Doughboys - Mr. Pizza with Jesse Thorn
Episode Date: May 4, 2017Guest Jesse Thorn (NPR’s Bullseye; Jordan, Jesse, Go!) joins Mitch and Wiger to dine at one of the two North American outlets of Mr. Pizza, the South Korean pizzeria with 400 restaurants in its home... country. The trio judge the unique potato stuffed crust and bizarre toppings, Mitch calls out Wiger on bagels, and another edition of Drank or Stank has artisan Mountain Dew on the agenda.Want more Doughboys? Check out our Patreon!: https://patreon.com/doughboysSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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After the Second World War, the Potsdam Conference subdivided the defeated Nazi Germany into
partitions overseen by the victors.
The West managed by the United States, United Kingdom and France, and the Eastern region
handed to the Soviet Union.
This birthed the neighboring nations of West and East Germany, which would see decades
of conflict and tell with German reunification at the beginning of the 90s the book was
shut on this particular chapter of history.
But on World War II's Pacific front, the after-effects of a different partition still
1945 division of Korea into the American-administered South and the Soviet overseeing North, a particularly
unfair fate for a people who suffered miserably under a nightmarish Japanese occupation.
Koreans would subsequently endure a brutal proxy war between the Cold War superpowers
that killed up to 20% of its population, ending in a people divided between the capitalist
democracy the Republic of Korea and the decidedly less democratic Democratic People's Republic
of Korea, which has endured the totalitarian rules of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and now
Kim Jong-un.
But South Korea, much like its bitter rival Japan, saw explosive economic growth as heavy
Western investment helped it modernize into a thriving metropolis powerhouse.
To this day, Korean importation and reinterpretation of American culture is seen in its passion
for PC gaming, the musical genre of K-pop, and of course, in its cuisine.
In 1990, the same year the Berlin Wall fell, businessman Jung-Hoo Woon founded a South
Korean chain restaurant serving a dish that had become the adopted national food in the
U.S., itself imported from another of the Axis powers, Italy.
With such unconventional toppings as cooked shrimp, yams, corn, and cream cheese, this
Asian pizzeria thrived, and now with about 400 locations in its homeland and two dozen
more worldwide, it's the largest pizza chain in South Korea.
But how does it stack up in the States?
This week on Doe Boys, Mr. Pizza.
Welcome to Doe Boys, the podcast about chain restaurants' reproduction of Feral Audio.com.
I'm Nick Weigar, alongside my co-host, dipshit Grimace, the Spoon Man, Mike Mitchell.
Mitch, how you doing?
Dipshit Grimace?
A courtesy of Matthew Skakluna, who adds, I love Mitch, please tell him for me so he
doesn't get mad.
Oh, fuck you, Skakluna.
If you have a roast you'd like me to use on Mitch at the top of the show, roastspoonman
at gmail.com.
Mitch, how are you doing?
We're at Max Fun Studios today.
We are, yes.
We're a great setup over here at Max Fun Studios because of our very special guest who we'll
introduce in just a second.
Very exciting guest.
I just want to say, Spoon Nation, and I've got a little drop.
Hit it for me, Christian.
It's Christian, yeah.
I know his name.
I'll just keep doing that.
It's coming in.
We can edit all this preamble out.
I think this preamble adds to it.
Christian's our engineer.
He ate with us today.
Lot of fun.
Great dude.
I'm going to say it's an internet.
It doesn't want to play.
Christian, say it doesn't want to play.
I'll play it to the mic.
Is this okay?
Oh my god.
This is fine.
Mitch, this is fine.
This is as seamless as it always is.
I've managed to fuck things up outside of our studio.
We're finally in a studio that has an ox cable, and still we couldn't quite get it to function.
Mitch, here we go.
Oh, it's not his fault that it's not.
Did you not download it?
Do we not have any internet access in here?
Is that the issue?
Oh my god.
You're right.
Now we are going to have to edit some.
It's just truly not playing.
Here's what we'll do, Mitch.
You'll have this drop.
Why don't you shout out who it is, and then we'll just edit it at the end of the show.
We'll play this drop, so that'll be a little treat for people who stick around.
All right.
This drop was courtesy of Captain Saddle Shoes at Funny Man 69420.
Guys, I don't want to tell you how to do your own drop.
You could edit it in after he said, here's my drop, instead of editing it at the end.
No.
It's possible to do internal edits on audio files.
No, we're going to put this at the end.
The man's name is at Funny Man 69420.
He is a funny man.
I like that.
That's fun.
Well, since we're having so many technical difficulties on our own end, we're supplied
with a great setup.
We should introduce our guest for today, who is one of the original podcast.
He's one of the best.
Oh, man.
One of the best interviewers there is, Nick.
Very exciting for us.
Very humble introduction.
The host of Bullseye, the co-host of Jordan Jesse Goh, great podcast.
America's radio sweetheart, Jesse Thorne is here.
Hi, Jesse.
Hi, guys.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm so thrilled to be here.
We said you were here, but really, we are here.
We are here where you normally record, which are different digs for us, but we like it.
Yes.
Nick.
Thanks, dude.
We are here.
Seriously, guys, I told you guys this when we were eating dinner, so I'm repeating it
for the benefit of the at-home audience.
This is like my life stream to be on your show.
I love your show so much.
Oh, boy.
I listen to our mutual friend, Jordan Morris, who's my co-host on Jordan Jesse Goh, and
a co-worker of yours.
Great, dude.
He sits next to me at work.
Wonderful, man.
He introduced me to the show some years back, or a year back, let's say.
And I had always thought, I love Mitch.
I didn't know Nick at the time, but I knew Nick was friends with Jordan.
And I thought, well, that's a terrible idea for a podcast.
Why would I ever listen to that?
And Jordan convinced me to listen to it, and I've been a slobbering, drooling fanboy ever
since.
So it's a real honor to be on the show.
That's high praise coming from you.
You're also your initial thought on the podcast was correct.
It is bad.
It is bad.
It's bad.
It's bad.
You know, we know Jordan was one of our first guests.
He gave us a lot of pointers.
You've helped us out, and when we said that, I was being very honest, I was telling Jesse
today that early on in the birthday boys, there was this podcast called The Sound of
Young America, and you hosted it, and it was one of, it was a great, great podcast.
I guess before podcasts, really, it was more like an interview show, right?
Well, we start, yeah.
I mean, The Sound of Young America, I started doing with Jordan Morris when we were in college
together.
Right.
And I've been doing that show every week for the last, I started when I was 19, so 17
years.
Goodness.
And it's now my NPR show, Bullseye.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
And these interviews for comedy nerds at the time, when there wasn't a lot of, the thing
of not taking comedy seriously, which you've said, there wasn't a lot of that, and there
were like some awesome, awesome interviews back in the day, and we traded them around
like mixtapes.
It was really, really cool, and you've continued it on for this long.
Nick and I have done a year and a half where we eat fast food and we want to kill each
other and end the show, so yeah.
That would be, and I don't know why anyone would ask us for advice on, I was starting
a podcast, so if I made any advice, would be don't pick a format where you have to
eat something in advance because it really starts to wear thin.
Yes.
And it takes a toll on your body, and psychologically.
Also, Jesse, Jesse is just a, he's a good interviewer, he's a good talker, we were talking
about-
A great talk, professional broadcaster.
Professional broadcaster, man.
We're out of our league right now.
Do you, now, here's a question for you.
Yeah.
Do you hate guys like Nick and I for like even talking into microphones like we shouldn't,
right?
Like we should stay away from mics.
I mean, I hate you guys, but it's for a whole other, it's a whole other set of reasons.
No, I love your show.
It's a rich psychodrama.
Who will crack first?
It's like watching one of those movies where the description on the back of the video tape
box says a descent into dot, dot, dot.
It's a real descent into film.
Like at some point one of you is going to murder the other, or murder someone surprising,
like kind of like cool up for Lysok or something, just like someone you wouldn't expect you,
someone would murder.
Yeah.
And like a weird murder suicide, or like, yeah, like a really-
And it's definitely Wyger you're talking about here, right, who's going to murder somebody?
Hey, maybe it's me.
I mean-
That's a fun ending to this.
Sure, like that's the natural direction, but it's also the kind of thing where there
could be a twist at any moment.
I mean, you're a genius, but what are you hiding, Mitch?
Right.
That's a good point.
You know what I mean?
Like, sure.
Wyger is the one who seems like he possibly could be a psychopath.
Yes, very-
I mean, Wyger right now, I've never seen the VHS box cover for Dahmer, but I'm pretty sure
that Wyger would fit right on there.
But like, let's be honest.
You got sad when I said that.
No, I was just, I was contemplating it.
I think, yeah, I don't know.
Dahmer was a good-looking man.
He was, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, he wasn't bad.
I don't think he was, like, super handsome, but he was no Ted Bundy, but he's a decent-looking
man.
Oh, yes, Bundy is the good-looking one.
Both of you guys are too good-looking for podcasting.
Oh, God bless you.
There's no doubt about it.
Now, I knew, I knew how good-looking Mitch was, because I've known Mitch for a long time.
Mitch is a handsome man.
That is very true.
You knew me for a long time.
I'm very self-conscious, because I've always been a big man, so I appreciate these kind
words, you guys.
You know what?
Even if you're, even if it's tongue-in-cheek, I accept it.
I'm not being tongue-in-cheek.
It's not tongue-in-cheek.
You're a big guy with a real good-looking face.
You're a handsome dude.
You're very handsome.
And...
You're America's teddy bear.
I have to admit, the first time I met Nick Weiger, you guys were kind enough to come
to a live Jordan Jesse Goh show that we did here in Southern California.
That was real.
That's right.
It was fun.
It was a ton of fun.
Down in Orange County, we got Syrian food afterwards.
Me and my wife Natalie.
That sounds nice.
Great.
We went to this place called Aleppo's Cafe, I think it was called.
It was great.
Natalie's great.
Yeah, she is great.
That's what I've heard on the show.
I can attest to that.
Nick just cracked his glass.
When Nick showed up, I was disappointed at how good-looking Weiger was.
Oh boy.
I'm looking at Weiger, I'm like, come on, give me a break, Weiger.
Nick is handsome.
And you're a handsome man.
He's a good-looking guy, especially if you're like, you know, like those like Rocky
villain types, those Estonian, like a handsome Estonian.
Yeah.
He's a real super soldier type.
I'm an Eastern European heritage.
I'm a doughy super soldier.
I'm a super soldier.
Not anymore.
You've now officially gone back over.
You're skinny again.
I've got a little softer on the middle.
You're quite svelte.
What happened?
Was this all your swimming?
I do.
Actually, swimming does do a lot to, I mean, you just burn so many calories when you're
swimming last.
I've been going to a trainer so much, and I do this podcast with you.
What the fuck?
Well, you know what?
I think, look, part of it is genetics.
I think you're naturally, like, we're both kind of heavy, naturally heavy set, but I
think you're naturally a larger man than me.
I think we just sort of, if we had the same eating habits, I think you'd probably be a
little larger than me.
I think that's just the hand.
I like that, though, because I can crush you if I need to.
But I mean, also, I think it's, a lot of it is just diet.
I mean, that's a Eugene thing from dumbbells, Eugene and Stanger thing is 80% of it is diet.
And I think I'm pretty strict with myself outside of the podcast in terms of eating
habits.
Do you see bags of almonds?
I do.
I'm an almond guy.
I'm not insignificantly overweight, and I'm naturally thin.
I really earn my fat, and, you know, maybe 15 or 20 pounds overweight, but, like, I have
to work to get that on, you know?
I have to be really careful not to exercise, really careful to really cram food down my
gullet.
So, Jesse, you're, we're throwing all this pressure on, you're also a good-looking man,
and you also have one of the best beards in the game.
Oh, my God.
That's very kind of you.
Quite a beard.
Very kind of you, guys.
How long have you been working on that, bad boy?
Years.
Years.
Well, here's the thing.
I'm not a natural beardsman.
Okay.
So, I'm a natural candidate for a beard because I have a very soft chin.
I've got it.
I have a very undistinguished chin, and it really helps me to hide it.
Yes.
That is why I grew a goatee in college, and when I was, like, in great shape, I like
shaved it, like, you know, had no facial hair, but then I was like, I look better, I look
better with a beard.
I shaved my beard for this movie, the Netflix movie, which I can't remember the name of,
which is bad, too.
We'll edit this later, too.
Other people?
Other people.
Yes.
Thank you, Jesus.
And it was a nightmare for me.
You were very self-conscious about it.
I was very self-conscious.
It was a bad time.
I probably was maybe at my heaviest.
Right.
I like you different than you, but similar thing where I was like, I think my face just
looks better with a beard on it.
I'm going to grow a beard.
Yeah, and I always assumed I couldn't grow a beard, and it turns out there's a certain,
for some people, I have like a B-quality beard, I would say, but it took some doing.
It took months to get to where it did not look pathetic.
Right.
I'm going to say this, but he has a beard that I think a lot of people can't grow.
I agree.
I think that a lot of people would either bale before they reach that length, or they just
can't.
They're just not capable of having it be that full.
I think that's an A-beard, if you ask me.
It's an X-beard.
That's really kind of you guys.
When you said B-beard, honestly, I thought you were talking about the Guinness World
Records beard of bees.
Yeah.
No, that is what I was talking about.
You were giving yourself a letter score, Mitch is the one who misunderstood.
No, yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, it is both A-beard and a beard of bees.
Right.
So you're both right.
Okay.
We maybe need you in to moderate us a lot more.
Yeah.
Yeah, Jesse, we've been-
Guys, I'm so glad that you've decided to come to therapy.
Tell me about these feelings of self-harm that you've been describing on the podcast.
Well-
Do you have specific plans?
As you know, since you listen to the podcast, we constantly talk about dying, or if you're
wanting to die.
But you know what?
I'm not in that sort of mood today.
You know, we're actually, your offices are lovely, and you're up on, what floor are you
on?
The ninth floor.
It's the downtown Los Angeles.
Beautiful view of downtown.
There's the, which lake is that?
We're working on.
It's MacArthur Park Lake.
MacArthur Park Lake.
The legendary MacArthur Mark of Song.
It's right out there, and it's lovely.
And Mitch and I, before we recorded, were taking a look out there, before we walked into the
studio, and neither of us vocalized, man, how great would it be to break this glass and
plunge to our desk?
Obviously, that was an internal monologue.
You thought that of that very quickly.
You were talking about how, if you swim in that lake, there would be a lot of condoms.
Right.
It's a lovely lake, but it's probably not the cleanest lake.
But then I come to find, I have swum in that lake.
Have you really?
It is a disgusting leaf.
When you say not the cleanest lake, I appreciate your being generous.
It's a foul, genuinely foul lake.
And it's a wonderful neighborhood, and a wonderful park.
I feel like sometimes people who are familiar with the MacArthur Park area, think of it
in a sort of 1992, like the depths of the lowest point in Los Angeles is history, economically,
and so on and so forth.
It's a wonderful neighborhood.
I really love it here, and I love the park.
But yeah, the lake is nasty, and it's full of enormous fish.
Oh my God.
There's a truck that backs up and rockets fish into it out of a chute.
Wow.
It's astonishing.
Is this true?
Literally, I'll be sitting here in my office where I don't have a view of the lake, and
I'll hear from the front, fish truck, fish truck, fish truck.
Everybody rushes to the window, and we have a lot of sets of binoculars for this purpose,
or if drifters are fucking, or whatever might be going on out there.
And we go all press our faces against the window, and basically there's a little boat
ramp in the lake.
It's not a man-made lake, actually.
It's a paved, natural lake.
So it's a concrete paved, natural lake.
They created it in like the teens or the 20s.
And there's a little boat ramp that goes into it, a little tiny one, and they just back
a pickup truck that has a huge tank on the back of it, a standard pickup that has a big
tank on the back of it, and a hose comes out.
It's about the size of, it's about a volleyball, maybe.
Think Wilson from Castaway, I don't know.
Yeah, for movie fans.
For people who are bigger movie fans than they are volleyball fans.
And it shoots a stream of water and fish out into the lake, like a garden, like a giant
garden hose full of fish.
That's insane.
Yeah, so anyway, I've swum in there.
What was your impetus for taking a dip?
I just want to quickly say, don't go getting any ideas Heath Cliff if you're listening.
Heath Cliff, we know you love nothing more than plucking a fish out of the trash can.
Can I send a message to Heath Cliff real quick?
Heath Cliff, Heath Cliff, no one should terrorize the neighborhood.
Heath Cliff, we know you love to sing opera, but you know that the old lady's just going
to throw a boot at you?
Don't bother.
Heath Cliff, Heath Cliff, leave that garbage ape alone.
Yeah.
Is that what the fuck it's name is?
Yeah, the garbage ape.
That's the recurring character in the Heath Cliff universe.
This shit that I would never know until you had your weird grudge with Heath Cliff.
It's a bad comic strip.
The most mad you've ever been at anything.
I've never seen you be mad at a person the way you got mad at the fictional character
Heath Cliff.
It's poorly executed.
I'm not mad at Heath Cliff the character.
I know that that's just ink on paper, but I feel like the creator or whoever is currently
overseeing the Heath Cliff franchise is not doing a good job.
Hold on.
Heath Cliff isn't just a series of photos?
No, Mitz, these aren't photographs.
These are photographs that someone has taken of an actual cat.
These are drawings.
Mitz has only seen Heath Cliff in like a magic lantern show.
Getting back to the like, I'm still curious, why did you take a dip in it?
Well, because a lot of people say that cholera has been eradicated in the first world and
I wanted to prove them wrong.
We, you know, Maximum Fun, my podcast network, the podcast network I own, we're donor supported.
And so I promised that if we got a certain number of donors a couple of years ago that
I would swim in the lake and it was a number of donors that I very sincerely did not believe
we would reach.
So I went to Big Five Sporting Goods and I bought every piece of swimming gear that I
could find, like water shoes, the thing that pinches your nose, ear plugs.
I think those are just nose plugs possibly.
Goggles, like underswim things, like, you know, remember when they banned that swimming
suit that's like two-thirds of your body because it makes you swim too fast in the Olympics?
I bought one of those.
Like, anything I could, and I walked into it and I have never clenched my butthole.
I don't want to be vulgar here.
No, please.
Never clenched my...
Don't be vulgar on our podcast.
That hole more tightly than as I waded into that disgusting water and then I felt like
I had to like dive into it or else it wasn't...
I was selling the bit short, you know, like I wasn't meeting this promise that I'd made.
And I literally like inverted my lips, like put my lips into...
I felt more comfortable with my lips inside my mouth because I was worried that I would
then lick my lips and get the water from the lake.
Oh my God.
Jesus.
I remember like that and then just close my eyes as tight as I could and jumped in.
Then it was foul.
There's...
I mean, we were saying there's no doubt there are some needles on the bottom of that thing.
There's trash for sure.
Guns.
A lot of guns.
Guns for sure.
The thing that I think people don't know about Los Angeles is that, and we're in it
right now a little bit, it gets very windy and dusty.
And I think that...
Santa Ana winds blowing hot from the north and we is born to ride.
What the fuck was that?
Little Randy Newman.
Yeah, it was the Noom.
Jesus Christ.
Big nasty redhead by my side.
I did not know the song, first of all.
Second of all, I thought you were doing a Bill Cosby impression.
God, don't scare me.
You scared me for once.
You did recoil a little bit.
God.
Yeah, the Santa Ana winds, which don't happen throughout the whole year, but we get dust
and dirt in that lake right now.
I'm just thinking of it must be...
What's the word?
Brackish.
Brackish.
The thing that upsets me the most about it retrospectively is that recently there's been
a few articles about this organization called California Ghetto Carping, which is a sort
of informal fisherman's association that fishes in urban lakes.
And a guy recently caught a 35-pound fish in the lake.
That's so crazy.
Which is...
That's the size of a dog.
That's a big fish.
That's bigger.
That's like my two dogs put together.
That's huge.
And the thought that one of those disgusting, like, silo-canth, prehistoric beasts could
have, like, basically bitten my balls is terrifying to me.
I don't know why they'd go for my balls, but it's probably the most tender meat.
Yeah.
When you're at the beach, when you're younger with your dad, dads are always afraid of fish
swimming up and biting them.
I know.
Well, it's weird.
Get out of there, fish.
Right.
I mean, that's...
It's vulnerable.
It's a vulnerable area.
It's the part you least want to be bitten in or attacked at.
And...
Are you talking about how getting bitten your balls is bad right now?
But I'm saying, like, in terms of swimming, why it's a fear, it's because you can't see
what's going on down there.
So who knows?
The mind just goes whatever.
I'm afraid of sharks, for sure.
There's no doubt.
I've said it on this podcast before, and I've said something like, I wish that sharks were
wiped out.
I know that that was extreme.
I take that back.
I take it back a little bit.
Not extremely, though.
They should be fished.
You're right, though, Nick.
I feel like you should always be able to have eyes on your dick.
That's why I never wear pants for that reason.
A lot of people think I'm being gross, but I got to be able to see my dick, make sure
everything's okay down there.
Is that why you're big on goggles?
So I can look under the water and look at my own dick?
Yeah, that was my guess.
Yeah, yeah, Mitch, that's the reason.
I used to be very genuinely afraid of sharks.
Because fish won't, they will bite you, but not all of them, and most of them won't bite
you.
Sharks are the scary thing.
I'm scared of stingrays.
I'd hate to be stung by a stingray.
We always had to learn this.
Because of the crocodile hunter, specifically?
No, it was before that, because when we were kids, they always made us do the stingray
shuffle.
You're a California kid.
Yeah, but I'm from San Francisco, where the water's too cold to go in.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
So was this like the truffle shuffle, where they had you take your shirt off, and for
the feeding and using it of others?
Yeah.
The stingray shuffle, William Refrigerator Pairing?
Right, right, exactly, yeah.
No, it was like a thing we had to walk in, and you had to sort of move your feet.
You couldn't, you didn't step into the ocean, you kind of shuffled your feet into the ocean,
like you were on roller skates.
So that way, if there were any stingrays, they would get scared off by the rustling
of the sand, and they wouldn't sting you.
Oh, interesting.
But I have like an irrational fear of stingrays as a result.
Wait, what?
This happened in California public schools?
That's what they teach you instead of reading.
We might have learned it in school, but I definitely remember it at like camps, where
we would go to the beach.
I feel like we took some beach trips in school.
Maybe I'm wrong.
The stingray, you know, a lot of people don't know that the Pacific Ocean is like cold
and worse.
I feel like it's worse than the Atlantic Ocean.
We've had this argument before, you discussed some sort of East Coast ocean supremacy.
Oh my God.
And you can never let me win anything.
No, I just like it's just such a dumb battle to fight.
Like you're saying your ocean is better than our ocean.
Our ocean is better.
Atlantic all the way.
It's an ocean.
Let me put it this way for you, okay?
But I'm just going to break it down real quick.
Let's say you were Tom Brady.
Which ocean would you prefer?
Atlantic Ocean.
All day long.
QED.
Point driven.
Case closed.
Although Tom Brady wasn't here originally from Northern California, he might have some
Pacific.
Oh, that's a good point.
He is from Northern California.
He's from the Bay Area, isn't he?
He's from somewhere.
Oh God, is he from Santa Rosa or something?
Is he from San Mateo?
Or no.
San Mateo sounds right to me.
There's Chankton living in San Mateo now.
Tom Brady.
It's one of those two.
It's either Tom Brady or Chankton.
Look up San Mateo, California.
Look for famous residents and see if Chankton is listed or if it's Tom Brady.
Could be Bugman.
Do you know who Bugman is from San Mateo?
Do you know who Bugman is?
We'll bleep it if you know.
I don't know who Bugman is.
No one knows who Bugman is.
Yeah, he is from San Mateo.
Okay, well done.
Is it my friend Cameron Loefflin from middle school?
He's from San Mateo.
Maybe Bugman is Cameron.
You don't know.
Jesse, I was just going to say, I met you very early on in my comedy career.
And like I was telling you, we were big fans and we got to meet you at the New York sketch
vest.
Were Jordan and I still doing our sketch comedy group pranked the Dean at the time?
Yes, I believe you were, yes.
And I think you guys were performing there.
But I also think that you were...
I think I did a sound of Young America there.
I think that you did a sound of Young America.
I want to say with my friend Jay Smooth from The Ill Doctrine was the guest on that, if
I remember correctly.
I think that that sounds correct, yes.
I think that sounds correct.
I mean, I have no idea.
I think that that is right.
And there was the Apple Sisters were there, us.
There were these old sketch teams.
The whitest kids you know.
Oh, yeah.
There were a bunch of, like maybe Sidecar was there.
There was a bunch of early sketch folks there that kind of have done some stuff.
So it was, it's a great, it's a fond memory and you were very nice to us and we were big
fans of yours.
Yeah.
Thank you very much.
I look back on it fondly.
And I don't look back on a lot fondly as Nick knows.
The thing I remember most vividly from the New York sketch fest is my friend probably
yours, Kurt Brown-Oler, the very funny stand-up comic.
And Jane Borden, another very famous stand-up comic, hosted the festival closing show.
And their main thing that they did was a poppers doing contest on stage.
Like it was like a death wish show, basically.
It was like, how badly can we hurt our brains and bodies on stage?
Really left an impression on me.
That and that sketch that the birthday boys used to do about, oh, gotta get that pie.
Those two things are the things that I remember most vividly.
Our famous pie sketch.
I love that pie sketch.
Do you really?
That's a great sketch.
It was a sketch where they wheeled a big ladder out on stage, put a pie on one of the higher
rungs of the ladder and then the various birthday boys, except for Mitch, came out as like
a gang of street kids, made like a 1950s street kids with I think Calpacus leading the way,
going, oh, gotta get that pie.
Got to get that pie.
And then at some point, Mitch came out dressed as an old lady.
I came out as an old lady, I said, this is my house and that is my pie.
I remember that line specifically.
And if you're wondering what the joke of the sketch is, it's already been described.
And maybe it was even better than you're imagining folks at home.
I know this sounds amazing so far, but it was, man, what a delight.
And maybe that was why I don't know if they ever did a New York sketch fest ever again.
Maybe that was the, I think you killed it off.
I think we killed it off.
Well, that in the Poppers Contest.
In the Poppers Contest too.
Mitch, you and I should have a jalapeno Poppers Contest.
Oh, that's really, that's a sweet direction to take that idea, or how about this, a spicy
direction to take that idea away, right guys?
Nick, do you know what a Poppers Contest is?
No, I thought, I mean, I was going to act like I knew what it was.
Amel nitrate, like the mostly gay club drug.
Okay, what does it do to you?
Makes you high for like, I've never done, I'm a straight-age guy, but it makes you high
for like five or ten seconds, and then a little dizzy and uncomfortable afterwards, I think.
So it's like when you used to open the two-liter bottle, and then you just take a whiff of
the CO2, like you just put your mouth on the bottle and it's like in the CO2.
That would be, yes, that would be your equivalent, yes.
Yeah, yeah, it's just like that.
Is that what gets robots high?
Are we going to talk about what food I left when I was a kid?
Yeah, we should talk about that a little bit.
You know, we were there, we were in that general area, you're from the Bay Area.
San Francisco, California, morning bread.
