Catholics, FreedomToons, and Public Schools | The Seamus Coughlin Interview
On The Babylon Bee Interview Show, Kyle and Ethan talk to Seamus Coughlin of FreedomToons about animation, public school, and personality types. Seamus has grown a large following with his YouTube channel, FreedomToons, while also being the Catholic voice on various podcasts including The Tim Pool Daily Podcast. Seamus grew his love of politics and animation into one of the best channels on YouTube. He has since amassed over 650 thousand subscribers. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Go to Betterhelp.com/babylonbee and use the code BabylonBee to save 10% off. Kyle finds out about how Ethan and Seamus started their animation careers. They go into how the education system has evolved in our current culture. Seamus goes into how children's films have degraded and how he hopes to renew them. Seamus tells Ethan and Kyle about the temperament personality types coined from Thomas Aquinas. In the Subscriber Lounge, Kyle and Ethan get a lesson on what Catholics believe about the Eucharist. They go into how churches reacted during to being shut down. Lastly Seamus answers a new set of 10 questions.
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
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Oh, hi, everybody.
How's it going?
It's me, Kyle Mann, and this is my buddy Ethan Nicole.
Hey, everybody.
Hey, we got an awesome interview here today.
Seamus, one of the crowd favorites of the Babylon Bee.
Seamus McCoglin?
Coughlin?
Seamus Coglin of Freedom Tunes.
And you didn't even get his name right.
You got to pay better attention.
Seamus is one of our favorite guests.
Like Ethan said, he does Freedom Tunes, and it's fantastic.
Yeah, Seamus, he's a good friend of ours.
And we had him on the weekly.
We also did the interview sit-down show.
And you can actually find a video where me and him talked about making animation as well.
But we just went and I can't remember what we talked about on this thing.
We talked about all kinds of stuff.
You guys remember anything we talked about?
I'm not really there for most of that.
Okay.
It's Seamus, so it's always going to be fun.
So we just, this is a pretty casual one, right, Kyle?
Oh, yeah.
We just kind of shot the breeze.
We didn't have a lot of notes because Seamus is just one of those cats you can just sit down with and just you just chew the fat.
That's right.
Man, you sound so much like yourself today.
Well, let's just welcome Seamus in.
And if you haven't seen Freedom Tunes, go watch them.
And if you haven't seen the other episodes with him on them, go watch those.
Seamus guy is a hoot and he's a Catholic and a very impassioned Catholic.
So that's fun.
Seamus Coughlin.
Hey, everybody, welcome to the Babylon Bee interview show.
Today we're sitting down with fan favorite Ethan Nicole to discuss with our other fan favorite.
Seamus.
I don't remember how to pronounce your last name.
Coglin.
We can't both be the favorite of the fans.
Like Deathman's one favorite, like the favorite.
And I don't know.
I mean, if we're looking at pure YouTube numbers just on animation, you can't shake a stick at this guy.
Then I'm the fan favorite.
But also, if it is your fans, I would imagine your fans would be considering you the favorite because they're your fans.
I have to put a lot more time in with these people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you.
And yet, I'm still their favorite.
Yeah.
Or at least their favorite.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I'm doing okay.
Yeah, you're doing good.
With the Babylon Bee people.
They seem to enjoy my presence.
You keep being on Tim Poole.
How's that going?
That's been really good.
Tim's super cool.
They like you.
Yeah, his audience seems to.
Some of them doesn't like you, but he likes you.
He likes me.
His audience hates me.
They just constantly trash me.
I think he brings me on as a lightning rod.
Okay.
So that no one will talk smack about him because I'm insufferable.
I mostly just get called the theocrat in the comments section.
No, in all reality, the audience feedback is usually really great and it's awesome because I talk about Catholicism a lot.
And there are some people who are very edgy.
They're like, he's talking about his skydaddy or whatever.
But for the most part, people really seem to enjoy it, including people who aren't religious.
They just find the refreshing perspective refreshing.
Yeah.
How does the sky daddy comment affect your faith?
You know, I really wrestle with it.
When somebody leaves my comment, I'm like, I'm like, wait a minute.
Daddies aren't in skies.
They're right.
It doesn't make any sense.
Something you lie awake at night thinking about for sure.
Exactly.
Demolishes me.
Owned with facts and logic.
But no, it's been great.
And then I recently just did Matt Frad's show, Pints with Aquinas.
He's pretty awesome.
We went for four hours.
Wow.
So that was.
You can't do that.
I can.
You guys might not be able to, but this is going to end up being four hours, and I'll do most of the talking.
I think our longest interview was probably a Kira Davis episode, probably two and a half hour.
Wow.
Wow.
I had to do one with Kira and Seamus, and we don't have to do anything.
We could just do a five-hour interview.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's try it.
So we're winging it today.
We have no show notes.
We do no show notes.
Let's sit down and have a conversation.
We just have that much confidence in Seamus.
You shouldn't.
In our chemistry.
There is good chemistry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You didn't just show cold.
You guys have been hanging out for like a whole day.
Yeah, we hung out.
So we did a little recording already, kind of a bonus video where we talk about just animation because he does Freedom Tunes.
People don't know who this guy is.
Yeah.
So I am the creator of Freedom Tunes.
I've been doing it for about seven years now.
Thank God.
It started when you were like 14.
Yeah, I was 19.
I'm not that young, Ethan.
But yeah, Ethan and I were hanging out most of yesterday.
It was a lot of fun.
It was a lot of fun.
He insulted me most of the time, but I was like, you got to take your licks when you're new to the office.
It's true.
So that's how it be.
And then we hung out at his place.
We were actually watching our old work.
Like, I was showing him my stuff from high school, and he was showing me his stuff from high school.
We were very young.
It was pretty cool.
Check out my cool drawings.
I was like, look at this.
Yeah, look at this cartoon I made when I was 17 years old.
It's cool showing that work to somebody that understands what went into it.
Yeah.
That's the thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Because anyone else would watch that and be like, this doesn't look like the TV.
This is garbage.
But I saw it and I was like, I know why this is garbage.
I know why.
No, I'm kidding.
But seriously, your flipbooks were awesome.
The stuff you're doing in high school, I loved that.
You were really ambitious with it.
You'd have multiple characters on the same page, which is really difficult when you're just doing straight-ahead flipbook animation.
So it was really cool.
I was obsessed in like an end.
It was hard to find a good flipbook that flipped nicely.
And so when I got one, I would really be economical with it.
And so I wouldn't just draw one kung fu fight on it.
I'd fill the whole page with a crowd of people destroying each other.
So then would you just draw, would you just animate one person kung fu fighting at a time and then go through and add another person all at once?
No, one at a time.
Okay.
One fight at a time, generally.
Okay.
And then you put them all together.
It's pretty good stuff.
It's fun.
I drew some cool Stoosey S's.
Oh, yeah.
I'm a Trapper Keeper.
Are you the guy who invented that?
Yeah.
Those are pretty cool.
I came up with it.
I was reading an article about this, and no one knows where that came from.
It's just a strange focus.
And everybody thinks it's with all the angles.
Yes.
You do three lines.
Three lines.
The two dashes.
Stoosey didn't invent it?
No.
It was Bob Stoosey.
Bob Steucy.
Yeah, of course.
There's got to be a name, Stoosey.
Stoocy should be a name.
I'm taking it for Freedom Tunes.
You guys were here when I came up with the name Stoosey.
Stoosey.
We're going to put it in a cartoon.
But yeah, no, it was cool to talk about the creative process yesterday and go over some of our stuff.
And hopefully we can talk about some of that.
And Kyle will just be left out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Corner.
Stocey S's.
We had to see the video.
It was a cool video.
So how are you guys doing?
Life's good?
Treating you well?
This is going well.
He's already asking us how to do it.
I'm interviewing you now.
Flipping around.
Look at me.
I'm the captain.
I'm glad you both got vaccinated so I could come out here because thoroughly vaccinated.
I am afraid of the disease, but I'm also afraid of the vaccine.
So it's like, everyone else I interact with has to get vaccinated, so I won't catch it, but I'm not getting vaccinated.
I force people very demanding.
And I'm glad you guys took that up and got the needle in your arm.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a weird thing.
I'll have people that'll ask me like, have you gotten the vaccine yet?
Or when are you?
They'll say, when are you?
I thought you did.
That's why I came here.
Yeah.
Well, I just identified it.
Okay.
But they'll say, when are you getting it?
You know, it's just like a weird thing.
Just assuming.
Did you see that text from Tucker Carlson where somebody texted him and said, when are you getting the vaccine?
Yeah, the NSA show you that.
I'm going to go off on him.
Yeah.
And the NSA leaked it.
I did not see that Tucker Carlson text.
He texted back, you know, basically, I will give you all the gory details of my love life if you wish also.
It's like such a weird invasion of a person's privacy.
So it's socially acceptable.
Let's just shame a person if they didn't get it.
Like, I never really, people never really asked me about the flu shot.
Like, once in a while, someone might be like, oh, I got my flu shot.
Do you get them?
You know, it's more like, yeah, you got a casual, oh, okay, yeah.
Yeah.
And it's a very strange thing now.
Now, it's like, if you don't get that shot, you're a conspiracy theorist who wants children to die.
Yeah.
Right.
It's a weird thing.
Yeah.
I'm fine with public schools staying closed forever, though.
That's one where I guess I'm not conservative.
All these conservatives are like, open the schools.
I'm like, don't do that, as a matter of fact.
There is a weird dissonance there where you go, the public schools are destroying our children's minds, and yet I need someone to babysit my children.
Because the right doesn't have any principles.
It just opposes the left.
And so the left-wingers are going, we need to keep these schools closed down.
And right-wingers are like, no.
Now, the one area where I understand where they're coming from is that these teachers are saying they want the schools to be shut down, even though there's basically no risk, but they still want to take the pay home.
That is ridiculous and annoying.
I'm with them on that.
But I think public schools are just a problem in and of themselves.
I think it's inherently bad for them to exist.
This is like the thing that becomes completely clear the moment that you start homeschooling is that public school is babysitting.
Like if they pad that day out, the full days are to a workday, they waste so much time.
That's so much your child's life just sitting there.
They're getting kicked on.
Which is so ridiculous.
That's what's ridiculous about how they tried to move people to homeschool when the pandemic thing started.
You know, they were like, we're going to take the eight-hour day and just move it to home.
Yeah.
Yeah, like that works for everybody.
Well, and also when people homeschool, they don't do it for eight hours.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, you're able to get through it much more quickly.
It's a very small classroom size.
And also, no one knows the child that you're teaching better than you do.
Right.
Like, I was just, I, on my, on my, you probably, I think you saw you're at my house, my, uh, Alexa, my fire stick just starts playing family photos if it just sits there.
I saw a photo pop up.
These photos pop up of my kid holding pumpkin spice items in the store.
He'd been given an assignment to like find pumpkin spice items and show them to the camera as a part of a project for school.
