MK 1215: Brennan Lee Mulligan Eats His Last Meal

Hey gang, I’m Brennan Lee Mulligan, and this is my last meal. Every person has exactly two things in common, we all gotta eat, and we’re all gonna die. Today’s guest is the host of “Dimension 20” on Dropout as well as the dungeon master of the new campaign on “Critical Role.” He and his intrepid heroes have sold out stadiums like Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl, and he’s the only person to have ever successfully cast a fear spell on a real live horse. Brennan Lee Mulligan, welcome to the show. Josh, what a joy, man! Thank you for having me. I did, I cast a spell on a horse! It was actually, like, to potentially protect children, like there was a real reason you cast a fear spell. We have to go back in time. So first of all, I’m a LARPer. I do live action role playing. I was working at the Wayfinder Experience, where kids come and learn improv, and fantasy role playing, and theater, and all these amazing skills, and it’s just a great community of people. We were playing a game, and someone in the game was playing a knight, a fell knight in black armor. And, like, the armor’s foam, the sword is foam, the horse is a real horse. Yeah, the horse is mostly made of horse. The horse is mostly made of horse. Anytime you see that, you go like, “Hey, I don’t know. We are gonna be, like, screaming and, like, charging into battle.” This horse is gonna be hearing battle cries, and to my knowledge, this horse doesn’t understand Meisner, or Adler method. Yeah, yeah, it does Strasberg. Yeah, yeah, the horse does Strasberg. And it’s a real problem when you see that. So this horse is barreling down. Now, I’m sure the rider was a very accomplished rider. However, I am 15 years old, and I see a real horse charging full speed at me. And so I blow on this little plastic hockey horn, which creates time stop! And the person riding the horse stops, and I call out, and this person that was playing tended to play these extremely overpowered characters. And so I went, “I know if I cast a spell on this person, they’re gonna be like, “As a half fairy, half demon, “I repel your spell.” And so I said, “I’m gonna take a swing on this one.” And I called out and said, “By my power as an arc mage of the Jaden Circle, I target the horse! Who I assume has no arcane defenses to speak of! Fear by the power of nine, fear!” And to the rider’s credit, as a great LARP player, they whipped that horse around and rode off into the forest. Incredible. What a way to just like preserve all of the fun that’s being had, and then also preserve mangled bodies from happening. That’s beautiful. Preserve the 12-year-olds that I don’t want to be trampled by a real horse who’s going, “I have no ability to discern fact from fiction.” Have you thought about your last meal before? I thought about my last meal so much that I deeply annoyed my wife. Yes! Ruining relationships since 2016. That’s what we do. Number one, I love thinking about the human condition and mortality, I love that element of the show. And I love food. Josh, the initial draft list of meals was 18 meals long. When are we gonna do the Snyder cut of your last meal? Like, we can carve out a whole day. How often do you think about death in general? A lot. I think about death constantly. Has that been the case all the time? Bizarrely, I just did an interview not too long ago for “Rolling Stone.” And two people came up in it that are deeply significant to me that I think about, my old philosophy professor Tom Davis. He passed away in 2008. And I also was thinking about my friend Tigre Bailando, who passed away a few years ago. So like in talking about that, I realize whenever I go to work, I have, as company, friends of mine, a mentor of mine that has like passed away. And I think, yeah, you do have to return to it a lot. There’s these five pillars of fantasy storytelling that I’ve boiled down. I’m like, this is the five things that make stories good. It is swords, family, magic, kissing, and death. Yeah, I’d listen to that album, and I’d follow those tenets. And the idea of death, of finality, of consequence, it sort of is deeply related even to our sort of understanding of meaning. Yeah. It’s not like I am dreading death, but I think about what it says about our life and the fact that we only understand ourselves in the context of death. Yeah. And sort of, actually, to get really deep into it, the presence of death at the end of life has started to make me more okay with moving on from things, so sort of not being completionist. Yeah. Because there’s this idea of, like, if you’re spending a day in an art gallery and you’re trying to be a completionist, you’re like, “I’m gonna see every single painting “and read every single plaque.” What you realize after doing that a couple times is like, there’s a whole wing of this museum you’re not gonna see. If you don’t sort of make your peace with moving through some parts of this more casually, like, being attracted to something, digging deep into it, and then maybe having another part where you just view them as you walk on. There are all these things in another wing, past another set of doors, that you’re never gonna see, and you have to be okay with kind of moving on from life chapters. And if you’re not okay with that, go to dropout.tv to check out the director’s cut of his “Last Meal.” It’s nine hours long. We both end up in a coma. You ready to eat? Let’s eat! I’m starving! Brennan, for the first course of your final meal, we have the Arepas con mantequilla y más. So in here, we have several plain arepas with butter and then several that are fully stuffed. We also have a pepperoni pizza, that’s coming on the way. Many people know you as one of the world’s foremost Dungeons & Dragons players. I know you as the world’s foremost heavy, dense food in a slightly wet paper bag enjoyer. And so we wanted to gift you this and sort of let you explore and hold and feel. Ah, yeah. Oh my god. So here’s what’s happening, as I hold this bag, we’re activating traps. Yeah, I see them. We’re activating lats. They’re right there. The rear delt is actually getting a little bit of- The rear delt’s getting a little. That’s good food. I don’t need to see it or taste it to know the food’s good. If it’s doing that, it means it’s good food. And if it’s not doing that, frankly I don’t care for it. Absolutely not. Oh, please get it open. And then if we could get that pizza in as well. Look at that. Oh, my God! Okay. And then, Brennan, we have your pepperoni pizza. Owl Bear Pizzeria! Look at this! So this was designed by fan and artist Julian Hill in-house. Owl Bear Pizzeria. Come for the hoot, stay for the growl. Hoot, growl, baby. Hell yes. Should we start with the arepas? Let’s start with that. Let’s do the ones with first. Okay, perfect, perfect, perfect. So in Washington Heights in New York, I grew up in a building on the Upper West Side. My mom was working as a comic book writer, and comic book artist. My dad was on the road a lot doing comedy. He was a standup comic. And the wonderful Ortiz’s. Carlos and Leticia Ortiz basically took care of a lot of kids in the building. And my earliest memory, Oh, my God. Oh God, that’s so good. Right. That’s really good. It’s so dense, and so heavy, and so wet. That’s so good. There’s no leavening. It’s just a pure corn, with so much butter and a little bit of hard cheese inside. I have memories of being in a high chair, like literally like almost infant, like early memories of the griddle. Like the little burn marks. Like this is what it’s about. This little thing right there. Tell me about this pizza. And also do you think that the Owl Bear Pizzeria design is better or worse than the unlicensed Tony Pepperoni Batman design from Henrietta New York? Well this is absolutely gorgeous and stunning and also is such a kindness to… We gotta shout out the original designer of the Owl Bear, Mr. Rick Perry, the maestro himself, the originator of hoot growl. But this is stunning. These can’t be freehand check marks. These are all freehand check marks because we submitted the request to Julian too late to print it and they said screw it. I will hand dry it. Julian, you are straight up crazy. That is nuts! Okay, here we go. Look at that. Okay. Typically I forego the dressings, I forego that like… This. Normally the chili will kill me, but for now think let’s do a little Parmesan. Do a little bit of, get some of that dress. Beautiful. And we’ll go in here. The original place near me that I remember with my dad was Fat Sal’s in New York, which was on 10th Avenue, but the main spot in Stone Ridge, New York with Benny’s Pizzeria. I think there was a moment where my mom used to get pizza for… I was running DnD games all day Saturday, all day Sunday from like the age of 11 to 17. And there was a moment where my mom was just getting pizza and then like at the end of the year went ” I think I’ve spent a significant portion of our yearly income getting DnD pizza.” And the investment paid off. Thank you, Mom. There you go. The machine runs on pizza. That’s really good. Do you ranch pizza or no? Is that anathema to New Yorkers? I don’t ranch pizza. I will say the only thing that I would consider pizza anathema, and I’m gonna put a lot of people on blast right now. Uh-oh, uh-oh. I was on a cross country road trip with some pals many years ago. We were driving through Iowa. On a good trip, Iowa? We were driving through Iowa. I know exactly what you are gonna say. A circular flat pizza cut into squares. I have been told not to curse on this show. No, no, no. Curse. What the are you doing out there? What the is wrong with you? Why are we… Here’s the thing, if you’re doing a big Sicilian pie, great, cut into squares. If you have a rectangle pizza, it’s a circle, by going from a radius, by creating a diameter, you create equalized slices of pizza. Perfect for sharing, that come equipped with their own handle. It kind of goes against