Episode 11.1 - Voice Actors and Content Creators in the Age of Platform Capitalism with Tim Friedlander and Avi Gandhi

I'm Lauren Urbino. I'm Jake Orland, and I'm Mitchell Ann Hebbitt. In your listening to Dialectic, the official podcast of the UCLA Law Review. Joining us today are Avi Gandhi and Tim Friedlander. Avi is a pioneer in content creator talent representation and founder of the Consulting firm Creator Logic. Creator Logic disseminates one of the industry's most successful newsletters and provides frameworks, analyses, and other resources to help content creators succeed in the creator economy. Tim is a voice actor, studio owner, and musician based in Los Angeles. His career has spanned animation, video games, narration, and commercial work. He is best known for his work in Hunter Hunter, record of Ragnarok, and for being the voice behind dozens of political ads. Tim is also the president and co-founder of the National Association of Voice Actors, where he advocates for artist rights and standards in the industry. Avi and Tim, thank you for being here and welcome to Dialectic. Oh, thank you for having us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Absolutely. So, we've just come out of a wonderful panel from both of you. One thing we are interested in is your relationships with voice actors and content creators. We are curious to know for creators and voice actors you work with, what are some of the most common challenges they face? Have these challenges always existed? Or are they newly emerging? That's a great question. Maybe I'll go for voice early because I think some of the challenges go back a little further than content creators. In general, I think there's this idea of this creator umbrella encompassing a lot more people than it used to. I think a lot of voice actors feel of our creators. We're all in the creative society together, this creative industry together, voice actors for forever have had a deal with this challenge of getting the value of the work they do paid fairly. But I guess that goes to any artist, right? Any artist is trying to get paid fairly for their work. But primarily in working for a gamer project or show that all of a sudden becomes massively successful and their character does really well and they don't get additional compensation for the value they bring to that. And then in the age of AI we're talking about, then the loss of our voice both metaphorically and literally losing our voice and losing our ability to continue working. Yeah, I think I would say that content creators have a very similar set of challenges. It is getting paid fairly for the work that they do. I think a big part of that is the economics of the industry. Part of that is driven by just the overall economics of advertising and digital media advertising for the traditional media advertising. Part of that is platform economics and platforms, especially meta-platforms, TikTok, Snap and a number of others, not paying creators for the content that they're creating even though they are running ads and monetizing that content. And that waterfalls because these same platforms have algorithms that require creators to create more and more content in order to maintain their viewership and maintain their ability to get other forms of income, which by the way are more work. If you're doing a brand deal that is additional work on top of having to create for the platform who is not paying you. And so it's like race to the bottom and burnout is often talked about in the space, but it's largely economically driven for that reason. It's actually really interesting. This is a great discussion because this kind of goes to the title of our panel today, which was his creative work, labor. And I think this goes back. If we talk about challenges, just the general concept of valuing artists and creatives in this country going back close to 100 years has devalued anybody who is not a physical laborer in a lot of places or devalued the creating artist easy. Being a musician is easy. Being a YouTube creator is easy. Why should you get paid for something that I would just do for fun? And to not really understand the actual labor, both emotional, physical, mental, psychological that goes into these things. It's on par and sometimes more taxing than some other physical labor that people are used to thinking about doing. And I think this goes to multiple different areas. And now we have this idea of online creators who, sometimes the artists look down on the online creators as not creators or artists as well. So you have this kind of additional hierarchy that keeps going down and devalued the artists all the way down to the bottom and that almost the bigger you are, the more fun you have doing what you do, the less you deserve to be paid. And I think again, it all comes back to the market's economics, right? For example, it's probably still like this, but back when I was in Hollywood, 15 years ago, and even more so before that, my parents were like, don't work in Hollywood. Everybody wants to work in Hollywood. And so no one's going to pay you and you're not going to get paid anything until you get to the very top. And the reason for that is if you don't want to take this role for no money, then this guy's going to take this role for no money. And I imagine it's, of course, it's the same for voice acting and for writing and for all of these