It's like, this is like the kind of like stupid thing that is this blues clues?
Like he's like, he's like eight or something.
I'm so glad some projects that they're given to like pad out the time.
Yeah.
Where does California rank in terms of education?
Oh, I thought you were going to ask in terms of pumpkin spice.
Well, of both.
I mean, I assume there's a strong correlation between the two.
Uneducated people don't consume pumpkin spice products.
Yeah, we're pretty low.
California public schools are pretty low.
Yeah.
I think.
Yeah.
Google.
Surprise.
Well, that's this weird thing.
I think I don't think anyone on the planet believes that our public schools are good in the United States.
The right and the left seem to agree on this, though they disagree over what the reason might be.
The left claims it's because we've been slashing funding for education, which is factually completely incorrect.
Every year since the Federal Department of Education was founded, real spending has increased for public schools.
And yet results have not.
So it clearly isn't the case that this is a matter of schools being underfunded.
And what bothers me is that we give kids 12 years of a free education, which is to say a bloated and extremely expensive education at the taxpayer's expense.
And they're not prepared for the workforce by the time they're done with that.
And so people say, well, we need to give them free college.
All right.
Well, if you couldn't prepare them for the workforce with the 12 years that we gave you to educate them, I don't know that giving you another four years with them is the best possible solution to that.
Yeah, and they do the same thing with preschool.
They should try to do preschool from two years old enough or whatever.
Which is literally daycare.
Yeah, it's just now you're just admitting it.
It's just babysitting.
Yeah.
California's 38th, by the way.
38th?
Oh, that's higher than I thought.
Good for you guys.
We're killing it.
That is actually higher than I thought.
Who's in last place?
Probably Alabama.
Probably Illinois.
I love you in Alabama.
I just randomly smeared Alabama.
Come on.
Who's the worst?
I really want to know.
Yeah.
I will let you know.
Do you think that there's a certain personality type that just really loves the idea of like school, like of just being in that controlled environment?
Everybody has to learn.
I think even people like being in it.
Like they will go to college and then they never want to leave that environment.
They even want work to be like that.
And then those are the people who end up teaching.
Yeah.
It's like weird.
They think that's how the world should be.
Like the freaky.
Scares me.
The weird kid you knew who liked school, that's who's going to teach your kids if you send them to school.
Are you sure you're okay with that?
And they're scared of real jobs.
Scared of real jobs.
I think that's what deep down, the idea of going out and doing like a real job.
And like the educational system just sets you up to stay within the educational system for your entire life.
And it's a weird fantasy.
So Albert J. Knock writes about this, but basically, prior to the early 1900s, late 1800s, what an education meant was that by the time you were 16, you were fluent in Greek and Latin and understood all the relevant mathematical theories of the day.
And what happened was people decided that they wanted to universalize education, give everybody access, because of course at that time, only the very wealthy and well-educated had access to education.
And people assumed that that must mean that when people are very intelligent and well-educated, it's just because they were wealthy.
And that was the reason only a small minority of people were getting an education.
And there was some truth in that in terms of access.
But once they tried to implement a national public education system, they realized very quickly most people are not capable of learning all the things that were expected of an educated mind in the 1800s and prior.
And so we've got this weird system that people seem to think was intentionally dumbed down as some kind of conspiracy to make people unthinking serfs.
The reality is it's extraordinarily difficult to make a standardized educational curriculum for the entire population.
And I think it's great, for example, that we have widespread literacy that everyone is taught to read.
But the problem is we no longer expect from the truly intellectually exceptional what was expected from any educated mind just 200 years ago.
I mean, again, by the time you were 16, you were lettered in Greek and Latin.
And then for your undergrad, you were going to become familiar with the entirety of the Western lexicon and read all of it in the original Greek and Latin.
And now, by the time you get your undergrad, I mean, you're not even close to even being capable of attempting that.
People can't even spell or pronounce Euro.
They say gyro.
Gyro?
Exactly.
And that is my biggest problem.
That is the most serious flaw with our educational system.
But it's just really weird that we sort of rewired the system.
And I think it would have made sense to say, okay, clearly not everyone is capable of being educated at the same level.
So let's make multiple different tracks for people based on their intellectual talent.
And we sort of have that a little bit, but it's not particularized enough.
Like you kind of have average, then you have gifted, and then you have slow.
And it's a little more complicated than this.
Yeah, and I was pointing this way when I said slow.
He's all gifted.
I'm physically slower.
It's fine.
A big deal of facts and logic.
But even so, it's just very strange that the people we consider the cream of the crop in terms of their education are incapable of what was considered standard for an educated person in the past.
So we're getting down.
And that's one of the, yeah, it's not just that, like, it's not as if we're getting dumber in terms of raw intellectual capacity, but in terms of the knowledge we're passing on, absolutely.
And it's no wonder.
We also talk about intelligence in a very weird way.
Classically, it was understood by the likes of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas that intelligence is your ability to see the world for what it is and act in accordance with that.
That's not how we discuss intelligence anymore.
We mostly talk about G or what IQ is measuring for.
And there's something there.
It's a very valid metric.
I can't remember everything that goes into it, but it's basically working memory, your intellectual processing power, ability to spot patterns, all really great predictors of economic success, all really great indicators of intelligence in terms of the ways that we define it.
But there are some really high IQ people who don't see the world at all.
I mean, they see themselves.
They have a bunch of very strange theories about the way things should be.
And so they try to fit the world into that box.
And because they have a lot of raw brain power, they're really good at making things that are stupid sound smart.
And it's weird that you can be like eight years old or like 78 years old and have the same high IQ level.
Yeah, that is also interesting.
Because, well, it norms for age and it corrects for age.
But that's another thing.
Our educational system doesn't really put the same emphasis on virtue.
And that's a problem because that's really what intelligence is, your ability to see the world and interact with it as it exists.
And what is virtue but behaving reasonably?
Intelligence.
Yeah, you can be a high IQ serial killer.
Yeah, or you can be a person with a high IQ who doesn't know the differences between boys and girls and writes your dissertation on how that difference doesn't actually exist fundamentally.
And there are millions of different genders and just all sorts of other absurdities.
Yeah, there's something that changed there where we started to look at the world and say, what's wrong with the world instead of what's wrong with me?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And I think a big part of that is the fact that really intelligent people are not given a classical education the way they would have been in the past.
So the intellectual elites are creating their own narratives rather than falling into what was traditionally understood as the Western narrative or Western values, which is to say Catholic values.
No offense, Calvinist boys over here.
Yeah, it's, you know, C.S. Lewis's Men Without Chests.
You know, if you ever read an evolution of man, it's similar to his argument, you know, that it used to be in a classical education was your head and your heart.
And how do you relate those things to each other so that you can relate to the world, the objective reality outside of yourself?
And if you see something wrong, you know, with the way you're relating to the world, your first question is, what am I doing wrong?
Yeah.
How do I need to adjust My attitude or my heart or my head to get the waterfall.
It was the waterfall thing about the objective beauty.
Yeah, well, and now it's you're not doing anything wrong, sweetheart.
Let me tell you, it's the whole world that's a problem.
The whole world is the issue.
And we teach this to kids from a very early age.
We were having a conversation about children's entertainment and how it shelters them from the realities it shouldn't shelter people from, and then it throws them into realities that we should not be exposing children to.
So when it comes to abnormal, deviant sexual lifestyle choices, every child in the world has to know about all that.
That's progressive.
We're educating them and making them more tolerant.
But when it comes to wrestling with the fact that you are a flawed human being and you're not special just because you're you in the sense, and of course, you are creating the image and likeness of God, but you're not just special in the sense that you can do no wrong and it's always the world's problem, which is a fundamentally immature attitude that most children have.
Instead, they shelter them from that uncomfortable fact and tell them, just be yourself and it's all about you.
I have a good friend.
There's a family friend who's a priest named Father Tom.
I'll give him a shout out.
He's great.
And one thing he used to say, and it just sounded so wonky to me when I was younger, and it's definitely not something that I would say because I'm not nearly as smart as he is, but that so much of what Disney puts out there in their films is all embodying the Nietzschean triumph of the will.
These were his words.
But I mean, it makes perfect sense.
These films are always I want and then I get.
And I don't think that's a healthy message for kids.
Right.
Yeah, I was trying to think: what was the message of Brave?
Their whole reason for bravery was just basically like, you are you and you be you.
I can't remember, but I remember watching thinking it was really hopeless.
Yeah.
Well, and so a good friend of mine from Savannah is a former Disney animator.
And I remember him explaining to me that he just can't even watch kids' films anymore.
And the reason I'm mentioning that he's a Disney animator is because that might be like a weird thing for another grown-up to tell you in any other context.
Like, I'm just done watching these Disney films.
They don't speak to me, these kids' cartoons.
But honestly, in this culture, actually, that might not be that strange a thing to hear because we extend childhood forever.
But he was basically saying that as someone who's an animator who likes to keep up with the industry, he can't watch this stuff anymore because it's literally all the same story every time.
And so I was like, believe in yourself, and deep down you have the power to do whatever you want.
And it's just so banal.
But I guess it sells.
I mean, it embodies our culture's values really well.
You can give them that.
And it's a chicken or egg style thing where you're not sure if the media is just embodying what our values have become as a culture because we've degraded so much or if it has been a concerted effort from the media to propagandize people.
And by that, I don't mean people sitting in a cigar room saying, how do we change the public's minds on this?
But just people in media having bad values and then those values coming out through their work.
And I'm not really sure what causes and what's the effect.
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Yeah, I've talked about this before, but I used to be worried about showing my kids things that had violence or, you know, like, I don't know if they're ready for that yet.
Now it's like, I just, it's way worse to me to show them like Frozen 2.
Yeah.
You know, when it's like the whole message of you can go out and find this existential reality for yourself and it's you.
You are your own savior.
I'm like, that is way worse than just showing them like a breaking bed or something.
Not that I've shown them breaking bad.
No, well, but maybe you should.
Of course.
It's a much better moral lesson.
Yeah, exactly.
If you want them to show Max Taxcott.
Exactly.
Show Max Con.
No, I hear you on that.
There's so much children's entertainment that's really horrifically insidious.
I can't.
And I mean, part of what I would love to do as I continue to grow and expand is start to create children's content that isn't insidious.
And it's not about going in there and saying, how am I going to infect their young childish minds with my right-wing perspectives?
It's just making films that have decent morals for kids that don't tell them that they're the center of the universe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe even showing kids both sides of an issue and teaching them how to think rather than like, this is what to think exactly.
Yeah, we'll do that some with our kids.
Like if we watch it, if we do watch a Disney movie, like, hey, what was that movie trying to tell you?
Yeah, you show them both sides and you're like, all right, now, what did the stupid liberals say?
Did the thing the smart conservatives say make more sense?
Yeah.
Both sides.
Then we have a bonfire and we burn the frozen two Blu-ray together.
Oh, New Mexico is the lowest ranked state, by the way.
Speaking of breaking bad.
Where's Illinois on that list?
And then Alabama's 44th.
So I wasn't too far off.
Sorry, Alabama.
Who's top?
Where's Illinois?
It says Illinois 13th.
I refuse to believe that.
Well, that probably includes all of Illinois.
Yeah, not just Chicago, though.
No, to be fair, the public school I went to was very good for a public school.
I won't rag on it, but Illinois.
You know, it's absolutely landed down and had really good public school education.
Yeah, no, I hear you, honestly.
You probably have to do that.
What's number one?
Do we know?
Massachusetts.
I don't even know what this is ranking, though.
This just says the same thing.
I mean, like, they have the highest standard scores.
The kids are the most socially well-adjusted.
But you always look at what they spend on education, too.
And it's like it goes up and up and up every year, especially just for inflation.
It still goes up.
Yeah, even adjusted for inflation, we spend more on it every single year.
But then there's another narrative.
It's a great education.
But it's literally not even true at all.
I don't know what numbers they're looking at.
I think they're just saying it.
I'm not sure if they're looking at.
Maybe they're looking at like state-level funding in certain areas.
I really don't know.
It says we spend over $12,000 a student in California.
But you think about if they just handed you $12,000, do whatever you want with your kids' education.
$1,000 to educate your kids?
Just buy a new car.
A solid down payment on it.
$12,000 per student per year.
Yeah, that's quite a lot of money.
And that's stupid.
But hold on.
Instructing them on picking out pumpkin spies from the grocery store and taking pictures with it is an expensive endeavor.
You can't really put a price tag.
And you got to feed them the school lunch.
Well, this is another prime example of why Christians are way better at doing everything that socialists claim that they want done.
They talk about free education.
My father went to a Catholic school as a kid in the 50s and 60s, and the tuition was $2 a month per kid.
Wow.
I mean, nothing.
And he probably got the best education of any generation in this country with respect to mass education.
I know I was ragging on mass education, but as far as mass education, like Catholic mass, no, in terms of widespread education.
Welcoming to mass education.
And it's also sad how horribly that system broke down, including, and maybe even especially the Catholic school system.
My father is 10 years older than his youngest brother, and he was well educated in the tenets of the faith.
By the time his youngest brother graduated, his youngest brother didn't even learn how to pray a rosary the entire time he was in Catholic school.
So the whole system just degraded throughout the 60s.
Which is why I also tell people, and I say this to Catholic parents, don't send your kid to Catholic school.
Don't send them to public school.
But unless you do your research and you determine that this is a very good Orthodox Catholic school and they're really going to be teaching them the tenets of the faith instead of just whatever they would learn in a public school with the added scandal of being led to believe this is compatible with Catholic thought, you just have to homeschool, frankly.
Most Catholic schools, and most people I knew that went to Catholic schools, weren't even Catholic.
Like they just learned that they were good schools and the Catholic schools, well, because Catholic schools are the most affordable private schools.
People just don't want their kid going to public school and who can blame them.
It's a good way to convert the youth.
Yeah, well, no, unfortunately, not Catholic schools.
If it's a really good Catholic school, but most of the kids I knew who went to Catholic school, that's my experience.
Well, and I know that a lot of it is just the scandal that's given to them by their teachers because a lot of them will give like a various, but even the religion teachers will give them a very modernist take that casts a lot of doubt on the faith and what scripture teaches.
And it's very sad.
I've had, and this is completely out of line with what the Catholic Church teaches.
This is not something the church says Catholics are able to believe, but I've had Pope Francis, if you're watching.
But I've had friends tell me that they heard like homilies from priests saying, well, the miracle of multiplication was actually the miracle of sharing.
And Jesus just told the people to share the little bits of food that they had with them.
And he didn't actually multiply it.
It's like, that is not what we believe.
Why would you document that as a miracle also?
Yeah.
That seems like such an uncritical thing to believe.
They'll just do anything they can to deny any supernatural element within scripture.
A lot of these modernists and non-Christians as well, they're willing to believe things that make zero sense because there would be no point of documenting this stuff if it was just.
I mean, if you want to make the argument, I don't think it's plausible when you look at all the facts, but if you want to make the argument that these were just stories that evolved into legends later, I think that's wrong.
But I can understand that.
However, to say, well, this was really documented because they were trying to talk about the miracle of sharing.
It's like, that's completely incoherent.
Why?
Paper was expensive back then, man.
Very few people were literate.
Why would you waste your time documenting the miracle?
Like people shared before that.
It's like, that's not a miracle.
That's not what miracle means.
It's the miracle of friendship.
Yeah, it's just it's on there's a horrible catechetical crisis in the church.
And I'm sure it's probably also the case with a lot of Protestant denominations, too.
Oh, yeah, you know, problems in the Protestant church.
Wow.
The Reason Church is doing very well, right?
I don't know about that, but first of all, I've seen your movies.
I saw God's Not Dead 2.
If you call that doing well, well, as long as we disown all the heretics, we're fine.
Joel Osteen.
Then there'd be none of you left.
It's true.
But no, it's very sad.
I'm curious about this.
In Protestantism, is there a kind of catechetical crisis you found where there's just many liberal leading Protestants who like kids aren't being taught the catechism properly?
I guess it's difficult because in the Catholic faith, there is an ordinary magisterium that's been propagated with set tenets.
And I know that there are so many different Protestant sects, and many of them don't even have that standardized set of values.
So maybe it's harder to pinpoint.
But I'm curious if you notice.
Yeah, it's entirely dependent on the denomination.
Yeah.
