For my latest restaurant adventure, I went to Mr. Shota AYCE Sushi in the unincorporated town of Spring Valley in the Las Vegas Valley.
To start, I got salmon and yellowtail carpaccio with ponzu and truffle oil.
Next was the seafood salad.
For my third dish, I received a sashimi roll with tuna, salmon, whitefish, and crab wrapped with cucumber and topped with screaming orgasm sauce. At other restaurants, this roll is often called the Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Following that was seafood aioli with assorted fresh fish topped with fried onion and drenched in creamy aioli and eel sauce.
Then came towering sashimi poke with assorted fish and crab on wonton chips with ponzu, spicy mayo, and eel sauce.
Next was an oyster.
After that was amaebi, or sweet shrimp.
My final plate consisted of salmon belly, ocean trout, salmon, and sea urchin.
For dessert, I got ube ice cream… but more on that later.
If you look through my photos, you’ll notice that this is substantially less food than I usually have at all-you-can-eat restaurants. It’s not because I wasn’t hungry… it is because Mr. Shota had the literal worst service I have ever received at an all-you-can-eat restaurant in my entire life.
I spent about two and a half hours at the restaurant and the waiter came to my table six times. The first time was to give me water and take my first order. The second time was to bring me my first round of food. Then nobody showed up for about an hour, before I managed to flag someone down to put in my second round of food. My second round took over half an hour to show up, during the waiter’s fourth visit. The fifth visit wasn’t even a real visit, but I flagged someone down again to get myself some dessert. The sixth visit was to drop off a small container of ice cream. I went straight up to the register to pay, then left.
Decent waiters at AYCE restaurants will check on you once every ten to fifteen minutes to make sure you have all the food you want, or at the very least, show up once they notice you’ve finished eating everything on your table. I understand that some AYCE restaurants have policies in place to intentionally place delay in food ordering and delivery, thus trying to make you feel more full and encouraging you to eat less food to cut costs… but Mr. Shota has done this to an unacceptable extreme.
The reason the table in the background of the ice cream photograph is different is because I took it back with me and ate it at home, because I was way too frustrated with the restaurant and didn’t want to stay any longer.
A few days ago, after arriving back home to Las Vegas, I met up with a friend at Gaetano’s Ristorante in Henderson for dinner. Afterwards, I got back in my truck and drove back to the western suburbs of the Las Vegas Valley where I live. Before heading home, I decided to take a quick stop at the local Target a mile and a half away from my condo to buy some snacks and beverages. I made it there without incident. It was approaching 10 PM and about to close, so I quickly finished shopping and walked out of the building and towards my truck.
Working in law enforcement, especially at a police department, makes you pick up some interesting quirks. Because I was never a sworn patrol officer, I don’t do active duty things like taking off my seat belt early or opening the door before the vehicle is fully stopped. However, there are things I do do, like always sitting at restaurants with my back to a wall and facing the entrance, or never standing directly in front of doors, or checking the waists of people around me to identify bulges that may be weapons.
Another strange thing I do that is loosely and indirectly tied to law enforcement is always remote starting my vehicle—not for convenience, but for safety. If someone planted an explosive in or on my truck that triggers upon turning on the engine as an attack, the idea is that I will be far enough away that I will not be victimized as severely as I would be if I was sitting inside the cabin. The chance of this actually happening? Pretty much zero. But studying crime makes you hyperaware of small things like this.
With my plastic bag in hand, I pulled out my keys and pressed the button on my fob to remote start my pickup truck. I saw the lights flash, but the engine did not whir into action. Confused, I immediately stopped in place, looked around to make sure the coast was clear, then attempted to remote start my truck again. The lights flashed once again indicating that it received the remote start signal, but the engine remained dormant.
From a distance, I swooped down to angle my view so I could see under my truck to make sure there was nobody hiding underneath. Once I concluded it was safe, I unlocked my vehicle, stepped inside, inserted my key into the ignition, and turned. The infotainment system lit up, but nothing happened. I tried a second time, and again, nothing happened.