creative roles in a world where there was limited creative work paid for by limited number of companies, but there were many people that wanted to have that creative work. Supplying to man meant that creative work was devalued because people, especially the people who wrote the checks, saw it as commodity. Now we know it's not a commodity, like my voice cannot replace your voice. And so what's I think been interesting about the Creator Economy, the Digital Creator Economy especially is that there is a new market set by audiences and by platforms, right? And there's this interplay between audiences and what they want and what they're interested in and platforms and their algorithms and what they show people and why and how. And it's making it all a lot more complicated. But at the end of the day, it still comes back down to the supply and demand elements and you could make the same argument for interns, for example. And yet there's a big push towards paying interns. You make the same argument for entry-level roles, right? Lots of people want to work at, name your company and should that company be able to pay below minimum wage because people are willing to take it because they need to eat. This is an ethical and legal question. For other types of labor, the market and the law says no, there is a minimum wage and California that minimum wage is a lot higher than the rest of the country, but arguably should be even higher, right? Based on the cost of living. But for creators, a lot of the times, that's not even the case. I think there's a little bit of hypocrisy there in terms of how we view creative work. Absolutely. In that vein, what stood out to me for both of you with Creator Logic and with the National Association of Voice Actors and Creators Coalition on AI, I'll focus on educating artists and creators on their rights. So we are curious. When you meet a new voice actor, a new content creator, what is your biggest piece of advice you offer early on regarding the protection of their performances and work? Our very first things is reread the contracts. That's where we start. I think we're still in a more traditional business sense where we do have an employer in a contract and a job that you're going to be hired for, where you're going to work with somebody directly. I was commenting and this is like, when you said this a little more nuanced, what I was commenting on in the panel was this idea that voice actors only in the last few years have started to think of themselves as small business owners. That's insane. And that it's an interesting change. You're like, no, I'm an actor. I'm an artist. I'm not a small business owner. No, you are a small business owner. You actually operate as a small business. You potentially employ six, seven or eight different people through the job that you do. So think of yourself as a business owner, as a small business owner, in addition to being an artist, which a lot of people have a hard time putting those two things together. But for us, it's just read your contracts. Read your contracts. Read your contracts. Yeah, I think 100% if you're getting contracts, you got to read the contracts. And there are more and more resources that are being created for content creators in general. But I think more broadly for digital creators, it's even more basic than that. Get an LLC. Sure. There are so many, this is a thing that I think more established artists in Hollywood know is like you need to incorporate and separate your business for your personal life. But if you are somebody who's been posting your daily fit picks on Instagram and over a year or two have somehow gotten a few thousand followers and now brands reaching out and offering to pay you to post their clothes, you shouldn't do that yourself. You should have an LLC because if maybe they say, hey, don't just, you don't have to say that it's sponsored, just pretend it's not. And you get in trouble for that and you're not an LLC. That's you on the hook, right? And with your taxes and there's all kinds of legal liabilities there. But so many creators don't know that. So many creators are just operating in a silo. And it's interesting because I was looking at the data. And since 2020, if you look at new small business registrations in 2019, there were three million in 2020. There were four million. And then 2021 through present, there's over five million each year and new small business registrations. I would guess that there's actually a lot more small businesses than that. Just these people haven't registered to know that they should get an LLC and separate their businesses. And I think that's something more creators need to know. Another commonality between voice actors and content creators we picked up from your panel is that Tim, you had mentioned that 80% of voice actors do not have a membership in SAG after or similar guild. Obviously, you advise content creators who are largely unconnected to any guilds. How do both of you approach advising artists whose work isn't covered by a collective bargaining agreement? And obviously I know you touched a little bit about this on the panel as well. Do you think that it would be helpful if there was some sort of unionization of content creators? Yeah, so I am not a town representative anymore. It was a long time ago, but I think this still largely holds true, right? Like almost no content creators are part