God. You look at a circle, there is a right way to divide it. There are certain things where you look at it and you’re like, “Okay, cultural differences.” Where it’s like, “Oh, why don’t they build out of stone here in this part of the world?” And you go, “Oh, well there’s a lot of earthquakes. So it’s super dangerous. So you want a lightweight construction.” and you go, “Oh, isn’t that fun that in the vast tapestry of humanity, there are all these different ways to solve the same problem?” Sometimes cultures get it wrong, and square slices on round pizza is getting it capital W, wrong. Anti-universalist over here, Brennan Lee Mulligan. Clip that. That’s gonna be it. I’m gonna double back to this stuff. Oh, look at this. The thing… Oh, yeah. The sauces that do not match up with the current food in the box, in the box. That’s how you know you’re having an incredible time. It’s perfect. Well, and it’s very New York too. The Ortiz’s, so Papi and Lety were from Colombia. In that part of South America, there are… In Central America there are a couple things like arepas, but I think those are very specific to just a handful of countries. The idea of what a sovereign country is is so new to society. You know, what’s not new? Arepas. You know? And until like the borders moved around the people that were making these delicious disks of cornmeal that was just feeding people for literally thousands of years. Like making little breads out of corn, predates actual bread by several thousand years. Like it’s just these fantastic miracles, and then now we’re sort of bickering about like… Well, not you, I’m bickering, but just being like, “Is it Venezuelan? Is it Colombian?” Like, the miracle of corn didn’t care about your soccer rivalries and your political rivalries.” Right. These lines were created by politicians and empire. And you know, it was not created by the beautiful rivers of this land, the language that we speak, the food that we share. These parts of culture. What’s the meat in here? Pernil. Pernil. It’s like a roast pork and then a little bit of pickled onions, some like soft melting cheese. Hmm. Why is that pickled onion… This is just a food science question. I don’t even know how to phrase it. Pickled onions. I wouldn’t eat them loose out of a bag. Sure. And in a sandwich they are amazing. So if you think about taste, it is ultimately a poison detection system. It is like either your body getting rewarded for a thing that is good for you, or is being punished for something that is bad. So you think about like, fat tastes good because we needed to nourish ourselves. Protein where the term umami effectively comes from, that is also good for you. Acid and bitter are where it gets kind of interesting because acid can mean either vitamin C, or it can mean danger, or battery acid, you’re going to die. Yeah. And so at certain levels, acid is really good. And then at when things are too sour, your body goes into like, “Oh, God, I’m dying.” The onions can taste good, but at a certain point you’re like, “Oh, that’s simply too much vinegar.” Until, boom, reward of pork fat. And the pork fat is a reward. It is a reward. It’s a special reward. And chilies are interesting ’cause these were initially an analgesic. Beg your pardon? An analgesic. Ooh! Chilies were used as medicine in the Aztec empire to relieve pain. ‘Cause the capsaicin distracts you. The only thing I know about capsaicin is that birds can’t taste it. Do you know that because of the one chef who exclusively feeds birds red hot chili peppers to make their yolks violently red? Because that’s the reason I know that. What? His name’s Dan. You need to say a last name! Saying “Dan” makes it seem like this is a guy you saw on the highway. He’s the three Michelin star chef runs Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York. Dan Barber, he’s invented multiple vegetables. He sent us the cabbages he invented last week. Invented a cabbage is crazy. Yeah, it’s a pure cone. It comes to a violent point. It’s incredible! The point is, Brennan, you and I, I think, both lived very strange, nerdy existences, that I don’t think at any point in human history would’ve been rewarded like they are today. No. Until now. I own so many swords. And I… What I know deep in my heart, Josh, is that if I went back in time to the middle Ages, they would not give me a sword. They would shave my head and put me in a monastery and they would say, “Draw pictures around the Bible.” And I would go, “Okay, thank you. I’m so sorry.” Yeah, if I walked into like Louis the XIV’s kitchen was like, “Guys, I have some ideas to modernize your sauce work.” I think they’d just be like, “Go back to the syphilis colony because you reek and I can tell your flesh is rotting off.” ‘Cause of course I would’ve had syphilis. There you go. Who wouldn’t? I mean it was back in the day. Back in the day it was more in vogue. Oh, there’s that great… I forget who about the time I got it. Which was the… There’s a little poster that you’re supposed to put on the inside door of your time machine that basically breaks down all these little things like “Penicillin, leave out bread.” And it’s like all this stuff that like is how you do… Because there is a huge problem where you’re like, “Well, I’m from the future so I’m gonna go into the past and have this effortless time. I’ll become their king.” And being like, cell phones, they… We have satellites, and you shoot ’em up… I couldn’t explain to somebody in 2025 how a cell phone starts to work. My wife Izzy and I have a game that we play, which is… It’s a terrible thing. It’s basically an instant panic attack. You point to something in the room and you say, “How does it work?” I like to think of myself as a smart guy. My wife pointed at a TV and I said, “Well, easy.” It’s plugged into the wall. Electricity goes, shoots in the wire, and it goes to screen, and the electricity it… It uses little numbers and it tells the screen what color to be? The screen knows from the numbers! It knows! And you just really realize like, “I am a neanderthal. I’m a caveman.” Yeah! “It’s all magic. I have no idea what the hell’s going on.” We stand on the shoulders of all the giants that came before us. And I think that’s like, you know, really wonderful. Yeah! But I think also drilling, like you said, you’re in the museum, you can’t be a completionist, you can’t hope to know everything. But like as somebody who has been, say, DMing for several decades at this point, like going on three decades… Crazy. It’s like you have found yourself knowing more about that than near anybody else. And it’s almost like you’ve been doing the things consistently that you love to do. And then like the forces of the world turned around you in a sense. And then everything just went , and locked into place and then suddenly you’re in the middle of Madison Square Garden. I’m sure much more simplistic from my lens, but it’s like really cool and inspirational in a way? Yeah. Of seeing you do those things and now it feels like the world is rewarding you for staying on the true path. Man, that’s really nice. That’s really nice. First of all, thank you for the kindness baked into that observation. But also I think zooming out, I think we live in an age where there are a lot of forces that I would consider to be kind of on the whole, even if not intentionally, malevolent cultural forces that try to persuade people to view culture, and commerce, and professionalism, as this vast game that you can ruthlessly optimize. Yeah. You know, what’s the Charlie Chaplin thing? “Machine men with machine hearts and machine minds!” That, you know, that try to guess. You know, I always am very wary of “visionaries”. I’m very wary of “ideas men”. Yeah. You know what a great idea would be? Do something. Execute, right? Rather than being like, “My contribution is a broad idea.” It’s like, “Oh, where’d you get your broad idea from, if you have no, like, boots on the ground experience.” Yeah. And in my own personal life I have to occupy that sensibility because no one in their right mind could have anticipated that any of this would’ve worked. Yeah. Describe the person that in the late 90s, early 2000s, as people are getting their heads dunked in toilets for playing Dungeons & Dragons is like, “You know, if you put all your eggs in this basket, you’ll be at Madison Square Garden in no time.” The crazy thing is there… By just the law of big numbers, there was a person that said that. That there was that person may have also said “Motorized roller skates. Those are the wheels of the future baby.” Yeah! But if people say a lot of things then we take the one person who happened to be right and go, “That guy, visionary.” That guy’s a visionary. Let’s look at what all these Nobel prize winners have also said about other things. Yeah! Well I mean, a buddy of mine was on CNBC and didn’t get invited back because someone was asking about like, “How do the big billionaire investors do it?” And my friend explained the law of big numbers where he said like, “Look…” He was like… He basically was like explaining to these like Jim Kramer type, like “We love money, and the people who make it!” But what he was explaining was like if we made a bracket of all 8 billion people on the planet and we said “Everybody partner up, flip a coin, someone call it one way someone call the other way in the first round half the people will be eliminated and the other half will move on. Bracket number two, you’re down to 4 billion. Flip again, half 2 billion people left. Wow! 2 billion people called three coin tosses right in a row. Let’s cut that in half again.” And you can continue doing that until, yeah. Someone has called the right coin toss like 20 times in a row. Is that magic? Are they a genius? No, it’s how brackets work. Dove Moroskovitch from Uzbekistan. He’s a Bukharian jew. Mh-hm? He’s where I have my money on. It’s gonna be you, Dove! It’s gonna be you, baby! I think you got what it