Interview with Famous Twitch Streamer Puhdado

Puhdado is a talented Twitch streamer who has been on the rise over the course of the last year or so. I recently had the pleasure of conducting a brief interview with him, where I asked him a few questions about his newfound streaming career, as well as his inspirations for his content. 

 Let’s see if this fine, upstanding young spud has any secrets to tell us.

Greyson Ditzler (GD):  Hello, thanks a lot for being here, what is your name and what do you do?

Puhdado (PD): My name is Travis, or my Twitch username is Puhdado, and I’m a broadcaster on Twitch.tv, I play video games for a living.  

GD: Alright. What made you start streaming?

PD: My old roommate introduced me to it. It was during “Twitch Plays Pokemon”, and if you remember that… yeah it, it was crazy. I kinda went back to the site a few days later and was like ‘oh there’s this game that’s coming out, this baseball game, let me see if before I buy it’ — because you know you can go to review sites like websites like IGN, but those can be very biased or paid-off sometimes.

GD: Yes.  

PD: So I was like ‘Lemme see somebody play it, LIVE, and get their opinions live’ — like it’s not a YouTube video edited, it’s completely their opinion live on the game, so I watched people play it and I was like — I didn’t really understand what it was. Is it entertainment, is it tips and tricks, and I was like ‘well I play a bunch of games anyways, I might as well stream myself playing games’. It also gave me an excuse to play video games more often than my girlfriend would have wanted me to, while I’m streamin’! So yeah, I can do this! So that’s kinda where it started.

GD: Nice! I’ve done a bit of poking around in your YouTube channel and I’ve seen a lot DayZ, so I feel like I might already know the answer to this question, but what’s your favorite thing to stream?

PD: (chuckles) Yep, you’re right, DayZ, it’s my favorite game to stream. It’s not necessarily my favorite game to play, honestly, but… there’s a lot of running, and there’s a lot of looting up and gearing up, a lot of downtime, so it’s great to interact with the chat, answer questions and go back and forth.

GD: Yeah, so there’s enough action and enough downtime to keep up with people watching.

PD: Yeah, and the action’s really intense, because in that game if you die you lose absolutely everything. Like you don’t respawn with a gun, you respawn with like a t-shirt, and jeans, and a rag, and that’s all you have, which makes it really intense. That’s kinda the game that I PC for, and so that’s the game I’ve been playing the most often.

GD: Alright! Um, how did you come up with your name? Also, for clarity’s sake, for the folks at home, how do you pronounce it?

PD: Okay, it’s Puhdado (puh-day-dough). Just think of a potato and put “d’s” instead of “t’s”. 

GD: You see, yeah, that’s what I thought, but my mom was like “no it’s puh-daw-do”.

PD: Oh trust me I’ve heard everything. Poo-day-do, poo-dale, THE potato, I’ve heard everything. 

GD: (chuckling) “The Potato” is my favorite.

Picture of “The Potato” from his 50,000 Subscriber face reveal Q&A special.

PD: (laughs) Yeah. But the way I came up with it — well it wasn’t really ME that came up with it, it was a podcast I listen to, the Adam Carolla Show, and Norm MacDonald the comedian was on there, and he was just telling some story and he said the word potato but he just said ‘puhdado’. And they were like ‘Wait. Wait, what’d you call it?’ and they just made a big deal of it, and I don’t know why but it just struck me as really funny, and then whenever I’d say the word potato I’d say puhdado. And then I was trying to think of a user name, and it just came off the top of my head, but, I kinda went with it.

GD: Yeah. Coming up with your name is one of the HARDEST things to do.

PD: Yes.

GD: It took me like four years to come up with mine.

PD: It’s hard! I mean, most people call me ‘dado’, for short. Which, I think is good. I like it.

GD: Cool. So, do you make any plans for when you stream, or do you just play it by ear?

PD: Um… I usually play it by ear. Like, there are times when maybe I have a friend who streams, or another streamer I kinda partner up with, and just say ‘hey let’s play this game at this time’ but, for the most part I usually start out DayZ, and then gets to the point where it’s like ‘I’m kinda done with this game’, and I’ll say what sounds like fun right now? Or I’ll ask the chat ‘hey, these are the games I’ve got available, vote on what games you want me to play.’ Or new games that are coming out, like the Battlefield 1 beta was available so I played, y’know… a full day of that.

GD: Yeah.

PD: But I try to mix it up a little bit, I try not to pigeonhole myself into just DayZ, but uh, yeah I just kinda play it by ear mostly, with not a whole lot of planning.

GD: Alright. Sorry, I just wanna clarify something, my vocabulary might not be accurate, are you partnered with Twitch?

PD: Yes, I am partnered with Twitch. 

GD: Alright! Then, what’s it like being a Twitch partnered streamer? Has anything changed about your content since that started? 

PD: Honestly, no. For me, no, I haven’t changed anything. ‘Cause really, the only thing that changes is that people can subscribe to you, and you get ad revenue instead of all the ad revenue just going to Twitch. I mean, some people, they choose to play a bunch of ads like every fifteen minutes, every half-hour/hour they play an ad, and they get however much money for how many viewers they have. But, I choose not to play ads, aside from whatever ads pop up automatically through Twitch. But yeah, nothing really changed ’cause, like, I try to think of it as a business, like it is MY business, but I try not to think of it that way because when you think of it in business sense, you kind of lose some of the passion and the fun.

GD: Yeah. On a different note, do you have an old stream or a highlight that you’d like to recommend to people in particular? 

PD: Um, I’d say, probably on my YouTube page, one of my older ones.. Uh… I think I called it “My Greatest DayZ Moment” and it was… Well I don’t wanna spoil it, but basically two guys; armed, they have guns, they’re trying to hold me up, they cornered me in a room, and I find a way to get out of it alive. Short and sweet, it’s probably one of my favorites. It’s my most popular video too, people bring it up all the time.

GD: Alright! Well, that’s about all I wanted to ask you about. Is there anything else you’d like to say before we wrap this up? 

PD: I mean, I could go in detail about a lot of different things, but if that’s all you need, then hey, I can’t really think of much off the top of my head.

GD: Okay. Thanks again for the opportunity for this interview!

PD: No problem!  

Once again a very special Thank you to Puhdado for this interview, it was an enjoyable and enlightening experience, and I hope that both you and he enjoyed it. 

If you’d like to check out Puhdado on Twitch, then do so, but he also has a YouTube channel for stream highlights. If the Twitterverse is your thing, then follow him on Twitter if you want.

And if you’d like to watch a personal favorite Puhdado highlight of mine, then feel free to watch the video below: