Dan Allen Gaming: Welcome everybody, look who we have here, Rayvis himself from Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, D.C. Douglas. How are you mate, how have you been?
D.C. Douglas: Greetings, I’m good, I’m good. Nice to be here man.
Dan Allen Gaming: I love what you did with Rayvis by the way, I just want to say. Um, we’re going to jump into it, but have you been mate? You’ve been good?
D.C. Douglas: Yeah, yeah, it’s been life’s been, you know, different since the the pandemic. Um, there’s this weird thing where people still have one foot in the pandemic I think, and then one foot out of it, so we’re sort of going around like life is normal and that didn’t happen, but we’re not doing as much as we used to do. Um, I don’t think people are as social and it’s just like there’s like a weird like hangover from that period. Yeah, no life is good. I’ve got the closest relationship with my cats that I’ve ever had because I’ve been home so much.
Dan Allen Gaming: Are they loving it or not?
D.C. Douglas: Of course they’re loving it, I’m a good cat owner. Or a friend, I should say “owner” in front of them, that’s rude.
Dan Allen Gaming: What are their names again?
D.C. Douglas: Uh, well now it’s uh, Monkey uh, is my oldest one, and then I have a new one, uh uh, Leo, uh who’s a snow, snowshoe siamese. Um, softest cat I have ever had. I’ve ever petted. Um, and he loves to be petted. Uh, you like, like immediately splays out so you pet his belly, so soft. And his cat fur you know, like regular cat fur, you, you just roll it off you or whatever. His fur is like cotton, which is really cool until you go to vacuum the the following week and you realize that vacuum doesn’t pick up cotton when it’s smeared onto carpet. It’s like, it’s literally, it’s, it’s, I have to go turbo on the vacuum cleaner and even then go back over and try to like hand-wise get it up. It’s little cotton balls everywhere which is kind of cute. So if I’m an animator I’d make a cartoon about him being the bunny cat. Oh, that’d be some cool animations out of that if you could get that done.
Dan Allen Gaming: No, how has your work changed over the last few years and and, you know, just by doing a lot from home and and the auditioning process and all that sort of stuff? How’s it been?
D.C. Douglas: You know what’s interesting, is I, I started my home booth in 2002 I think, and nobody was doing it back then. Um, I was uh, a friend of mine, Laura Kane, turned me on to this. Um, she was doing promos for radio, they’re called radio imaging I guess she was doing radio imaging from her home studio that she’d created because she lived in Texas and came to LA and didn’t want to lose her clients. And so that’s what she did. I got tips from her how to set up my booth, set up my booth, and I was in a closet at first, and so that’s, I’m used to that life of doing lots of auditions from home.
And then the agencies were slowly moving to home studio prior to the pandemic. And then when the pandemic hit, it was funny, it’s like all my on-camera actor friends who did the voice over on the side were all emailing, going, “How do I set up a home studio? Do I do it in my closet or bathroom?” The bathroom, no. Everybody had to move over to that. And I, I will, good and bad. So the good thing is, since the pandemic now you don’t, the agencies, they, they’d rather you just send it from home which is great. I’ve always preferred to self-direct for auditions anyway. Um, and so that’s cool.
On-camera stuff, which I don’t do as much of these days just in general because I changed my whole look but the the on-camera, they want you to audition to record your first round of auditions, and then sometimes, you know, callbacks, you’ll go back in, or you’ll just do a Zoom thing. So everyone is kind of keeping that going, because it really, I’m sure, is very cost-effective for the, the agencies and the casting places. So I’m, I’m appreciative of that.
What I’m not appreciative of is that it’s weird how like, talking to a human online on Zoom or in your, on the phone, like, it’s, it is a connection, but it’s not the same thing as being in person, even if the exchange in person is just like, not, you know, regular everyday, “Hey, how you doing,” whatever. Um, and so, like, there’s a studio down the street, like, they let me work remote, and I’m like, “You’re down the street,” and I go, “I want to see people, and afterwards I want to go out and sit in a cafe and have a coffee,” so I’m like, “I’m coming in, damn it. Uh, coming over, got a 45-minute session, then I’m gonna make a day of it.”
Dan Allen Gaming: Yeah, but you love that, you love adventuring, don’t you? You love getting out there and, because you don’t want to be stuck at your house all the time, do you?
D.C. Douglas: No, not at all, exactly. Taking my mom to New Orleans later this year. She’s never been, so that’s for a birthday gift for her 80th. Oh, and yeah, that’s of all the places that I love to go to venture, it’s New Orleans.
Dan Allen Gaming: Gosh, oh really? Yeah, that’s at the top of your list? No, I haven’t, but my girlfriend really wants to go.
D.C. Douglas: Oh, it’s so, I mean, you see a lot of the Bourbon Street stuff, which is like, it’s fun for like an hour or two but then after that, it’s like, it’s more about going to Frenchman Street or going off, and there’s like, from Magazine Avenue I think it’s called, or whatever, there’s all these other little areas, but the thing that I love the most is music.
I love just walking into a place and hearing, you don’t, can’t do that in LA. It’s like, there’s a couple places that, like, once a week maybe do jazz or something, or if you want to see some bands, it’s an entire venue that’s just about going to the bands for that night. You got to pay the cover and then the overpriced drinks. There’s no like, just walking around, and there’s art happening all around you, where New Orleans, you’ve got that feel, which is so nice, a little bit like Greenwich Village in the summertime, so.
Dan Allen Gaming: Um, do you remember your first concert?
D.C. Douglas: Well, okay, now that’s not gonna make me seem cool at all, right? Come on, the first concert that I ever went to, and this is solely because my sister was a big fan, it was Alice Cooper. Um, I think like 1980. So it was right when he switched from his really theatrical cool stuff, and he was doing, it was his Clone tour, um. Yeah, it was, it was out. Um, I’m a fan of Alice Cooper, but, but my first one that I went to after that, that I bought the tickets, I used, I would my McDonald’s money or whatever, wherever I was working at the time, and I was going to take a girl on a date, and I took her to, I didn’t know anything about this band, she apparently really loved them, so I went and took her to Air Supply.
Dan Allen Gaming: Air Supply?
D.C. Douglas: Air Supply, no problem. [Singing] “I’m all out of love” I’m like, I just want to go on a date, and she’s thinking marriage while we’re listening to Air Supply.
Dan Allen Gaming: No, they’re from, they’re actually formed in Melbourne, Australia, believe it or not.
D.C. Douglas: Yeah, I was gonna say, there you go. So, I don’t yeah, and I hadn’t heard of them. Maybe I have heard of some of the songs. What was your first concert?
Dan Allen Gaming: I think it was AC/DC.
D.C. Douglas: Oh shit. Yeah, not bad. I would have loved to have seen Led Zeppelin.
Dan Allen Gaming: They’re probably my favorite of all time.
D.C. Douglas: But I went to, I went with a friend to this weird little venue to see this new band that was coming out called Twisted Sister.
Dan Allen Gaming: Uh, sorry for everyone watching, we’re on a delay. This is what happens when you live in Australia, so bear with me, guys. So tell me about this character in Star Wars, mate. I mean, it wasn’t your typical villain, but it also was, if you know what I mean. There was a bit of a mixed bag, and I found him really intriguing. I loved the voice, obviously, and tell us about that, because you did mocap for this one and everything.