The third time’s a charm. I tried starting my engine one last time, and my instrument cluster screen lit up long enough for me to be able to see a warning that said my battery was critically low. I navigated through the options on the menu to check my battery status; after jabbing the “scroll down” button several times, I finally got to a screen that showed for a split second that my voltage was only 11.0 before fading to darkness.
My battery was dead.
This was fine. I pay for roadside assistance along with my auto insurance policy. I can get a free jump start and make my way home, then jump it again a second time from home after I have an appointment to get my battery changed. I pulled up my insurance company’s website to put in a roadside assistance request.
Of course, they don’t have an option to request roadside assistance over phone call, because that would be too easy (either that, or it was too late and there were no customer service representatives available). You need your username and password to log into the request page, which I forgot and only had in my password manager on my computer. You can log in with your policy number too, but the card I had was from the previous renewal cycle, and apparently my policy number changed for my next semi-annual period that started a few weeks ago, so the previous one was invalid. It took me about 15 minutes to gather all the information I need and put in the request.
The estimated wait time? 118 minutes.
I was not going to sit there waiting in the parking lot of a closed Target for two hours until midnight. Frustrated, I canceled the request and called an Uber to drive me a mile and a half back home. I would deal with this tomorrow. I live in a relatively safe neighborhood, so there would surely be no issues leaving my truck in the parking lot for one night. If anything, my truck should thank me. It’s basically like I’m letting it go camping.
I got back home safely. I let my dinner friend know what had happened, and told him how relieved I was that this had happened when I was so close to home, as opposed to when I was still in Henderson on the opposite side of the Las Vegas Valley. I also rantingly told the story to one of my friends who was visiting South Korea so I could share my torment and make sure she’s not having too much fun vacationing. 🙃
I ended my night by editing food photos, blogging about the restaurant, and winding down by watching some YouTube before bed. Stress level: 0.
The next morning, I started my day at a leisurely pace. I woke up early, got a little bit of work done, went back to sleep for a short nap, then showered. Because it was the daytime, I figured I should probably knock this out all at once instead of doing my two-jump method I had devised the previous night. I called a mobile battery service company that would arrive on-site, deliver a brand new battery, and install it for me on the spot so it’s all resolved and I don’t have to worry about it anymore, all for only US$300.00.
I told them the address of Target and scheduled an appointment with them for 1 PM. I called another Uber and rode my way a mile and a half back to my truck. Upon my approach, I was unsurprised, but still relieved, to find it just as how I had left it the previous night.
Shortly afterwards, the technician arrived. I told him what happened, and he reacted as if it was nothing special—just a regular old day at work. His expression changed when I popped the hood. His outlook on the situation also changed when he took a closer look.
I wish I had taken a photograph before the technician cleaned it all up, but the connectors to my battery looked like something out of an alien horror film. There was a blue growth festering out of the metal and I couldn’t tell whether it was spiny, fuzzy, or both. According to the technician, it was corrosion that grew on top of corrosion that had grown on top of even more corrosion.
He pulled out his workbag and got to work chipping away at the corrosion and getting everything cleaned up. I sat in the cabin of my truck because it was a little chilly.
As time went on, he started whacking, then hammering, then full-on pounding at the battery. I personally have never swapped out a car battery on my own, but I was still getting suspicious when it sounded like the technician was fighting the battery in a twelve-round boxing match, and losing.
Eventually, he motioned for me to step out of the vehicle. He let me know that the corrosion had gotten so bad that the battery release had effectively gotten welded onto a different part of the vehicle. He had apparently been unable to separate the pieces in order to get the battery out, and he was attempting to use increasingly higher force, but he had reached a point where he was concerned he would permanently damage something and decided to tap out.
Instead, he gave me a jump start and told me to drive straight to the dealership service center to get the corrosion repaired. Because he wasn’t able to complete his dispatch order, he opted not to charge me anything, even though I offered to pay him for the jump start.
I called the certified GMC service center nearest to my condo—the AutoNation Buick GMC West Sahara—and miraculously, they had an express service appointment time slot available in an hour. I drove straight there with my jump-started engine and pulled into a service lane. Upon arrival, I made contact with a service advisor who popped the hood and sprayed some diagnostic chemical on my battery to confirm that it had apparently been spewing acid all over the place. He put in a work order for corrosion repair and a battery replacement, and I also managed to convince him to squeeze in an oil change while they were at it, because my oil life was nearing the single-digit percentages.
When I’m waiting for vehicle service, I usually bring my laptop to get some work done and be efficient with my time. However, I obviously did not expect this whole ordeal to last longer than about half an hour beyond just the battery swap in the parking lot, and I wasn’t planning on anything else going wrong, so I didn’t bring my laptop with me. Maybe that was for the better, because this encouraged me to be offline for a bit, drinking some free coffee while watching sports on TV, taking a look at some of the new pickup trucks on display, chatting with the salesmen about new trends in pickup truck technology, and even getting an opportunity check out the new GMC Hummer EV SUV on the lot.
Two hours later, I paid for all the service done, and the bill was actually a pleasant surprise—dealership service centers are known for aggressive mark-ups, but the price I paid was fairly competitive. I drove back home, thankful that all this had unfolded precisely in this manner.
Sure, it technically isn’t a good thing that my battery decided to paint its surrounding with acid and corrode everything it touched, but I am under the belief that, eventually, vehicles will end up with some kind of issues, regardless of how much preventative maintenance you do. And yes, I understand that it is not statistically accurate to think of it this way, but I’m glad that one line in my “problem quota” was taken up by something as mild as this in such favorable circumstances.
I’m very fortunate that this happened while I was at home in Las Vegas, and not traveling somewhere else. I regularly drive back and forth to California, and on a macro scale, this would have been a much worse situation if I had taken a break at a rest stop in the middle of the Mojave Desert and then broken down there. I also just wrapped up a two-year road trip not too long ago, and I can’t imagine how much of a pain this would have been if I had broken down on some random unpaved trail in Wyoming with no cell signal. Even on a micro scale within Las Vegas, the fact that I broke down at a Target parking lot in a very safe neighborhood was very fortunate, as opposed to somewhere near downtown or on the other side of the Valley.
I’m also very fortunate that this happened on a Saturday when the dealership’s service center was still open (as they are closed on Sundays), and that they had an express appointment slot available so soon that I wouldn’t need to leave my vehicle there overnight until Monday and have to find alternative transportation to my upcoming appointments.
So, if you’re going to have things go wrong… I guess this is how you do it in the best way possible.
I’m back home in Las Vegas for a bit before my next trip, and for my first nice meal back, I met up with my friend Aidan who owns the Skip the Tutorial channel on YouTube for another food adventure.
This time, we decided on Gaetano’s Ristorante, an Italian restaurant in the Siena Promenade in Henderson, Nevada.
When we arrived, we were served a basket of complementary bread. This was actually one of the nicer bread baskets I’ve had; there were three different kinds of bread, and they were more “premium” pieces than just the plain white bread that you get at a lot of other restaurants.
Like usual, so I can try as many different dishes as possible, I did a “build your own” dinner where I ordered multiple appetizers instead of just a single main entrée. My first appetizer was tenderloin carpaccio with raw filet mignon, arugula, shaved parmesan cheese, and Sicilian olive oil.
I thought this was fine. There was way too much cheese, and I think I would’ve liked it more if it had about a quarter of the cheese that it came with, but I think that particular aspect of the dish is highly subjective, considering that I’m not really that big of a fan of cheese in general. I ended up only using a quarter of the cheese along with the carpaccio, then finished the remainder of the cheese afterwards as a topping for the bread.
Unfortunately, the filet mignon slices were more like shavings instead of slices, as they were a bit excessively thin. It would’ve been nice if the portion size was a bit larger, but when the slices were separated and swirled around, there was still enough substance in them to have a satisfying bite.
Aidan’s appetizer was three stuffed mozzarella sticks with pistachio pesto and marinara. As you may have deduced from what I just said about cheese, I wasn’t particularly interested in them, so I didn’t sample any.
Aidan also got a house salad with mixed greens, carrots, shaved parmesan cheese, and balsamic vinaigrette.
My second dish was grilled Calabrese mild sausage with rapini, olive oil, and garlic. I’m usually more of a fish and seafood person, but surprisingly, this sausage was my favorite plate of the meal. The sausage wasn’t too salty, it had a deep and rich flavor, and the greens complemented it well. At this point, we had also requested a second bowl of bread, and the bread enhanced the flavor of the sausage and rapini very nicely.
My third and final dish was brodetto, made from fresh black mussels sautéed with a lightly-spiced marinara sauce served with crostinis.
I probably should’ve Googled “brodetto” prior to ordering it so I could see that it was basically Italian fish stew. It wasn’t what I was expecting, but it wasn’t too bad either. I like the isolated oceanic flavor of raw seafood, so it was a bit different to have the cooked mussels along with tomato sauce. The crostinis were a bit too crispy to the extent that it was a little painful to chew, so I ended up soaking them in the marinara to soften them up first.
Aidan ordered truffle mac and cheese for his main entrée.
For dessert, we split a spumoni, made with layered gelato and whipped cream with a cherry in the middle. The flavors we got were vanilla, chocolate, and pistachio. To me, it just tasted like regular ice cream, which was refreshing after having such a thick and meaty meal.
This is what the inside of the restaurant looked like.
Bread
$ 0.00
Tenderloin carpaccio
$ 22.00
Mozzarella sticks
$ 12.00
House salad
$ 14.00
Sausage and rapini
$ 18.00
Brodetto
$ 22.00
Truffle mac and cheese
$ 32.00
Spumoni
$ 12.00
Diet Coke ×2
$ 10.00
Sales tax
$ 11.90
Gratuity
$ 23.00
Total
$176.90
The table on the right shows how much we paid.
One thing I found comical about this restaurant is that it aims to be an upper- to high-end restaurant, but it’s located in a major shopping center area. In order to give off the impression of being premium, they have a valet parking option (which I obviously did not use). Hilariously, the “valet parking” was nothing special—the valet spot was marked off with cones, there was one single valet spot, and it was literally about 20 steps away from the front door. To compound the humor, there is a Buffalo Wild Wings a few doors down, and it was absolutely packed with people who had shown up for Super Bowl LVIII who were just desperately parking their cars anywhere there was space. I already despise the concept of valet parking anyway, but this entire situation just made the stupidity of the concept even funnier.
Also unrelated to the food, but still something I want to mention: their service seems to be a little scatterbrained. Throughout my dining experience, I think there were either four or five different people who served us, so it was difficult to tell who exactly our waiter was—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but definitely different. When the first waiter showed up to take our appetizer order, he listed off so many off-the-menu specials (I’m talking probably like 6+ options) that it would’ve probably been worth it for them to create a special mini-menu for the daily features. He also did not have a notepad, so when we ordered, he tried to memorize everything, then came back to us twice because was second-guessing himself on what we ordered and wanted to re-verify with us.
A recurring theme I’ve noticed from most Italian restaurants is that they serve their food extremely salty, but Gaetano’s seemed to be an exception to that, which I appreciated. The food definitely was still a bit salty, but it was nowhere near the level of other Italian restaurants where it felt like the inside of my mouth was basically getting pickled.
Overall, I’m happy with what I got, but I think there might be some better options that you may want to check out at this price point where you’d get better value for your money.
Yesterday, I was invited to Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California for a tour by an acquaintance who works as a software engineer in the animation department of the company. Unfortunately, a lot of it was private so I wasn’t able to take my photographs, but I was able to capture some of the more public areas.
Our tour started in the museum area. I don’t really watch movies or television shows, so a lot of this didn’t really have much meaning to me.
The tour continued outdoors.
These large tan buildings are where movie sets are created and scenes are filmed.
These facilities used to be on-site housing for actors, but now they’re just offices. Apparently that golf cart is manufactured by Cadillac and is owned by someone famous, but I didn’t really recognize the name so I don’t remember whose it is.
Apparently there’s a new Ghostbusters movie coming out. They had the Ghostbusters car parked outside.
We were then led through an outdoor set.
I don’t remember the significance of this building, but there were some awards sitting inside (which I was not permitted to photograph).
After a tour of that campus, I met up with my acquaintance, who had finished working, and we got a tour of her work area. An overwhelming majority of it was confidential, so the only photograph I have of it is this Spider-Man mural.
As part of our tour, there was a photo opportunity where my friend Doug Wreden and I were supposed to stand in front of a green screen and we would be chromakeyed into an episode of Jeopardy. The prompt was to act like we had won, but while I was thinking about how I would react if I won Jeopardy, the photographer already captured the shot.
As someone who is not really a fan of movies, this wasn’t really the best tour for me. Sony also has a music division, and I discovered throughout the tour by way of random posters that some of my favorite artists are signed to Sony Music, but the tour itself focused almost entirely on film and not on music. I am a lot more interested in music than film and television, so if there was a more music-oriented tour, I think I would have enjoyed that a lot more.
The highlight of my visit was, by sheer luck and coincidence because that was just the walking route we happened to take, overhearing Olivia Rodrigo in one of those tan buildings rehearsing for her performance at Coachella 2024. My second favorite part of the visit was eating a free Rice Krispy Treat. I think that might put into perspective how disinterested I am in movies and movie stars.
With that being said, if you are a big movie nut, this could potentially be a good tour for you to take. You don’t need a special invitation to go on it like I did—apparently you can just go on Sony’s website and purchase tickets (at least for the first portion on the main campus, though it wouldn’t grant access to the animations building). If you like celebrities, you might even see some famous people during the tour.
For the past month and a half, I went through a phase of chasing nostalgia. I live streamed a lot on Twitch during my holiday break between Christmas and New Year’s Day, just like how I used to stream a lot during my winter breaks from undergraduate university over a decade ago. I also wanted to try daily blogging again, just like how I used to daily blog in 2011.
Needless to say, I failed. I made it January 1-9 of daily blogging before I realized it was unsustainable. My minimum acceptable quality bar of a blog post has increased substantially up to the point where it usually takes me an average of an hour or more to finish writing one… if I even have anything to write about to begin with. Over ten years go, this wasn’t the case—on some days, I would just publish a single random photograph and call it a day.
Earlier in the month, I was collecting sets of pictures that I thought I would turn into individual blog posts, but didn’t because the size of each set wasn’t satisfactory. I don’t have much from the final couple weeks of January because I let myself indulge in something personal I wanted to do that took up basically the entirety of all my free time and even some sleep time, but I think I still have enough to warrant a small photo dump from this month.
Here’s a small set of photos from a quick all-you-can-eat lunch from Tomomi Sushi in Alhambra, California. To open, I got tuna, salmon, yellowtail, albacore, and tilapia sashimi.
Next was a plate of baked green mussels.
My third dish was tako wasabi, which is raw octopus.
For my assortment of nigiri, I got salmon, yellowtail, Spanish mackerel, albacore, escolar, and squid.
My final dish was ika sansai, which is squid salad.
As many people already know by now, I used to live on the Las Vegas Strip in a residential high-rise condominium building. It obviously has its perks, like having great amenities and security, and being central to the Las Vegas Valley so I can pretty much get anywhere within 20 minutes, but another major thing I liked was the view.
One of my biggest regrets from the past year is moving out into the suburbs under the false assumption that I would appreciate the more peaceful lifestyle after having road tripped for two years non-stop while living out of hotel rooms. The first month was pleasant, but after that, it got boring—it was too quiet out near Summerlin South, and more than anything, I missed waking up to a stunning view and bright sunlight.
While in Los Angeles County in January, I visited a friend who has a nice view from her home, even though she doesn’t live in a high-rise. It’s definitely not the same as a high-rise view, but it reminded me of when our Tempo team house was up near the Hollywood Hills, and it gave me a little bit of nostalgia from my time living on the Strip.
I have historically not been much of a board game person, but I was persuaded to join my friends Doug and Billie Rae for board game nights once in a while.
Our very first attempt was Pan Am, which is apparently built around Pan American Airways, a now-defunct airline. We spent almost two hours unpackaging the game and learning how to play, actually played the game for around 20 minutes, and then proceeded to get distracted and quit before ever finishing a single round because it was almost 3 AM and I wanted to go to sleep.
Next was Monopoly. This went a lot better than Pan Am, though I accidentally made a catastrophically critical error which allowed Billie Rae to snowball out of control and make it absolutely hopeless for anyone else to have a chance at winning. Luckily, in exchange for my inadvertent generosity towards her cause, Billie Rae gave me a few breaks when I landed on her spots, which at least let me beat Doug and not get last place.
I also landed on the Free Parking space. I am going to save this photograph as evidence and use it the next time I go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium (which is what this version of Monopoly was themed after) so I can get free parking there.
I’m a fan of going to restaurants by myself with my laptop so I can enjoy a nice meal alone while getting some work done and not feeling pressured to uphold a conversation. However, I do still occasionally like dining out with friends, which I did earlier this month at No.1 Kazoku Japanese Yakitori and Sushi Bar in San Gabriel, California.
Our opening dish was tuna belly nigiri. The cuts of fish were extremely high quality and were overwhelmingly rich in flavor.
Next were chicken skin and beef tongue skewers. I found these to be pretty underwhelming—the chicken skin just tasted intensely strongly of gamey chicken flavor, and the beef tongue was overcooked and lacked the tenderness that you normally expect from tongue. However, my friend absolutely loved these, so much so that she texted me in the middle of the night, hours after dinner, telling me that she was still thinking about the chicken skin skewer.
Next up was tuna carpaccio. This wasn’t bad, but was vastly overshadowed by the tuna belly nigiri from earlier.
Finally, the closing dish of our dinner was a chirashi bowl. It’s very rare that chirashi bowls come with sea urchin, and I’m glad that this one did, considering that sea urchin is my favorite sushi. However, it also came with little chunks of a strange cold cooked fish, and I never really found out what it was.
My friend Doug Wreden is a full-time content creator and live streamer. Over the past few years, I have been making relatively frequent guest appearances in his content and collaborating with him on some of his projects, which has ultimately led to the cross-pollination of our audiences. Due to the vast size of Doug’s follower-base, it was inevitable that I receive a lot of questions about Doug.
Today is his birthday, so in celebration, I decided to release this FAQ about him. I’ve tried to include multiple wordings and variants of each question so you can try to use the Find command to search for a certain topic.
How did you and Doug meet?
Doug and I met in late 2017 as co-workers at Tempo.
Tempo currently focuses on game development, but in 2017-2018, its primary business objective revolved around esports and multimedia production. I joined Tempo in 2015 and held various roles throughout the years; I still work there today doing corporate operations.
Doug was hired in late 2017 as the Executive Producer to run our Hollywood studio. He resigned from Tempo in late 2018 to pursue independent content creation, which is what he is still doing today.
Are you and Doug roommates/housemates? Do you and Doug live together?
Doug and I have never formally been roommates nor housemates. Ever since 2018, I have been a resident of the Las Vegas Valley in Nevada; during that time, Doug has been a resident of Greater Los Angeles and the Seattle Metropolitan Area. With that being said, I do visit Doug a lot, so it is reasonable that some people would mistake us as roommates or housemates.
During the 2022 portion of my cross-country road trip, I stayed at Doug’s house in the Seattle suburbs in his guest bedroom and was in and out throughout the span of a few months. As of right now, I have a designated guest room at his new house in Los Angeles County where I stay during extended visits to Southern California. Because of this, we have technically “lived together,” even though I officially am and have been domiciled in Las Vegas.
Are you and Doug dating, or otherwise in some form of a romantic relationship? Can I write romantic fan fiction about you and Doug?
No, I am not gay.
I do not consent to my likeness being in works which include me participating in homosexual activity. With that being said, if you choose to write such works anyway, my opinion doesn’t matter and there is nothing I can or will do as long as you are not violating my right of publicity or otherwise committing commercial appropriation.
Has the extra attention you’re getting from Doug’s community been overwhelming or bothersome?
I’ve already been a public figure for a long time—I started formally creating content online under my personal likeness in 2008, hosting and commentating at live events in 2012, and consistently making various on-screen and on-stage appearances throughout the years since then. Because of this, I’m already familiar and comfortable with what being a public figure entails, and pretty much any amount of non-violent and non-extremist attention will not be bothersome to me.
With that being said, Doug’s community is unlike any other I’ve seen. I’d say about 99.99% of his fans fall within a broad scope of being “normal,” which is a much higher percentage compared to other public figures. However, the remaining 0.01% of his fans are the polar opposite—they are some of the most intrusive and obsessive people I’ve seen who have absolutely no sense of personal boundaries and are very out-of-touch with even the basics of societal norms.
Although that is a microscopically small percentage, due to the sheer size of Doug’s audience, that still ends up being a sizeable number of people. Even when we account for only a fraction of the fraction of those people finding me, that has still resulted in me having several instances where these people severely interfere with my personal life. I have had multiple cases of people impersonating me or pretending to be my employee; trying to make contact with my family, friends, and clients; and parroting Doug-specific jokes out-of-context and in a way that they would be easily misconstrued as statements of fact, thus effectively spreading misinformation about me (more on this below).
There are positives and negatives to everything, and this is one of the inevitable downsides of being a public figure. I’ve already accepted years ago that things like this are bound to happen at some point, and I have been taking a proactive approach implementing preventative measures to mitigate the effects of future incidents that may arise.
Why can we no longer joke about you being a lawyer, police officer, doctor, or murderer anymore?
Falsely calling me a lawyer and a police officer within the DougDoug community originated from the first time I made an in-person collaborative appearance on his Twitch and YouTube channels during which Doug spent a majority of the time trying (and failing) to come up with a scenario where I would use my firearm against him when I am not under immediate threat of severe bodily harm or death. My steadfastly sound judgment, refusal to use a firearm in any situation where it is not deemed strictly necessary, and above-average knowledge of the law birthed the jokes about legal professions and firearms.
Jokes like this on a personal level are fine, but due to the sheer size of Doug’s audience, people kept copying these jokes out-of-context. Doug is one of many friends whose content I appear on, and most people who know me don’t also know Doug, let alone the existence of that video. With the absence of contextual cues, people will take statements at face value and be tricked into thinking that I actually hold those professions or behavioral issues.
Practicing law without a license or impersonating a sworn peace officer is explicitly illegal, and so many people functionally accusing me of it by declaring it out-of-context ended up catching the attention of a law enforcement agency and triggering a legal investigation into the matter. There were also people review bombing my office and consulting service with these claims to the point where I couldn’t keep up and realized that the best course of action would be to just take down my page. Some people also found old collaborations and videos where I was a speaker at panels and posted ironic comments like “I’m surprised he didn’t shoot up the audience,” but there was no further indication whatsoever that the comment was intended to be satire, which prompted past business partners to reach out in concern.
I strongly support open and free speech, but when such speech contains indisputable falsehoods that cause material and articulable damage to my reputation, there starts being a problem. I have asked Doug to stop making these jokes and, to whatever extent he can, make his community also stop making these jokes as a form of damage control and reputational protection.
Do you expect it when Doug randomly calls you in the middle of stream? Do you know when Doug is going to call?
