Scott also holds the Guinness World Record for owning the most pizza boxes. One more reason to be jealous.

There is almost nothing better than a good slice of Brooklyn pizza—the molten cheese, the piquant sauce, the chewy crust. But I would argue that listening to Scott Wiener of Scott’s Pizza Tours talk about pizza might be even better than eating it.

During a recent lecture in the Brooklyn Collection of the public library, Scott won me over, not just because of his enthusiasm for pizza (which is considerable) but also his willingness to forego the easy route of merely touting the merits of various pizza joints and instead diving into the more complex terrain of pizza history. You should have seen the way his face lit up when he pulled up the PowerPoint slide of the preserved communal ovens from 1st century A.D. Pompeii. Or the way he elatedly traced the web of relationships that connected Lombardi’s in Little Italy to Totonno’s on Coney Island. (It’s true that I got a little lost during the part of the talk in which he discussed the physics of coal-burning ovens, but that might have been due to the monster pour of white wine a librarian had given me just prior to sitting down. Man, I love the library.)

Judging from the reaction of the crowd, I wasn’t alone in being wooed by Scott. There was an audible groan when the words “Papa John’s” were uttered, and crows of delight when he revealed a stream of research that hinted that the original Ray’s might well have been in Brooklyn, not Manhattan. I was a little concerned that one peculiar old dude might kidnap Scott just so they discuss the details of oven construction, about which the old dude seemed passionate.

The story of how Scott Wiener became the crowd-pleasing pizza maven he is today turned out to be almost as good as the lecture itself. Building upon his already substantial pizza knowledge, he decided to rent a bus for his birthday and take his family and friends around town for a taste of his favorite pizzas in the city. Afterwards, his loved ones would allow him no rest, hassling him about when they would get to do it again. And thus, Scott’s Pizza Tours was born. Today, you can sign up for a walking tour of various pizza-heavy neighborhoods (Greenwich Village, Little Italy, the Lower East Side) or you can go for half-day bus extravaganza that mimics that original birthday bash. I don’t think there was anyone in that room who wasn’t dying of envy when he told us this story.

He might never have extricated himself from us, his weird pizza groupies, if the pizza for the post-lecture reception hadn’t shown up. It was delicious, of course, but Scott excused himself. “I’ve already had three slices today,” he said, “which means I’m right on track.”