D.C. Douglas: Yeah, no, it was, it was a really fun gig. Um, it’s, I learned a bit about the genre, I always, agenda, I always forget which, obviously I didn’t learn enough, but what was interesting is I started off with a voice. My audition was, here’s this weird thing with voice actors, and I don’t know if it’s with all voice actors, but I used to have a thing, and every now and then it crops up, which is that when I’m doing something that I think is going to be fairly big or people are going to see, I want my voice to be different from other characters that I’ve done that people would know.
And obviously, you know, they just needed a low kind of rough voice for this, but I wanted to make it more alien-like. And so he was talking more like this, and knowing that it was going to be mocap, you can get a read with doing a voice like this, which was a weird thing to do with the tongue and all that, and I was like having fun. I auditioned that way. I had a callback that way.
First day of mocap, we’re doing the scene, we ran through it like two times, it was it’s that first thing that everybody sees. And, and then here’s the thing, is, um uh, the the performance director, Tom, on this is, is so amazing. Um, he really is an actor’s director. Um, and he did a thing which I think was smart at the time, I was like, “No,” he’s like, he’s like, “You’re doing a lot with the voice,” and he goes, “But you don’t need to.” He’s like, “Just drop the voice and just, just be,” which I know sounds like a, like an average thing or whatever, but what we was trying to do was like, just get more to the beat of the acting and the, the, my, the technical voice actor was too much in charge right then. Um, and, and so by letting go of the voice and, and just being Rayvis down here allowed me to have a little hopefully you don’t get dinged for this on YouTube, but again, it allowed me to put more balls into it and, and less, um performance or presentation. Um, and and so that was so that was, so it was freeing.
Um, and he also loved to go, like, we did so many takes first off, it’s, which is so ironic, because it’s computers, you’d think that you could just pick up on any line and they could just stitch it together but with the, with the computer stuff, they want you to start from the very beginning to the very end, because of the way they’re tracking everything. Um, and so when you can’t mess up a take, well, you can, but then everybody’s got to roll back. Um, it’s not like we’re on, on camera, regular on-camera work, you can flub a line and like, “I’m sorry, reset,” okay, and then just pick up right where you left off and they’ll edit it later.
So, um so when you want several versions, even if it’s a one-line, you do pretty much, it’s the whole thing. Um, so I got to explore lots of different aspects of him. And then, you know, Tom has his thoughts about what the character was, then there are the creatives behind there that know, that knows, they know all the lore of Star Wars and know everything about these, these creatures. And I only know what I could find online. This is before chat GPT, so I couldn’t cheat and like, really get there. I’d like, keep going to the blog posts, but from what I’d gathered and what I’d gotten of the species, which is, you know, pretty straightforward in a lot of respects, it was interesting, because then Tom wanted to add more depth, and in ways that you don’t necessarily associate with his species. And I think that tug of war between the lore and, and, and then the acting creative stuff allowed for the character to have much more dimension than would normally be, I think, in any kind of game. So I was appreciative of that.
Dan Allen Gaming: He pushed back when he said bring the voice back a bit. Were you a bit taken aback by that, or were you…
D.C. Douglas: I said, “Do you know that I am D.C. Douglas? I’m leaving.” No, I’m just… “I was in Sharknado 2, motherfucker.” Yeah, no, not at all. Listen, I’m, I’m one of those people, it’s so rare, I mean, if I’m doing like some little rinky, I should say this, well, I’m doing a little, like a little rinky dinky voice over gig out of my booth, and it’s some, some, you know, small client, who they get the, like, the shit, shit directors who’s like, going, “Do it like this,” and gives you a line reading for every line, and I’m kind of like, “I’m like, you’re an idiot, and I’m just gonna get out of this job as fast as possible and get my money.” Um, but it’s something in a scenario like this, where Tom has got an amazing history, you’re working with all these other wonderful actors, and, and these also these freaking bad geniuses that are working the, the whole other side of it beyond the performance, and and so I’m like, I’m like, I, I want to please you. I want you guys, I want to fit your picture, because I have no idea all of the things, especially in games, you have no idea the full picture of stuff. Um, so I can only know my story or my character’s story, really, and and then I hope that I’m being true to that.
The only times I ever get pushback, and it was not pushback per se, it was more about, I get a direction, I’d go, “Help me,” um was the word I’m looking for oh, I’m just totally blanking on the word, but you’re working on a you’re trying to get to a solution, you’re merging the two things later, but help me, um merge these two ideas together that are seemingly contrary so that we can so I know how to do that with my performance. Um, and that was, so that was not pushback, it was more like clarity and, and things like that, and yeah, so for the most part, I’m just like, you know, and also, it was fun.
It was like being a kid in a candy store. It’s like, we’re gonna do, you know, you end up doing like six or seven takes to a scene, and so he’s like, “So for this take, let’s do,” uh, I’m like, “Sure, what are we doing now?”
Dan Allen Gaming: All these different directions in the realm of what we’ve established. But you got to really got to play around a lot. And I so yeah,so I, I got so many questions. I’m wondering, has the tech changed much since the last time you did it? And, and also, Rayvis is quite a tall, big boy, and yeah, so do they have to look up or how does that work?
D.C. Douglas: Everybody had to perform on their knees around me. Um, and I’m like, “This is how it should be at home.”
Dan Allen Gaming: I’d love to see that behind the scenes, man.
D.C. Douglas: It was interesting at first, because there was a thought that people had to hold a whole was it me? They were gonna put a pole like in the back of me with the tennis ball up there so people could look up to that face. Um, and it became apparent pretty early on, that first day, that it was taking away from the acting, because you don’t get to look in the eyes of the other person, and that’s the whole particle, purpose of mocap.
Or performance cap is that, is you want to have those connections. And because, and, and as the one of the programmers came up and he said, he said, you know, afterwards, we just put in a couple numbers and the eyes go have the other eyes, like, “Oh, all right, cool,” so, like, they’ve all, and we were on our way. Also, they were originally going to do the tennis ball because they did that with Lady D in Resident Evil, I remember. So that’s why I was curious, or, or maybe she was just that tall anyway.
Dan Allen Gaming: They have done that before.
D.C. Douglas: Yeah, yeah, they have done that before. You kind of expect, like, like the levels, it’s funny, is there is obviously a difference in, um technology depending well, time frame, like something I did, I did one like way back in 2011 performance cap, and then and so the technology then they wouldn’t have had the facial capture, right? Like, the, the facial cameras?
Dan Allen Gaming: No, they did.
D.C. Douglas: Oh, they did capture. Yeah it was the camera and the mic and all of that. Was that 2019? It was NBA 2K14, so it was 2012 or ’13.
Dan Allen Gaming: Um, the Uber driver, right? Was that it?
D.C. Douglas: No. What was it called? The agent. Stackable limousine. He’s not a fucking Uber driver.
Dan Allen Gaming: Oh. Let’s see, I’m sorry, man, I was the Uber…
D.C. Douglas: Oh, that’s right. I was the Uber boss. That’s why you said Uber driver. Uber boss. Sorry, I mixed my words.
Dan Allen Gaming: No, Uber driver. But when you do… I’m the “Hey, I did did you really?” Yeah, that’s so sweet. Yeah.
D.C. Douglas: Just for you. Just for you. All the improv, we like, we get to improv our scenes, like, read them first and then do an improv on top of it and just kind of go crazy with it. Um, my biggest feat that no one will ever know, I don’t know if I did this in your last interview, so sorry. The biggest thing I ever did on that game was, one day, I mean, every night I was memorizing, like, lots of dialogue. It wasn’t me, like, like, at least like, there was not much dialogue for Rayvis in this game. There’s a fair amount, but uh, but not a lot. But what he does have is very important.
