Hey! Jake and Josh is a podcasting network run by Jake Mason and Josh Nichols, two best friends originally from Austin, Texas. Starting with two core shows The Morphin' Grid and Pokemon World Tour, the duo have since expanded into many a podcast in order showcase a wide variety of their various hobbies and fandoms. The two have cultivated a dedicated fanbase thanks to both their seamless chemistry and their propensity for fan interaction, allowing the listeners to feel just as important to their shows as the hosts themselves.
Shows with their own pages:
Their other shows:
- The Morphin' Grid: Their first show, a twice-a-week Power Rangers fan-cast where they pause the recording, watch an episode of Power Rangers, then recap and review it along with pointing out the inherent weirdness of the series. Can occasionally devolve into weird tangents and massive giggle-fits. It has its own twitter here
. - Pokemon World Tour: A Pokémon series with every episode focusing on a single city or part of a city in the Pokemon world, replicating the route that most player characters would take. They also feature Pokemon news, a spotlight Pokemon, and a name-rater segment where listeners can send in their Pokemon's nicknames. It has its own twitter here, which it shares with its sister show Pokemon World Tour United.
- In late 2023 the show was re-branded as Pokemon World Tour +, doing away with the globetrotting aspect in favour of focusing on parts of the series that they enjoy. Each episode is dedicated to either creating a new gym and gym leader for a Pokemon type, ranking Pokemon or another aspect of the world, or name-rater segments for a specific group of Pokemon.
- GaScast: Games and Sports: A podcast for Jake and Josh to talk about sports, wrestling, and game shows.
- K-Pop Smarts: A spin-off exclusive to donors of the Kingdom Smarts patreon, where Jake and Shannon watch a K-Pop music video and try to figure out the plot and what kind of world it takes place in.
The duo also has a variety of associated acts thanks to their aforementioned fan interaction.
Dedicated listeners can donate to the shows' Patreon. There is a main a twitter here, and both Jake and Josh have their own as well. There is also a YouTube channel where they post character creation videos for their actual-play podcasts and occasional Let's Plays.
These two little idiots and their podcasts provide examples of:
- Artifact Title: Pokemon World Tour was named as such because the premise had them travelling across Pokemon regions and discussing each location. However when it was re-branded as Pokemon World Tour +, that aspect was dropped and the focus was moved to more popular segments like rankings and name rating.
- Audience Participation: Almost every show has it to some degree.
- Morphin' Grid, Pokemon World Tour, and Kingdom Smarts all have segments for reading listener emails (though for the latter those are usually saved until the end of each game to manage spoiler potential).
- Pokemon World Tour also has the name-rater segment with viewer-submitted nicknames.
- Pokemon World Tour United is the most noteworthy since all trial captains and gym leaders except for Blue are played by Patreon sponsors.
- Couch Gag: During Time Force on Morphin' Grid, Jake replaced Apple Podcasts with a different fruit each episode. He ran out pretty quickly and had to resort to either googling, repeating himself, or using pretend fruits. In Wild Force he moved on to naming different types of apples. By Ninja Storm he's moved on to "apple" in other languages.
- Cross-Referenced Titles: Every now and then a Morphin' Grid episode comes along called "The Giggles", with an increasing number, to indicate an episode where Jake and Josh simply cannot stop corpsing. The last one so far, from Dino Thunder, breaks the tradition being named "Jake and Josh Meet the Gigglefits".
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- The first several episodes of Pokemon World Tour feature Jake giving recaps of anime episodes where the locations where featured; these were soon shortened, then made into separate episodes, then removed altogether. They also spent most of Kanto rating any nickname sent to them during Name Rater, before shifting to their current format of only taking names for the previous episode's spotlight pokemon.
- Fans of World Tour United who listen to old World Tour episodes may find it jarring to hear Jake make jokes about eating Pokemon while Josh is uncomfortable. One of the defining traits of their characters Rose and Cobalt is that the former is Poketarian and the latter is constantly trying to give people Tauros jerky.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Comes in several varieties for The Morphin' Grid.
- Every Turbo episode is titled "The *blank* Episode". Episodes bad enough to stand-out from the season tend to get this treatment as well.
- All the Clip Show episodes starting in SPD are titled "[season]'s Hit Clips".
- Every episode of Jungle Fury is given a Taylor Swift song as its title (even the clip show, though it still gets in on the previous gag by being named "Hits Different").
- Insistent Terminology: Any mention of Hell or the devil will be prefixed with the words "Literal Christian", for emphasis.
