given up until this point. Again, the fact that we're over 50% funded is incredible. It's amazing.

We still have a way to go, so if you guys not only want to get access to the pilot and see what this show is all about, but if you want to help us produce culture, I've got the team, I've got the experience, and I've got the drive. If you give me your support, I will be unstoppable. If you go over to twistedplots.com and you donate what you're able to donate, You will be part of the future that we're creating here, because my goal is not to just make this one show and then stop, right?

Like, my goal is to make this show, if it does well, we're going to do another season, or we're going to do a movie, or we're going to create other films and television programs. Like, once we have this produced, it's going to open a lot of doors, and it's going to allow for us to make more content so that you'll have more options outside of What's put on Netflix? What's put on television? And you'll have television-quality stuff to watch, too, because that's what we're producing.

You got me convinced, Seamus. I don't think I can say it any better than that. Twistedplots.com is where you can support the project, where you'll get access to stuff, and I've never talked to someone more convicted and taken bigger swings right now in today's moment.

I'm going to leave you on one final note. I think you mentioned, and I thought about this too, like you were sticking your neck out kind of before it was cool, and there's real consequences to doing that. Talking about certain issues that were kind of impasse, whatever. It feels like we're in this new moment, you know, kind of been opened up by the new Trump administration, where you can kind of say whatever you want. And I think there's a, at my core, I mean, I believe in the First Amendment.

Like, everyone has a right to say what they want, but I think a lot of people kind of feel... Like, out to pasture a little bit, politically homeless, they're frustrated with certain things going on, and they're not sure how to think about everything with AI on the rise and everything. So, I know we got the Twisted Plots project, but going forward, like, especially we're talking to a really Catholic audience here at the LOOPcast, like, how do you think about navigating the new moment we're in and the opportunity that people have, just on a very personal level?

Like, what advice would you give to someone kind of navigating the news and the culture moment we're in? Yeah, it's difficult to say just because I was privileged enough to be in a position where I was able to make my living creating these cartoons, and so what I would say is the way I'm navigating this new landscape is exactly the same way I was navigating the old landscape by just saying what I believe is true, and even though woke is dead, as they say, even though you can get away with saying edgier stuff, We haven't really changed messaging because I was saying what I wanted to say the whole time.

There's no mask to take off now that we're allowed to be edgier. I think I've always just been really clear about what I believe and what my values are, and I've tried to ensure that the jokes and stories that I tell are in line with that, and I guess that would be my advice to the audience. Just keep doing what you were already doing. Keep speaking the truth, and if you weren't speaking the truth, Well, thank goodness that now we're more able to, but I think generally, listen, I think generally Catholics are pretty good at this.

I think we believe in things that the world has laughed at or punished us for believing since our faith was incepted, right? So, it's just any other day for a Catholic, I suppose. Water's warm. Come on in. Seamus, thanks for the time, man. Appreciate it. God bless. Thank you. We'll be supporting you from far. Thank you so much.