of a guild or any sort of collective bargaining agreement. And actually relative to the number of content creators out there, almost none of them are actually represented. There were 10,000 talent management companies now, which isn't that insane. That's Christy, yeah. And by the way, most of them are acting as agencies even though they shouldn't be. Because the lines are all blurred now. And even still there are millions and millions of creators who have no representation. And so I think part of what I meant by creators are entrepreneurs or small businesses is that they just need to learn the business themselves. Use whatever tools they can to have whatever conversations they can, but they got to read their contracts. They got to learn what those terms mean. They need to figure out their own accounting or hire an accountant. They need to incorporate. They need to think about what they're doing like a business because until they get to a certain point, no one is coming to save them. And even if they get to that point, you never know if whatever manager signs with them is going to be any good, if they're going to actually provide any actual value, if they're going to provide any actual advice, you just don't know at this point, right? Unless you're at the level where you're represented by a big traditional Hollywood company or one of the big management firms that has a good reputation. And there are dozens of those, but there's thousands that don't. Thousands of managers who are just someone who decided, ah, this seems like a good hustle. Yeah, exactly. And then the second part of the question was that unionization might not actually be the goal for content creators. I think, so first off, I'm on the advisory board of the creators Guild of America, but we are not a formal union. I think we're more of a nonprofit. I don't actually know the formal structure, so don't call it. But we do work in the hopes that we are creating infrastructure for creators at scale. For example, we created a legal writer that our members can use in their brand deals with agencies and big brands that are signatories that will improve their overall terms or at least set like a baseline around things like payment schedule and ownership of IP and all of those, which a lot of agencies and brands have very overarching contract terms. And for creators who, again, haven't learned the business or haven't done the research to figure out what is acceptable and what's not or who just don't have a baseline from where to start, they're getting taken advantage of by contracts that say, oh, we're going to pay you $100 for this video. And we're going to own all of the rights and pay you in six months. Those kinds of things are happening. They're not acceptable. And we create resources like that. But in terms of actually organizing is a collective bargaining unit. I think there's a few headwinds there. I think first off, I think there's very little leverage against platforms. I think because of the scale of the space, the number of creators that we need to organize to make an impact, it wouldn't need to be thousands. It wouldn't need to be millions. It wouldn't need to organize millions of creators. And to strike, you'd have to ask millions of people to stop creating content and even potentially pull down their content because their libraries are still going to exist on the platform. And I think in terms of impact, right, it's no different than the impact of going on strike for any laborer. I just think organizing at a scale of millions, there are unions that have done that, of course. But this is a relatively new industry. Like AFL, CIOs existed for 100 years. It's relatively new and it's massive. Yes. And it's massive and it's so spread out and decentralized. You just basically are self-defined as I'm a content creator now and I'm this. So there's no even organization like SAG after a, or writers deal to something like that's how you become an official writer or an actor or whatever it might be. I'm finally a professional actor because I'm a SAG after actor. So I'm now defined by these things that makes me an actor. It's really parallel. The very first thing that we did with Nava was we launched an AI writer, a contract writer three years ago that said, you cannot use my voice for training or to create a digital replica. Just straight up, not even no bargaining, no collective bargaining agreement, no talk about terms or licensing. Just straight up, you cannot use my voice for anything outside of the scope of this work. You cannot use it for training. You cannot use it to make it the digital replica. So that was the very first thing that we did. That's just organizing. That's not collectively bargained. But now you do that enough and now this contract, this language comes back now as boilerplate from companies that are picking it up and using it because it's easier than them trying to recreate it. We've already created it. So now they can put it into place and it's our terms. So now it's really advantageous to the actor because the actor created those terms that the producers now throwing into the agreement. And that's that we've done it. But I think the advantage that the voice over industry has is that it's much, much smaller. And so a smaller group of people can have a larger impact than we're talking about millions to affect YouTube. You're looking at millions and