takes! Come on! Do you view yourself as just like that sort of winner that came out of this just morass of Dungeons & Dragons players from decades? From the bottom of my heart. Yes. Hell, yes. Nobody admits it. It’s luck, and if you don’t admit it, you’re really mean. Yes. It’s really mean to be like, “Actually this was the Lord’s plan!” “He has chosen me to play Dungeons & Dragons in Madison Square Garden! I’m his greatest son!” You know, like, that’s not nice. I agree. It’s not nice, man. Yeah. Deep down in my heart is a belief fundamentally in luck. And when I say luck, what I just mean like an acknowledgement of the forces beyond anyone’s individual’s control in that many of those forces are not working under a common intelligence. Yeah. And that it is possible to get lucky. And what that does for me on a moral level is I get to look at people that are undergoing tremendous hardship, chaos, catastrophe, disaster. And go like, not only there, but for the grace of, in this case, fortune go I. But also like, this is not their fault. Yeah. And I think that it’s… I don’t know how to be moral unless you can go “People are not responsible for every bad thing that’s ever happened to them.” And on conversely you have to say people aren’t responsible for every good thing that’s ever happened to them. There are ways to tilt your luck. Like I love working hard, I love trying to do the right thing. I love all that stuff. But there are a lot of people that work harder than me that aren’t playing their favorite TTRPG for a living. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, I think that it’s a necessary component of moving through the world with grace and kindness and consideration for other people, to go, a lot of this was how the cards fell. A lot of this was just like where things landed. And so no, I will not rewrite history, and go back and say “As a 10-year-old I saw a gap in the market.” “I saw that TTRPG were an underserved audience!” No. “Media will fragment and linear cable shall fall!” Exactly! The gatekeepers will fall to the side as individual media silos around a free internet rises! “A beautiful city of purple called Roku!” Brennan, for course number two of your final meal, we have the latkes with applesauce and sour cream. And we tried to follow your wife Izzy’s recipe exactly, because we did also find a tutorial on TikTok. We’ll talk about that later. And then we have your family’s leftover biscuit, ham and sweet potato casserole sandwiches. We left it deconstructed, tried to leave it as leftover-y as possible. Someone stole a portion there. This is… I’m so glad they did. It’s so delicious. So this is my mom, Elaine Lee, noted a science fiction author and incredible sweet potato casserole maker. Right now, this is a very happy Hanukkah and a merry Christmas on the table in front of us. I’m salivating so much. It’s hard to talk. Go fast. You gotta go fast. Go fast, you can get the food. Growing up, bit lots of southern comfort food for Christmas. And wait, how did you get Izzy’s recipe? So we found her making it on TikTok but fully in character as sort of non-denominational Bubby. Yes. And Bubby does not cry on chop onions. Bubby made of steel. And so we tried to get the exact shape as we possibly could. That’s so good. What can I interest you in first? Is Hanukkah first or is Christmas first this year? Let’s start with… Hanukkah’s generally first. We just discussed how you are probably more Jewish than I am. I celebrated Hanukkah a ton. My stepbrother, my step family celebrated Hanukkah. And I think I took the record for most Laktkes in one evening with 32 Latkes. I deserve this! It’s a Jewish delicacy, but fundamentally as an Irish American, this is a whole lot of potato and that’s delightful. Yet the food of struggle is onion and potato and some sort of fat of an animal that has likely just died of starvation. My family is from New York, there are many great, you know, Stiller and Mira. There are many great classic cultural Jewish and Irish marriages. I’m happy and it’s the joy of my life to be in such a marriage. And it is, we are united by the potato. Truly. The potato is a super food, it’s incredible. I’m curious to see what your strategy is with the sour cream and applesauce because most kids like who grew up Jewish but tried to sort of assimilate . We dip these in ketchup. That was it. We’re like, “Well, this is like a McDonald’s hash brown.” But now. Oh, my God. Sounded racist when I said it in Italian. I think it’s just… It’s like, “Oh, wait, is this okay?” God, that’s so good! Mm. I love both. I love the apple sauce and sour cream, but I think you gotta start sour cream. Mm. I noticed you have both. This is not like a traditional, this is just how I have always done it. And to me, you gotta sauce the whole thing. We also made ours kind of thicker and puck like, ’cause that’s at least how Bubby did it in the video. And as you seem to really jump in on the bit. Hello, welcome to Bobby Talk. Today we make latkes. I’m curious ’cause you said that you know, your mom was the scholar of like Arthurian and Celtic lore, and then wrote comic books and sci-fi novels and your dad was like a traveling club comic. And you said that you’ve basically been bred in a lab to do what you do for a living. Now that you have been in the lab cooking, and if you know what I mean, making a child of your own, what is your child bred in a lab to do between you and Izzy? My wife and I are both improvisers. We’re both comedians. Izzy is not only an amazing improviser, she’s also an incredible writer, and an actor, and filmmaker. Her movie Dead has been touring the country, which is this incredible supernatural, like family comedy, but also autobiographical. ’cause it really based on her life events around the passing of her father. A couple years ago, one of the first things we sort of went through as a couple we were dating was her father passing away. Wow. And she wrote this movie about a kind of larger than life dad, who’s a bit of a charlatan and a rambling man who passes away, comes back as a ghost and haunts everybody in the family but her. She’s a genius. She’s a genius at making movies and making comedy. My big thing is, I’m a nerd, which means I’m passionate about all the things that I’m into. Yeah. And I do not want to put pressure on my child at all to adopt my interests. I want her to spread her wings and fly wherever she goes. But whenever I do see, like, pointing to a dragon sculpture and being like, “Dragon?” I’m like, “Yes, exactly.” “Exactly. That is a dragon. You’ve nailed it. If you’re interested, we can get you 10 dragons, a hundred dragons!” But I think it’s important to monitor in yourself that that is not for your benefit. I think where the enthusiasm comes from when you can see a child gravitate… And this is true also for kids that you work with as a teacher you work with like in childcare where it’s just, the reason you get excited when they adopt your interest, I think isn’t actually necessarily selfish. Part of it is if you adopt this interest, I can keep helping you. You know what I mean? Like, I like it’s my greatest joy when I can be a resource for you, and there are gonna be times where I can’t, there are gonna be times where I need to find a teacher for you or a mentor. You have an interest that I can’t help you with. Yeah. And there’s something that that’s a little bit heartbreaking about that. My wife and I was talking about like, if we have either a… I’m serving. If we… It’s Hanukkah, it’s Christmas, we’re serving each other. Please. We’re gonna be set as long as we have either a theater kid or sports kid. Which I think covers a broad swath of things. Yeah. You know? And then either of us are going to be happy. But I think so much of your early development as a kid is just based on like gravitating towards what you’re praised for, and shying away of what you’re shamed for? Yeah. You know? Totally. And I know you started playing Dungeons & Dragons, right about the time that you got removed from school because the bullying was so intense. Yeah. Did you internalize any of that self hatred of like, “Oh, I shouldn’t be doing this nerdy thing. I should try and shy away.” And what kept you doing it? When you’ve gone through a period of like really bad bullying again, thrown in trash cans and kicked around in the playground. Thank you. You can’t help internalize some of it. And it’s really bizarre, right? Because it defies logic. Yeah. It’s like, it is not a rational thing to be like, “Oh, you know, I’m a performer. I do these shows that have the X amount of viewers or whatever. And to walk into a room and be like, “Everybody probably gonna hate me.” Like, you know? It’s like it’s not super rational, but I think it’s really hard to disabuse yourself, it’s almost like you get put like a pair of jeans, you get put through a washing machine. It’s like the age is so foundational. Yeah. That it’s like, “Oh, I got washed my first wash at a wrong temperature!” Yeah. And now this just set in. I’ve had friends that I’ve talked to that went like… Isn’t that so goddamn good? I’ve had friends that talked about like, “Oh, why didn’t you conform? Or why didn’t you, like, if you’re getting this negative reaction to what you’re doing, why not switch it up?” And my answer is, I tried as hard as I could and it did not work. I was interning at the Daily Show, interning, you want desperately to be hired. You like “Please don’t get rid of me after this semester, I love this place so much, please keep me around.” And there was an executive producer of the show who was talking to another producer in the kitchen while I was changing out like a water jug or something like that. And they were talking about honey near the tea setting area. And the executive producer who I’m like, “She calls the shots around here, if she says that you should be hired as a full-time PA, that’ll happen.” She’s like, “Does this honey smell bad to you?” And the other