Yeah

... and so charming and charismatic.

And what I find really interesting is I've never s- you never see that Arnold again.

You never see an Arnold who is that kind of, like, I don't know, um, witty and, like, kind of ironic.

Not just, like, witty the way he'll become later, you know, throwing off one-liners, but, like, a prankster and a guy with, like, an impish grin.

Like, you don't see that later on.

And, and it's interesting that he just totally shut that out.

Yeah.

Can you talk to me about how the story came about in your brain and the process of writing this book? Because it's so good.

There is a Wu-Tang side project from the GZA called Liquid Swords, which is like a gangster rap record from the 90s that opens up with a little boy talking about how when he, his father used to be the Shogun's executioner, but now they were on the run together.

And I love that album.

And so I listened to this little kid tell this story hundreds of times and eventually found out that was the opening dialogue from a movie called Shogun Assassin.

And then I learned that Shogun Assassin was based on this series of manga from Japan called Lone Wolf and Cub about a powerful warrior who was on the run with his child and they were fighting together on the road to death.

And I was working in television and I'd been writing short crime stories.

And then somewhere I had the idea of what if I took Lone Wolf and Cub and told it in the world of like white trash and Nazi punk criminals.

You're like, shoot, like, why didn't I put that together?

What's your note taking process? Well,

I have a few, you know, I do like I text myself stuff all the time.

Right.

And that's both will either be like facts or a newspaper link or just a line that I like.

And I do that for everything I'm writing.

But for these kind of books, I use a program called Rome Research as ROAM.

And it is a networked So that like, for instance, if you use the word cop in one of your files, it will highlight the word cop and you can click on it.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, you will see people, like, with like, listening to drill music, which is violent rap music that came out of Chicago, but there is French drill.

There is [laughs] drill music all over the world.

We sell violence to the world.

There, there...

We export more weapons than any other country in the world.

We import more weapons than any other country in the world.

Yeah.

Let's start, like overall, what are some of the channels that you're using to do this, and how are you using them to build out that education strategy?

So when I started the brand in 2020, I definitely think the social landscape has changed.

So I think that when you're thinking about starting a brand today, you need to-- I still believe truly that, like, social is the best place to start your brand because it's free.

And when I think about starting my brand, like, I didn't have any money.

I didn't have any way to start it.

So I think knowing that, like, we have a free platform, whether it's TikTok or Instagram or YouTube, I started mine on YouTu- or, um, excuse me, I started mine on Instagram [chuckles], trying to grow my YouTube right now.

But when I think about these, like, social platforms and what you're doing, there's, there's so many ways that they're changing.

Wow.

[laughs]

...

I guess I am unavoidable.

I, I mean, I can't hide it.

Uh, I, I do.

I love, uh, Japanese culture.

I love, um...

[laughs]

[laughs]

... you know, it also has a, a, a police riot where police, uh, go nuts and, and shoot a bunch of protesters with, uh, you know, non-lethal, uh, weapons and make them lose eyeballs and, um, stomp them.

And it has a lot of fun romance, and car chases, and murders, and dismemberments.

And, uh, uh, it's, it's got a lot of everything.

It's, [laughs] it's a big book.

I'm very proud of it.

Wow

... you know, no-nonsense, a very, you know, cut the Gordian knot sort of directness that you find in, like, that kind of hero.

But for people new to the topic, can you just offer an overview of what synthetic panels are?

Yeah, so the Qualtrics synthetic panel, I mean, I suppose maybe the first thing to start out with is it can mean many things.

And it is interpreted in several different ways, depending on who's selling you the synthetic panel, who's talking about the technology.

The majority of platforms out there that sell synthetic panels or synthetic research are essentially just wrappers around an LLM.

ask a question, sends it off to the LLM, takes the answer back and returns you a result.

Find that those, that type of approach to synthetic research, and I'll put some air quotes around research in that one, you essentially get very stereotypical persona-based responses that mean revert quite easily.

They don't really provide the same kind of diversity or The same kind of distributions that you get when you ask humans questions because humans are a little messy and not quite as logically perfect as LLMs, even when LLMs are hallucinating and behaving a bit strange.

It's fascinating, isn't it? Are there any parallels between the two, the human responses and the synthetic?

Maybe, I know you touched on a little bit, but maybe set the stage on how Qualtrics sees its role evolving in this new era of AI, you know, driven insights, as you mentioned, and, um, you know, how you're, you know, helping to lead those, those capabilities.

Yeah.

I think, um, you know, like, like every business, Qualtrics recognizes that, uh, AI is gonna transform not just the way we do business, but the way all of our customers do business, and the kind of questions they ask, and the kind of things that they need and expect from us, and what their customers expect from them as well.

Like, one of the things that, that really excited me about joining Qualtrics last year was the forward-thinking approach to, uh, to AI, to really leaning into this technology rather than, like some companies do, kind of lean away from it and become a little bit scared and threatened by it.

But what was really clear to me from speaking to everyone at Qualtrics was this was being fully embraced and, and, and leant into, but in the right way.

So we're integrating AI technology and tooling into pretty much all of our platforms one way or another to help support customers make their lives easier, to help make their experiences using our tools and software better, and to help them get better insights and, and, and action from the data that they're creating.

Inside the synthetic research work that we're doing specifically, uh, it's about creating...

Maybe unpack that for us a little bit and, and explain, you know, what, what do you mean by that?

She actually gets to look inward and goes, who the fuck created this crazy world?

Oh, it's us.

It's this shit.

Yeah.

Her role is an unusual one in a film.

I think there are a lot of really great novels where it is told through a first person narrator who is not the center of the story.

And I think oftentimes you find those are the stories that are the hardest to adapt to film.

Look at this shit.

For the viewing audience at home, those who aren't in Hollywood, what have you noticed about what's different trying to get TV made in 2025 versus, you know, 2018, 2019?

Well, you know, I think we're seeing the kind of end game of trends that started a little earlier than that.

Streaming is not a friendly medium for art.

And that's what we're learning.

And everybody's going to immediately come up with counter examples to that.

And there are counter examples to that.

But the actual golden age of television that we refer to actually died around the same time that streaming was born.

What's different about now versus what was asked of network television in that?

Could there be crisis PR at work with a lot of these big food companies trying to combat this trend? But

I think in the large sense, yes, I do want to differentiate.

Crisis PR is usually done in the face of an actual crisis to be dealt with.

But black bag PR can cover a lot of different aspects, including what you're talking about.

And the history of food industries manipulating the press in America goes back decades and decades.

and they work hand in hand with scientists who they fund the studies of.

They also have access to a thousand studies, but they're only gonna write articles about one.

But for those listening, what are some signs that they're seeing the work of crisis PR or black bag PR in the news they're watching or the news that they're reading?