Um the Uber boss Uber manager, whatever it is, Uber agent, he does not have necessity, he has a lot of dialogue. None of it’s really that important, which is why we’ve got the improv on it. But so every night in that hotel room, I’m like, learning all these scenes, because we’re gonna do 30 pages the next day. Well, on one of the days, it was only 10 pages of dialogue in the scenes. And then it was another 20 pages of me doing a monologue over and over and over. And the monologue shifts by like a, it’s because I’m saying, “Hey, hey, buddy, you got a new sponsor. The sponsor is blah, blah, and this is what they sell, blah, blah, blah. And so you’ve got to take the deal.” It’s like one of those things. And the player can pick any of the…
Dan Allen Gaming: Yeah.
D.C. Douglas: So, I, but I’m like going, “Guys, I’m trying to memorize it, but this differences are enough to be important, but not enough to be memorized.” And then they came up and they were, they came up and they said, “We’re going to do ear prompting,” and I had never done ear prompting before. They stuck a little thing in my ear, and the AD, who had never done it as well, was off to the side, and they just had me stand in the center of the stage, and it’s like, “Okay, here we go,” and you just started reading it, and I performed it as I heard it. And I realized I’m really good at that.
Dan Allen Gaming: Yeah. Okay, well, that’s a skill.
D.C. Douglas: Yeah, it is a skill. Oh, but as far as technology I would say that, I, I mean, I know there is… Oh, yeah, here’s… So when we did it there, we weren’t able to see anything other than the video feed of our cameras. Um, they didn’t, like, you could see in the back where they were working on stuff, but they had wireframe of things, and it was, even then, it was not that much. On this one I don’t think I’m giving any technology away here, but they had, you can see yourself immediately as like live action. As you’re moving, you can see yourself as the character in there, in the plane, they’ve recalled the Z plane or whatever. So you can see it. So I was immediately able to get a feel of like, what my, how big I was, and how, you know, if I moved too quick, it didn’t kind of fit the physicality. I mean, they can also fix all that stuff afterwards as well.
Um, but but seeing it was like, that was really cool. It’s like getting your costume, like on film, it’s like, you can you rehearse at home or you learn your lines and all, you get to set, and maybe you do a walk-through with your coffee and all, then you go and you get into makeup and you get into your costume, then it’s a whole different feel. And, like, other little nuances come to your performance because of that. Um, and, but with, when you’re doing a performance cap, you, you don’t have that usually. Um, but now this new technology shows you what your costume is, and you can move, and you go, “Okay, so this works, but this looks really stupid,” you know, things like that.
Dan Allen Gaming: That’s why I don’t pick my butt in the game.
D.C. Douglas: You haven’t seen the deleted scene they’re left in the game, where Rayvis picks his butt. Um, but I was gonna say, also, they have a thing now, I went into one session and they just set up a, what looked like a regular, like, camera try core or whatever, and… Trying quarter? No you know what I mean? Like a radar camera, a tiny mobile thing, but, yeah, I sound like an old man. I don’t know what the word is for this, camcorder. They set it up, and they had a wire going to a, a laptop, and he sets it up, and it immediately looks at the entire face and immediately molds the entire face. Isn’t that crazy? All the gestures. I didn’t have to put anything on, the dots or anything, and I had headphones on and I could still stand there and do the performance, and it captured all of my face performance for it. And I’m like, that’s insane. Now they have AI being able to do it, you know, even better, so it’s just wild what’s going on.
Dan Allen Gaming: Did you find you, you were puffing your chest up a bit as you played this character, like, you, you did move differently, you’re moving heavier when, like when you were on the set or not?
D.C. Douglas: Well, I did starting in the pandemic, I knew that one day I’d book a gig that would require more weight, so I just gained it over the years.
Dan Allen Gaming: Same here, but I wasn’t even… Didn’t even have a role.
D.C. Douglas: You never know when you get hired, though. You might get a job tomorrow… But, no, it’s kind of funny, because I really wanted to actually, to be really buff for it, and I just, um never got around to the workout schedule that I needed to do that. Um, but, you know for the first like, read-throughs, then we did some, like, walkthroughs without having to be in suit, and I like, I’ve got boots that I love to wear, and I had the boots, and I kept my jacket on, and I just, and just so I could have, like, kind of that bulky feel as I walked around. But it’s, it’s a lot of this stuff like, it’s so funny, because there’s, because performance capture really is a synthesis of that was the word I was looking for earlier, but it’s a synthesis of your, your stage, film, TV acting, and your voice over acting, right?
Um, and because of that, the, the, so when you’re in a voice, when I get a character and I got a voice that I have to do, I read the description of what they’re looking for, I start to read the dialogue. The dialogue starts to dictate a little bit how you’re going to do the voice, and you, you kind of key into a certain thing. And even in the booth, when you’re just using your voice, your body’s doing weird little things to create the voice as well, you know. Um, it’s just something that, ha, it’s a, they, you might call it a psychological gesture sometimes. You can, you can consciously choose the gesture to create a certain feeling in yourself, and then do that gesture before you go to a scene, or in a booth you can do it while you’re doing the voice over, whatever. But it works both ways. You can also, you, you can innately, especially if you’ve been doing, I’ve been, I’ve been acting, well, I’ve been acting since I was seven, but I’ve been in LA since I was 19, so I’ve got 30-some-odd years. But the, but when you’re in the booth and you start doing it, it can just start to come out of it, and it helps, it, it helps perpetuate the performance.
So for him, it’s, I mean, it’s kind of apparent that he’s going to be big and moving slow or what have you. Um, I wanted, I wasn’t sure how big he was, so when I was able to look up at the monitor and I realized, “Oh, there he is,” um, and I could see it, you know, that, that, I could, I could dictate even further, like, what gestures kind of sell. It’s funny, because you think bigger, you might have to do something more to be really seen, but it doesn’t. Little things kind of work with them. I was surprised they kept some of the more subtle stuff. Um, I haven’t seen all of it. Um, I’m saving, I’m saving myself. Um, before, we’re going to stream it, uh…
Dan Allen Gaming: Are you gonna stream it? Nice.
D.C. Douglas: Yeah, well, he’s gonna play it and I’m gonna be on watching it, because apparently it’s only single-player, I guess, or whatever.
Dan Allen Gaming: Yeah, yeah.
D.C. Douglas: Um, and I don’t have a PS5, so he’s gonna plug me in and I’ll watch while he plays, and I’ll try to, you know, mess him up. Um, but but there was, like, one of the, one of the cut scenes I saw, it’s like, there’s like some subtle stuff that I did at one point, and I almost kind of missed it, and, but they kept it, and I’m like, “Well, that’s kind of cool,” because it is there if you’re, if you’re, if you’re looking forward, if you’re, if you’re keyed into…
Dan Allen Gaming: Rayvis is a tough boss fight.
D.C. Douglas: The character. So, yeah, and it’s funny, it’s like the game has not been out that long, but I of the people that I’ve, I’ve heard from, you know, that they, it’s nice to know that a character that’s in a game, because I’m not the, who, spoiler alerts, no, let’s skip that. That’s all right, if we can, we can say spoiler and you can go…
Dan Allen Gaming: Everyone knows now it’s spoiler. Yeah, he’s not the main boss, but he is a boss.