So what is the, I mean like, let's keep it broad, let's talk about what you want to talk
about.
What was your favorite food as a kid?
Burritos, burritos, burritos, and burritos.
Does that continue to this day?
I have more passionate feelings about burritos.
Right.
Like, I have alienated many fans of Jordan Jesse Goh because of my passionate feelings
about burritos.
I've probably ruined friendships because of my feelings about, like burritos are, I had
a conversation with my friend W. Kamau Bell, stand-up comedian, he holds a show on CNN
these days.
Kamau actually works now, again, in the Bay Area, lives in the Bay Area.
Which by the way is pretty easy because politics is a freaking joke.
You got it, buddy.
Between the Republic fools and the Spendocrats.
Oh boy, and not to mention our clown in chief.
You got it, buddy.
You know exactly what I'm, it's like we're on the same level here.
Hey, how come the Doughboys don't have a show on CNN?
Hey, how come?
Not funny enough.
How come the Doughboys aren't president of the United States?
Hell yeah.
All right.
First executive order, pizza all night, every night.
Yeah.
And you have to eat it, or you get sent to a camp.
I had this conversation with Kamau where he was telling me, sorry, he gets sent to
a camp.
Sorry.
I had this conversation with Kamau where he was telling me about, like how much his
career changed when he moved away from sort of observational comedy and towards social
and political comedy, because he felt like that was really who he was, like in his heart,
that's who he was.
And I had this like crestfallen feeling deep inside me, because he, he, in the early days
in San Francisco used to do this joke.
He had moved from Chicago about eating a San Francisco burrito.
And the part that I remember most vividly and not even really a punchline is him holding
an imaginary burrito and going, you've been talking a lot of shit, burrito.
And like that is what he was describing about how core to his identity the social and political
commentary was.
I was like, no, but that burrito joke was like that for me.
Someone else cares this much about burritos.
Right.
So, wait, are you, are you, you think that the best burritos in California, you find
them in the mission?
Is that what you're saying to us?
Well, I'm, here's the thing.
Or have you now turned?
I was born and raised in the mission.
I'm from the mission district in San Francisco.
All right.
I think I know where your vote is.
And so, I, you know, I've lived in Los Angeles for like 10 years now.
And I understand the merits of food in Los Angeles, so much wonderful food in Los Angeles.
Great food city.
But that burrito, the quote unquote mission style burrito made famous across the world
by Chipotle's B minus version of it is like, I mean, it's like, it's as essential to who
I am as Del Taco is to Weigar like, why does Weigar love Del Taco so much?
It's not good.
Oh, come on.
Blow, blow.
It's because.
Jesse, I'm happier here.
This is, I'm happy.
You like Del Taco.
I know.
You just like me feeling bad.
Nick, this is the saddest I've seen you.
No, it's fine.
I, it's, it's not bad either.
It is what it is, right?
But it's like, it's the thing that is your home.
It's like the food.
Yeah.
It's comforting.
It's good, Nick.
It's a great place.
Thank you, Mitch.
Of course.
And that's how I feel about a burrito.
Like that is, you know, that's like, like the place I'm from is, I mean, one of the things
I love so much about the Doughboys is that, Mitch, you, your constant prattling on and
on and on about Boston things makes me feel better about my constant prattling on and
on about San Francisco shit.
Right.
Like Jordan Jesse Goh fans will like to tweet at me, Hey, Jesse, what city are you from?
I forgot.
Or like, Hey, Jesse, do you like burritos?
I can't remember.
Or, and it really is like in a weird way, it is my, that place is like who I am.
I had a conversation with my shrink about this once, you know, I'm going to get fucking
real with you guys for a second.
If you don't mind.
We'd love it.
And I said, you know, when, mind the neighborhood I grew up in has changed a lot over the past
20 years.
Now the guy who owns Facebook lives there.
He has a car elevator built into his house in the mission.
Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg lives there and has a car elevator and his wife is from Quincy, Massachusetts.
Sorry.
Glad to hear it.
And I said, I said to my shrink, like I almost feel guilty about how much I care about this
place that I'm from and how much I care about the way that it's changed, like how, how much
that hurts me.
Like I feel like I'm a grown man, like I have my own family.
I live in Los Angeles.
Like these things are, and he said, well, didn't he used to tell me that like late at night
you would like leave the house and like wander the streets of the mission or like whatever.
And I'm like, yeah.
And he's like, and didn't you tell me that you've like always been somewhat emotionally
alienated from both of your divorced parents?
And I was like, yeah.
And he's like, do you feel like it's possible that the place you're from might feel like
a parent to you?
Like the only thing that you could rely on when you were a child.
And I was like, yeah, I guess that's possible.
Wow.
But like, and burritos, it's like the symbol of that for me.
Yeah.
And I know I'm this like grand eloquent, like this ridiculous thing to say, but it's very
sincere.
No, I think that that's beautiful.
I truly think that's beautiful.
And I think that why compare the two?
You know what, in this show and everywhere we compare stuff too much and there's a mission
style burrito and then there's a SoCal style burrito and there are two different great
things.
You know, they all have their merits.
They all have their merits.
And I've had some delicious, delicious burritos up in the mission in San Francisco in general.
I mean, it's like, if you're in Chicago, right, you know that there's great deep dish
casserole style pizzas, and there's great thin crust, crispy pizzas, and there's great,
you know, you know that these are like their things in and of themselves that have their
own values and their own, you know, and that's how I feel about the two kinds of burritos.
I actually, to be honest, I rarely eat burritos down here for that reason that it's like,
it will never be the thing I want it to be, but it's not its fault.
It's not because it's bad that it's not the thing I want it to be.
But it's not going to scratch that itch, why bother?
Exactly.
What are some of your favorite, do you have a couple favorite burrito places down here
that you go to or?
Well, down here, I, like I said, I rarely, there's a place called Yuccas in Los Feliz
that has a tasty burrito, but it's such a totally different thing.
Yeah.
San Francisco.
Wow, I'm surprised.
And so you basically don't eat, you stay away?
No, I eat tons of tacos.
I eat tons of...
Oh, okay, hell yeah.
I eat tons of pupusas.
I eat tons of...
Great pupusas.
I eat a lot of things, but I don't really eat burritos, but...
Wow.
In San Francisco, for me, like, the places that I went, like, the place that I went as
a kid is called Takariel Taco Loco.
It's now called Takariel Gran Taco Loco because there's another smaller one.
Right.
And, like, it's...
I don't know, I was just talking with, like, my childhood best friend about a time that
we were there and it was, like, 11 o'clock at night, we're working on our burritos and
just a limousine pulled up outside and this guy got out in, like, going to the club clothes,
you know, like a black suit and a black shirt or something and he just had blood streaming
from his face and he just came in and ordered a burrito and brought it back to his limousine.
And, like, I have all these, like, complex emotional things, but because of how much
my neighborhood has changed, like, the...
Most of the TakarÃas are still there, but the clientele has changed so much that I actually
go to, like, if I want to eat...
When I'm home and I want to eat a burrito, my father lives in the Outer Mission, which
is, like, in the neighborhood called the Excelsior, which is, like, this cold neighborhood that
actually has not changed.
It's, like, the only part of San Francisco that has not changed dramatically in the last
20 years.
You posted a pic of that recently, right?
I did, yeah, totally.
It's a very beautiful-looking neighborhood.
It is a beautiful...
And it's always cold there, but besides that, it's a really wonderful neighborhood.
It really is, like, it really hasn't changed a lot, which is, you know, everything else
in San Francisco, it's like Manhattan or something, you know?
It's so...
There's so much gentrification.
It's insane.
Yeah.
It's completely insane.
But I will go to a TakarÃa called El Farolito that's on Mission Street, but way, way, way,
way past Outpass the Mission, and it's just, like, beyond the circle of whites, like, it's
not Walnut Creek there.
It's not, like, the camp...
It's not Cupertino, the campus of Apple Computers there.
It's, like, the one place that feels like home to me, but it's, like, the last.
It's the edge of the edge of what's left of that feeling.
And a lot of burrito places, if you're up in San Francisco, you go into a burrito place,
you're going to run into people at Facebook, they're trying to make an app for it.
You're going to run into John Laster, he's trying to make some sort of animated feature
out of these burritos.
I know.
You're going to run into some guy from ILM who's trying to make a digital version of
Kylo Ren.
You got it.
God, thank God we're finally talking about the new Star Wars movies.
You guys have been biting your tongue about those movies for too long.
I still haven't watched The Last Jedi teaser, and you know what?
I think I'm not gonna.
Really?
I think I'm going to go in cold.
No, no way, dude.
You need to watch it.
No, I'm not going to watch the teaser or the trailer, I'm going to go in cold.
If you watch the teaser for it, you will know nothing.
It truly is a nothing teaser.
Yeah, I was blowing up Twitter and I'm like, oh, I wonder what's in this fucking trailer.
And I'm interested in it because I love Ryan Johnson, the director of this upcoming Star
Wars movie.
He's like a wonderful, he's been on Bullseye over the years a number of times and he's
just a lovely man, just a really good guy and a brilliant filmmaker.
And I'm like, this is the one I'm looking for.
This has been the one.
I heard Ryan was going to direct it.
I was like, oh, fuck yeah, that's like the perfect guy to direct that, that'll be great.
And you turn on the trailer, it's like, oh, right, what are these fucking trailers?
Oh, here's six non-sequential shots of some Star Wars ship.
Yes.
Like, oh, yeah, spaceship.
Right.
That's every, like, it could have just been shots pulled at random from all the other
Star Wars movies.
I would have had no idea.
Maybe it could be a fan-made trailer and I hope to, because I got my fingers crossed
for this one big time.
As much Force Awakens hate as I have and as much shit as I give it, I want the movies
to be good.
You have hope in your heart for that new one.
I have hope in my heart and I know that that Ryan is a talented guy.
And you like Rogue One.
You know that they, they can do...
I like Rogue One, yeah.
They can make these new Star Wars proper.
They can.
They can do it.
And I'm really hoping for something special.
Here's what I'd say real quick on the teaser.
To me, I still haven't watched it.
I probably never will.
I'm going to go in cold.
It sounds like what you guys are describing is an effective teaser where it sort of gives
you some images of things that are familiar and intriguing, but gives you no information
from which you can discern what's going to happen in the story.
And that reminds me of one of the best teasers ever for the movie Fargo, which just gives
you a bunch of different images and you're just sort of like, oh, what's going on?
What is this?
I see a lot of snow.
You remember seeing the Fargo teaser?
I remember seeing the Fargo teaser and I was like, oh, this is really intriguing.
And then I saw the movie and I had no information about what the plot was and I was delighted
by it.
I just want everyone who's at home who didn't get the benefit of the full visual effect
of Nick's, but can only be classified as a rant.
But Nick was swelling and shrinking and pumping his finger in the air as he said that Fargo,
like a Pentecostal preacher, like he was about to ask us to take up the snakes in our hands.
We've referenced this in the podcast before.
The bitches call me out on this.
I move my hands sometimes when I talk.
You went full hands there.
It was scary.
To make up for the fact that sometimes I have trouble communicating emotions with my face.
So the hands are a useful guide.
You might as well have been saying, in the plague of the Pharisees, and on the fourth
day, he said, his hands went wild.
It was very much like a muppet.
When Kermit's hands go crazy, it was kind of basically that.
You should also, I want to interject and say, just watch the teaser.
Don't.
Don't go in cold.
I don't know.
Maybe I'll go in cold.
No, don't.
Also, before we get to our restaurant, because there is a lot to talk about with it.
Here, real quick.
Real quick.
If you think I should watch the teaser, hashtag tease yourself.
And if you think I shouldn't watch the teaser, hashtag go in cold.
Wait.
Can I suggest a different second teaser?
Please do.
Please.
What was it?
Tease yourself?
Tease yourself.
And then hashtag please-y-no-tease-y.
Okay.
Hashtag please-y-no-tease-y, if you want me to go in cold.
Tease yourself.
Hashtag tease yourself.
Hashtag tease yourself, Weiger.
I'm just saying tease you.
Just watch it.
And you're saying you use the hashtag on social media, I'll count it in the tally.
I'm not going to vote.
I think you've got a little bit of experience teasing yourself.
Oh boy.
That's me, alright.
Always jacking off.
Teasing myself.
Folks, it's funny because it's true.
The man loves to masturbate.
Oh boy.
There's nothing I love more than to get home after a hard day of work.
Tell my wife to leave me alone for a second, go into the home office, lock the door, go
to town.
And that's when the violence screams.
I'm rocked.
Mitch is murdering Kulopp's wife.
Kulopp's going to hear this and get scared.
Kulopp, I would never harm you.
No one would have.
That's why it's no one expected.
That's true.
She's one of the most delightful people anyone knows.
I could get away with a murder you guys are telling me.
You guys saw me try to pour a glass of water earlier.
Oh boy.
That was not a case of the Weigars.
Not a success.
You get on me for spilling a lot and I am a man who spills.
I don't have to do it.
Yes, because you do it constantly.
No, yeah.
I did it once.
You did.
But you had a spectacular spill.
It was very bad.
You had a two-handed pour into a glass.
It was also like just before, I really ate my words because I was like, I said something
like, I'll just pour a cup of water real quick or something insane.
Like I spelled it out that I was going to just quickly pour myself a glass of water.
Very simple task.
Yeah.
You poured it into the glass.
The glass toppled over.
The bottle toppled over.
The bottle toppled over.
No, I'm saying both of them did.
They both toppled over.
They spilled water everywhere and I think you went, uh-oh.
We said, it's okay, Mitch.
We got it.
You sort of pre-called it out.
It was like as though you had said, well, I never step in that paint bucket.
I was saying that it was very much like a very physical, you'd see Chris Farley do
something like that and you'd laugh, but if you saw this, it would just kind of make
you feel upset.
