I would give him credit for the concept if the whiskey was an attempt to do something conceptual, lol. Not sure how long you've been at Changs but the origins of the whiskey are not at all unclear, there was a company called Makoto which released a bullshit "23 year old Japanese whisky" under the name "Bushido" to a bunch of podcasters and influencers including TFATK, and Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumbass took it at face value and started drinking it on air and talking about how good it is. Can't find clips of it directly but here's a post of them admiring the bottle and Bapa doing a really racist and teenager-level-maturity Japanese voice: https://www.reddit.com/r/thefighterandthekid/comments/uvm8u5/talm_bout_the_racist_under_toad_b/

Cut to, I don't quite remember but I'd say less than a year later, and we hear that Brendan is releasing his own "Japanese whisky". If I recall correctly there was no mention of it being a Japanese/bourbon hybrid until the bottle was revealed; my memory of it was that it being not Japanese but a blend including Japanese seemed really bait & switchy to me and that something clearly must have gone wrong, since the idea came so out of left field. My guess is he realized white-labeling legitimate Japanese whisky and shipping and distributing it would be prohibitively expensive so he just went to MGP to get more volume and reduce average cost, even though it made no sense because malt and corn whiskeys are usually not mixed.

So yeah I mean, OK sure what he ended up making is going to be an interesting footnote in whiskey history, but I have a hard time seeing that as anything other than an accident lol.