woman she’s talking to goes like, “It smells fine to me.” She’s like, “I don’t see an expiration date on it.” And the woman says like, “Can honey even go bad?” And I went, “Here’s my shot!” And I said, “Actually, honey is so good at not going bad, that they used to entomb Gallic princes in it.” “I would like a job, please.” It was this crazy thing! And when I say the look on their faces, is a look that every time I close my eyes it’s on the back of my eyelids. It’s because I’ve seen that look my entire life. Every time I’m out in a gathering somewhere, I’m like, “Here’s a fun cool thing to add to the conversation that won’t stop things dead in their tracks.” You go like, “Oh, I thought that was gonna be such a contribution. And instead everyone’s going, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’” Yeah. Getting that negative feedback. It wasn’t that I didn’t try, I just literally, like, I would look at people who were like, “I figured out how to conform.” And I would be like, “I really thought that Gaelic princess thing was gonna hit.” Yeah! You know, like, I thought it was gonna hit! That’s not normal? I think what led to DnD was actually being a dungeon master is kind of a service you can provide. To be honest, Josh, I’ve used this metaphor many, many times. Being a dungeon master is a lot like being a chef. There’s a tremendous amount of research and preparation that goes into creating an experience for people. Yeah. People sit at your table, you come outta the kitchen, you come outta your office and you go, “I prepared something that I really hope is gonna make you happy.” And you sit down and you present it to them. I think for me, dungeon mastering early on, yes, it was about expression. Yes, I love storytelling. I had an innate fascination with making up worlds and telling stories. But also I was like, “This is a way for me to establish friendship and community through providing a service for people.” And I can do something for them that is gonna make us have a shape that keeps a group of friends together, or keeps a community together. Do you ever run into the problem where now that you have at least a little bit, and especially from a young formative age, define some of your self-worth as providing value to others? That ever gets you in trouble? ‘Cause I think about that with even food. Food is the main domestic value that I can provide. Yeah. To my relationship. And I’m terribly bad at everything else, but I can make healthy, nourishing, tasty food for my wife. But then- Brother you’re telling me. But like, do you ever think of Continue your thought, Go ahead, continue your thought. No, like, do you… Continue your thought. Do you ever feel worth less if you cannot provide that value exchange for somebody? It’s really… That’s a really interesting thing. The person I found who seemed to first and foremost just delight in my company, I married. One for one! Let’s boom! Knocked it out. You only need one. Yeah, I think that like it’s probably good on some level to detach from drawing your self-worth from who you provide value to or… You know what I mean? Like I get that. That makes sense to me. I’m gonna take a big bite of this. I only have one reaction to this. Goddamn! Going back to our pickled onion discussion from before. I’m not a big Christmas ham guy. It’s not my favorite pork preparation, favorite pork preparation gotta be pulled pork. Christmas ham has never really hit for me, but the first time I had it in the biscuit with the mustard, something happens. And Brennan, why does mustard taste bad when you eat it by itself but tastes good with the ham surrounded by a fatty dough? Well, Josh. It’s ’cause of poison, I think. ‘Cause of poison, he thinks! He’s right, goddamn it! This is just an arepa! Oh, my god, it kind of is! I’m seeing the connections across the years of my life. The webs we weaved! Oh, that’s so good. The answer, maybe this is actually overly a confession. I think about how tied up I am and a lot of people I care about, and that value, like, who would I be if I couldn’t take care of the people around me? Who would I be if I couldn’t work hard enough to support these projects, right? Yeah. And I don’t know that I have a compelling answer for that. Maybe I think I probably would be very sad if I lost the ability to do that. And it’s really challenging, ’cause I think that like… I’m gonna say something a little controversial. Please. Do a little hot take. There’s a lot of language that has emerged in the past several years that is deeply therapeutic and tends to come from therapy. Yep. About providing value. Don’t be hard on yourself. There’s these little adages and forms of wisdom. One of the pitfalls I’ve observed in language like that is if our world is not conducive to mental health, is therapeutic language essentially offloading the heft and weight of what are actually real problems onto individuals managing their self-care? Sure. You know, like, “Hey, I’ve noticed that the sky is burning and that the worst people ever are in charge of everything.” And you go buy an adult coloring book. You know? Like, that’s tough. If we lived in a world where demonstrating value wasn’t so essential for survival. Yeah. It wasn’t so essential for how we create social bonds and how, you know what I mean? Like, then I probably would have a healthier relationship to it. So I think for me, the way I rebel against the idea of basing self-worth on utility is to dream of worlds where that’s not true anymore. Rather than psychoanalyze myself out of what I think is an adaptive response to the world we live in. Training for course number three of your final meal. We have a dumpling obelisk, this is exactly 20, you can count them if you’d like. Dumplings from Vanessa’s Dumplings in New York. Perfect. And then we have the bacon, egg, and cheese on a Kaiser roll with the New York bodega coffee served in the Greek cups. Ooh, love that. Those are a fit 20 dumplings exactly. Great. Thank you. We are all good. May I have some of them or is this like 20 for you specifically? Now, we are gonna share here, but the ritual is an important one. So living on Gold Street in Manhattan with my darling pals Connor, Jack, my brother Griffin, we were in a frightening state of, some would call it poverty, some would call it brokenness. Take your pick. Sure. We lived in an apartment in the old Excelsior Power company building on Gold Street way downtown. So the apartment was like an M.C. Escher painting with almost no natural light. Sick. But every once in a while you’d see someone and their eyes would sort of lose. Yeah. Their glossiness. You’re like, “Ooh, your eyes are developing a matte finish.” And we call that like a pre jaundice, you know, where… And we’d say “The time has come to journey to a world of plenty, where we know no hunger nor fear.” We will walk for 50 minutes north into Chinatown to Vanessa’s Dumplings on Eldridge where they give you four dumplings for a dollar. And we would each put $5 down, and we would each eat 20 dumplings. It was a ritual. I’ll get… Ah, it’s one of my favorite memories, and I’m gonna tuck in right now. Bon Appetit, my friend. Bon Appetit. There is something that is so humanizing about a hot meal that is handed to you by the people that make it. And it’s something that frankly makes me very unnerved about this new technocratic food future where they’re cooked by anonymous ghost kitchens. I want to see the light in your eyes transmit to mine via the dumplings. We got the actual Vanessa’s brand vinegar and chili sauce as well. Let’s go! Oh. Yes! I’m noticing that a lot of my food is coming in bags. I noticed that too, brother. Do you think I’m not a very classy guy? I think that’s correct. I don’t think you’re a very classy guy. And I think because class is literally a way to divide people into their social strata. Right? When people use the adage “Food brings everyone together.” Some of my first memories of food were how they divided people. Wow. I was sitting at the lunch table in Orange County, which is deceptively a very, very diverse area. People are sitting there and just seeing all, you know, I had the state subsidized school lunches. So I was sitting there with just like the cardboard pizza, and then I remember I had a friend who’s parents were from Lebanon and they would make him like Muja Dara, you know, in a Tupperware. And like he hated that ’cause he wanted to assimilate. So I’d like trade for the Muja Dara. And I remember just like trading up in these social strata up to the kids that had like fully packed bento boxes because their parents, you know, had disposable income. So for me, I always saw those differences. And I think your food is all about connecting two individuals. This wasn’t a story about the light in your eyes going away, even though I’m sure that happened and people would drag you two finesses. Oh, yeah, I got a couple interventions for sure, yeah, absolutely. But the story they choose to tell was about somebody else. The Latkes were Izzy, the potatoes were your mom’s, and the biscuits may have had something to do with an aunt, but even then you were very careful to not misattribute them to your mom. This is all about connecting with people as opposed to separating from people. Man, you rule. You rule too! Half time hug, man. It’s really special! I’m just looking at these bags and boxes and just remembering all the times that I didn’t have time to sit down and eat. And I think that your point about food can unite people and it can also separate them. I mean, a million percent. And there are all these things where it’s like we wish we could find the perfect tool to solve all the problems, but the truth is everything, food, culture, language, history, can be used for good or ill. And I’ll tell you what man, memory of being with my friends in this place it’s… This show is very special. You’re doing a very special thing here. Thank you, man. I’m sure you can relate to this. I’ve been working my off recently. I’m doing a lot of stuff and what doing this show provided for me was actually an opportunity because I owed you an email, to sit down and reflect on my life and the chapters of my life that have meant something to me. And remembering my pals with those dumplings is, I gotta call ’em. As soon as I’m outta here I gotta go give my pals a call! Yeah, I hope you really do. In fact, I’m going to monitor you. Like a UN white hat observer. Sit there and… Time you move to L.A. Which, one, who knew Pharrell Williams was that old? That’s incredible. Dude, Pharrell, you owe me $50,000. For our viewers. The only reason I was able to move to Los Angeles was I won $50,000 on who wants to be a millionaire. You did. I did. And you got tricked on a really tough question. I got tricked on a really tough question. Really tough question. Well, ’cause it was like eight questions. Yeah. It was like which of these celebrity pairs were alive at the same time? Which means you need to know four different death dates for these older 20th century figures and then four different birth dates for these younger celebrities. One the correct answer was Charlie Chaplin and Pharrell, which is nuts! There were like two years where Charlie Chaplin was alive and Pharrell was a baby, and that is not okay! I agree! Charlie Chaplin lived to the ripe old age of 5,000, and Pharrell it’s very… Towards 5,000 looking 34. He has looked the exact same since The Neptunes. Well it’s a very funny thing too. ’cause it was very, like, there’s this moment where you can see me in the crowd. Like, in the actual television thing where I’m going like, “Well, Pharrell is so young.” And it’s me saying that and it cuts out to an audience with a bunch of white people going “Mh-hm.” And one older black man going, “No.” So Pharrell owes me 50 grand. Sure does. For looking so baby faced. This is so good. A made meal coffee? Yes. We’ve eaten a lot of food. Yes we have. And this is a wonder… This is a great settling of it. That we went to a diner to get their bags. I knew this was diner coffee! I wasn’t gonna guess on camera. I knew this was diner coffee. It’s so weak. It’s awesome. Because if you make it super strong, I know you go to these little coffee places and it’s like we are the, we are the Russian branch, and then you’re like, “Okay, the Russian branch, what’s going on here?” You go to the Russian Branch too? And they’re like, “Each one of these beans was handcrafted by a Tuscan bean smith. And then we burnt them for five days, and we shot the ash into the hottest pot of water we could and now it tastes like battery acid and getting slapped in the mouth by a huge man.” I love the ritual of drinking coffee. The warm cup… By the way, this Greek cup. It’s our pleasure to serve you. Is that such a bad mantra? Is it such a bad life motto? Maybe we can all learn something. I dunno why I’m so aggressive to the viewer right now. Maybe we can all learn something. No, they’re representatives of the Russian Branch, and they hate you. And they hate you. You know, like as Dave Franco came in and he was reading Bell Hooks at the The Russian Branch drinking a V60 pour over single origin from Guatemala. And you aren’t Dave Franco, you piece of shit. I’m not and I’ve never claimed to be, okay? So this is a… Speaking of Dungeons & Dragons, this is the symbol, the talisman, or one of the talismans of Kingston Brown. My best friend Lou Wilson’s character from the Unsleeping City. We did it a setting in magical New York City. So it’s New York City with magic behind every corner. I have a little ceramic version of one of these. Oh, that’s so awesome. It’s very, very… Whenever I have to make night coffee, that’s my night coffee mug. But that allowed you to move out to L.A. Also please eat the bacon, egg and cheese. Don’t lemme stop you. But that allowed you to move out to L.A. which you described as like one of the darker points in your life. Yeah, man. You know, is that because of kind of just leaving your sense of community ending up in a place full of, I don’t know, L.A. is described as crushingly lonely sometimes. You can’t talk about L.A. when you got a… No, no problem. Oh, my God. I used to get one of these at 4:30 in the morning every morning. I would wake up and do all my writing. I did my writing homework when I was in film school in the morning before, I had a 9:00 AM class. So I’d wake up before the sun, walk to the corner, bodega cup of coffee, bacon, egg and cheese and I would write for three hours before class. It truly is like the city just starting to come into life. As the sun starts rising. You can like hear city and blue playing. I know it’s like a cheesy romantic way to talk about it, but it really is like, I don’t know man. Life is very short, I think it’s cool to love stuff. Man, I love New York City. When you’re struggling in New York, you go, “Yeah, it makes sense. The city’s out to get me.” You come to Los Angeles, you see the Hollywood sign, the swaying palm trees. Yeah. Beautiful fit people walking around, and you go, “Why isn’t it happening for me?” New York has this attitude of like workaholism or like, “It’s New York! You gotta get some grit!” Man, no city has a warped relationship to work like Los Angeles. It’s not even close because this is a city where you come to pursue a dream. Yeah. And in America, what does that mean? You’ve come here to work. Yeah. Yeah. And so it’s dominated by an industry. You know, you drive yourself off the bus from Kokomo and you go like, ♪ I’ve got a song in my heart ♪ ♪ Please help me ♪ But you know, that first year I was lonely. It was really tough. Opportunities were not coming through. I applied for a job at College Humor, did not get it. Whatever happened to them? Caught their asses. Well, well, well! Looks like maybe we should have invested more in that Tim Curry, and eating pizza impression! There was one person who was kind to me with no reservation, who was the barista at the Inner Sanctum Cafe at UCB and that was my now wife Izzy. She was so kind. She gave me a lot of free coffee. Thank you, Iz. And you know, she was trying to smash. She was trying to. She was working an angle! Let’s go! That’s what I’m talking about! Woo! That’s the mother of my child. I’m so sorry. I really overstepped and I need to know when to apologize. Dude, she was like… She was so sweet and so kind. And there was something she said, I brought it up in our wedding vows where I literally… I think about it all the time, where I walked in, she was working at the cafe, I walked up, I’ve been really… It had been many months and I was feeling like, “Did I make a huge mistake?” And I walked in and Iz went, “Brennan, good to see you. I was thinking about something you said.” and Oh! Romance is that. Yeah. To me. Like, that is… “I was thinking about something you said.” Because when you feel like a ghost part of what a ghost feels like to me is the second I’m gone, I vanish. Hmm. And all memory fades and you don’t stick in anyone’s mind. And that was the first time that someone in Los Angeles went, “I thought about you when you weren’t here.” And to me that I remember this feeling of like, God, like an airlock opens and like pressure re-equalizes in your heart. And at that point I was still a total doofus and was like- “Just the coffee. Thanks.” I was like, “You’re so nice!” Well here’s the… If you want me to be honest about it what was happening was I was at work, and I was trying to be professional! You know, I showed up and she’s over here like, “Dude, I’m trying to line this up. Don’t you get it?” Yeah. And meanwhile I’m like, “When I get out of the car here at UCB I am as sexless as a Ken doll.” “I am a monk moving through space being like our time to impart lessons of improv comedy.” ‘Cause truly, you know, ’cause you don’t wanna be that gross guy. Sure. Just walking around being like, “What can we make happen at the workplace?” You know? Like. So I was truly buttoned up and it wasn’t until she told me that she was gonna move to New York and I went, “Oh, no!” Like, it was crazy. I had just started dating someone. Like it was just relationship had just started up. That was not a promise to be a long-term thing. Yeah. But I was like, “We should do like an improv show.” and she went like, “Or we could just hang out.” And I went, “Yeah. Yes!” Oh, finally! She has led the horse and has forcibly, taken the horse’s head into the lake. Into the lake! And I’m like, “Yeah!” Frat platonic friends hangout? That was kind of like, “You really got upset with this person moving.” And then we went to go see Wonder Woman as friends! and I got outta the car and I saw her waiting in front of Phil’s coffee at the art clay. And I just saw her waiting there, in the morning light was like an 11:00 AM matinee. And I went, “Oh, you love this person.” Like, “You have feelings for this person, which means that you’re being unfaithful. You’re a bad person.” “You are seeing someone else right now. This is bad, this is bad.” Flop sweat, got through the movie show, went “This was very nice. Thank you for your time!” She moved to New York, didn’t like it, much like you, came back, and I saw her upstairs at UCB and went “Iz!” and she, “I moved back!” And she ran down the hall and leapt into my arms. Oh! We were pals you see? And then we got married and had a baby. The thing in my life that I’m the most proud of and the most grateful for is Iz and my child. Not a single person on their deathbed has said, “I wished I saw my kids less, so I could’ve worked harder for a bigger boat.” Yeah. Not a single person has said that. Totally. Unfortunately, due to the theory of large numbers. Somebody has said that. We don’t like that. We don’t like that guy. We don’t ascribe to that. Yeah. Well, that’s the crazy thing too, I feel like, I don’t know, me and my wife look at each other and we’re like, so, you have this little kid who’s discovering the world and you see the microcosm of everything