Yeah.
We were all just kind of sad for a second and then we all helped you out.
You did all help out, which I appreciate very much.
I got to say this, Nick, before we move on to the restaurant, there's just something
that we have to cover really quick.
Today, Nick Weiger said bagels are whack.
I walked it back a little bit.
I walked it back a little bit.
First of all, I'm glad you didn't say the thing, I'm glad the thing we have to cover
wasn't you bringing up once again, deflate gate, which is where I thought this was headed.
No.
This is, I mean, this should be bigger than deflate gate.
Yeah, this feels bigger than deflate gate to me.
Here's the thing.
Here's where I ultimately landed because you were very mad at me.
Our buddy, David Phillips, D.P. was very mad at me.
Evan Susser removed himself from the conversation because he couldn't handle it, but-
Fucking coward, Commissioner Susser.
Fucking coward.
Can I just say this, Nick?
You was on your side.
Why are you calling him a coward?
Move himself from it.
Can I say this, Nick?
Real quick.
Yes.
Because this is a real, I didn't, I hadn't heard about this.
Now, Nick, I knew a lot of things about you from listening to the podcast and from having
friends in common and we met each other once before.
Yeah.
I knew you were a talented, funny guy.
God bless you.
I knew you had a beautiful and charming wife that your friend Mike is sweet on.
You know, I knew that you had sometimes less affect than you would like in your speaking
voice.
Right.
I knew you used to work in video games.
That's true.
I didn't know you to be an anti-Semite.
Okay.
Here's the thing.
This is going to get conflated with anti-Semitism.
That's BS.
I understand the merit of bagels and here's where-
You're not against Jews.
Just bankers.
Okay.
Look.
Here's where I ultimately landed.
Bagels-
Nick, it's fine.
It's problematic to us.
No.
It's fine, but they're too heavy.
It's too much for one man.
Wait.
They're too physically heavy?
No.
They're- it's too heavy of a meal.
You have a hard time lifting a bagel.
No.
I can easily lift a bagel.
Look.
I used to have- this is- I got in this whole thing and I explain this all to you, Mitch.
You're making me rehash this on there.
Jesse, he's- he's- he's- he's very- what's the word I'm looking for?
I'm just stipulating wildly.
Ver- uh, Ver- Clempt?
Ver- Clempt.
Yes, I'm a little Ver- Clempt.
Jesus Christ.
Nick, bagels are too heavy?
We just ate like seven slices of shrimp and streusel pizza.
But we didn't have it for breakfast.
It's too heavy as a breakfast food.
What is the issue?
You used to like them.
I used to like them.
I used to have bagels every day.
I had bagels every day for breakfast.
My dad would make me a bagel every day before school.
He would put butter on it.
He would put cream cheese on top of the butter and then he would put jam on top of the cream
cheese and-
That's why your bagels are so fucking heavy.
Just eat it with just cream cheese.
Here's the thing.
Okay, I eventually learned that you didn't need both butter and cream cheese and also
jam on a bagel.
I eventually learned you could just get by with one spread.
Would you read it in a fucking book?
You learned that?
Look, you learn things from your family and you think that's how it's supposed to be done
and then you eventually learn- you realize there are other sources of information and
your parents aren't infallible.
In any event, my dad made me breakfast every day growing up.
He's a very good father, very loving-
You start to Google is this normal, dot, dot, dot.
Yes, I learned that that's not how you're supposed to have a bagel as a preparation.
That's not the issue.
As an adult man, before work, when I worked in the video game industry, as Jesse mentioned,
every day before work, I would either bring in a bagel and I would have it at the office
or for a time I was stopping in a very nice bagel shop in West L.A. on Sepulveda Boulevard
and I would go in there and I was a regular and they would know to get a salt bagel toasted
for me and to put some plain cream cheese on it and that was my regular, regular meal
before work with a cup of coffee and I did that every single day and you know what?
It was too heavy and I was too heavy.
I put on a lot of weight having that as my eating habit and I also was just worn down.
I need like a light meal.
You're coming to the waterworks.
No, there aren't any waterworks coming.
I'm just saying like I need like a little bit of protein, maybe of anything like some
fiber.
I don't need something that's just like starch that's just going to be a gut bomb that's
just going to sit inside of me and weigh me down.
Nick is more of a Jim or Tammy Faye baker.
Look, I'm just saying, where I said them, I said bagels are whack, that's like made
people mad.
I get that I shouldn't have said bagels are whack.
You really went in on it though.
I doubled down.
And anti-semitic.
And it might have been anti-semitic.
Look, it might have been anti-semitic, it's not, but I might have been perceived that
way.
I doubled down at first, which was a mistake.
The funny thing is that he is taking these accusations seriously.
We know it's not anti-semitic.
I know.
I'm just saying.
I doubled down at first, which was a mistake.
And then I walked it back to clarify my position and my official position on bagels is not
that bagels are whack.
Don't use that sound bite that Mitch took out of context and say that that is Wiger's dogmatic
take on bagels in the same way that you said that I hate fries and everyone thinks that
I hate fries now.
Hold on a second.
You admitted to this first of all.
Yes.
You really did say this.
Second of all, you said that English muffins in toast were better than bagels.
They are.
Stand by that.
And number three, everyone knows you hate fries.
Okay.
All right.
It's not worth denying.
Why are you trying to snowball all of that?
I love fries.
Here's where I landed and this is my official position.
Put this on the Doughboys Wikipedia.
Here's my official stance.
No one maintains the Doughboys Wikipedia anymore.
They stopped after the Dough Olympics.
We've been to this before.
Here's my official stance.
Bagels are good, but too heavy.
Can I respond with two words?
Yes.
Fake news.
Wow.
We know that you think bagels are wack because you're an anti-Semite.
That's true.
I am on board for this.
Okay.
You guys, Mitch told me about this.
He said you said that bagels are wack.
Right.
And he said that you said that bagel-ish folk control the world's banks.
Okay.
That's a fabrication.
That's another fabrication.
That's what you said.
When you talk to me about Susser, you say our bagel-ish friend.
That's more in reference to his shape, though.
He really should get that hole in the middle of himself, check that out.
Well, David's working.
We'll take a quick break.
We'll be right back with more Doughboys.
Welcome back to Doughboys.
We're here with Jesse Thorne.
So over the break, we took a little break.
The studio got a little warm.
We turned on the AC.
I stepped outside.
By the way, our little break is maybe two minutes.
I stepped out to about the length of the ads that you listen to.
I stepped outside to get our beverages for the next segment we're going to do after we
do our review.
And in the process of doing that, we chastised Mitch for this earlier, but I spilled something.
I want to say from our perspective, a wall separates us.
It sounded like a mad TV sketch was happening over there.
It sounded like an Inspector Clouseau movie, like a full Chris Farley scene.
It's like a Foley state.
I heard Mrs. Swan for mad TV.
It was like Letterman throwing one of his index cards through the invisible window.
Just this cacophony of clattering crash sounds came.
I thought I was being proactive because I anticipated a possible spill within the studio.
So I was like, oh, I'll grab some paper towels in case we spill anything when we're doing
these beverages.
And then as I was grabbing the paper towels, I knocked the paper towels off the rack.
Those fell into the sink.
Knocked over the dominoes.
Yeah.
As I tried to reach for the paper towels, I knocked over a glass that was sitting by
the sink.
Jesus.
It's okay.
Nothing broke.
Everything's fine.
It was sink-adjacent.
It was easy to clean up.
And the interest of full disclosure, we just wanted to address that.
So Mr. Pizza, what made you land on this one, Jesse?
This is a weird pick.
Very weird pick.
First of all, I just want to say that I'm sure that all of your tens of thousands of
listeners at home are wondering, is being on Doe Boys as great as they imagine it to
be?
The answer is yes.
This is a fucking joy.
I literally, I met John Waters this week, and this is the highlight of my week.
I want to make this clear.
When I first moved to Los Angeles for a number of years, I lived in Koreatown.
We're adjacent to Koreatown right now here in the Westlake District of Los Angeles.
One of the amazing things about Koreatown is it's one of the biggest Korean American
populations in the world.
It is the biggest Korean American population in the world.
One of the biggest populations of Korean people outside of Korea in the world.
Korea is like super America when it comes to consumer food culture.
Like all of these concepts and like the cycle of hype and people waiting in lines and stuff,
so dominates the culture of food in Koreatown.
There's a huge base.
There's all these different kinds of all quote-unquote authentic or traditional Korean restaurants,
but then there's this other layer of restaurants with logos that is constantly churning in
Koreatown.
It's kind of amazing to see.
When I was living here, this giant enormous pizzeria opened up and just had a huge sign
that said Mr. Pizza Factory.
All I could think was like, what happens there?
What's inside of Mr. Pizza Factory?
What magic exists therein?
It must be awful.
What country would you say is best known for pizza?
Wait, it's not Korea, right?
No.
No.
Who knows what's happening in there?
You know what I mean?
Right.
That is a fun side to it.
When I heard what we were going to do and I knew that you were the guest, I told you
this Jesse.
It makes the most sense of any episode we've ever done.
Do you think of me as like your eccentric uncle?
You're an interesting man and you're going to choose an interesting spot that maybe is
going to make me, it's going to be, what's the word I'm looking for?
It's not going to be easy for me to do it.
It's going to be a new experience.
Was hard the word you were looking for?
Yeah, hard.
Let's not be vulgar.
Say something too messing.
I was thinking, I was thinking, I was thinking, I was thinking uncomfortable in some sort
of way.
Right.
You're not a guy who makes people uncomfortable, but I'm saying you're an interesting man,
you like interesting things.
I knew this was going to be completely different and I have a hard time with some foods like
this place.
I have to say is that this place is different.
It is very, very different.
Absolutely.
And I think what you were speaking to a second ago, and one thing I will say is you absolutely,
this pick is 100% valid as a chain in a global sense because it is the biggest pizza restaurant
in Korea.
There are 400 locations in South Korea.
It's a genuine phenomenon worldwide.
There aren't a lot.
I think there's just a couple in North America.
Let me just say Jolly Bee was a cake walk.
Compared to this?
Well, here's what I was going to say.
I think, Jesse, I think you hit on an interesting point, which is that it's kind of the Italian
Americans gave us American pizza.
And then this is like a, it's like a multiplicity style copy of a copy where this is the Korean
interpretation of American style pizza, maybe even probably with some influence of the Japanese
interpretation of American style pizza.
So it's like pretty far removed from the original.
And you can definitely sense it in the types of pizza that they offer there on that menu.
This is a world, I think, like one of the interesting things about Korea Town in Los
Angeles is there's sufficient concentration of Korean American people here that you get
things like there's a lot of Korean style Chinese food here, which is a very distinct
thing from American Chinese food or whatever quote unquote authentic, the various regional
Chinese cuisines.
It's like its own thing and it's pretty good.
And so like you have this population of three, 400,000 people, something.
And so you get these really culturally specific things.
As you said, and it is like, it's like a funhouse mirror projection of America in the same way
that, you know, in this, I like, I'm a menswear writer.
And, you know, one of the things that's been really remarkable in menswear the last 10
years is the influence of the Japanese interpretation of Americana.
Oh, interesting.
And like this is in some ways that only, as you said, through a couple of generations
because it's Italian pizza reinterpreted as American pizza, reinterpreted as Japanese
pizza, reinterpreted as Korean pizza.
Right.
Yeah.
And to speak about what we were having specifically, so I'll get into these pizzas in one second.
We can talk a little bit more depth, but let me say this, please do.
So originally opened as Mr. Pizza Factory, I never went.
I couldn't get my wife to go with me.
Eventually, I looked it up and realized that they served crazy pizza.
So I was like, oh, great.
We have to go now.
Right.
My wife was just like, that will not be a good pizza restaurant.
We should not go to that.
We should go to this other pizza restaurant where the pizza's good.
So but then once it was crazy pizzas, I was like, I don't need to do that.
I have no need for food contests or challenges in my life.
Right.
Just eat things that I think will be tasty.
Your wife sounds very normal.
Yeah.
She's a sensible woman.
She'd be more than glad to eat adventurously if there was the promise of something good.
Right.
Yes.
And as the years have gone on, this restaurant stopped being Mr. Pizza Factory, eventually
became Mr. Pizza.
And when we went, they were in the middle of a grand open event as M Pizza.
They had just, they had clearly just chiseled off the R.
Yeah.
There was a gap where the R was.
Like there's a part of me that wonders if just letters have fallen off the facade and
they've just been like, fuck it, change the stationery.
Right.
Because in Korea, the brand is Mr. Pizza.
And so there must, I mean, the real, the more boring real explanation is probably that someone
no doubt owns the copyright for Mr. Pizza, the trademark for Mr. Pizza in the States.
And so they couldn't be Mr. Pizza and they tried a few different ways around it.
Now they've landed on M Pizza, which I think is very confusing.
Well, I mean, it's not that much more confusing than Mr. Pizza Factory.
I guess so.
But it is still a part of Mr. Pizza.
It is still a, it is still a part of Mr. Pizza, correct?
Yeah, it is.
It's, it's a, this is a version of that.
This is one of the U.S. branches of it.
So here are the pizzas we get, we got, we got the, we got two pizzas split into halves.
We got the half golden potato and half golden shrimp with sweet potato.
And those, sorry, half golden potato, half golden shrimp, and those were on the sweet
potato crust.
We also got half sweet and savory and half surf and turf.
Those were on the hash browns crust.
We got one small golden Cali burger pizza and just for shits and giggles, we got one
small conventional pepperoni pizza.
Let me talk a little bit in depth about what are the ingredients on these and then we'll
break them down.
Yes.
The golden potato has.
It's so thrilling to get to see you do this live.