D.C. Douglas: And and but it’s nice to know when you’re not, like, the main, because usually, if you’re the main boss, everyone’s gonna go, “Oh, my God,” but if you’re like one of just the characters you have to come across, it’s like, “Hey, good job,” or whatever. But I was getting a lot of nice, like, people seem to really get stuck on that character, and I’m like, “No, that’s not because of my performance per se, it’s for all of it, it’s the whole combination of everything, and how he’s written into the story,” and I’m like, “And it’s so cool to be a part of something like that.” So, um…
Dan Allen Gaming: He is the toughest boss in the game. So you are the main boss.
D.C. Douglas: Really? Or is it because he’s glitching? I don’t know.
Dan Allen Gaming: Yeah, he actually is that. He’s the toughest boss, especially on the hardest difficulty.
D.C. Douglas: Oh, that’s cool. Somebody sent me a clip of him that, I guess he did a thing, and then he just starts to stutter and all that, and I’m like, going, “Yeah, that’d be hard to beat,” but he’s like, like, there’s no way you’re gonna get… No, no, that, that’s, that’s a very, you know, that’s a one-in-a-million sort of glitch. But I feel like a lot of games these days will put the harder boss not at the end, because they want you to go through the struggle maybe 70%, wait, 70% through the game, and then I feel like they make it a bit easier as you go getting towards the end. There’s something in the psychology of it, I feel like, because every game does it these days.
Dan Allen Gaming: It’s probably more rewarding, because if you’re, if the final boss is like, they spend all that energy and that frustration, and then they end the game, and you’re kind of like, “Well, cool,” but if you, all that chapter…
D.C. Douglas: Yes, I get a reward, I get some sort of, you know,
Dan Allen Gaming: Exactly. Yeah, payback, yeah. Now, can you talk to me about the art of the laugh? Because you’ve perfected it, where a lot of times, actors, when they do a laugh for a character, a villain or whoever, it feels false, it feels fake, it feels there’s something artificial about it. But when you do it, it feels natural. Talk to me, how do you, how do you master the art of the laugh, D.C.?
D.C. Douglas: There’s no mastering. That’s just everyone’s laugh. As everyone’s laugh. Listen, when I’m in the booth and I have to laugh as a character, especially when we’re doing, like, just an Excel sheet of lines, I’m like, I think that’s the biggest laugh I’ve got because, first off, I realized I have to let go of a lot of breath. Something about my lungs or the way that I made, I, like, some people just go, [laughter], I have to go, [laughter]. It sounds so fake when it’s just doing voice over. Um, there’s no mastering. I will say this, my I got my laugh from my grandmother on my mom’s side, who was a stripper in the, in the ’40s and ’50s. Um, and she had a cackle, amazing people, you know, she used to annoy people in movie theaters when she would laugh, and she didn’t care. And also, she was like, very carefree, so she always had that cackle, and I’ve had that cackle too. It’s one of the things I got from her. So that, an inability to strip really well, so.
Dan Allen Gaming: Oh, so how does it, how does it feel to be in a Star Wars project? I know this isn’t your first time, but this is probably the meatier role you’ve had in the universe.
D.C. Douglas: It is, absolutely. The because this one’s canon. Because I don’t think my Lego character is canon. What would he be? Maybe… Are the Legos canon?
Dan Allen Gaming: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so.
D.C. Douglas: Well, yeah, who were you in the Lego one?
Dan Allen Gaming: I was a med bot or MedBot Number 2. I have no idea who is a med bot.
D.C. Douglas: Um, and that was a Star Wars… Was it the Awakening one? Lego Awakening? What’s the voice on that? I’m making it up now. What’s the voice I’m doing? I, I don’t even, I can’t even recall right now. It was like, it’s not like it was… It was really one session and I think I did, like, 10 voices, and that was the one I knew that, when I was doing it, I’m like, “I want video of this character.” Um, the, and then, what was the other Star…
Dan Allen Gaming: Knights of the Old Republic.
D.C. Douglas: Oh, the Knights of the Old Republic, that one, I ended up doing, God, here’s the thing about that game, because I guess you all know, because you’ve played it, that there’s, like, hundreds of characters. When you went into the voice over booth, it was literally like a giant phone book, and they would go, “Go to page 147, you know, let’s do that character,” which is just one page of dialogue, and it was like all these, like, like, small, random characters. So, and they booked me, I guess, on this for four hours. Um, and we went through, so the first two hours, we went through, we ended up doing, I don’t know how many characters it was, maybe it was a two-hour session, and the first hour we went through and we did about, I think, about 12 or 15 characters. This is a long time ago. Uh, I had gotten in trouble with the Tea Party back then and all that, whatever, screw them. Um, but the and but I’d become, like I’d been on, like, CNN that week and all of that, and the director had been following that stuff, and it just slipped out.
She’s like, “Wait a minute, you’re D.C.,” and I’m like, “Yes,” and he’s like, “Oh, my God, it’s like, tell me more,” and so we ended up, for the whole second hour, talking about that, so I would have been twice as many characters in that game, but we spent a whole hour just chatting about my own issues. So, so but, so yes, Rayvis is the very first, like, full-on in their uh, thing. It’s, I will say, it’s almost akin to when I did an episode of Star Trek Enterprise back in 2002, I think where it was like, this is a thing from my childhood, and now I’m in this thing. Um, and granted, that character was just a guest star for one episode, but I was an alien race, and I was in the shuttle, and we were being shot at by Klingons, and the way that we had to do the, the, the thing, being a head, is we had to literally all go, “What, three, two, one, three, two, one,” and I’m like, “Oh, my God, I’m a kid living out my dreams.” So that one was super fun. Um, but it was still fun. Uh, but this, this Star Wars stuff yeah, it’s really cool. It’s such an immense universe, and getting larger and larger so it is an honor to be a part of it.
Dan Allen Gaming: And is Rayvis, do you think he’s completely done? I feel like there’s got to be some, hopefully some more story one day, you know, for…
D.C. Douglas: I don’t want spoiler alerts, because I have not, I usually, you would think I’d know how it ends I have not watched it yet. Um, I had a whole idea, you know, the, apparently there’s a thing with Disney where they weren’t allowed to show any kind of the arms getting cut off, it was like, like, bloodless or whatever. They tried to, like, not show those stuff, and I’m like, because I had, I go, “Listen, he’s, you know, he’s, he’s, he’s a gungan, so why don’t you just slice him in half? I had this whole thing where I wanted to make a torso…” Spoiler!
Dan Allen Gaming: You better… It’s all right, it’s fun. People need… Come on!
D.C. Douglas: But like, I described that, and the guy’s looking at me, he’s like, he’s like, “Yeah, that ain’t happening.” If they ever go back into the storyline and they decided, like, you know bring it in or whatever, then, then yeah. But yeah, it’s, I mean, this is, like, the fate of the characters that I play, every character I play gets killed. It’s so rare that they don’t. Even in anime, even in, like, subtle, cinematic anime, I did this thing called, um Lycoris Recoil forget his last name it’s a beautiful character, first gay, openly gay character I’ve played in an anime, and beautiful, all his scenes were, like, things like that, they were all very subtle acting, cinematic stuff, really enjoyable experience. Last episode, I’m killed, and I’m like, “Come on, why does everybody have to die?” Uh…
Dan Allen Gaming: Someone else I interviewed recently said the same thing. They never survive.
D.C. Douglas: Some, some actors just get, get, the… They can never return. Usually, it’s the lower the voice, the more your odds go up.