You have some denominations that are doing very well and they are very, you know, they do catechize the kids.
You have some that don't.
So the mainline ones have all gone off the deep end.
Any mainline Baptists, mainline Presby's, they're all gone.
So I'm curious, what do you think is going to happen with the Calvinist community over the next 20 or 30 years?
I don't know.
Whatever God wills.
Yeah, fair enough.
Yeah, fair enough.
I mean, I think we already saw that you had the young, restless, and reformed movement that came up, all these pipe-smoking Calvinists with beards and the flannel.
And a lot of them already have kind of gone off.
We've got that too.
Well, I mean, Catholics, most young Catholics are extremely traditional.
And it's become a meme that young priests are always extremely orthodox priests who mostly just want to say the Latin Mass and don't do anything to spread heresy or seem as if they're attempting to spread heresy.
So that's encouraging.
And I think a big part of that is as the world becomes less and less Christian and the people who are most interested in conforming leave the church, the people who are left are going to be the really solid believers.
And the people who enter the church are really going to be countercultural.
Yeah, I saw exactly the same thing that like my parents' generation, you had a lot of people that were kind of doing this wishy-washy mainline, getting away from the doctrine.
It was more about the feeling.
And that's what you saw in our songs, what you saw in our sermons.
And then our generation was like, you know what?
We kind of like the really old hymns.
We kind of want to go back to teaching doctrine.
We don't really care about the pastor showing Braveheart clips every Sunday.
That's not going to draw.
That was happening?
My goodness.
Yeah.
You guys didn't do the Braveheart clip?
No, we did not do the Braveheart club.
That's the daredevil.
Yeah, exactly.
Because he's Catholic, of course.
No, but a similar thing.
So it leads me to wonder if this is just something that occurred across all, if this is just something that happened with Christianity broadly speaking.
But I know that in the Catholic Church, you had a crisis where there are many priests and members of the church trying to insinuate that Vatican II said things it didn't really say or that the new rubric said things they didn't say.
So for example, the documents of Vatican II say that all things being equal, Gregorian chant must be given pride of place in Catholic churches.
But how many Catholic churches have you been in over the past 50, 60 years where Gregorian chant was given pride of place?
A lot of these things were just ignored and it's because the laity were not well educated on what the faith taught.
And so more corruption.
I have been into the Catholic Church twice.
Wait, three times in a decade and no Gregorian chant.
Yeah, it's rare.
And granted, like language that says like all things being equal, that can be tricky to nail down.
But ultimately, I think what happened was they got rid of kneelers and altar rails.
There's a beautiful church in my neighborhood that it was just gorgeous before the 60s and 70s and the reforms.
And they literally, what they did is they literally took statues out of the church and were just like throwing them in the dump because somebody there convinced them, well, oh, it's like in the spirit of Vatican II to get rid of our traditions, which is not true.
None of that was called for.
And so it seems to coincide.
Maybe it's even correlative, or I'm sorry, maybe it's even in causal in some respect with the general watering down of Christianity in America.
Yeah, I definitely see something like that.
And then you were saying about how you think it's just going to be the hardcore people who are even going to church anyway.
And we saw that, especially through the pandemic.
The people that are going to church are the people that really believed anyway.
And the priests who are saying mass are the ones that those people knew they could turn to to be fed.
And so I think fewer of them are going to return to the lukewarm parishes that they came from.
I think that one of the positive long-term effects of this lockdown could be that the more lukewarm modernist parishes collapse or become impoverished, see fewer numbers.
Because a lot of the churches I know of that were struggling before the pandemic, the really Orthodox ones, are doing really well.
That's all the same thing.
And so thank goodness, really.
It's incredible.
So, yeah, God draws straight with crooked lines, as they say.
Well, so when you go to Tim Poole's house, is there like half pipes?
And it smells like incense and bongs.
No, not the second part, but there are half-pipes.
Franking Benjamin's plan.
There are lots of half pipes.
He, dude, he's got an awesome place.
I can't tell you guys too much about it.
You're not allowed.
He made me specifically promise not to tell you guys.
He's a guy called Armband.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But he is, no, he's a cool guy.
We met.
We first started speaking because I was doing a video making fun of his encounter with Jack Dorsey and his lawyer on Joe Rogan.
And I realized I couldn't do a Tim Pool impression.
So I just messaged Tim Poole on Twitter.
I was like, I wrote some lines making fun of you.
Could you do your own voice, please?
And he was like, all right.
All right.
And then he did.
And it was really funny.
I thought he did a great job.
And so we started talking a little bit after that.
And then about a year ago, he has to collaborate on some projects.
And so we have been.
And I've been going back and forth between his place and doing the show while I'm out there.
So it's a lot of fun.
His people are super cool, too.
He's got a great team.
Yeah, he's got a bunch of homies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Podcaster homies.
Lydia and Ian are there a lot of time.
And then the people who are off camera too, like Dane and Tiffany and a lot of the, I mean, the people who work there are awesome.
The guy just like reads news all day.
Yes, he does.
He does.
He reads a lot of news.
Yeah.
I guess that's his job.
Yeah, it's like a big part of what he has to do.
It's not a fun part of any job.
No.
Reading?
Gross.
Well, especially the news.
It's depressing.
The news is, and this is what I tell people with what I have to do for a living and with what you guys have to do for a living.
And listen to me.
What we have to do.
Like, we're paid to make jokes.
Look what we have to do for a living.
But with what we do for a living, there is a requirement to stay caught up on these issues.
But for the average person, it's probably better for you to not be consuming this stuff 24-7.
Totally.