There's so many components on these, like they're, they're preaching more is more.
There's so much stuff on these pizzas.
Watching Nick read these ingredients off of the picture he took on his cell phone.
I am as chew-messant as my engorgement cannot be overstated.
Jesse.
I am as hard as a diamond right now.
Jesse, I, I wish I could give all these experiences to you somehow.
I wish I could transfer the hours over of me watching Nick read menus aloud.
You're not, you're looking at your phone while I do this.
Do you know what though?
Yeah.
I do not look at my phone while we're in the, in the podcast.
That's true.
You're very good about that.
Unless I am looking up something that I need to look up.
I miss a little insider tip.
You didn't do your intro up top.
I do.
I sometimes record my intro later on.
Afterwards, but we're recording here.
Why don't you just record it?
Well, I figured I'd record it later.
The mics, the mics, the mics aren't going to match.
People are going to complain.
Yeah.
No, it'll be fine.
They're going to say what's wrong with Nick's timbre.
Yeah.
We do that.
We record this a lot this way.
We record the podcast and then record my intro afterwards so we don't keep our guests waiting.
I think, I think that the, he would love to hear the intro.
I would have loved that.
Look, I didn't write my intro, okay?
Oh my God.
I didn't write it yet.
We're recording again tomorrow and so I figured I had to work today and instead of doing it
like while I was working, I decided to focus on my work and I'll finish my intro tonight
after we wrap and then we'll record it tomorrow at another session.
Nick, a lot of folks support your Patreon and they do it because they appreciate your
commitment to this show.
Withdraw.
Yeah.
Get out of the Patreon.
Wait a minute.
This is bad for me.
You know, I'm, I'm, I don't, maybe it's an over, no, it's not.
I'm crestfallen.
You know, I, I did, I did a lot to be here tonight.
You know, I have three children.
I have a two month old baby.
No, you're a very, very busy man.
My wife said I'm sick.
Nick.
I don't know if I mentioned that to you.
You didn't mention that.
She's sick.
Sorry to hear that.
She's got to go to San Francisco to do a live performance of her podcast, One Bad Mother,
this weekend.
And she has a book out, right?
And she's got a brand new book out called, You're Doing a Great Job.
And so it was a lot to, it was a lot, it was a big, it was what they call a heavy lift
for my family, for me to be here.
Right.
And what I promised them was, don't worry, honey, daddy will come home.
And when he comes home, he will have heard live in person.
Nick Weiger do one of his legendary, grand eloquent, hyper verbose, historically minded,
semi-comical introductions.
Semi.
You got to, you got to put a emphasis on semi-comical.
All right.
Let me, comedy-like introductions.
They're more, they're informational.
Comedy.
Comedy-like is good.
And he's got kids at home.
And you've disappointed me.
So I'm going to go home to my, I have a five-year-old daughter named Grace, I have a three-year-old
son named Oscar and of course, baby Curtis.
And I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to gather them together and I'm going to say, Daddy's
got bad news.
Nick Weiger let you down.
Nick.
That's sad stuff.
Like, look, I'm sorry, yes, I have, I have a kind of written, I just didn't connect
all the, I'm holding my family.
I'm holding my family together right now with paste and twine.
It's like, it's like, it's wrapped up in brown paper, tied up with paste and twine and you
just threw it in the river.
God, and they call me the unprepared one.
Yeah.
You know, Mitch.
You are the unprepared one.
Wow.
Mitch is the paragon of professionalism compared to what we've seen here for you today, Nick.
And do I know what paragon means?
No.
But I know that.
You know what, Nick?
Yes, you do.
Yeah.
But you're not going to tell us.
I'm not going to tell you.
And you know what?
I didn't disappoint this man today.
No.
When he gets home and he says, Daddy, Daddy, did you have a fun day?
You know what?
Mitch gave him that part of his day.
I gave him a fun day.
Mitch gave me exactly what I expected.
He showed up 25 minutes late.
That's part of the experience.
That's part of the experience.
You're right.
It's what you, what you thought you were getting.
I would not.
It would not have been me being on the Doe Boys had Mitch been on time.
Right.
That was my greatest fear.
What if, what if I get to the restaurant and Mitch is already there?
Right.
What if I don't have to, what if Weigert doesn't have to text Mitch to find out what he wants
to order?
When I, when I was, do you know the reason I was late today?
I was so nervous.
I wanted to just do a good job for Jesse to have him have this go perfectly.
I was thinking about all that and I was just thinking, I hope that Nick does his intro
and he does a good intro.
Okay.
I actually, I'm sorry, give me just a second because I just got a text message.
Hold on.
Oh, it's from, it's from my wife.
It says, um, I hope you're having fun at the Doe Boys.
I am.
I'm having a great time.
Okay.
Um, and then it says, uh, it says, I hope, uh, I hope that Mitch is late and, um, I hope
you get to hear him, uh, refer to a friend of his from high school that no one's ever
heard of.
Two for two.
And that at some point he shoe horns the words Quincy, Massachusetts into the conversation.
That did happen here.
Three for three.
It says, and I, and I can't wait to hear, uh, some of the amazing historical facts that
Nick included in his famous introduction.
Hmm.
Oh.
Well.
Wow.
I'm, I hold on.
I have to go out for cigarettes and you're never going to come back.
I don't think I can face them.
Wow.
Well, you did it again.
You should head.
You know what?
This will be, look, no one would have at home would have known if you hadn't spoken up.
We could have just recorded this later.
You should do it for us again.
I liked them.
I missed them.
That's why I brought it up.
You like me doing it at the top of the podcast.
I think it informs the rest of the episode.
Okay.
I'll start doing it again.
I'm prepared before we start recording.
I'll do it while our guest is sitting there or at least while you're here before our
guest arrives.
Okay.
And we'll, we'll, we'll make that our policy.
So thank you Mitch.
That's good to know.
I thought they were a waste of everyone's time, which I, it was why I reserved them
to the end of the record after everyone else.
And you should probably apologize to Jesse and his family as well.
Jesse, I'm sorry to you and your beautiful family that I didn't deliver the full though
boys experience that you expected.
I'm here.
Let's just finish the show.
Okay.
The, the golden potato pizza here, the, here's the list of ingredients.
There's a lot.
I like if we all just had this tone for the rest of the podcast, downbeat tomato sauce,
mozzarella cheese, mushrooms, ground beef, corn, onions, potato wedges, bacon, nacho
chips, flakes, sour cream and gold crust nacho chips, flakes, nacho chips, flakes.
The golden shrimp pizza, which is the other one that was split down the middle on this,
the same crust, sweet chili sauce, mozzarella cheese, Cajun shrimp, corns, mushrooms, onions,
bell pepper, olive, gold crust.
I'm sorry.
Was that corn's plural?
Corn's plural.
There are, there are some, some mild typos on this menu.
Oh, okay.
I didn't know if that meant like there were different types of corn.
No, I think, well, it might, it might be, but I think it's, it's more likely to be a
typo.
Okay.
Um, the sweet and savory pizza, which I mentioned, condensed milk sauce, corn, pineapple, sweet
potato, diced, bacon bits, almond flakes, streusel, cranberry, emmental cheese, hash brown
crust.
The other one, the hash brown crust was the surf and turf, which was Italian sauce, bell
pepper, onions, ribeye steak, Cajun shrimp, cream cheese, blue cheese, emmental cheese,
and that hash brown crust, as I mentioned, a lot going on on these pizzas.
I love a pizza with a nice Italian sauce.
Jesse, no, we just, we just, we just leaned into Nick for a little bit there, but uh,
what in the fuck?
What did you do?
Why did we eat this?
Yeah, it was a little intense.
What in the fuck was this?
What?
It is, it was an amazing experience.
It really was.
It was a very interesting experience.
I, I, it is so, it, it's, it's one of the most, it's just so fucking rich.
Right.
It's insanely rich.
Every bite you take of it, you're like, oh my God, there's a, feels like a thousand
different things going on in your mouth.
So many components.
Like what, every bite not only tastes like a thousand things going on in your mouth,
but a thousand things selected at random at a 7-eleven.
Like, just everything tastes like salt and sugar and plastic.
Yeah.
You, you made a great point of, you know, like, oh, all these individual ingredients,
I'm like, I don't have an issue with any of them.
And then you said that all of these individual ingredients, like none of them are gourmet.
Like none of them are good.
None of them are good.
None of them were like gross.
Yes.
Like to be clear, none of them were gross, but it's like something, I, when I said we
should go there, having never been there, I imagined it to be like the cheesecake factory
of Korea, not the apple bees of Korea or below the shakies of Korea.
Yeah.
Not competent, nothing genuinely disgusting, but no one element suggested that it hadn't
been poured out of a bag in the freezer.
That's fair.
Yeah.
I mean, go on.
I would say, what do you think?
Do you think, are you going to be in defense of it and say that it's slightly better than
some places or what?
I would say that it's, it certainly was, I didn't think it was trashy.
I thought it was like, these were, this was well prepared.
I don't think they were, like you were saying, I don't think they were gourmet ingredients.
I don't think this was anything that was farmed to table or anything that would qualify
as that.
But I mean, I think it was, these were well prepared pizzas that certainly were very pleasing
to the eye.
I feel like aesthetically, they looked really interesting.
They did.
I'll give an example of what I mean when I say this.
Yeah.
So the first, our starter, which I don't know if you read, but was a bulgogi fries.
Yeah.
I jumped straight to the pizzas, but the bulgogi fries we started with, it was a real highlight
for me.
Those were delicious.
And I expected to see, you know, bulgogi is a, the signature marinated meat of Korean
barbecue, right?
It's like, if anybody out there has had Korean barbecue, you probably had bulgogi.
I expected to see, you know, that kind of like thinly sliced eye of round or whatever,
you know, like a classic.
And in fact, it was a sort of ground meat that was sort of like the meat you would find
in a fast food burrito or something.
It made me think of a Philly cheesesteak.
Yeah.
It was like shredded.
Taco Bell.
It was like a Taco Bell shredded beef.
Yeah.
And it was, it was indeed tasty.
And the sauce on it, I expected to be cheese when in fact it was like a, it was like a
7-Eleven cheese sauce.
Yeah.
It came out of a pump there.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Which also, there's something to be said for that.
Yeah.
For a pump cheese.
Yes.
I also, I thought the fries, I was like, maybe they're going to be weird, turn out to be
my favorite thing, I will say.
They were very conventionally, like that was for, to me, I don't know if that was intended
for an American palette, but it was a very American dish.
Like this, it felt like this could have been at an Applebee's.
Yeah.
It sort of ended up tasting mostly like a kind of nacho fries things and had jalapenos
in there.
Yeah.
And the sweetness of the bulgogi was kind of downplayed by the fact that it was underneath
this pool of yellow cheese.
So it sort of tasted like nacho fries, which, let's be honest, you do a lot of fucking worse
than nacho fries.
Yeah.
Exactly.
It was, I was genuinely excited to try the pizzas after we ate the bulgogi fries.
Yeah.
And I don't know if I turned on that, by the way.
Also, we got just a regular, a small pepperoni pizza with a regular crust.
Yeah.
I mentioned that and also the other pizza that we had, the description I didn't read,
the Golden Cali Burger.
Yes.
Thousand Island Dressing, American Cheese, Juicy Burger Patty, Grilled Onions and Bacon,
Mixed Salad, Tomato, Avocado and again on that cold crust.
Here's the thing.
You order something like that.
Yeah.
You think, hey, at least we're going to have this one.
It's going to be different, but it's not going to be weird.
But no.
You weren't thinking that ordering an In-N-Out Burger as a pizza would be weird.
I thought that it would be the most normal thing that we had.
Mixed salad is one of the toppings on that pizza.
They do not lie.
It is mixed salad.
Yeah.
There's a lot of salad on the pizza and it's almost hot.
Right?
Right.
It was like warm lettuce.
I feel like it was hot.
Yeah, it was.
Should we start by addressing their signature crusts?
Yeah.
So here's what's going on with the crust.
You reach the end of it and the first of all, the crust is very flimsy.
It doesn't hold up.
Like if you hold that slice, it just sort of like falls straight down.
It's real droopy.
It doesn't have much substance to it.
And so...
Not funny, like droopy the dog.
No.
Oh, God, droopy's hilarious.
It's like the anti-heath glyph.
Weier, did you put your head back and genuinely laugh at droopy right?
Yeah, it was funny.
He made a funny joke.
Oh, I thought you were laughing at droopy.
No, we're laughing because you're a funny comic performer.
You compared a slice of pizza to droopy the dog.
It's ridiculous.
You're a professional entertainer.
Maybe you laughed by virtue of surprise.
You're quite good at it.
Yeah.
You're quite good at your job, Mitch.
That's why everyone loves you so much.
Hold on a second.
Is Nick fucking with me?
No.
I'm being genuine.
Not the slightest.
That was very fun.
Look.
Now, granted, whether Nick is fucking with you or not, does he just say it kind of like
this?
Can he only modulate the volume of his voice?
Okay.
Yes.
You didn't give me any hand stuff there, so I had no idea.
No, that was fun.
But you reached the end of the cross.
Nick, can you do me a favor?
Yes.
Can you just say, at some point, not right now, can you talk about the restaurant's concept?
Just use the word concept a couple times.
Right.
So that I can achieve what we're going to do.
Okay.
I got you.
Got it.
So, yeah.
So we're going through it, and you reach the end of the cross, and the cross is kind
of like, you kind of bite into it, and the way I describe this in the restaurant is,
and the restaurant, I would say, it's kind of, the concept is kind of like a, it felt
like a sports bar inside.
It's kind of like that kind of, like interior wise, it felt like it has a sports bar concept,
but the actual food that they're serving.
There you go.
There's that good concept.