you know about reality being reflected back and a brand new face and continue whatever this insane story of the universe is. The feeling like, “Oh, I got to be a link in the coolest chain of all time. How sick is that?” Bringing it back to mortality. Like I don’t have a higher aspiration than that. I don’t wanna be around forever. I will be around forever in that I’m a link in this chain that goes all the way into the past and goes all the way into the future. And then I look at people who go, “If you have 10 boats you will be happy.” And I go, “Doug, you’re not happy right now.” I know, I know. Brenn, for course number who knows of your final meal, we have the most sacred final meal of all. We have your standard diner order. Now, this is a large cheeseburger deluxe, that means wide, not tall, very important. With the lettuce, the tomato, the bacon, the caramelized onions, American cheese, a nice hard griddle cooked burger to medium well, the waffle fries, pickle spear, chocolate shake. We got refills in the chocolate shake if you want it. L’chaim. L’chaim. ♪ I love you, baby ♪ ♪ Quite all right, maybe ♪ A certain amount of seconds is fair use. Goddamn, that’s a good milkshake. I used to order multiples of these new Paltz Plaza diner. I think the most I ever did one night was five and I had a gastrointestinal catastrophe like you would not believe. Now, gastrointestinal catastrophe, that is sort is sort of a latinification of- Dude, I had a that was crazy. “Yo, I got the craziest shit.” Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Yes! God, it’s good to eat! Come on! Come on! Come on, man! God, it’s good to eat food! It really is. We get to do this every single day, multiple times a day! You have one bad meal? Got at least two more coming if you’re lucky. It’s already in the past, let go of them. I know. Me and my wife don’t cook that tremendously much. We have a few, a few staples, right? Latkes is one of them. But one of the reasons that cooking is so challenging, I think for people that wanna pick it up and learn it, is that the sorrow I feel when I make something not tasty feels like an outsized punishment. Because I think you work up an appetite cooking. Yeah. If you make something that you don’t like, I think it is heartbreaking in a certain way. Is that something that you experienced? Do you have to push past that? Like what was, how did you first start cooking and was that, like… When did you get to the point where you’re like, “I reliably make things that I like eating?” I got to that point probably by the time I was like 15, 16. I started cooking when I was, I mean, it became like my nightly chore around like 10, 11 years old to like cook family dinner every night, and kind of shop and keep a budget. ‘Cause my dad was like, “I don’t know how to cook. You’re already better than I am. I’m gonna just give you like 60 bucks cash. There’s a Trader Joe’s and a Ralph’s across the street, you figure it out, small child and I’ll clean the toilets.” So I started doing that. But I think I’ve heard you kind of talk about the idea of storytelling as like, there’s never a when, or a why. It is the primordial. It is just, I’ve sprung like Athena from Zeus’s brain, from the idea of telling a story. It’s rooted in everything. There’s almost this thing with food for me that’s always been so intrinsic that like, I’m like borderline… This is weird. Like, post appetite. Like, I make food, and my appetite doesn’t get worked up? I grow to, like, resent it in a certain way. But no, I’m like always cooking sort of for somebody else and like to practice the craft. And if I cook for myself, I cook like nondescript slot bowl that is like seasoned to my taste and that I can get Yeah. Inside me very quickly. I don’t know, It’s a very weird relationship for me where I don’t have the same sort of emotional attachments to other people because it’s almost so important to me. What I recognize in myself is my fear of failure around cooking I don’t have in storytelling. Yeah. But it’s also one of those things where you just realize that like, sometimes what I feel very grateful for is how much failure I got to do when I was too young to care or no. 100%. The first thing that I made for my family under this new program. Yeah. Where I was the cook, it was a Giada De Laurentiis recipe. It was like potato gnocchi with Gorgonzola cream sauce. Tough first recipe, kid, should have done like shake and bake pork chops. But it was… The gnocchi was so gummy that it was like borderline bubble gum. Like you had to chew through it. Oh, my God. And the only reward for chewing through it was getting more broken, grainy, Gorgonzola cream assaulting your mouth. But yeah, I have so many memories like that of the stupidest things. Yeah. That they eventually, those mistakes just become intrinsic of you knowing how to never get there again in a certain way. I worked for many years as an improv teacher and it’s very interesting how you have to develop a relationship to failure as a teacher. Yeah. When you’re trying to communicate to people who desperately don’t wanna fail. By the way I knew this would happen, ’cause it’s sort of like how like bread always lands whatever like butter side down. I knew you were a pickle person. Do you want my pickle? Yes! Thank you so much. That’s how we go. And why do I like the pickle after eating the burger? Because it’s gonna kill you. It’s gonna kill you. It’s the poison in the pickle! It’s deadly poison. Don’t touch it! Yeah, this was the signature man. I ordered this every time. And like, I think SoCal kids have a wider variety of third spaces than kids in the Northeast have. I think there’s, depending on where you’re at, there’s beaches or there’s parks. Ours is called outside, which was cool. Yeah, for sure, right? But I think there’s parts of the northeast that it’s challenging to find that space. And what diners are is it’s a way for you to get out of whatever you’re doing at 8:00 PM or 9:00 PM and be like, “I want to hang out until midnight. Where can I do that?” And have a really, really sweet older Greek woman pinch my cheek and call me “Honey.” And that’s a diner. Would you like me to? “Ah, honey, you look so good. You eating your burger so fast.” That’s my old Greek impression. It feels bad now. What I love about cooking that feels very similar to comedy is that it seems like there are really incredible, almost like deep rooted principles that govern a lot of it. And then there’s also some fun tricks, and tricks are great. I was just thinking about this a second ago when you mentioned like, oh, you were speaking linguistically and you know, like I said, I had a gastrointestinal catastrophe. Yeah. And you said, “What does that mean?” And you were like, “I had a huge shit.” And there’s a funny thing that’s like I was thinking about that was just literally like a good improv teaching trick of switching up the root language of the words you’re using in the middle of a sentence. Yeah. So if you’re starting Latin based, go to German by the end. Or if you’re starting Romance, you know, like if you’re showing Romance, go German at the end. It always works. It always gets a big laugh. And you see the same thing. And you see people like play with this in memes. Like it’s not a PB and J sandwich. It’s like a laminated wheat dough with a, you know, sweet and sour marion berry guest streak and a peanut cream. It’s like, no, that’s a PB and J sandwich. That’s what we… You can extrapolate anything to have that sort of meaning, but… Man, talking about language dividing people that shit, it really does, it makes my hackles rise up. I know, it’s funny ’cause I feel like when you grow up, my parents were were artists, and art is this weird thing where you can grow up with a lot of access to education but not a lot of access to money. Yeah. And so it’s this interesting thing where you end up being like, I know you can use some like SAT vocab, but like being in a space where it’s like, ah, we have a fine dining experience. I feel like a mouse that’s just been spotted by a snake. Like, “I gotta get outta here!” Yeah. Yeah. It freaks me out. There’s like… I had this thing where I went to go buy earrings for Izzy for the first time after I got a full-time job. It was her birthday, she had played a character in a game that had Chanel earrings. She played a DnD character that she had represented to have Chanel earrings. And I was like, “Oh, I’ve never…” I was like, “Maybe that would be a nice gift to get the earrings that she mentioned her character having.” To, I was like, “Well, I’ll go to the Chanel store.” Who knew! And then I show up and I walk into a room, no jewelry, people wearing all black surveillance headsets. Like the president’s gonna be like, what’s happening? And I walk up to this woman and I’m like, “Hi, I am looking to buy earrings for my at the time girlfriend.” And she’s like, “Are you looking for high jewelry or fine jewelry?” And I went, “I’m gonna cry. Please be nice to me. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” ’cause I was in like a showroom, I think? I was like… It wasn’t what the store was. That’s like the time that I tried to buy socks at a GAP, and I accidentally… In New York City, I was like, “Oh, there’s a GAP in this building on the 38th floor.” and it was GAP headquarters. This is when Google Maps was not as good. Yeah. I like went past a reception desk and I like walked into like a conference room being like, “You guys don’t have socks?” I wanna circle back to education. ’cause like you said, you were in college at 14, didn’t have the high school experience. You mentioned a very formative figure in your life. Professor Tom Davis. Yeah. What were the biggest lessons that you took away from Professor Davis? You know, in the eulogy, I wrote for him, I said he was like, Bugs Bunny, Merlin, and Buddha all rolled up into one person. And he taught classes, you know, he taught broad surveys of like early western, eastern philosophy. I did a lot of philosophy of religion classes with him. What he did that I loved was, he had a point of view, but when he was teaching, he was performing. And what he was performing as was every time he would explicate a philosophy, he would do it from the perspective of the culture and time that had generated it. So every time heed a philosophy. It’s he spoke and sounded like someone who believed that, he never had a condescension of being like, “And these people at this time believed this.” You know what I mean? It was always like, “Well, let me tell you about Samsara.” And this was truth to someone. This was truth to somebody. Everything he said, and he’s like, “Of course, you know, like Christ up on the cross, he died for our sins. He died for our sins.” You know? Like, everything he would perform it and he would have these chalkboards that he would write words, but he only wrote words for emphasis. So by the end of a lesson, you would be like, “Utilitarianism, deontology, circle, circle, line, Joey from Friends, line, you know, e equals mc squared, line over here, jainism. You know, like you’d have all this stuff where it was like, it was so beautiful. And I think that like also he was just so generous getting pinned down for like 40 minutes after every class by two 14-year-old homeschooled kids in pajama pants being like, “I had some thoughts about logic.” And you’re like, “I bet you did, buddy.” Yep. I think what I took from his classes was a belief that there was nothing dry about it. There was nothing dry in his classes. It was, everything was earnest and heartfelt and urgent. Like these were the ideas that people had about the most important questions in their life. What could be naval gazy about this? What could be academic about this? Yeah. This is the stuff of life. How do you be good? What is this? Is this for something? And so it’s funny because I know that there’s this like attitude around philosophy of it being kind of hopelessly detached or aloof or kind of producing a certain class of person who is emotionally disaffected. Yeah. He was the most affected by the world, by life, by everything. And again, I look back at my work, whether it’s DnD campaigns or it’s a web comic or it’s a screenplay or all the different stuff I’ve done in my life, I think that everything comes back to a early love of axiology and ethics that I learned from him. ’cause to me it’s like, well, what could be frivolous or trivial about how to live a good life? So yeah, I think his fingerprints are on everything I’ve ever done. For somebody to imbue you with earnest excitement about something and to give you permission to say “You can be very earnestly excited about this thing.” Is to me the greatest gift that you can give anybody. And especially those formative ages now that like you have the opportunity and likely are the Tom Davis to a lot of people in a certain way. Like, how much do you take that burden or that privilege onto yourself? Teaching at UCB and teaching workshops at Wayfinder, truth is I love teaching. I love it so much. I miss teaching. And I sometimes dream about one day being a little white bearded old man teaching philosophy somewhere. I think that if there’s any part of his life that I would aspire to try to like mimic or model in some way. There’s no way to compel people. What he did was reveal to people in his class how fascinating all this was. I think there’s great lessons in there for parenting as well. Right? What it felt like he did in his classes was show us how much he loved this stuff. And if I could do that, then that would mean everything. Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, is that we are powerful beyond measure. There’s our light, not our darkness that frightens us. But when we allow our inner light to shine, we subconsciously give others license to do the same. Timo Cruz from Coach Carter starring Samuel L. Jackson! Greatest high school sports movie ever made. Hell yeah. My greatest fear is the candiru, it’s a fish that swims up your penis. Oh, my God. It’s either that or the pools that change color when you pee. ‘Cause I’d rather have a penis fish than have people know that I do pee in pools. For the final course of your final meal. I mean, self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m about to die. Yeah, same. Same, same, same. We just collapse in each other’s arms Beautiful. After this. We have the hot dog soup. This is a cut of hot dogs with a can of baked beans. And then the Rocky Road ice cream. Shout out to Joe Mulligan, baby. My dad would whip up some hot dogs. Tasty hotdog soup. Cut up hot dogs, baked beans. He would do, I think he was a fan of bush mills and he would do the… Bushmills Irish whiskey? Or Bush’s baked beans? Was he also a fan of Bushmills Brennan? My dad was a mean drunk, huh? He’d drink that Protestant whiskey and throw hot dogs at me. “Why can’t you be more like your father!” Boom, bam, hot dog in the eye. Bush’s baked beans or B and M or something like those. In any case, he put hot dogs and beans in a bowl and make me eat it. I love you, Dad. Dad I’m having a food… What’s the word when you… Hallucination. It’s like a fever dream. I can see like, a… Oh, it’s so goddamn hot. I love it. How they get it so hot. That is a period accurate. Come out… Fresh outta the microwave, Fresh out the microwave, radioactively hot. Pure nostalgia. Where where are you right now when you log in to this taste memory? Dad’s couch, facing east in a railroad apartment on the fourth floor of a building on 50th Street between ninth and 10th, on a couch. We’re watching Young Frankenstein, and he’s whipped up some hot dog soup and he’s teaching me to love movies. Again, not a very classy meal, cut up hot dogs and baked beans. But I don’t know. I think my wife just the other day said like, “There’s no such thing as a bad hot dog.” Which is kind of true. Like, a lot of this stuff is so funny ’cause it’s like it’s cheap or it’s mass produced, it’s whatever, you know, there’s nothing fine to it, but there’s something within that like familiarity that I really desire. This is really wonderful. To whoever made this, by which I mean heated it up. I appreciate you. And the Rocky Road ice cream. This is just the of the entire situation. This is a very dad ice cream flavor. It is. It’s very funny. It’s remained my favorite ever since I was a kid Like, almonds doesn’t like appeal to a child, but there’s something about it that’s just… And can I say, the fact that you source the ice cream that has the marshmallow as actual marshmallow chunks. Get this swirl stuff outta here. No, that’s not proper Rocky Road. No, not at all. I think you’ve called yourself like a stone cold atheist. Whereas I’m a cold stone atheist. That means I walk into cold stone creamery. Dead God? I’ve gotta have it. Dude, I love that. A cold stone…. “I’m a cold stone atheist.” I don’t think God’s real, but if it’s his birthday I’ll sing for him. Only for a death. Yeah. I have described myself as a stone cold atheist. What’s so funny is I can’t not cry at a Christmas Carol. Cannot do it. Destroyed person puts on brave face, will not admit that they are destroyed. Bob Cratchit in the future, walking home, you see the crutch by the fireplace. Tiny Tim has passed. Mm. Scrooge has not learned his lesson. And so the Cratchit’s are suffering in poverty. He starts just at the door size, I think about Kermit doing it, in my Christmas Carol, size. The greatest at work of art in all of history. And he opens the door and he goes, “I’ve seen him his his grade up on the hill where he could see the ships come in. He loves it.” And says this thing to make everybody else feel like everything’s okay. Ooh, I love all the old Christmas hymns. Like, “God rest ye merry gentlemen.” and “Good King Wenceslas” “Therefore Christian men be sure wealth are ranked possessing you, now shall bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.” And you look at all of this, as a stone cold atheist, I feel drawn to people that I sense have a spiritual heft to them even though I don’t think of myself as a spiritual person. Yeah. What I love about Christmas, even as someone that doesn’t believe in God or doesn’t even really believe in the supernatural, I believe, you know what could be above nature? The thing I think about when I think about Christmas and why I love it so much is I like anything that’s still got a little sauce to it. And there’s plenty of, I see things that are pretty godless that also seem pretty empty. I see a lot of naked unspiritual capitalism that doesn’t really strike me as being that great of an alternative even to a cruel and despotic God. Sort of two bad flavors that are each bad in a different way. I relish a time of year that asks us to think about what we owe to our fellow human beings. So it’s interesting, I am a stone cold atheist and yet I feel like the people that I gravitate to, are the atheists, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Pagan. Yeah. Of any belief system that believe that there’s some good in this world and it’s worth fighting for. And you seem like somebody who tremendously loves ritual and tradition in a way. I do. I think part of it’s almost more impressive that we did all this. We with our minds. Yeah. That’s crazy. The power of the human brain to sort of conjure these experiences, these fictions. As far as we know, we’re the only animal that can tell fiction. And that’s been a massive part of us being able to collectivize. Maybe we did it a little bit too much, agricultural revolution could have taken it or left it. But we’re here now and that’s pretty cool. We made Rocky Road ice cream. That’s very cool. You know? Yeah. Is there an argument being made that surplus energy derived from capitalism created hierarchy and therefore despotism? Maybe that’s for people smarter than me to figure out. I’m just enjoying my rocky road ice cream here in the death thrones of a crumbling