millions of people. To affect the voice acting industry, you're looking at hundreds to a thousand people can walk away from a job on some cast. The cast is 20 or 30 people on a major production. And those 23 people walk away and you can shut down a production. So the leverage is much different in there. And I think it's much more diffuse even in YouTube, which I'm about Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. There's so different ecosystems and communities of people and different personalities that it seems go into those things that they self-compartmentalize, but don't talk to each other. It's more like political organizing and that's it. Because actors all have that in common that they are actors. They are hired by studios and video game companies and animation companies to produce content. And there's this kind of perspective that they are part of the industry. Creators, many creators don't even identify as creators. LinkedIn actually completely changed how they address creators. They changed all their programs, all their language because so many people who create content on LinkedIn every single day were saying to them, "I'm not a creator, I'm a lawyer. I'm not a creator. I'm a doctor. I'm not a creator. I'm a chef." And a lot of creators identify as small business owners or as entrepreneurs or as whatever their trade is because at this point, content creation isn't just about content as the product. It's also about content as a vehicle for selling other products. I think organizing people like that or at least trying to create a collective bargaining unit for people who are so disparate and many of whom look at Instagram and say, "Don't actually care if Instagram pays them because they are or rather they care." Of course, they would want to get money from Instagram. But they're not going to leave Instagram because that's not their core business. The core business is selling boots or running a bar or whatever it is. And Instagram is just a vehicle by which they get customers. So I think there's also that dynamic. My thesis is that everyone is a creator, right? So trying to collectively bargain all of mankind seems to be an insurmountable challenge. I think more likely is political organizing because this can and should be a bipartisan issue, right? There are left-wing creators. There are right-wing creators. Both have incredible power in their spaces. Both have influence among voters but also among politicians, right? Right-wing creator economy moved the United States electorate in the last election. And over the last two weeks, I've been seeing the United States Congress people going on YouTube channels to talk about the Epstein files and other salient issues right now. And I think both parties in the U.S. are really seeing the power and starting to embrace or have already embraced the creator economy and content creators in general. And I think that creates an opportunity for creators on the whole to organize because they have influence. Now platforms have money. This America and money is allowed in politics. And it would end up being a clash between big money and big influence. And I hope that it happens. And certainly, of course, I hope that the influence wins because again, my thesis is that everyone is a content creator. Even if you're casually posting on Instagram or Pinterest or whatever it is, you are creating ad inventory at the end of the day. Like if you just distill it down to what it is, you're creating ad inventory. And if you distill what a TV show is down to the business unit, it's also ad inventory. And if you create, distill a movie down to what it is a business unit, it is a reason to buy a ticket and et cetera, et cetera, right? And so if you are creating something that creates a kind of value for a business, then you should be paid for that. Yeah. And then this goes right into the training argument, the training discussion, right? If you're creating value for a business that's going to be a multi-billion dollar trillion dollar corporation, and you were part of that training data, however small, you are creating value for this company and that totality of all the creators. This is where I think influence comes into play potentially is that as these systems get built, they need more content. You can say, sure, at least companies are going to have all the content they need. They need more. Look at the Lionsgate dealer or it was a couple other companies that licensed their content. Even an entire movie studio does not have enough content to create a viable model, AI model. And so what does that tell you if that much content, they can't even create something viable, right? So these companies have to come back to the creators. They're going to have to come to the humans who are creating things. And this is where I think potentially influence and leverage comes into play that you can potentially refuse to contribute to the next generation of these systems. A lot of damage has been done already. A lot of work has been stolen, a lot of art has been stolen, a lot of music, everything. People's voice image name, likeness, music, everything has been taken in and jested into these systems. Trillions of dollars of money. I mean, just look at the, I literally add up the market caps of all these companies and it's probably half the GDP of the United States. Yeah. And that's just like the creative industry is what 4.4% of GDP for the US. It's the creative industry brings massive amount of value to the world, to the United States, to the bottom line of these industries. That undersells the creative ends because that doesn't include chat GBT, which is entirely - It's entirely trained on creative output. It doesn't include probably meta companies, which are also all entirely monetizing creative content. And then if you look at how content creation and social media is built into marketing across every industry at this point. - Sure, yeah. The creative economy is the economy. - Yeah, true. Which makes it so scary when you try and, if you think about all this value moving away from the creative economy that is so valuable into another system in AI economy that has the potential to collapse in any given moment, this bubble burst, which I personally believe were coming towards. I was in Seattle in the 90s. I lived through the tech bubble of the 90s. I've seen this before. I could be completely wrong. And maybe you hope maybe I'm wrong. I do not know, but it feels like this feels similar to the late 90s or early 2000s before everything just imploded in Seattle. And that is damaging for the world. And damaging for everybody, unfortunately. - There was an interesting conversation I had yesterday at Professor O's here who was talking about, I think it was Jaren Lignet. - Jaren from Microsoft. - Yes, he was on the pioneers of VR. But he wrote a book predicting a lot of this. So how do you actually solve that problem? Legislatively, you can either, the obvious solution that is also technically probably difficult or would be argued is very difficult, is like revenue sharing, right? It's okay, if you're posting on a social media platform then you should get paid a percentage of the revenue. They're gonna say, how do you calculate that? YouTube figured it out, so why can't you, Meta, or Chatchy Petit or whatever. And probably they can, but there is also an interesting argument which was made by Jaren in one of his books, which I haven't read. So it may not have been him, again, this is like his say in a conversation. That actually the solution is just, tax the companies, let the government disperse the money as universal basic income. - That goes Jaren. - Yeah, yeah. Instead of Meta trying to figure out how much money you should get, versus I should get, let the government take half of Meta's revenue or profit or whatever it is, and Chatchy Petit's and open a eyes and, and Thropics and TikToks, et cetera. And then redistribute it to the people who are using these platforms and creating that wealth so that they can keep doing that and not worry about money. - I think both are politically challenging but potentially viable solutions. And we need one of them at some point because there's a lot of uncompensated labor happening and a lot of value flying from that labor to a very small number of people. - You two are such amazing speakers. You've predicted some of our questions already in your conversation, which is wonderful. One thing that you had mentioned, obviously, as you said, some legislative changes or options moving forward, Tim, is there anything as well that you would like to see short term or long term for voice actors? - I think in general, so we've been a DC about 100 times advocating for the NoFakes Act, specifically for the fact that it makes a new intellectual property for voice image name and likeness, which would, instead of regulating AI, it just gives you rights to something that we don't currently have. Now I know some concern with that is that there is a collectively bargain carveouts in there. So it says that if you're under a collectively bargain agreement, then the NoFakes Act doesn't apply or some of these things don't apply to it. So the concern is that the NoFakes Act becomes stronger than a collectively bargain agreement and if you're in a union, now you actually have less protections because this law went into place. And as I mentioned, I believe with the Elvis Act in Tennessee, that while on the surface it may look like it's really good, it actually has handed over power to the record labels of some of the companies. - And what she was saying to me yesterday is that NoFakes has a similar problem where the record labels have managed to insert a bunch of language that basically makes it so that artists now, they can claim artists' rights that are signed to them. - Yeah, yeah. And this is why the bill went from, I think, 11 pages to 45 pages. - Right, right. - And why it's been in negotiations and discussed for going on three years now, I believe. - We can't have anything nice. (laughing) - For voice actors, it creates a very specific IP that we support. And so we are supporting that in the hopes that something goes into play. And if not, then maybe the ideas of that will go into play or get extracted and possibly become something else. I don't know if it will go through, nothing is gonna go through the government right now. The government just cannot do anything so whether that goes through or not. But I think the bigger thing, and I'll go back to what I said in the panel, is my faith in consumers. And I think the really most powerful thing that we all, that we can put it in general is labeling. And I think that if anything is labeled as AI, that will be completely clear and transparent and we'll let consumers decide whether they're gonna interact with it and we don't have to regulate it. If that labeling is there, as we've seen, there's been massive pushback from consumers against AI-generated content that people are calling it out. But if you lie to them, it's impossible to tell what's AI and what's human. Though if you lie to them, people will assume that it's human-generated as a human. And so this is where I think labeling is the most important thing that we can do. Consumer protection, it's like organic food. If it's GMO or non-GMO, what I'm going to ingest into my brain, whether it's artificial human, I should have a right to choose what I ingest the same way that I do with food. - Yep. - So a lot of our audiences lost students. And so not there are fewer lawyers, but I'm sure you've worked with great many lawyers over your careers. - I love lawyers. - I think that my favorite people to talk to you because you get the actual details and nuances of things, especially when it comes to like contracts and implications. - Yeah. - Yeah. - So what would you say for people who are going to become lawyers and who are interested in moving this space forward in a better direction? What advice do you have? Where do you think the biggest opportunities are? - So I think the biggest opportunities, probably also the hardest one to figure out. Right now when you talk about the Creator economy, and when you look at lawyers who serve the Creator economy, largely the conversation and the targeting of customers is at the very top. So like everyone talks about the Mr. Beast and the Joe Rogans and that level of folk, right? That's not the Creator economy, actually. The Creator economy, there's 14 million full-time creators in the United States. There's 200 million creators worldwide, but including full-time and part-time inside hustle and all of that. That's majority of those, 99.99% have less than a million followers. We probably less than a hundred thousand followers, right? But there is a rising creator middle class of people who are making a living with a relatively small audience building businesses around those audiences. There is not really a strong legal infrastructure to support those people. And this might be a problem for small businesses in general, but there are plenty of small business lawyers out there, I am sure. I have not been able to find any that really understand the Creator space. The vast majority of attorneys who serve the Creator space really focus on top creators, which makes sense. They can charge higher hourly rates. A lot of entertainment, a lawyer's charge of percentage, which then of course you want the biggest talent because you want it 5% of Joe Rogan's $200 million podcast deal. But there are, again, 14 million full-time creators out there. They are doing their deals, their brand deals, their partnership agreements, and all these things on their own. Maybe they're using AI to do it. AI right now, I'm working on a new project. I need a privacy policy and terms of service. And I don't have anyone to go to for it. I'm using cloud and cloud is saying, hey, I'm not a lawyer. Don't use me for that. I'm like, I don't have a choice. Cloud is-- thanks for reminding me. So I think there's a big opportunity to serve those creators, both as a service provider, as a lawyer for those creators, but then also within all the infrastructure around those creators, thinking at the platforms that serve them at the tools, companies, and services that serve them. And even at the government level, to think about how to serve them. Yeah, agree with all of that. It's hard for artists to find lawyers. Really? And because if you're going to go to an entertainment lawyer looking at percentage looking at a huge amount, and a lot of times what you need is 10 minutes to say, hey, it's this contract going to screw me over or not. And so it sucks that the way that you get there is for a lawyer to say, hey, I'm going to be benevolent and volunteer my time for free. So now you just wear out the lawyers who are going to be doing that for free because they don't have other things. What we've done at Nava, one of the things we did about two years ago was we added a legal aid service. We partnered with a lawyer who's also a voice actor. And we have for a small amount of money or included in your membership, you get three contract reviews a year, five pages or under. And you can come to us. We get a 24 hour turnaround time. And our lawyer will look at it and say, yeah, this looks great. You're going to go ahead and say, no, I would redline this and go off. And that's it. And if they want to have any further representation, they can hire the lawyer directly. They can dig into it more. But just something that's that quick McDonald's drive through version of a lawyer has been extremely helpful and has saved a ton of people a little bit ahead of accidently signing over something they didn't think they were going to sign over. You can offer a quick 10 or 15 minute contract review for $75 or $100 or whatever. I'm put in the number that you think is worth it for you with you and the creator. But just being accessible and being accessible financially, but also I think being accessible in a way that you can converse with artists that's not as a lawyer. It's very hard. Like what do the advantages we have with the lawyer we have? Is he also a voice actor, a voice actor and an on-camera actor. So he spends all of his time as the artist and then as the lawyer. So he can speak across. He still talks like a lawyer. And it's still, you're like, just get to the point. Tell me what you do. But I think there's a real opportunity in these areas that isn't give it away for free and just become the original version of Better Call Saul, where you're just not working for any money. You're just trying to scam me way through the system. But you can really actually be beneficial and help. And eventually those current artists that you're working with are going to be the future celebrities of this industry. And it can be the ones who are going to bring you along for the ride. If somebody would talk about a lot, don't be an asshole. If you're an artist because the PA you're talking to today is going to be your director in six weeks in six months in a year. The lawyer you meet at a law school is going to be a partner in a firm three years from now. If they're really lucky. But there's an opportunity to get in early, talk to people, make some connections. work with somebody throughout their entire career, work with an industry, work with a group of voice actors that you follow through for the next four or five years, work with a stable of 10 or 15 or 100 YouTube creators, or somebody online where you're like, "Hey, we got a contract. I need five minutes to look at this contract." Great boom, there you go. And something along those lines that makes it accessible and easy to access for people who work in an industry that is almost instantaneous. - Yeah, that makes me think of two things. One is the hourly system needs to die, especially for small businesses. It's interesting, I operate as a consultant and I charge a retainer or sometimes I do a project rate. And in general, I have been doing my job long enough that I know how long something will roughly take. And so when I charge a retainer, I'm assuming it's gonna take less time than I'm charging for. If I charge a project rate, I'm assuming it's gonna take less time than I charge for because I know what I do, I know my industry, I know the project. And very rarely it runs over, it went over, like a grown-up, I go have a conversation about it and figured out. For some reason, every time I ask a lawyer, "Hey, can I pay you X dollars to look at this or give me feedback or do a red line or whatever?" It's always, I do only do an hourly, I have no idea how long it's gonna take. I mean, doing this for 10 years, can't tell me that this eight-page contract, you have no idea how long it's gonna take. That's bullshit, I'm sorry. And these are not dumb people, right? Like I think they are used to this system. And I would respectfully suggest that, think outside the box, because I think there's a lot of opportunity, a lot of opportunity to go outside of the box for entrepreneurial attorneys who wanna build something that disrupts the system as it sits. And on the other side of that, to your point about, you need a lawyer to look at a lot of these things, because they're written in legalese. You don't need to write in legalese. The reason legalese exists is because big law firms want to make it harder for people to read contracts so that they hire lawyers. But most of the language in any contract does not need to be that unclear. And I have seen contracts. There was a long time, we got 10 years ago. There's a company in the Creator Space that had a creator agreement. That was literally just laid out in plain English. Actually not even plain English. They were writing like they were trying to appeal to Gen Z. There he is. But it was a legally binding contract. And it was legally binding. It worked. And it was clear what they were giving you and asking for. And you could have a discussion about it as an intelligent human being who can read without needing to understand the various terms that are thrown in there that don't actually need to be used when you could just use English. Sure. By the way, they often don't even teach us in law school. Yeah. They're gonna teach you that at the firm. And that's because the firms want their clients to not know what they're reading. That they call them for advice so that they can bill 15-minute increments. I think that is bad for lawyers and businesses and content creators. I think it's bad for lawyers because it creates a sense of frustration. It creates an unwillingness for creators to come to them. And now in the age of AI, it creates the desire to replace them. If people can't understand you, they're gonna ask AI to figure it out. And then they're gonna go with what AI says and you're out of the money you could have made. It's bad for content creators because they are getting screwed because they are reading contracts that they don't understand, which may be the goal of the company. But I don't know that's necessarily the case. I think a lot of companies have good intentions or at least they wanna get theirs. Of course, every company wants to get theirs. They're not trying to trick anyone. And then I think that it's bad for companies because it makes creators not trust them. It makes creators unwilling to sign contracts and it makes it harder to get business. And I think there's a big opportunity for disruption there. - Yeah, about grade, yeah. - Tim, Avi, thank you so much for joining us. This has been absolutely great. We're so grateful to hear your insights.