I would not read the news if I didn't have to.
Yeah.
Well, and even going back to what we were saying about the church, I tried to impart this to other Catholics.
Like it's the most important part about your faith is your relationship with God and growing spiritually.
And there are a lot of controversies in the church, but you really shouldn't dedicate a lot of your time to fixating on those.
I mean, if there's problems with the church, it's because you're not holy enough is the short answer.
And so get holier and then there will be fewer problems.
But people become obsessed with controversy.
And I get it.
I'm very interested in politics myself.
And part of the way I am able to survive doing this without losing my mind is because I'm making fun of everything as you guys are.
Exactly.
That's the only thing that, yeah.
And to know that our viewers, you know, when they are readers on the Babylonbee.com, when they see something and it's like, oh, yes, we are playing on this controversy, but we're also mocking it so that you don't care about it.
Exactly.
Exactly.
As soon as it's in their face, they're laughing about it.
And when I first started doing this, I'm curious what your process or evolution was.
But when I first started doing this, I almost saw it as trying to translate my rage into someone else's laughter.
But then that sort of became unhealthy.
And I realized I needed to moderate maybe my own emotions a bit better there.
And now it's gotten to the point where I see these things.
And the best strategy is to catch it before it becomes anger and look at it in the funniest possible way right off the bat and then try to make other people laugh with that.
I'm curious with you guys.
Did you ever find yourself reading these stories and then you're mad and you want to do something about it?
Or do you read it and you just kind of laugh and go, this is ridiculous.
And I can make it even funnier.
I rarely get mad.
I rarely get enraged about steadiness.
I'm way too Gen X.
Yeah, you guys are both pretty like phlegmatic.
Sure.
You son of so many big words for a young child.
Are you familiar with the temperaments?
Plegmatic?
Flag magnet?
No, phlegmatic.
Are you guys familiar with the temperaments?
Sure.
The temperaments.
The temperament.
So it's a Greek thing that Catholics have adopted.
And it's basically, it's not like part of the faith in a canonical sense, but it's just something a lot of Catholics tend to be interested in because it's part of classical philosophy.
And Catholics are smart.
Yeah, geniuses.
But the idea is that there are four basic personality types, and everyone usually has a dominant and then a secondary.
And so I'm usually not into personality stuff.
Like Myers-Briggs was interesting to me.
And it is kind of based on the temperaments, but the score changes a lot.
And then there's like the big five, which they all tell you something.
But the reason I like the temperaments is because they're really simple and you actually find they map onto other people really well.
You don't have to sit down and take a test to know what someone is.
So there's sanguine and sanguine people are usually just like more fun-loving, upbeat, like to laugh, and also tend to have like a little more difficulty with self-control.
And then there's choleric people who are the people who are like more, usually more intellectual, but just generally like to anger, like argue, get angrier more easily, fast moving.
And then there's melancholic people who are usually more introspective and more prone towards sadness and being gloomy.
And then there's phlegmatic people who are just not super energetic.
They're more likely to let things roll off of them.
And yes, I am phlegmatic.
You guys seem pretty, you're both very laid back.
Yeah.
I mean, I do get upset about some issues, but you also, I mean, I don't know.
The way that we consume news, like just when I see a news headline, I'm immediately deconstructing it, being cynical about it and going, this isn't what it says on the face of it.
You know, you read a Daily Wire headline that's like, I can't believe this.
You know, the way you read the news is as if you're in a pitching room and someone's like pitching things at you to make a joke about.
Like, here's one make a joke about this.
Like you don't even think, you don't even think you might even forget that.
Like oh, people died or something happened.
Yeah, you're just you be.
This becomes your world of like, how does this turn into a joke to laugh at?
Yeah, it's just.
I read a news headline.
I don't even believe it anymore.
Yeah, maybe that's a problem, I don't know.
Yeah no, 100.
I mean, in the past it really seemed to me as if what the media had done was they.
They took a story.
Every with every story I saw, it felt as if what they'd done is they took something.
There was some, you know, kernel of truth in their heresy.
They twisted a few facts and tried to construct a narrative that doesn't quite map onto the situation but could be believed if you had half the information.
And now it just feels like they're making stuff up, and I was like it feels like you literally just made this up.
Like it's.
Yeah, even like the way that they're written to provoke and to the internet clickbaity, way that headlines have become.
So it's almost like you're trying to reverse engineer.
Like what is the motive behind this headline?
Yeah, that becomes the joke.
Yeah yeah, that's like.
All right, that's interesting.
So now I know your comedy strategy for writing these headlines and i'm going to steal it so part of them, all the audience can.
You're gonna have a million competitors tomorrow.
It's true, I release the secret formula.
Yeah no, but I, I guess I am curious about your process.
So you do the headlines and then you write the articles, and usually I know that with satire websites, the big part is the headline and the image getting shared and not as many people read through the article, but it's still a victory to have it shared around.
What, what is that like?
I mean, when you're writing the article, how much, how much emphasis is put into the actual body of text and how much is just put into needing to have this really snappy title?
Yeah, I mean, obviously the headline is, I mean the pitch and And what someone's going to get sold on, you know?
So that's where most of the effort goes.
Most of the creative effort is just generating that.
But we do try to make the copy funny enough to where someone clicks.
No, it is.
I've read through.
You want it to be this psychological, oh, that's an interesting concept.
Last time I clicked on a B article, there were some pretty funny parts in there.
And we try to hide the little jokes.
And it's a very dry, we want to very dryly report the news and then kind of twist with the jokes in the copy.
And there's some.
There are some really good headlines that you guys have had that have been conducive to getting people to click as well.
So the one was like groups that Jesus didn't specifically instruct us to love.
Right.
That was a great joke.
That's a great bit.
And then also you're kind of curious to see who you're trashing in the article.
And we've been doing more of those like clickbaity ones recently because Facebook crushes us so hard on the viral stuff.
We can't get links to go viral anymore.
So now it's if we can get it to go do okay and you get a much higher percentage of people clicking on it, then we'll do a lot more of those like lists.
And yeah, you're right.
If it's something that a good listical headline is something that immediately somebody comes up with two or three punchlines in their own head of what it might be, you know, we have one that's like signs your baby might be a racist.
And they want to see if their joke is in there.
Yeah.
And they well they immediately go, yeah, there's just a really strong premise where they go, you know, yeah, signs your baby might be a racist.
And they immediately start thinking of things their baby does and say, oh, and they click and they might have, and they might get two or three of them, you know, but then we have, we have twists and different punchlines that they didn't expect.
And so that's a really good formula for getting those.
Yeah, for sure.
No, and it's interesting too, because obviously on my end, it's almost the opposite where the title and thumbnail come last.
But at the same time, title and thumbnail can make or break your video's performance.
So I think that's probably a big part of your success with the articles is you put a lot of intentional effort into that title and thumbnail.
And sometimes for me, it's like, I have to upload this video in an hour and I just really need to think of a strong title right now.
Yeah, and we're trying to correct the video thing too.
That's what we're working on.
It's a different way of thinking about it.
But sometimes, like, yeah, we do take a B headline and we just put it under a video.
If we have a strong thumbnail, it works great.
Well, that's good because you already have some mileage out of that headline.
You know which ones are going to get the most clicks.
Have you found there's a difference between YouTube and Facebook in terms of what headlines get clicks?
Like, will one headline do better on a specific platform?
Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah.
I don't know what the breakdown is, but it's bizarre.
You know, we'll have one that's one of our most viral videos ever on YouTube.
Facebook, not as many shares.
You know, it's just a weird thing.
And I don't know if that's Facebook algorithm or I don't know if that's just some things are some things are more intentional for YouTube the way that we do them.
They're like, we know this is going to do well on YouTube.
It's just a different audience.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not something that someone would want to share on their Facebook page for their grandma to see, but it's something they'll watch on YouTube.
Do you guys ever have a really funny idea for a tweet?
And you're like, no, I need to save this.
Do you ever wrestle with that?
Because that's a thing for me.
I'll have a funny idea for like a tweet or a social media post.
I'm like, oh, I should probably put that in a video to make the video funnier.
And if people read the tweet here, it won't be as funny when they see it in the video.
Is that a thing?
Or am I just a neurotic human being?
I just started tweeting them out.
And then if they do well, and then I just put them into an article.
It's a good test.
Test it out.
Well, part of the problem is people will steal your joke once they see it as a tweet.
So I had this happen.
I wrote a joke that TP USA just copied and put on a meme without giving me any credit for.
Yeah, TP, they're an interesting organization.
I've had other run-ins with them, which he will detail in the subscriber.
Oh, that's right.
Are we going to do that?
Are we going to do that?
But it's this anxiety.
If I tweet this out, is someone going to steal this joke?
And then are people going to think that I stole it when they watch my video that has the joke in it?
Because that's like the worst.
You know, I've had ones that I've tweeted and then I've tweeted the joke out.
It's gotten a few thousand retweets on my account.
And I'm like, this has to be a B article.
So I turned into a B article.
The B article is even better, and nobody ever mentions the tweet that okay, good.
You have the people that tell you your Treyer Pickering.
They're like, hey, Babylon Bee stole your joke.
Yeah.
Or yeah, they're the other way around.
That's hilarious.
They don't know who you are.
Doesn't your bio say that you work for the Babylon B?
Or does it just have your pronouns in it?
Yeah, well, that too.
But the problem with public schools, you know, people can't because of public schools, people ought to read.
What are they doing on Twitter?
No, that's a good point.
I have to tell you their pictures.
They only communicate with GIFs now.
Hey, you, are you enjoying this interview?
Oh, I know I am.
Oh, I sure am.
I'm actually probably sweating trying to think up new questions right now at this very moment.
But if you're enjoying it, you should become a Babylon B subscriber because the interviews are much longer.
Yes.
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By the way, what is this?
Does this mug have something heretical on it that I'm drinking?
Okay, no.
Good.
Is this some kind of Calvinist?
Did you give him the Luther mug?
You didn't give him the Luther mug.
We do have a Calvin mug.
Yeah, we do.
Don't want to either.
Don't want either.
Well, let's get to the subscriber portion.
And we're going to ask him the second 10 questions.
Oh, you didn't do that.
Oh, the second 10 questions.
There's even more.
Yeah.
Those amazing questions.
Did you prepare new ones for me this time?
Go ahead and find them because Patrick usually gets them and he's not here right now.
Well, if he is here, I mean, he's back.
We have food.
We have food to eat.
We're going to go eat and have a subscriber portion.
All right.
Oh, we're done.
This is it.
We're going to go to the subscriber portion.
We'll stop.
Take a quick break.
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Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
And isn't it sad, too, how every, I mean, how many Christians just kind of rolled over and allowed their churches to be shut down?
Like, I'm starting to mean that way, where there is something mystical and special that's happening.
And maybe that's just the true Catholic faith.
I don't know.
It could be.
A huge part of my problem with what we talk about when we discuss religious freedom is so often that term is only used.
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Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dylan for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.