- Lost Episode: Several early episodes of Morphin' Grid don't play on some podcast apps due to their age and the roundabout way their hosting was set up when the two began. That being said, all episodes from the beginning are still available on their website.
- The Nicknamer: Jake and Josh often refer to Power Rangers monsters as something other than their name due to not remembering it, not liking it, or it being autocorrected in their notes.
- Person as Verb: After Jonathan Craton appeared in Pokemon World Tour United dressed as The Babadook, the boys started using "babadook" or just "dook" as shorthand for somebody being haunted or influenced by the supernatural, and it crossed over to the other shows.
- Retool: Pokemon World Tour eventually fell by the wayside compared to the other shows since Josh got so sick of having to do research on every individual location in every main series game (a task which is simple on paper but becomes incredibly mind-numbing when there are so many redundancies between close locales). The only reason he and Jake powered through was because of their nostalgia for the first two generations. As such, they only got halfway through Generation III before throwing in the towel. The eventual return as Pokemon World Tour + did away with the globe-trotting aspect of the series and instead focused on the parts of the show that the boys did enjoy: name rater segments, creating original gyms, and ranking elements of the franchise.
- Running Gag: A few.
- Referring to the Apple Podcasts app as "Snapple Podcasts".
- Pokemon World Tour has "the Kemps Test", in which the quality of a nickname is based on how good it sounds when you yell it at a Pokemon for doing something bad (eg, "Kemps! Get off the sofa!").
- Jake rattling off the places people can listen to Morphin' Grid which includes Podbaby (a fake site that Jake nonetheless owns the domain for) and another fake site inspired by his and Josh' tangents before the episode. These also usually include a Take That! at the podcast Rabbits.
- Whenever someone mentions Trey of Triforia they comment that it just sounds like a fart noise.
- Josh once accidentally called Rocky from Turbo "Ticky", and now almost exclusively refers to him as "my boy Ticky". In a similar vein, Turbo is often referred to as Turbp due to a typo.
- "Andros. Wow."
- "Muscle Butt Suit", named for Andros' Battlizer and kept for any and all power-up modes from then on.
- The Z-Wave is referred to as the "Yuppie Wave" because of how the purified villains look.
- "Mama needs her coffee".
- "Papa Haim hates kissing!" And just generally referring to The Powers That Be as Papa Haim, Papa Walt, and Papa Hasbro depending on the season.
- After Time Force, they refer back to Mr. Collins' odd line reading if they're proud of some one.
Mr. Collins: My son did...andimproudofhimfordoinit!- Heralding any moment that could be seen as a Ship Tease with bleeping noises and a declaration of "It's (insert ship name here) watch!"
- S.P.D. has plenty of references to Dog Police, especially when Doggy is the focus.
- Self-Deprecation: They refer to themselves as "us two little idiots" in Morphin' Grid. It's even in the show's e-mail.
- Serious Business: The entire premise of Kingdom Smarts is that Jake doesn't know anything about the series other than what Shannon tells him. As such they don't suffer anyone trying to spoil him about things, with both encouraging the use of the #KHFree hashtag to keep Jake from seeing spoiler tweets and Shannon often screening certain Kingdom Hearts related things that come near them to ensure he remains unsullied.
- Signing-Off Catchphrase: Several throughout their shows.
- Morphin' Grid has "May the Power protect you!"
- Both Pokemon podcasts have "Smell ya later!"
- "This has been the Cool Kids Table, and you can sit with us."
- Sound-Effect Bleep: Any swearing on "The Morphin' Grid" is replaced with a Putty noise. Sometimes they or a guest will self-censor by saying the words "putty noise" instead of actually cursing.
- Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: They've never forgiven Leo for fleeing a battle instead of helping free slaves, and will often bring it up to show that no matter how bad some rangers are, Leo's probably worse.
- Special Person, Normal Name: Jake and Josh both appreciate this trope, expressing delight in giving Pokemon normal human nicknames. They also give normal nicknames to all the mutants in Time Force instead of using their monster names.
- The Swear Jar: Implemented during Jungle Fury for The Morphin Grid, with Jake and Josh putting in a dollar each whenever they cuss (guests have to put in three dollars because that's the minimum you can transfer through ko-fi). However they soon realized they weren't sure what to do with it - they didn't want it to go to charity because the point was trying to swear less. They also let words like "ass" and "piss" through, the former justified with "it's in the bible" and the latter determined with a twitter poll.
- Tender Tears: Jake Mason cries pretty easily at emotional moments, and he is not afraid to let the audience know when something hits him that hard.