empire. When you’re walking down the street in New York City after Professor Davis had passed, and you walk into St. Malachi’s church and you sat in the pews and you saw something. I did. What did you see? I was at a real low point mentally, psychically, I was going through a very, very hard time. Walking into this chapel, not because I’m Catholic, I walked in because it’s a tiny little place that’s echo-y and calm in the middle of midtown Manhattan. That’s important. I went in, sat down in a pew, I was crying hard. It was around the one year anniversary of I think when Professor Davis had passed. And I look up, and I see the back of someone’s head. It looks very familiar. And I look out and the head turns around and I see Professor Davis, he smiles and winks and goes, . He stands up, I see a pair of wings spread off his back and he rises up and vanishes. This was in a period of my life where I was routinely staying awake for days at a time. Yeah. What did I see? Well, I had this experience that a lot of people would call like a religious experience. What do you call it? I went back to use the tools that I had picked up in studying those philosophy classes. And I said, “Well, let’s see, what are some possible explanations for this?” One possible explanation is that when you die, God conscripts you into an army of winged men, and tasks you with certain missions on earth. And of the tasks that are put before this supernatural host, are helping out a 20 something year old white kid in New York who’s a film major, who’s having a hard emotional time, and allowing other untold atrocities to unfold, add infinitum throughout the world in its history. Or, another explanation is that there was a man who lived for a period of time on this earth whose impact on my life was so incredibly profound that I tied him into the symbol, one of the symbols that I love most for the force of good in the world. Such that when I was in a state of peak, looking for answers, a part of my mind reminded me that he, and what he represented was the answer. Yeah. I like that explanation a little more. I really miss him a lot. And he is still, to me a symbol for the fact that the examined life is the life worth living. Yeah. My mom said a great thing. ’cause my mom was a totally awesome… She loves science, she’s a skeptical, rational person. And we did like belting rituals growing up spring pagan stuff. You know, Celtic paganism is great in terms of searching for… There’s not a lot of mysticism to hide behind. Sort of like Manannán mac Lir, 13 foot tall god of the sea, lives in a castle, ate golden rams, are you in or you out? In or you’re out, baby? Oh, you know, I’m in. There’s not a gnostic text of Manannán mac Lir. You know? There’s not like “Maybe Manannán is a metaphor for…” It’s like, you know, it’s a piece of poetry. Yeah. But what I love is my mom said this great thing when I was asking her about kind of like ritual, you know, if we don’t believe in a supernatural, what the are we doing out here doing rituals for? And she said, “You only have to believe for the length of the ritual.” And what I love about that is it sort of tells you sometimes you need a little bit of poetry. Sometimes you need to believe that there is light in the world and that it’s with you in a given moment. But I think it’s really important for a lot of reasons, a lot of ’em having to do with kindness to keep those lines really clean. Because if you start to take the poetic truths out of poetry land, and you go like, “The light shines on me, that’s why I’m rich. And if you’re poor it means the light’s not shining on you.” Yes. There are moments where you have to go, “Hey, drop the poetry for a second. Come be in the real world with me.” Right? Yeah. Don’t bring the poetry into the practical, but also don’t live a life without poetry. Maybe that’s the lesson. I know you don’t like to prognosticate on the future ’cause everything is sort of just luck. And I know that ultimately when you die, the only things left will be two Costa Rican screws. Brennan, if you was a betting man, what happens when you die? Mostly to the Costa Rican screws. I have two really wonderful implants from the Dentavac, in Costa Rica. And yeah, my doctor did say when I had these two implants, there’s one of them ends kind of under my nose. If I bite into something that’s sort of like an apple can feel a twinge under my right eyeball, “Relax!” Hey, when you don’t have health insurance. The doctor actually took me aside and he was like, “Mr. Mulligan, this surgery was successful. Also, if you are ever cremated, this would be the last memory will be these two fake teeth.” And literally- And his bedside manner is his strong suit. I was like, I was thinking like shake them, and I was like, “Will it?” And he’s like, “Yes, like a rattle.” What happens when you die is the story goes on. I think the thing that we’re ultimate, you know, they had that great quote of like, “The thing we fear most is that, that we are powerful beyond reckoning.” I think the thing we fear most is that the party will go on without us. Someone talked about the preponderance of apocalyptic media and one of my favorite writers, Daniel Ortberg said this great thing, which is basically like Apocalypse Media is the fantasy that the world will end before you do, and that you and your friends will be the main thing going on. Yeah, yeah. But this story is not gonna end anytime soon. And when I’m gone, other people get their turn and that’s beautiful and I got mine. To imagine that I am owed some better deal that I have no proof exists, is not something that it occurs to me to want. This was a great deal, and I got a better deal than a lot of people through dumb luck. Ready to move on to landing round? Let’s do it. Who is the one person dead or alive you’d want to share your actual last meal with. Izzy. What song do you want to be played at your funeral? I’m just gonna say lightning. I said, “Oh, we’re halfway there. Oh, living on a prayer.” It’ll be a public domain with it. Yeah. Now that we’ve known each other for roughly two hours, how would you introduce me as an NPC to your Intrepid Heroes in Future campaign? This is Josh. He is, Josh is a level 20 chef! And he is a delightful human being, and a wonderful guy. Thanks, man, I appreciate that. It’s true man. Let’s hang out! I really like that. Well, I’ll hit you up after we’re done recording. Thought you’d say like “Fearsome warrior, huge traps!” God, fine. His traps are huge! Thank you! Jesus! Doing micro shrugs. Who’s your dream eulogizer at your funeral? By definition, I won’t be able to, but I’d love to know what my kids would say. I’ll record it and upload it to the cloud. Where your consciousness of this stores. Is there a trial you thought about putting Sam Rice through for Samalamadingdong but did not? Some of my earlier pitches for Samalamadingdong I was pulled aside and they were like, “Hey, that’s coming across a little hostile.” And we had to scale back. What’s your biggest fear? My greatest fear is the candiru, it’s a fish that swims up your penis. Not living my life in such a way that it matches up with what I want to spend my time here doing. Brennan, we have weighed all of the food in your last meal, how much do you think your last meal weighed? I was handed the results and I have not yet looked at it. I think we come in at a healthy five pounds? 26 pounds or 415.3 ounces. That’s with everything on the table. That pizza was five pounds by itself for those with thick pizza. Do you feel how heavy that bag was? None of this food will go to waste to be clear. So, okay, so I guess five, but it was 26. Finally, Brennan, are you happy? Yeah, I’m really happy. You seem really happy, man. I’m really happy for you. And I don’t know if it’s silly to like congratulate someone on the body of work of their life, not your career, but like it’s genuinely… I don’t wanna say inspiring, I wanna say like I admire it on a truly, truly deep way, man. So thank you. My man, first of all, I’ve just had all of my favorite food in the world beautifully and lovingly prepared. So on a pure animal level, I’m blissed out in a way where I need help getting home. Yeah. So help me. But number two, it’s always really lovely when you walk into a place and I think get a vibe of like, “Oh, kindred spirits. People that feel the same way I feel about life in the world.” And I think that there’s this… One of the most bizarre illusions of modernity is this idea that we’re alone. And it’s really lovely when you walk into a place and you go, “Oh, there’s a whole other front in the world and in this like struggle for a better, brighter world.” And you walk in and go “And here’s a whole group of people that shared my values who I’d never met before today.” It’s really encouraging and delightful and lovely. This has been incredible. Brennan, if you wanna deliver your last words to that camera right there. I loved this, and that’s applicable here. And it will be the last thing I feel when it is actually time for my last meal. And I love this too. This meal, not your eventual death. We’ll see how I feel about that. When it happens. I have time to turn it around. Do you got anything to plug? The Critical Role? You got Critical Role Campaign Four coming out on Thursdays, on Twitch, and YouTube, and Beacon. You got Dimension 20 that is coming out Wednesdays on . Drop… Yeah, Dropout. Dimension 20 is on Dropout. You go to Dropout.tv, you get that Worlds Beyond Number, it premieres on Tuesdays you can go check out the podcast Worlds Beyond Number. You find me at Brennan Lee Mulligan. In Bluesky and Instagram and you can find me the human, in a ditch after this. Yeah. You’re gonna roll me out here like that Blueberry girl from Willy Wonka. Violet Beauregarde, and not a ditch, it’s actually a gully, it’s really nice. But it’s dry. We all gotta eat, and we know you’re dying to get your hands on a Last Meals apron and pen. Get yours now at mythical.com