Food that they're serving is more akin to like a Korean California pizza kitchen, and
it's really going.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very, very good analog.
So anyway, so you reach the end of the cross, and the way to describe this in the restaurant
is, it's like biting into a savory version of a McDonald's apple pie.
It's just got like hot kind of, not really sweet, but just sort of slightly sweetened
potato inside of it.
You are not going out of the park because that is 100% correct.
And it's really hot, too.
That potato is really hot inside.
It's steaming hot.
Here's the thing.
I was saying to the guys when we were there, I am trucking through this pizza, a lot of
different flavors.
I'm trying to get to that crust so I can have this normal thing that mixes with all these
crazy flavors we have.
Again, I'm just going to interject here, and this is an aside to Nick.
Note that Mitch is looking forward to the normalcy of a pizza crust stuffed with sweet
potato paste.
And that was my issue.
I had either just forgotten or expected it to be a little bit more normal than it was.
And I rushed to this crust, and I take a big bite, and hot potato filling goes in my mouth.
And it was one of those instances where, one, I questioned why we do the show.
And two, I was like, what can I eat now?
But be honest, Mitch, you question why you do this show like when you get a haircut.
I question it too much.
Because of experiences like this, it was interesting and different, but I had nowhere
to go.
I wanted to go to something normal.
I wanted to go to something that wasn't going 1,000 miles per hour.
You're saying that you lack the emotional capacity to deal with this restaurant.
100 percent.
I was going to eat some of the garlic bread again, just because I wanted something, some
sort of base.
I had a poptail, which was a popsicle cocktail.
What was it?
Was it a strawberry flavor?
It was a strawberry popsicle that had real strawberry chunks in it.
And then soju.
And then soju.
Which I think is a rice wine.
A rice wine.
And so it was just literally a popsicle in this cup with soju.
Yeah, the popsicle stick was sticking out the top of it.
Yes.
And the popsicle was good, and the soju was good, but also it was like it wasn't a pallet
cleanser.
It wasn't something that I could go back to.
And it was kind of, they should have put an ice in it still, because it was kind of
still warm.
I had the same issue.
I got the Tropical Sangria, and it was lukewarm.
There were like two ice cubes in it, and it was not enough to keep it cool.
And it's so weird, because that's the sort of drink that just really would benefit from
being ice cold.
Is that a cultural thing?
I feel like Americans are obsessed with cold drinks.
I don't think I'm making that up.
I have heard that.
I have heard that.
I say that as a guy obsessed with cold drinks.
No, I have heard the U.S. has, the U.S. is what's weird in this particular case, and
in many cases, but in terms of ice, like the U.S. has this obsession with ice, and that
you don't really see it in Europe and other parts of the world.
So there was literally nowhere to go to, like an ice cold drink, I feel like, would have
been helpful.
No, you just had some warm punch.
A warm punch that was also weird in the end of it.
With a popsicle sticking out of it.
With a popsicle sticking out of it, literally.
So, this was really, it lived up to...
You're unmoored.
It was really crazy.
You're a man of drift, even more than usual.
I love pizza.
I love pizza.
So, and you know what?
I will say...
I believe you, Mitch.
I don't have to tell anyone twice.
That's the realest pitch Mitch has ever been on this show.
God damn it.
I truly...
You're like, the thing with burritos in the mission, pizza for me, that...
I love...
And God bless it.
One of nature's greatest miracles.
It's one of the best.
It was just this weird, demented version of it.
The regular pizza was fine.
It wasn't great, but I just...
It's unnerving to think about the country of people who...
This is the popular style, right?
Yeah, it was, I think, it was kind of like the Twilight Zone wish-fulfillment version
of pizza.
Yeah.
It was like pizza, and this is what was delivered to you, was this corrupted version that was
close to what you wanted, but was like just a demonic twist on it.
It was like a pizza you would get in a dream, where you order a pizza and then it's in
front of you and it doesn't make sense.
It's all things you know, but it doesn't...
You're like, well, sure, M and taller, geez, I'm familiar with.
Well, you're like, well, what is that, like, sure I know about juicy California-style
cheeseburgers, why is that in this pizza, like, and you wouldn't be able to reconcile
it in your dream, and you would go mad?
Yes.
It was very...
It's a very strange experience.
Should we break them down?
I would say, if I may, that the unstated in topping on all of these pizzas, the one thing
that ties them all together is incipient madness.
I 100% agree with that.
And you know what?
I don't like madness on my pizza.
Give me some madness-free pizza from here on out, because I...
So I'll just quickly talk about the...
You're not Clive Barker.
You don't want a mouth of madness.
Oh my God.
I don't even know what that is.
Is that him in the mouth of madness?
Is that him or is that...?
Maybe that was Wes Craven.
Hold on, I'm gonna get up.
Nick Weigler was so happy when he said that, it really made me feel good.
Is that maybe possibly Carpenter?
Wait, I don't know.
I just want you guys to be happy.
That's like a lot of your listeners.
Sam Neal was in it.
I just care for you guys.
Michael DeLuca wrote the screenplay, interesting, very, very successful screenplay.
It's basically a Stephen King character.
I just want you guys to feel good about your wonderful show and your great talent.
It will never, it will never happen.
It was John Carpenter.
It was Carpenter.
Okay, well we'll edit me saying John Carpenter into it.
Yeah, because I was right and you were wrong.
That movie is very funny where it's like, his character's name is something funny.
It's like, not a Stephen King, you should open up right now and see what his name is.
Sam Neal's character, he's supposed to be like a Stephen King.
John Trent.
John Trent.
That is very, that is a very Stephen King one-to-one thing.
Just for the audience at home, that made Mitch very sincerely happy and I liked that too.
Surf and turf pizza.
I took a bite of it.
It was like ground beef and shrimp and a billion styles of cheese.
I like cheese.
I bit in, I went through a cream cheese blob.
I hit like a blue cheese blob.
It was in, like it was one of those things where I was like, I don't, like I was just
thinking about it as I was chewing it and all these things I like and I didn't know
if I could swallow it.
It was, it was, it was fucking intense.
I took a, I took a bite of that and got a cream cheese blob and I was so confused and
upset that I just put that slice down and never looked at it again.
The smart thing to do.
Guys, I kind of like the blobs.
You liked the blobs?
I was kind of into them.
That's cool.
I was like, I like getting these concentrated sections of soft cheese.
Nothing to get between a boy and his blob, am I right?
That's insane.
You liked the blob.
Yeah, I liked it.
I thought the blobs were pretty good.
That was by far my least favorite pizza.
Here's what I didn't like.
I didn't like about that one.
I didn't like about the golden shrimp.
I just didn't like the shrimp and cheese.
It was just like the Cajun shrimp plus just especially the, the, the softer cheese that
I mentioned.
It just like, it was really a perturbing combination.
It just didn't feel like it worked.
Nick has a really deep emotional, deep seated emotional aversion to the combination of shrimp
and cheese.
Yes.
He talked about this in the restaurant.
I was thinking about like, would I eat a shrimp quesadilla?
I was like, yes, please, please serve me one right now.
Yes.
I was describing how that is something that like, he wakes up from dreams and a cold sweat
that someone has brought him some Gruyere and a shrimp.
Yeah, yeah, you have a huge aversion to this.
Seafood, I think seafood and cheese in general is something to stay away from.
I get it.
Sometimes it works, but I think in general it's...
But also a shrimp quesadilla sounds...
Shrimp quesadilla sounds dope, right?
I'd rather have shrimp tacos and a plain quesadilla.
Fair enough.
We're not giving you that option, okay?
Yeah.
Okay, then I won't have anything.
I'll just have some chips and some water.
Really?
You're going to starve to death?
No, there's chips and sauce on the table.
Oh, you're going to have salsa, too?
Yeah, I have chips and salsa.
Also, why don't you just invite yourself?
Would you like some guacamole?
I probably would order some guacamole.
Oh, okay.
Would you like some enchiladas?
Why don't you have some enchiladas?
That's why I read it.
That's probably what I'd do is I'd probably get some guacamole for the table and then
I'd probably go with like some cheese enchiladas.
Also, I just quickly ask, if he didn't eat, he would die.
What scenario is this?
Can I get a couple marks, too?
Can we get a round of marks for the table?
Oh, yeah, I'd probably go, I might go top shelf and I'd definitely get salt and on
the rocks.
Oh, Jesus.
Great.
Well, this sounds like a great meal.
Yeah, it sounds good.
We worked it out.
It sounds better than what we had tonight.
Right.
By the way, that second shrimp pizza, cocktail sauce.
Really weird.
That was that sweet.
Based instead of tomato sauce.
Very disorienting.
The sweet chili sauce tasted like a sweet cocktail sauce.
Yeah, it was really weird.
Now, I have to say, I want to say this because some people might get the impression that
because I described this as the kind of food that would be served to you in a nightmare
that I hated all of it.
Honestly, I didn't hate any of it.
I can't say that I want to eat it again, but everything except for that mouthful of
cream cheese that I wasn't expecting, I was like, huh, okay.
Right.
It was all very interesting.
I finished everything.
There were a lot of half slices left on the table for people taking a few bites and baling,
but I ate everything that I put on my plate.
Clean plate club for you tonight.
Clean plate club for me.
CBC.
And I'm not a big eater.
I liked it.
CBC.
Hell yeah.
I liked all of it.
I thought it was weird and it was unsettling, but I agree with Jesse.
It was intriguing.
My two favorites.
It wasn't bored.
My two favorites.
I actually didn't love the burger pizza.
I think my least favorite was the surf and turf.
I agree with you there.
Then the shrimp one, then the burger pizza, weirdly enough because I thought that would
be one of my favorites.
That salad is just not great on there.
And then after that, probably the sweet pizza which had condensed milk on it and just was
very dessert-like, even though that was also fucking hard to get through.
The dried cranberries were probably the weirdest part about that.
Just seeing craisans on a pizza, I was like, man, this is inappropriate.
One of the most interesting things about this place, and it's something that I think speaks
to what's special about it, is that you would think that what was weird about Mr. Pizza Factory,
the Korean pizza chain, is that you would be served something that a Western palate
doesn't understand.
Yes.
Like that there would be those dried plums that people eat in Asia, the dried salted
plums, or there would be dried squids, or there would be one of those fermented fish
sauces, or something that is a flavor that is unfamiliar to the American palate, and
that is why it is weird.
But in fact, it really is, every one of these pizzas could be made from shit.
You buy at 7-Eleven.
Yeah.
Literally none of that weird stuff.
There were no real weird ingredients.
There were no unconventional ingredients.
It was just an unconventional combination of ingredients we know.
It's like if someone Googled the top 20 foods in America, the 20 most popular foods in America,
and then just read that list and then just put all of them on the same pizza.
I think it must be what it's like if you are born and raised in China, and then you're
dropped off in, say, Quincy, Massachusetts, and you eat some of the East Coast's famous
East Coast-style Chinese food.
Yes.
Sure.
No, no, no.
They would love it.
You'd be like, I recognize all of these things, but I'm not sure what this is.
Right.
It's just a group of the things.
I shouldn't speak for China as a country, but they would love it.
Let's get to our final thoughts.
Jesse, you do the podcast, you do all this work, so I'll go around.
We'll say our piece and give our closing argument and then rate this chain on the order of one
to five forks.
You're our guest.
We will start with you.
Wow, guys.
Well, it's a real honor to be on the fork scale with you boys.
Every week at home, I'm rating restaurants on forks, even ones I haven't eaten at, just
so that I can play along with my favorite podcast friends.
Which is good to know.
We're actually creating an at-home game where you can rank with forks too.
It's a box with five forks in it.
How much are we charging for a kick?
$80.
Yeah.
Five plastic forks.
I mean, if all those kickstarters for new kinds of wallets work, why not this box of forks?
Some of the most, incidentally, some of the most successful kickstarters ever have been
for card games and board games.
People go apeshit trying to donate to those things.
People love a type of board game.
You don't have to tell me about it.
One time, Jordan said he doesn't like Cards Against Humanity on Jordan and Jesse Goh,
and we lost half our audience.
Oh, my God.
It was a cataclysmic event.
People are passionate about those games.
Michael and I love Cards Against Humanity.
Keep tuning in, everybody.
There's nothing I like to settle like Catan.
I'm going to say that I was surprised by a couple of things.
I was surprised that it was relatively low-end.
Not very low-end.
It was, as you said, a perfectly nice sports bar atmosphere, and everything was perfectly
fine quality-wise, but I expected it to be a little ritzier, and that surprised me.
I was surprised at how American all of the flavors were in their bizarro combinations.
I was surprised that I didn't hate anything that I ate.
Nothing that I ate I hated, even though I was barely recognizable as pizza.
It was this bizarre list of things.
That said, I also did not like anything that I ate.
In the bulgogi fries, which were the real hit, I wouldn't choose to eat again, but I'm
glad that I did it.
I'm glad that I went there.
They were very nice there.
It was really nice at the table next to us.
There was what was obviously a divorced dad in the midst of a disastrous attempt to impress
his child by bringing him to a pizza restaurant, not realizing they had brought him to a cream
cheese-based pizza restaurant.
Overall, it was an enjoyable experience, not necessarily one I would choose to repeat.
I'm going to give it two and a half forks.
Okay, two and a half forks.
Go ahead, Mitch.
Jesse hit a lot of good points here.
The service was great.
They were very super, super nice to us, asking if we liked it.
I think they know at this place that this is a different kind of pizza.
It's a different sort of place.
How do you judge a place like that?
It's very hard for me, because what am I going to give it?
Zero forks?
I can't, just because it was such a different experience as an entire country that loves.
It's waiting to hear how many forks.
There's an entire country that this is how they do pizza.
This is how they do it, and this is what they love, but how does Mr. Pizza rank for them?