Dan Allen Gaming: It’s true, it’s true. So talk to us about working with Cameron and some of the other guys that you worked with. How, how did that relationship go on, because you don’t get much time to really get to know these people sometimes, do you, on the set? It’s a lot about the work, but…
D.C. Douglas: No, I’m kidding. I’m…This delay is killing my punchlines. Damn it. Um, I know, so uh, you know, you are right, though, it’s because you really don’t have too much time. First off, I’m horrible with names, so I would love to talk about everybody and name them immediately, but I’m like, I was on a cartoon for four years and it took me six months to learn people’s names. That’s how bad I am.
Um, but no, Cameron, it was funny, is because they started with a, a reading of the entire cast, and they had people, like, Zooming in from London, and I think someone else was in France or something, and I mean, it was like, that was like, I knew it was a big game. I didn’t know until I got there, and that, the way that we were all set up, we’re all going to read this 180-page script, and, like, there’s actors I recognize on the Zoom, and I’m like, “I know him,” and, like, and he’s taking time out from the movie he’s shooting to go be a part of this. I’m like, “This is kind of a big deal.”
Um, but uh, so it, that was cool, but there was, because there’s so much, once you’re there, there’s so much to do it’s not like a lot of sit-around-and-chat time, like with a, excuse me, with the film, they may be doing, you know, scenes three, three, four, five, and you’re not until six or seven, so you can sit there with some other actor and really kind of, like, just, you know jawbone and get to know them. But with that, it was like, you’re, you’re in your suit, you’re then, it’s all the tech stuff, and then we have, like, a warm-up exercise as we did, there’s more tech stuff, and then it was, like into the volume and doing your thing. And so there was not a lot of that and I tend to also, I’m not that loquacious as I am right now when I’m on set.
But but Cameron, I mean, Cameron was in everything, so, like, there was not much time to, like, like, have any, like, casual conversation with, but it was very professional, he’s a, he’s a, he’s I mean, he’s, he’s got a sense of humor, he’s a very serious dude when he’s working. Um, he’s very focused, and and he’s very detail-oriented on what, especially with that character, he really, he owns that character and so he’s protective of it, and he wants to be everything that he does, from, like, literally the stances to how he’s using his, his equipment.
Um, but, you know, but all of that stuff, he’s uh, that was really impressive to watch I think it was one point that, I can’t, no, I don’t remember that story, there’s a story where I was a little confused as to what we were doing, because there was some of the action stuff, we were, how do I explain it? We were, okay, so we had stunt doubles, or not, not doubles, but they’re, everybody’s a double-headed smock cat but there were these stunt guys there, and his, so I’m doing the scene, the fighting scene, with his stunt double, and he’s doing it with my stunt double, but when we were choreograph, or not choreographing, we were, like, doing a slow walk-through, they made us do it with each other.
And I was like, and then when we went to go shoot it, and again, it’s not like a movie set, I’m used to movie sets, and the bell rings, and things like, you know what it’s gonna be a shot, like, it was, like, rehearsed. It was hard to tell, are we rehearsing, or is this actually happening? And then, all of a sudden, he moved over, and so I stepped over, and he’s like, “No, dude,” and I’m like, “No, we’re gonna do it,” and he’s like, “No, we’re filming it now,” and I go, “Right, shouldn’t we be doing it?” He’s like, “No, you do with that,” they’re like, “Oh, I do it with the stunt guy,” I thought I did it with you, and it was, like, very confusing, but they’re doing it at the same time, because that’s one of the benefits of, you know you know, the, the computer, is, like, you know, you’re just gonna move, they’re going to switch it back to each other later on, so…
Dan Allen Gaming: Actual physicality is just, right, so it’s very trippy. I don’t even know how to explain it.
D.C. Douglas: Yeah, I can’t even be remembering that whole experience incorrectly. Uh, Richard was a little… Fantastic. Yeah, I’ve seen him a few bit of conventions together, and he’s just such a sweetheart, such a, um he’s a joyful person. I really like him so it was fun to work. He came a couple of days that I was there.
Um, I’d never I’m gonna be bad, I’m gonna forget her last name right now Debra Wilson.
Dan Allen Gaming: Yep.
D.C. Douglas: Yeah, Debra Wilson. Yeah, what an amazing human being she is. Um, she made little gifts for us when she’d show up, she she also has, it, I don’t know if it’s spiders or snakes, or, there’s some, she’s got, she’s got pet tarantulas, yeah.
Dan Allen Gaming: That’s tarantulas, that’s right, yeah.
D.C. Douglas: She’s got, like, literally, she’s living, like, a weird legend out in, like, Silver Lake or something, like, there’s a whole other world to her that is so fascinating, she’s it’s funny, because she’s a badass, and you’re like, going, “With, with her look and her tats and all of that,” and I’m like, “You don’t fuck with that person,” and then she comes over and she’s like, “Here’s my heart,” and it’s like, she’s got the most immense heart. It’s amazing. She’s a super beautiful person.
Dan Allen Gaming: Beautiful. Did you have a scene in her with her? I’m trying to…
D.C. Douglas: I don’t think he did, did you?
Dan Allen Gaming: No, no, he had no scenes, so we on each other in days when we happen to be doing, like, I’d be there at the end of the day, yeah, they usually had everybody gear up at the same time, even though some of you would be shooting until the end of the day, kind of thing. So I’d see her on, like, some, that, so, yeah, yeah, I think one day she actually gave, she came to set, yeah, because I think we were near the end of the shoot, she just came by just to say hello and goodbye to everybody, because it was near the end of the performance cap shoot, so.
D.C. Douglas: Yeah.
Dan Allen Gaming: Last one on Rayvis uh, what did you, what did you love about him, and what was different about him, and then, thirdly, spoilers, everyone, the death scene. Talk to us about shooting that.
D.C. Douglas: Oh, wow I’m not a politician, so all of a sudden I’ve forgotten the first part if I’m going to take a three-parter. Um shit, what did you love about him, and…
Dan Allen Gaming: What was different? Yeah.
D.C. Douglas: Okay, yeah. What I loved about it, first off, I always loved being the badass, that is, that’s, there’s nothing beats being the badass in the room, knowing that you’re gonna be able to kick everybody’s ass. Um, the, the fact that you have an entrance, you know, when you get one of those, like, like, literally, if you were to hear the original taping of the, of the mocap I, I did the sound effects of myself walking out, because I wanted, like, Cameron, everybody else to hear me, so I was like, [sound effects], like, like, I was, like, a kid.
Um, and so, but what is nice is the I mean, I felt invincible anyway as the character, and you kind of, you kind of is in a lot of respects, I mean, he is a, spoiler alert, he is, the only reason he ultimately dies is because he allows it to happen. Um, hey, yes, he’s supposed to be honorable, that’s all.
Um, it was uh, so, but what I love, so what I loved about him was obviously the badassery of it, but I also love the fact that he was very, there was a a bit of a nuance to him that usually isn’t – [transcritpion error] – 70-year-old. Um, and I’ll, and I’ll be grateful for that. I still think that’s cool. So, but yeah, and I’m, one of the things that, that is consistent for me, aside from being insecure when I get roles is also change. I always embrace change, because change always leads to something more interesting. Um, usually, unless you lose a limb, but even that could actually lead to something interesting, come and think of it. So, yeah, that’s a weird way to end that…
Dan Allen Gaming: No, no, well, I’ve got a follow-up anyway, so we won’t end it on that. The, do you have any advice for the new Wesker actor stepping into that, those shoes?