If Doug uses his cell phone to call me, it is always unplanned. There have been times when Doug has called me on the phone when I’m trying to find parking in a packed city, or in the process of driving to a restaurant, or out hiking on a random mountain, or in the middle of a business meeting with the CEO of Tempo. At the beginning of the call, I will usually tell Doug what I am doing. None of those were made up—I was actually doing those things when he had called at those certain points.
If Doug uses Discord to call me, it is a toss-up. If I play a material role in his stream for that day, it is always planned. For example, if I have to review something that Twitch chat helped him make on stream, Doug will let me know before going live and give me a time estimate of when I should be available to participate. However, if Doug has an impromptu thought or idea related to me and wants my input, and he also knows for sure that I am at my computer, he will opt to call me on Discord because the audio quality is a lot better than on cell phone.
How staged are your on-screen interactions with Doug? Does Doug act to you off-screen the same way that he acts on-screen?
Our on-screen interactions are sometimes planned, but never scripted or staged. We may go into a broadcast knowing how we want it to play out, but it is never more than a general understanding of the goal of the segment.
Doug does not fake his personality for his broadcasts—he actually acts like that in-person, albeit a bit of a toned-down version.
I am also not faking my personality when I am on Doug’s broadcasts, but there is one important point to keep in mind. Doug is extremely smart, witty, and clever, and he knows how to act and what to say to get the funniest reactions out of me. This ends up naturally emphasizing and spotlighting the aspects of my personality that complement well with Doug’s, while suppressing other aspects of my personality that might not be as relevant to the content.
What is the favorite piece of content you’ve done together with Doug?
In my opinion, Doug always creates a fun and welcoming environment for all guests on his broadcasts and shows, so I generally enjoy being a part of all his content to which I’m invited. However, as of today, there are two specific streams that stick out as being particularly memorable.
The first is the “I’ll have what he’s having” fast food challenge. It was a good bonding experience with Doug and his staff members, the concept was very fun, and a lot of hilarious moments came out of it. The way it played out was also so good that it felt like it was scripted—we got strung along with just the right amount of motivation (i.e., the orders were such a perfect size that it wasn’t crushingly easy, but it wasn’t also demoralizingly difficult), so it felt like I was watching a storyline on the edge of my seat, but I was a character in the story and everything was unfolding in realtime around me.
The second is eating a whole salmon in bunny costumes. I loved this stream because it was a ridiculous concept, there was a perfect amount of absurdity such that it was very chaotic but still manageably executable, and it was for a good cause in the sense that it was a charity stretch goal. As a bonus, the salmon was somehow miraculously delicious.
Can I send suggestions on what you and Doug can do together for a live stream or video?
Please do not send me content ideas to do with Doug (or with any of my other friends either, for that matter). I unfortunately do not have the time to handle the logistics of executing on ideas, so the effort you put into sending them to me will be in vain. Instead, I encourage you to reach out to the other party to see if they would be receptive. If they are, and also handle all the logistics of making a certain idea happen, then chances are good that I may be willing to be a guest on their show.
Who would win in a fight, you or Doug?
This is a strange question, because I don’t routinely consider fighting my friends, but with the unusually frequent occurrence of this question, I decided to put in some thought.
Ever since I was a kid, I have been involved in some form of martial arts or combat sport—I started with taekwondo, added on Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and later trained some Muay Thai and kickboxing. I’ve never been consistent with training and have taken many long breaks from it, but I’ve always gone back to it throughout my life. With that being said, I am a thin person, currently in the lightweight weight class and at one point even reaching as low as bantamweight.
Although Doug does not have as extensive of a combat sport background as I do, he is much, much larger and stronger than me, and his muscles are visibly multiple times the size of mine. He is currently a light heavyweight, which is six weight classes above me—quite the difference.
If I catch Doug with a quick knockout or submission early in the match, I have a chance at victory. However, due to my relatively poor endurance and strength, once we get into a grappling or brawling phase, Doug would win an overwhelming majority of the time.