It's very popular, apparently.
Yes, it would be fun to go here with friends and try some things out.
Definitely get some sort of regular-based pizza.
We got the small, which I don't think it's fair to judge on, because it felt very much
like a ballpark pizza, the pepperoni pizza.
It was still kind of odd, and maybe it was just after eating all that stuff, but it still
felt like a little off for whatever reason.
My favorite was the golden potato, which is their signature pizza, right?
The golden potato or whatever.
Even that was very hard to work through.
The cocktail was decent, but not cold enough, and the bulgogi fries were my favorite thing
of the entire meal.
That all being said, how the hell do I rate this?
Because I don't want to eat that food again, and I literally had trouble getting it down,
and I-
You came very close to a full emotional collapse.
I have.
Over the course of this podcast.
As we've heard.
Yes.
It was tough to get some of this stuff down, and I eat weird stuff, by the way.
I've eaten bugs.
I was telling Jesse this, I've eaten a lot of weird- I've eaten prepared bugs, Weigher.
I know you were looking at me like I just-
We get it, Mitch.
You're not racist.
I'm not racist, like Weigher, in a minute, and I- I just- I couldn't deal with this.
It was too- it's too insanely rich, and so for that reason, I got to give it two forks,
because it's almost like a- it's like a novelty thing.
You know what I mean?
Right.
I'm not- I'm not going to go here to get food.
I'm not going to go here for a regular pizza, but it's interesting, and it's different,
and I understand people who- who like it.
It's just- it's not for me.
Yeah.
I- I- you guys both make great points, and I agree with a lot of what you're saying,
and I'm not just going to repeat these same points again, because I think we're on the
same page here.
Thank you, Nick.
Thank you.
You hack.
What?
No, I'm just saying, you guys made good points.
I mean, get- get your own ideas, but yeah, thank you.
That's fucking Christ.
Why are you w- this is- whatever.
Look.
Oh, it's so fun to be on this show with you guys.
Look.
Here's the thing.
I agree with you.
The drink was warm.
The service was great.
Weird flavors that I was intrigued by.
I wasn't expecting, but it kind of would be- would be down for again.
Really?
And I think this place has some novelty- novelty value as you got a friend in town who's maybe
an adventurous eater, and you're like, hey, you want to try something a little crazy?
A little off the beaten path?
You can take him to this Korean pizzeria.
You would go back.
I would absolutely go back to take somebody who was interested in trying it.
And I agree with you that the golden potato pizza with that sweet potato crust, it was
weird, but I actually liked that one.
I kind of liked everything.
Some of it was strange.
Some of it was unsettling, but it kept me interested and it kept me engaged the entire
time.
Here's how I'm going to do my fork rating.
Okay, wow.
I can't hear about this.
Yeah, what?
We wouldn't be able to do this record tonight if Jesse hadn't volunteered his studio because
our producer Dustin was unavailable, Ferrell's remaining engineers were unavailable, they're
doing a lot of voiceover recording right now over at Starburn, so people were booked up.
But Jesse volunteered to let us use Max Fun, and our engineer Christian came to the meal
with us, a lovely, lovely man, nice bit of company, and we couldn't do this without him.
So Christian, I am giving you my fork score.
Wow.
How many forks would you rate?
This is Christian, come on in.
Mr. Pizza.
Come inside.
Come inside and use my microphone.
Christian gave us a weirded-out look when he said he was a lovely man.
He is a lovely man.
He is a very lovely man.
We like him a lot.
Christian, step on up to the mic.
You can step on up to...
Yeah, Mitch's mic is great.
That'll get the job done.
Christian, overall, what were your thoughts and what would your fork rating be for Mr.
Pizza?
I thought...
I kind of have the same thoughts that everybody else here had.
Don't be a hack.
It's like, I would go back, but with somebody who...
I'm just...
Yeah, we would be like, you want to try some weird shit, because this is really weird shit.
So I would give it three forks.
Wow.
Yeah, I think the golden, whatever, their signature pizza was actually...
I actually really like that pizza.
Right.
The bacon was not the best, but it was definitely a serviceable pizza.
Yeah, the rest of it was...
Garbage.
Yeah.
Yeah, you take one bite of it and you're like, okay, I know how this is.
Next one, please.
Even the pepperoni pizza was not the best, not even great good.
So yeah, I think three.
I had returned, but only for shits and giggles.
Perfect.
Christian, we're on the same page.
I wanted to point out that you can also get this delivered, which seems like the worst
possible way to consume this pizza.
Oh my God.
When I made it to your house, it would not be a pizza, it would be a stew.
Yeah.
Yeah, that crust is so thin and insubstantial.
Stop being...
It would be as bouillabaisse of some kind.
Three forks.
Wow.
Thank you, Christian.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Christian.
Thank you, Christian.
Nicley Alsop.
Shout outs.
I love it.
To his colleagues at MaxFun.
Hey, you know, a quick shout out right here.
In case we have any Doe Boys listeners, I know we have listeners around the globe.
If we have any Doe Boys listeners in South Korea, hit us up with hashtag Dorya.
Dorya?
Yeah.
It sounds like diarrhea kind of.
Dorya.
Okay, well, don't...
That's what happens after you listen to our podcast, you get Dorya.
You get...
Wait, you get Dorya from listening to our podcast?
Like your ears are just trying to shit out all the garbage you just put in your brain?
Yeah, it's like one of those non-projectile weapons that the Army tests on people.
Quick shout out for me, too.
What's up to Chankton, Frailbott, Dano, Justin, the rest of the gang.
Everybody listens.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, keep listening names.
Clamps, Jimbott, Little Pete, Jimbott.
There's only one bot.
It's Frailbott.
Right.
Jimbott would be cool.
A fuck hammer.
I want to say what's up to all my buddies.
I've seen Francisco want to say what's up to Frowey, Snake, Shank, Farts Up, Potsey,
the Fonds, Joni, Chachi.
These are all real people.
I believe you.
Corporal.
My college buddy, Steve, Hanko, Randy, Poove, the rest of them.
Coach.
Dolbert.
You know what?
I take offense to your guys' fake names.
Mine are very real.
We believe you.
Caroline, the city.
The guy with glasses who was her boyfriend?
Herman's head.
This is fucked up.
We've got a beverage and we're going to decide if it's worth pouring down your throat.
It's a regular segment, Drank or Snake.
Mitch, you did a great job.
You got us some great beverages for this segment.
Thank you.
Tell us what you have for us.
I got us the first one out of the batch, Mountain Dew Green Label.
Oh, boy.
Curiously Daring Do.
This is a Daring app, apparently.
It says do with crafted green apple kiwi.
Then I also got us...
Wait, crafted?
That's what it says.
Like, I don't know, fucking put craft in there.
Millennials love that shit.
These are very confusing because they seem alcoholic, but they are not.
In fact, there's this other one, Mountain Dew spiked.
It says right below non-alcoholic, a splash of real fruit juice spiked with prickly pear
cactus juice and no artificial sweeteners.
This is how dew does lemonade.
So it's a lemonade.
Okay, yes, it's Mountain Dew spiked lemonade.
So I'm looking...
I'm pouring some Mountain Dew Green Label here.
Are we going to do that third one as well?
Yeah, we'll do the third one as well.
This is bright green.
It's terrifying.
You hand that back my way.
Then also, this is Mountain Dew White Label, do with crafted tropical citrus.
Crafted is in there again.
Hey, guys, I want to propose a toast to friendship.
Oh, of course.
That's very nice of you.
Mountain Dew.
To friendship.
May we all one day know it's warm.
Here we go.
Bottoms up.
Oh, boy.
I mean, I tell you, that's pretty good.
The green color is so, so strong.
It's like ectoplasm.
What is it?
It's like gack.
It's the color gack.
You got my surprise there.
It's like a very thin gack.
It's like something that should be bubbling through a long series of clear glass tubes
in a scientist's laboratory on a children's television.
It's not that far off from the reanimator, if anyone's ever seen that movie.
Nick, I think you're right.
It looks like if you were a child and you left your gack out in the sun,
I think this is what it would look like.
It's very green.
I don't necessarily pick up a lot of green apple in the flavor, but it is good.
It does have some apple.
It's a surprisingly light flavor, I would say.
I was surprised that it didn't kick me in the nards more.
Right.
I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as a light flavor overall,
but I was expecting something overbearing based on the ridiculous color.
Definitely.
And in fact, it's a light and refreshing apple-ish flavor.
And it's not very syrupy either.
Well, that was the green label.
Now, here's the white label.
Mysteriously exotic dew, which is trademarked.
Oh, I guess dew is trademarked.
So this is more of a tropical citrus.
A tropical citrus.
Very different color.
You'll notice.
I am so glad that these things are crafted,
because I am tired of machine-made soda ice.
You can really taste the hand of man on these.
You know what?
This is a very specific color.
This is the color of the stuff that's in the tanks of the Precogs and Minority Report.
Yes.
It's like this off-white.
It's like that milk protein, like, gruel that they lived their lives in
while they predict the murders that are going to happen.
It's essentially a sort of jizz water.
It is a jizz water.
It is definitely a jizz water.
And Weigar, I knew you were thinking that in your head.
Why didn't you just say it was like a jizz water?
No, I actually didn't go to jizz water.
I was thinking the Minority Report thing.
I guess they're basically sleeping in jizz.
Weigar was thinking about how crafted this is.
All that it takes to make one of these do's is one man with a passion for soda pop,
an anvil and a hammer.
This also looks like if you went up to Maine in a cabin and they were like,
oh, careful with our water.
You shouldn't be drinking this water and then you pour the water and you're like,
oh, it looks like very cloudy.
Oh, I thought you meant if you went up to Maine and you were at a general store
and they're like, so how are you doing there, fella?
How do you like some of our local drinks?
Some of the craftsmen have been working on it in the back there.
Local jizz water.
Would you like this mysterious do?
Would you care to try our mysterious do?
It looks like dirty, dirty water.
Yeah, it does.
It looks like high-altitude water.
You're absolutely right.
Jesse was right with his first description of it.
Yeah.
But it looks like a...
It looks like you jizzed in a cup, poured out the jizz, then later forgot that you
had not yet washed that cup and poured water into the cup.
And it says a weird cloud and you're like, why is that cloudy all right?
I jizzed in there earlier.
Yeah.
Girls aren't going to get that, but guys know what we're talking about.
Yeah, every guy is jizzed into a cup, emptied it, left it out,
and then later refilled it with water.
And drank from that very cup.
Hey, guys, it's your millennial pal, Jesse Ford.
You know how you're always jizzing into cups, then pouring out the jizz,
and refilling the cup with water?
Well, have I got news for you?
Jews been crafting the perfect beverage for your man cave.
Oh, look at this.
This new one is also very similar color.
Did we talk about how this one tastes at all?
It tastes very insubstantial.
It has a sort of like, if you had half squirt, half seven up.
Yeah.
Yes.
It's kind of like a carbonated diluted Gatorade.
I don't really like it.
I kind of do like this one.
I think that its initial taste is good,
and then I felt like I was drinking dirty water.
Yeah.
This next one, yeah, I'm with you, Nick.
Jesse, I'm glad you like it, but I don't know.
This next one, this is the Mountain Dew Spiked Lemonade.
I'm angry that you don't like it.
I'm sorry.
You know what?
I want to make our guest happy.
Thorne wins again.
This is lemonade spiked with prickly pear cactus juice.
That just means agave syrup, right?
I think so.
This is like the last one, but a tint of yellow.
Yeah, it is slightly yellow.
It's like if you jacked off into a cup,
and then you emptied it out.
Then you pissed into it.
Then you pissed into the cup.
You emptied that out.
Then you forgot you'd done both of those bodily fluids into it,
and you filled it up with water.
Or you remember that you'd pissed in there,
but you were Mahatma Gandhi.
You were looking to drink your own urine.
There's someone on earth who has done what you're saying.
Now we should explain that this is called Mountain Dew Spiked.
It does say that it's non-alcoholic right below there.
So do you guys think that the target audience for this
is volleyball fans or railroad workers?
I think it's Spike Lee fans.
There you go.
No, I don't know.
I think they put that disclaimer there
because people probably assume it's an adult libation,
and it's not.
Well, drinking it, it tastes like it could have alcohol
because it's weird tasting.
Yeah, it tastes like a Mike's Hard Lemonade,
which is not something I like.
So a Mike's Hard Lemonade with none of the alcohol.
Right.
The only reason to drink that putrid beverage.
It has a weird dirt taste.
Is that the agave?
It could be.
It might be.
Yeah, there's a slight didn't grossness to it.
Unless there was dirt in your cup.
Thumbs down to this one for me.
We started strong, and these tapered off.
These got bad.
We did these in the wrong order, not that it's your fault.
Well, yeah.
If you had to do your do more, I guess none of these would go on.
No.
But if I had to rank these gold, silver, and bronze,
the original green label do.
And if I can interject here, again, I don't mean to talk,
but you do have to rank them in some way,
and you do get to decide because it's your segment.
I will say gold, silver, and bronze, just like the Olympics.
Oh, OK.
Wow.
That's pretty smart, right?
It's really smart, Mitch.
The Olympics are coming up soon, right?
Yeah, the Olympics are coming up.
You guys should do something based on the Olympics.
Oh, boy.
Perhaps something over-complicated.
Oh, my God.
I won't ever do that again.
That was a fast go.
I will give the gold medal for the dolympics to the green label
Mountain Dew.
And actually, in the order that we drank them, silver goes to
white label, and then the spiked gets the bronze,
the shitty brown.
No, not bronze.
It's a metal, it's a ribbon with a log of shit.
The piss-and-come drink gets a shit medal.
Yeah.
Mitch, I agree with you.
I would be of the exact same, we are eye-to-eye on this one.