D.C. Douglas: Don’t listen to other… S, I think about it, it’s like, because my whole thing was, like, I didn’t know, I didn’t know Richard Waugh back then, I’m like, “I wonder what Richard Waugh thinks about” I saw Peter Jessup, we had the same agent, so when I did the first game, I saw him in the waiting room, back when we weren’t doing booths, and I said, “Hey and I go, just so you know, I you know, I, I did the thing and all that,” and he’s like, he’s like, “It’s good,” so he’s like, “It’s good, it’s like, good for you, congrats,” I’m like, “Oh, cool,” so he was cool about it. He’s, he’s a cool guy, yeah.
But Richard, I had no idea, then um, Adrian Hough and I are friends we met at a convention, then we’ve been friends on Instagram, whatever, and then every now and then he comes to LA and we’ll meet for dinner and all, and he came to LA and he’s like, “I’ve got a friend I want you to meet,” and it was Richard, we all ended up at a bar on Sunset Boulevard and got fairly tipsy, and then did a Western but such a wonderful, he’s such a wonderful human being, and at that moment, it was so, that was the neat thing, was to know that there was, this is, and by the way, I envy his career, he’s got a great on-camera career in Canada but I, it was, when I got his blessing, that was really cool. Um, and yeah, so, so, like, the new, like, the new guy’s a whole different direction, and I’m like, “Cool, now we’re gonna go, you know, a little WrestleMania,” danger… Okay, so I have, yeah, so I have no advice for that man. He knows what he’s doing, and I’ll be as fun, and yeah, so…
Dan Allen Gaming: Hey, can you talk to me, I don’t think we talked about this last time, but Legion and in Mass Effect and the other characters that he did, can you just give us a couple of stories about that, because how much does that game mean to you, because that, those, those games are considered some of the best of all time in gaming history, you know, the Mass Effect trilogy, so I’m just curious what, how you feel about that all these years later, and, because I know you reconnect with the cast sometimes for events and stuff like that, and that’s always cool to see.
D.C. Douglas: No, I was talking about how fandoms are different and there’s, like, a personality to the fandoms themselves, and the Mass Effect fandom, and I know there’s crossovers as well, overlaps, yeah, about the Mass Effect fans that are there, is, um wholesome, choose my words carefully. No, well, no, it’s a pause, I’m just trying to, I’m trying to make sure that it doesn’t reflect anything weird on any other fandom, but there, there is a there’s a calmness, there we go, there’s a calmness in that fandom and uh, you know, all, all fandoms have there’s an intellectual component to it, but there’s definitely, like, a maturity, there’s a, there is…
Dan Allen Gaming: Come on, I’ll say it for you, there is, there is a maturity…
D.C. Douglas: There is, yes, thank you. Okay, that is it. And, and so that’s kind of, and that is and that is because of the types of games that those are. Now, as far as my experience with Legion, you gotta remember that, only big game that I did, because Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2000, I don’t know how big that got, but I never got convention invites, but uh, but so I’d only gone through the whole thing of trying to be Peter Jessup and Richard Waugh in, in the Albert Wesker stuff, and then I get a call, and this, like, happened literally, like, a year later or whatever from RE5, was “Here’s the game you just got cast,” uh, had no idea what it was, didn’t know that there was one already out, and I went in, and Jenny McSwain, that’s when I met her, such a wonderful director of, like, a firecracker of a person and she moves a mile a minute, and but she’s also, like, “Come into the booth for a second, sit down,” she just wanted to be, like, she wants to know who she’s working with, and so we, we chatted for, like, 10 minutes, and then explained the character, said, “This is the first time the characters spoken,” um, and, “You wear the voice for the species,” and I’m like, “This is an honor,” um, but it was, I mean, there’s nothing, you know voice-wise, like, you know, there’s actors that have 150 voices and stuff like that, creature voices and things, and I’m not one of those guys, I, I can take until I make it, kind of thing, which is what I’ve been doing.
Um, but this, this required me to do my own voice, really, um morning-after coffee and the flag, and then do it, and so I just all relied on the, the story, the words, what they had written and the acting of, like, putting in whatever subtle emotion, because it was this thing where they wanted a balance between something that’s robotic, but that’s also emotional, like hell, but not devious, you know and so it was, it was, it was a wonderful experience to work on.
The second game, the second one I did, which was the third game, it was fascinating, because it was doing, because Legion so is subtle acting to begin with, and then they’re having me do there’s the general Legion, but if you let Legion die in the second game, there’s the Legion that doesn’t know you, so he’s colder, and then there if you kept me alive, then there’s the Legion who does know you, he’s…
Dan Allen Gaming: Crazy, how do you navigate all this as an actor?
D.C. Douglas: Well, it’s, it’s, you, I mean, it’s, it’s kind of weird, because when you’re in the, like, I can tell you right now, but in the moment, they go, “This is what we’re doing,” and then you just, in your mind, go, you just see warmer colors, and then it affects what you’re doing, and you’re just staying in that zone, and then the zone is done, and then that’s it, like, so, I, I can’t really say what specifically technically I’m doing, I just know that you, you’re given a direction, you, like a psychic, you hold the direction in your mind and if, if you’ve been doing it long enough, you know, like, the body knows what to do with those words, and then it changes the performance. This is why I was on, I’m on Skillshare, but you guys should go check it out, I don’t I had to tell them to put me on leave, because I realized I can’t teach, there are people that can teach this, I, I, I can’t, I’m like, there’s, it’s it’s an old famous actor from the ’30s, they go, “How do you do what you’re doing?” He’s like, “I don’t know, how do you bake a cake? You put the apron on, you get the ingredients, you just make it.” Yeah, yeah. So, a lot of my experience is that, like, if you were to ask me the same question 25 years ago, I would go, “Well, yeah, I thought about this, and I tried to make my voice like this,” like, it’ll be all very specific, but after all this time, I don’t you just feel it, do that, yeah, flow.
Dan Allen Gaming: Yeah, I don’t want to sound like one of those uppity or whatever, that’s like, you know, man, it’s just, like, it’s gonna be the spirit at the end, but there is a part of it, it’s like, there’s a thing you get to a certain age, like, if you’re working on cars your whole life, you know, you know, you look at the 20-year-old mechanic, and he’s like, “Hang on, let me get the manual again,” he’s looking at the things, but you talk to that 60-year-old mechanic, and just, “This is the car,” and he touches him, he’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s the carburetor.” Yeah, yeah, I don’t know, oh, yeah, so…
D.C. Douglas: Mass Effect, it’s still a treat to meet those fans and, and just reconnect with that game, isn’t it?
Dan Allen Gaming: Yeah, well, I got fingers crossed, I haven’t heard anything but the, I know that they’re working on a fifth one, and the teaser poster they put out got some interesting hints towards Legion, and I don’t know if it’s more of an homage to the dead species, or if there’s, or if it’s an intimation that, that the species will be back, because I am the voice of all of them. When you go through, I think there’s the archives or whatever, their history, you hear all the other different gaps speaking, and I’m, it’s different versions of my voice, so they’ve pitch them up or down, that kind of things, but it’s all still mean, so…
Dan Allen Gaming: Um, so let’s hope so, yeah, yeah, that’d be very exciting. Uh, I’ve got a couple more for you, I want to know, what character would you love to have had more time with over your career, if you could pick one and, and give him a bit more meat on the bone, who would it be?
D.C. Douglas: I would have loved… You, I would love to have gone back and done another as Wesker, like an original game. Uh, yeah, I always thought they were gonna go back in timeline or something, because I, I finally owned the voice, but after the big game, you know, yeah, I owned it for, I learned it for all the other ones that nobody gives a shit about, so, and so, and I would have liked to have gone back. I’m not sure if they would, it seems like they’re doing it with their remakes, but, but but that they allow the acting just to be a little more natural, because they really pushed it in the, the direction when we were doing RE5, to be more operatic, and, and, you know black and white in performance, so that, so that one I would have liked for that part of it, but as far as remakes, no, I think it makes so much more sense to have new voices for remakes and I’m sorry that WrestleMania voice guy, I’m sorry, I don’t know his name but that’s a sexy voice I think it’s crazy, I think it’s Craig.
Dan Allen Gaming: What’s that? I think it’s Craig, I could be wrong, but yeah.
D.C. Douglas: Yeah but yeah, sexy voice and so that’s kind of neat to see where they go with that and as far as other characters, obviously I would… Well, you see, more meat…
Dan Allen Gaming: Legion has all the meat you need.
D.C. Douglas: Um, as far as others, because I’m not in a lot of games, I’m in a lot of smaller, smaller things that, like, that’s what I mean, one of these smaller projects, is, they’re one that stood out where you go, “Oh, I wouldn’t mind returning or coming back?”
Well, I mean, as I mentioned, it’s so funny, so I’m on a, fun ones, like, I’m gonna have this thing called, um Welcome to Demon School of Rubicon at least we’ve done three seasons, or maybe a fourth season coming, I don’t know, but that character is so fun to do, but that character is that character, and there’s, like, it’s more just, like, it pleases the, makes me think of me as an actor in high school, and I loved all the fun, farcical stuff, and just, like, having fun, but that character gets feeds that part of me. So, but I get, I’m big fed with that. Licorice Recoil, when that character like, they got renewed for a second season, it’s so funny, they came, they were, like, on the session is the final session where I die, and they go, “Hey, D.C., we’ve got a second season.” Oh, as it really was just some wonderful nuanced sometimes sexy, excuse me, scenes, actually, sexy and… Great. But anyway, the, but really interesting stuff that was for that character in that game, so I would have enjoyed having done him more. I thought there could have been more for him, but yeah, but for the most part, you know, I’m like, I said, I embrace change, change is a big thing for me, and so it’s more about what new things are coming. I’m working on something now that will be pretty big too I’ll tell you that, I, I think this, promise, when it comes out, you’ll want to do another interview with me. Oh, okay, that means it’s, that means it’s pretty good.
Dan Allen Gaming: You know, I only interview the best of the best, you know, no, yeah, absolutely.
D.C. Douglas: Oh, that’s beautiful.
Dan Allen Gaming: Awesome I put on a space spring paper, I hope that’s playing for you guys, it’s beautiful, I love, it’s giving me just a chill-out vibes, you know, all we’re missing is a, is a beverage, but it might be a bit early here, yes, yeah. A few more. Chat GPT, you’ve been…
D.C. Douglas: AI and Chat GPT… Dabbling in this, haven’t you, lately, and AI am, are you, are you, I’m kind of like, we’ve got to control it, because how, what, what if it goes off, what, it’s like, you know, stay on the planet, come on what, what have we done for this planet that’s good? The human race has not been good for this planet at all, we’ve done nothing to help the planet, so from the planet’s perspective, it’s like, “Hey, if the AI can, like, you know, solve all the problems and get rid of the people that keep, like, you know, strip mining me, then sure, let’s do it.” Um, here’s what… Okay, so Chat GPT, I’m fucking, I’m so into AI, I love it here’s the thing, the, the, I’ve used it to write some code for me for uh, part of my website that I was working on, I, I, I was in Photoshop, and I, and it was a simple thing, I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of these guidelines, the guide ruler things that were on there, and I’m like, “I could Google that,” because I was like, “What’s the menus?” And I go, “Where the fuck is it, the menus?” So then I went to Chat GPT, and I just asked, and it told me, and in a minute I was, I had it fixed, and I’m like, “Thank you, Chat GPT,” that wouldn’t have happened with Google the, I’ve had articles things that I was, like, writing or letters to people, and I like, I put it through there and I go “Now, I say this more concisely,” and it gives it to you. I, there was a video that was all about, I’m, I do day trading stuff, and, and so this is video, and I’m like, it was like a 40-minute video, and I’m like, “I just want the highlights of this video, like, what are the main points?” Because there’s a lot of beginner info in there, and you can put, you can say give it the link, and you have to give it the title, otherwise it gets fucked up, but you give it the title, and you go, “Summarize this video,” it’s a 40-minute video, immediately I had all the main chapters of what it was about, it was about and then it’s so bad, a couple different ways, it took me a couple different ways to ask the question, but I got it to give you the timestamps for those as well, because they weren’t doing any video.
Um, and now I had a gig yesterday just, it’s a JRPG but an interesting character, beautiful picture of the character, is an older man, and but then the bio for him, because I like to, you know, when they send me the link, I’m like, “I’ll take a look at it,” you know, I don’t spend too much time, but I, I’ll get the idea of the character and the voice I’ll do, and then we’ll see what we’ve come up with when we get the booth, and, but the, the bio for him is like a fucking book, and I’m like, “My guys, like, I mean, I know you’re in love with your, your, your, your game, and good for you, but, like, the actor just needs a quick thing,” and, like, so I copied the whole thing, whatever the Chat GPT, pasted it in, I go, “Summarize this in three paragraphs,” and it gave me the summary of the character, and then I said, “Based on what I’ve given you, what would be the voice qualities of this character?” I forget how I wrote, I wrote it in such a way, because the first one I didn’t like, the second one I said, “Okay,” and it gave me the voice qualities, and then I said, for the hell of it, I go, “What famous people sound like these cookies?” and it gave me a list, all of them but one were… Wow, that is crazy.
Dan Allen Gaming: Wow, there’s ways that are, could be really helpful that was, like, the other one I’ve done, I don’t cook, but there’s this thing, apparently, where, if you’re just, like, if you, you want to make something, but you don’t know what to make, because what you’ve got in your kitchen, you just tell it what you have in your kitchen, and you go, “What can I make from this?” and it’ll give you, it’ll tell you what you can make, and, and how to do it, it’s really pretty cool, so.
D.C. Douglas: But yeah, are we, is it going to get, you know, this could be bad actors, if they’re going to come out there, that are going to use this technology when it gets smarter, and they’re going to try to make the death robots, because everybody wants an army of robots to kill the other people and is there any way to stop that? Probably not, but what you can do is, we’ll be gone by then.
Dan Allen Gaming: There’s that, too, exactly, well…
D.C. Douglas: The thing, you think you will be, but here’s the most astonishing thing about AI, is that, what is the term for, it’s not, um uh, exponential, it’s double exponential, there’s an actual phrase for that, and that’s what AI is, is learning, it’s learning at a double exponential rate, and just remember that keeps doubling and doubling and doubling, so what you think won’t happen until 2030 could have happened in two years, could happen next year, that’s how fast it’s going, and the only way to stop it is to unplug it, and, but everyone has got versions of this now, there’s, like, you go to GitHub, you can, you can get your own AI, if you get enough processing power, you can, you can, but that’s what I’m saying, shouldn’t there be policies to make sure there’s some plans in place for the future?