I have the exact same rankings.
Guys, well, I think I mentioned that that exotic do,
the white do, tastes a little bit like a combination of a
seven-up and a squirt.
I have a lot of real positive memories around squirt,
because my friend Pete Frauenfelder always had squirt at his
house.
This is one of my best friends I've ever had in my life.
Frountown.
I really love Old Frowey.
Stop trying to give him nicknames.
This is bullshit.
Frowey remains a friend that I truly love.
Great.
And so that could get the gold medal for me.
The second medal goes to, what color was the other one, black?
Green.
Green label.
The green, the apple-y one.
That wins the silver medal.
And the lemonade is disqualified for not being fit for human
consumption.
Wow.
That's how gross I thought it was.
Wow.
You know what?
It's called spikes.
You know what?
I'd like to see spike this.
It's Gronkowski.
Spike the cannon to the ground and destroy it.
Right, Nick?
You said it right.
Yeah.
Gronk would destroy that can.
He'd send it right to the core of the earth.
I'd love to see Gronk do that with his strength.
Yeah.
Fuck you guys.
I'm agreeing with you.
And he's, and the truth is, Nick, the hard truth.
He's as fast as he is strong.
He is.
I'd love to see him spike a cannon.
He's a unique talent.
It would be fun to see him spike a full can of spiked mountain
dew.
That would be a real hoot.
That would be a viral video.
They would love to watch that.
Are you fucking with me?
I'm agreeing with you.
Dew would be everywhere.
Especially with the enthusiastic spikings that the Gronk
is known to do after he scores a touchdown in football.
He was just in WrestleMania, Gronk, too.
He's everywhere.
Yeah.
So watch yourself.
Beautiful man, Rob Gronkowski.
He was just in WrestleMania.
He'd previously won the Super Bowl.
Next up, throwing a can of soda at the ground.
All right, that was Dranker Stank.
Just like a WrestleMania via your feedback.
Let's open up the feedback.
Today's email comes to us from Todd Brisket.
I'm not sure if that's his real name, but that's how he calls
himself.
Todd writes, being born and raised in Texas, I always have
wondered if the term was a...
Shit.
Wait, hold on.
What?
Okay, here we go.
I thought I hadn't copy pasted something right, but it was
just phrased weirdly.
Okay, I'm going to reread this again.
We'll let this out.
Today's email comes to us from Todd Brisket.
Todd writes, yes.
Can I say real quick, you guys know that whoever's in charge of
editing it out when you say we'll edit this out doesn't edit
it out, right?
You know that when we listen at home, you're constantly saying
we'll edit this out, and nothing seems to have been edited
out.
We live with our shitty fucking mistakes.
We haven't figured out how to do this.
Okay.
Being born and raised in Texas, I have always wondered if this
term was a local colloquialism or if it reaches further out.
The meat sweats, eating so much meat that you break out in
sweat.
I got the heavy meat sweats last time I went to Fogo de Chow.
Jesse, is that a colloquialism that made its way up north?
Absolutely not, but it sounds like a lot of fun.
Meat sweats I have heard.
I feel like I heard it more in college.
Okay.
In Ithaca.
Yeah, I feel like I didn't hear it much in Quincy, but I think
some Quincy people probably use it.
I don't know.
I feel like it's kind of a normal thing.
If I was in Texas right now, you bet your buttons I'd be.
So much of that Todd's famous brisket that I'd be breaking out
in the meat sweats.
Oh, right below it.
He says, P.S., my real last name is brisket.
And yes, people do chase me around with a fork and knife.
He actually did include a P.S. that I omitted for time's sake,
but his P.S. was, what is your favorite Mario Kart character?
Oh, my goodness.
Which I think is something we've answered before.
Toad for me.
Yeah.
I mean, I like Koopa Troopa.
Hold on a second.
Yes, Koopa Troopa, but he was only in, oh, he came back, I guess.
Yeah, but I also like Wario a lot just because I think he's not
my favorite racer, but I just like Wario.
Wario is so cool.
You like the character of Wario?
Yeah, he's great.
My choice.
What?
Wario is better than most video games' main characters,
and he's like the fifth best Wario character.
That's how cool Wario is.
Yeah, oh, you're saying how cool Wario is, yes.
Yeah, no, I'm saying that's how cool the Mario universe is,
that Wario is like...
I know, it's just very funny that you're putting the spotlight on Wario.
Wario is great.
I think you're right that the gold standard for coolness
is the Mario universe.
What do you think of Wario?
Watch out, trend spotters.
The cool new thing in the world of coolness and fashion is the Mario universe.
The fashion, Nick does wear Mario stuff, I feel like.
Or Marmin does, at least.
My choice, by the way, is the Eagles because then you get to be Randall Cunningham.
The question was, what team do you play in Madden 95 on Genesis, right?
Do you like Waluigi?
I love Waluigi.
Waluigi's great.
Me too, it would be Koopa Trooper if we were doing Super Mario Kart.
I mentioned this, wait, did I talk about Mario Suicide Squad on the podcast before?
I think I did.
Yes, but go ahead, I think you should say it again.
Fuck, I don't want to retread Ground Hold Ground.
He thinks that it should be all the baddies from the Mario universe
team up together to help save Mario.
Yeah, there should be an existential villain from outside of the Mario universe.
A new villain, a new threat, comes who threatens the Mushroom Kingdom, takes Mario away.
The bad guys realize they need Mario, so they form a Suicide Squad led by Bowser.
With that inclusion.
Bowser would be, that's two on the nose.
No, Bowser's in the Suicide Squad.
Would it be like Bowser Jr. or something?
But Bowser Jr. is in there too.
It's Bowser, Wario, Waluigi.
So now it's just, you're turning it into a game.
It is, it's just becoming, like, this, it feels like this is Mario's pitch for a movie.
I think it should be a movie and a game.
What?
Do you think it should be other stuff too?
Yeah, that may, I think it could probably be a comic, it gets to say in a graphic novel.
Yeah, a book, a show, a live box.
A live action show.
Backpack.
It would be awesome.
I think of Mario's Suicide Squad.
Special edition vans.
King Boo?
He could have King Boo on his team.
Yes, King Boo is good, but I feel like Bowser-
What is King Drew?
Dry Bones?
I feel like Bowser has to come in, like he has to have the Joker role where he, like, comes in like-
Oh, that's good.
Yeah.
He's too crazy for the Suicide Squad.
Yeah, Dry Bones is basically a Koopa Troopa that is all bones, and then you step on them
and they shatter, but then they come back together.
Oh, shit.
You can throw warts in there?
From Super Mario 2?
Yes.
You haven't seen wart in a while?
A shy guy?
A burdo?
Burdo could be, oh my god, burdo would be great.
Can we talk about something I know about, like, Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle for the Game Boy?
There was a Tiny Tune Adventures game for NES that was really, really hard.
Did you guys ever play that?
Yeah.
Fuck, it was so fucking hard.
It was hard.
God damn it.
They gave it to me crazy.
Can we talk about the funny Japanese baseball teams and baseball stars?
Where you know everybody's blood types?
Yeah, exactly.
To quickly just say, meet sweats are a real thing.
I feel like if you eat too much meat, you-
Yes.
It's just, what is it?
Your stomach just not being able to break down that food?
Why do you get them?
I don't know.
Or is it just eating anything that heavy?
That's a classic example of a good problem, though.
Yeah.
I mean, having the meat sweats is rough.
Yeah.
I'd certainly heard the phrase before this email, but I don't think I heard it in Southern
California.
I think I just heard it from the internet, and I'm not sure.
I assume it's from the south, just guessing this guy's emails from Texas, and that sounds,
it sounds like a Southern idiom.
Yeah.
But I don't know.
But yeah, I don't-
I'd heard it.
We've heard it in the northeast.
We've heard it.
I'd heard it.
I'd heard it.
I don't know how universal it is, but it feels very basically American.
Nick knows about the lingua franca of the information superhighway known as leet speak.
Exactly.
Hey, do you think Bowser ever got the meat sweats?
Oh boy.
From chowing down on too many Koopa Troopers?
Does he eat Koopa Troopers?
I don't think he eats his army.
What does Bowser eat?
That would be terrible.
What does he eat?
Can you imagine if Storm and Norman Swartzcoff was eating our boys in uniform in the Persian
Gulf War?
What a disaster that would have been.
All right, look.
From a Ralph, if nothing else.
Look, the direct comparison is not our world.
It is another fantasy world, and I can certainly see-
Do they?
Maybe they all eat fruit.
Yeah.
They might all eat like a-
They might all be fruititarians.
Maybe in the Mara universe, they're all vegetarian.
Oh, no.
You know where those pasta and spaghetti meatballs.
You know what I bet Bowser likes to eat?
What's-
Cheramoya, the custard apple.
Oh, that's a delicious fruit, Jesus.
Driving off the Cheramoya.
You know what, now that it's established, it just sounds like they have regular food
in the real world.
Yeah, maybe they do.
Pasta lasagna.
Maybe Bowser makes mac and cheese at night or whatever.
Yeah.
Wait, why were you so thrown off of that?
You could make any hot dogs or-
You know, at the end of the day-
I don't know.
It's hard to know what Bowser eats, but what brings us all together is something as beautiful
as Nick Wieger's vision for a Suicide Squad.
Super Mario bad guys.
That's a hit game and you know it.
If you have a question or comment about the world of a chain restaurant,
so you can email us at dowboyspodcast at gmail.com to get the Dowboys Double,
our weekly bonus episode.
Subscribe at patreon.com slash dowboys.
Just to let people know, we will answer more Mario Suicide Squad questions.
We get a lot of them.
Yeah, we're getting a ton of them already.
Just even from just saying this right now.
Yeah, our inbox just filled up with 50 more messages.
This episode isn't released yet,
but people can just sort of sense that it's in the zeitgeist.
Send them in.
We'll answer all your Mario Suicide Squad questions.
Send them to us.
Jesse Thorne, thank you so much for volunteering in your beautiful studio.
Thank you so much for giving us your talents and your time.
Do you have anything you would like to plug?
Yes, I would.
First of all, my favorite podcast is a show called The Dowboys.
I think you should check that out.
Oh man.
God bless you.
What an honor to be here.
Jesse, you're the podcasting king.
You gotta show it out your podcast, please.
Of course.
I own the podcastnetworkmaximumfund.org,
and we have over two dozen smash hit podcasts there.
The shows that I host, the one that's closest to this is Jordan Jesse Go,
which I do with Jordan Morris,
your co-worker and past guest on this show.
Very funny show.
Jordan and I are now in our 11th year of doing Jordan Jesse Go.
Damn.
It's a crazy, silly, very warm-hearted, formatless comedy show
on which both of you guys have been guests together and separately,
and I'm very proud of it.
It's real nonsense and bullshit and has no concept.
But people really enjoy it.
It really means something to people.
I also co-host the Judge John Hodgman podcast
with John Hodgman from The Daily Show.
That is like a comedy people's court,
and I am the bailiff.
So what's fun for me about that is I'm not responsible for anything.
I just yell at people.
I just periodically interject some yelling at people.
And John is a very, it's a comedy show,
but John is also sincerely very wise.
He's a very brilliant and decent man
who kind of finds the emotional core of people's personal conflicts.
And of course, I host the, as I'm sure,
national public radio is hanging its head in shame right now.
But I host Bullseye with Jesse Thorne on NPR,
and I'm guessing this will probably come out shortly, right?
So right now on Bullseye with Jesse Thorne,
which is an arts and culture interview show,
I think this week's show is Chris Gethard and George Saunders,
the MacArthur Genius Award-winning novelist and short story writer,
one of the most brilliant and wise people in the world,
as far as I'm concerned.
And we have John Waters coming up,
Verna Herzog was just on.
We just had a really, really amazing interview with Phil Elverham
from the microphones in Mount Erie,
a sort of indie rock legend who's, this is a little sad,
so forgive me for this,
but his wife passed away last year from cancer
and he made the most spectacularly beautiful
and heartbreaking album about it,
and he and I talked about that very sincerely.
So it's a show that, like I said,
I've been doing that show every week
since I was 19 years old in college radio,
and we've had every single one of your favorite comedy people on
if you're listening right now,
like every single one,
every Louis C.K. and Zach Galifianakis and Maria Bamford,
and they've all been on the show before they were famous
and after they were famous,
and if you want to get to know what kind of person they are,
you can listen to Bullseye.
The name has changed,
but the quality is always great.
You're a great man,
you're a great interviewer,
a great host, a pro's pro,
and thank you for hosting us here today.
We were overdue to have you.
Thank you, Jesse.
It was a joy, and again,
I am sincerely thrilled to be here.
I love listening to a guy's show.
My wife will tell you that I will be driving to the flea market
and listening to your show,
and then, like, I will call her cell phone
and she'll be taking care of our three children all at once,
and I'll be like,
oh, honey, can I tell you something that Weiger said on Doe Boys?
Oh, so your wife hates us.
She only hates you.
She likes Weiger,
as I'm always telling her the funny things Weiger says.
Well, we'll have you back for the World Series of Pork
or some bullshit like that.
Do you have a Tibetan barbecue restaurant you want to take us to?
Oh, yeah, let's do it, guys.
A Canadian porridge shack?
Let's make this happen.
That'll do for this episode of Doe Boys,
and until next time,
for The Spoonman, Mike Mitchell, I'm Nick Weiger.
Happy eating.
See ya.
Mitch, how's your penis doing?
Jesus.
I got honey on me now.
Mitch, are you okay?
My penis feels weird.
Mitch, you really look like you're...
I'm legitimately getting worried.
It feels numb.
Mitch, are you okay?
My penis feels weird.
I'm a Caucasian man.
I'm a Caucasian man.
I'm a Caucasian man.