Dan Allen Gaming: But, like, the, the, I’m sure you’ve, maybe you gave, I don’t know if you’ve seen this video, there’s that famous video that came out about a month and a half ago or whatever where some of these programmers from AI all got together, brought all the Cupertino execs uh, power movers into a room, and gave them a 90-minute presentation about the dangers of AI, and and the, and one of the, the best parallel I guess that you can come up with, is they said, “Think of uh the nuclear bomb, the atomic bomb, once they created that, they immediately moved to a place of, ‘How do we stop the arms race? Because it’s going to be an arms race now, so how do you get it under control?'” And if you look at it, like, there’s only so many countries that have it now, and all these other countries that don’t want it, because we’ve, granted, we’re not in a great place, but we’re in a far better place now than we were in, like, 1950.
Um, and that there may be something to the effect that that’ll be implemented with AI, and again, they’ll still be bad actors, they’ll still be that one guy that gets that, that, that, you know, programs some Robert robots to go in and blow up a building or something or something, but so there’s, there’s, there’s things that, that may be done, and again, also, we can’t, we can’t even imagine what it can become. Um, and, and so you’re regulating something that you don’t even know the full ramifications of yet, and we, so we’re going to continually get to new levels where we go, “Okay, now we should probably regulate that part, or we should regulate that part,” but as they, as these guys, these, it’s the guys who also made the film The Social Dilemma, I think it’s called, Social Dilemma, about social media and we haven’t solved a social media problem yet, it’s the, the, the, the depression that kids get from using it, the, um the amount of misinformation that goes on there, and there, there’s, and there’s so many bad actors that are involved in, in social media, and you’ve got people saying “free speech,” meaning, be anonymous and spread all this shit out there, it’s like, how do you regulate all of that stuff?
Um, we haven’t even figured that out, so, argument-wise, it’s like, yes, we do need to regulate AI, but we, we still have a mess over here at social media that we haven’t taken care of race, it’s like, we’re always, like, you know, it’s always, like, 30 years later, we’re like, going, “I can fix that now.” Yeah, there’s a game called Detroit, I have to bring it back to games just because it’s me, but there’s a game called Detroit: Become Human, where it’s about this thing where the robots are living among the humans, and they’re sort of considered, like, another race in the game, but they’re, you know, obviously not treated the same, and you just wonder if that could ever happen, and your mind starts to wonder, it’s really crazy when you, when you think about it.
D.C. Douglas: If you also think about it, too, we’re really strange in that we assume you know, when we look for life forms, our protocol, you know, are they carbon-based, do they, you know, things that are like us, that’s how we determine what life is, or that, you know, our consciousness, but, like, but we can only understand what our brains allow us to understand, like, we’re not even using the majority of the gray matter that’s in our heads, but we just imagine that AI is going to surpass us to a point where we will input in the question, “How do I, how do I utilize more of my gray matter?” and it will figure it out, and we’re like, “Oh, shit,” so, you know, in that way, it could actually help us, or it could go, “Don’t worry, you’re not going to be around long enough to make that work.”
Uh, so I could technically put into Chat GPT from our chat today, “Give me the timestamps,” and it would say, “We talked about Rayvis here, Resident Evil here,” that’s what it could do for me right now.
Dan Allen Gaming: I’ll have to try it, for…
D.C. Douglas: You say, “Summarize this video,” the link and then put “title,” full colon, and the title, and then that’ll do it. If you don’t put the title, it’s sometimes, it’s like a, like a weird, like, like a Google bot that goes onto a page, and it looks at the ad, and thinks the whole page is about that ad, but if you give it the title, it goes, “Oh, look at that video, okay, yeah, there we go,” and it’s weird, because people fuck with you, it’ll go, “I’m sorry, I’m not, I, I cannot my learning ended on, like, November whatever, 2021, about the Internet,” and I’m like, “Do you have access to the Internet now?” “Yes, I do,” and I’m like, “Well, then, you fucking go look at it now.”
Dan Allen Gaming: Oh, for the most part, it’s rewarding is there anything you wanted to say to the fans today, D.C., that have tuned in?
D.C. Douglas: But no no just the, this is it’s been, this is a kind of wild and wonderful career, and it’s neat to be a part of these things, I’ll never fully understand or appreciate the games like the fans do and so that’s why it’s nice to be in touch with fans that can you know, help me get it, you know but in regard all in all, yeah, I know, it’s been a fun ride, so, and anything else you wanted to, you got that stream coming up, when’s that happening, do you know yet?
Dan Allen Gaming: Yeah, I don’t know what day we’re gonna start doing it again, I, I do everything kind of, I’ve stopped kind of doing the whole promo stuff on my thing, things yeah, I just don’t really care, but I’m looking about retirement, I just want my island, and island living, and I’ll be happy, but we’re gonna probably by the end of this month or in June start streaming Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and my friend will be playing, and I’ll be commenting, and and I’ll post that on Instagram, @mrdcdouglas, Mr. Deus Douglas on Twitter, but, you know what you should do…
D.C. Douglas: You get rid of it, and I’m like, it’s, I don’t use it anymore.
Dan Allen Gaming: Social media, I just think Instagram are whatever, Instagram, of course, it’s more of an artistic appreciation of things, it eliminates a lot of the toxicity and yeah, I don’t say any toxicity on Instagram compared to Twitter, man, the difference, you have to go into the comments on the real political things, and even then, it’s like kind of a pain, and then you’re like, “This is a waste, there’s more pictures and videos to look at other way,” yeah.
D.C. Douglas: Scroll away. With Twitter, it’s just all that, it’s like, “Let’s get her with our outrage,” so, yeah, and the, the people that were fun to follow, that had, like, they were super intelligent, that wrote these interesting, you know, threads and things, they’ve all gone off to Substack and all those other places, and it’s like, yeah, and also, it’s, it’s funny, is having been banned from it, is time management, I’m like, “I used to spend a lot of time on Twitter back in the day,” and I’m like, “I don’t wanna, I, I’ve learned how to do other things outside of my phone, and I don’t think I want to, you know, go back,” so, I don’t know, I might just set up an IFTTT thing, where it auto-posts over to Twitter, might do something like that.
Dan Allen Gaming: Yeah, I got rid of Facebook all together, I could I know they’re owned, I know they own IG and all that, but Facebook, again, it’s the way it’s structured, is, it’s also, also, is it me, or is Facebook like, I swear to God, it’s like a shack, and it’s falling apart, like, I clicked to go to get the notifications for my page, it sends me to another portion of the web, and then I click on a thing, and I can’t, it’s like, I sound like an old guy, I really, I know…
D.C. Douglas: No, no, I don’t usually, I only use Messenger on Facebook, I don’t, I don’t post on it or anything, yeah, yeah.
Dan Allen Gaming: They’ve been, it’s just so convoluted now, the way they’ve made it, and yeah, it’s I don’t buy their stock.
D.C. Douglas: Uh, and when you, when you do play that Jedi: Survivor with your friend, do me a favor, when you get to your boss, say, “Oh, can you go get me a drink,” and then just quickly switch the difficulty to the hardest difficulty, and just watch him thrive in pain.
Dan Allen Gaming: God, that would be funny, because it’s, well, well…
D.C. Douglas: Good luck, we’ll say that, but, uh…
Dan Allen Gaming: If you’re in the hardest thing, do I kill you a lot if it’s on the hardest?
D.C. Douglas: Yes, definitely. Hey, D.C., it’s been a pleasure, mate, um…
Dan Allen Gaming: Before I let you go, can can Rayvis say something to Dan? I always like to do this, can, can he say something to Dan? Is that possible?
D.C. Douglas: Okay, you think you’re watching Dan Allen Gaming, but you’re not, it’s fake! My neighbors hate me so much right now, sorry.
