 We have a clip here speaking of AI from Brian Cranston, who I loved as Tim Wattley on Seinfeld. He's great as the father on Malcolm in the Middle. And he's breaking down a fantastic actor. He also played LBJ in a play. Zach, you want to cue this up where he's he's got a message to the head of the Disney studio and all the other suits. We've got a message for Mr. Eiger. I know, sir, that you look through things through a different lens. We don't expect you to understand who we are. But we ask you to hear us and beyond that, to listen to us. When we tell you, we will not be having our jobs taken away and giving to robots. We will not have you take away our right to work and earn a decent living. And lastly, and most importantly, we will not allow you to take away our dignity. Robert, how do you how do you respond to that? Well, first of all, I love Brian Cranston so much. And I mean, I'm a writer, so I'm like, yeah, I'm making jokes in my head. Like, really? Take away your dignity. You play make-believe for living. But I think as an actor, it is much more worrisome. And I don't think it's like you're replaced by a robot. It's just that you're not going to have to pay Brian Cranston because you got Brian Cranston already on your servers and you can kind of make Brian Cranston do and say whatever you want to make Brian Cranston do and say. And it is true that the studios have been planning that because the one thing they wouldn't back down on the reason SAG went out, I think one of the reasons SAG went out is because they said, all right, well, for, you know, big name actors would be one thing. But if you're just a background artist, meaning an extra will be called atmosphere, once we get you on, you know, whatever, we've modeled you digitally, we can use you in anything forever for free. Now, do we know that that is the contract or the rules that are being discussed? Because I've read that that's a misrepresentation that the studios say, yeah, we're talking about this particular shoot. But yes, that is the yes, they have clarified that. But if you're a writer, you kind of feel like, you know what, you're, you're, you're, you're going to need a writer to fix the AI. It may be a first draft, but you're going to have to pay a writer and we'll just just change the minimum. So you had to pay me more. And even though it's a second draft based on an AI draft, which is never going to be, right? Just that executives don't want to, they don't want to read a script, let alone type in how to write it. I don't, most executives don't read, right? So they don't even, you know, so but an actor is different and the actor is fundamentally different. And they understand why they're afraid. There's, you know, there's a, in the new season of Black Mirror, there's an episode that is built around this concept that, you know, Salma Hayek is her, her likeness has been captured and she's being used in a, in a, in a show kind of not quite against her will because somewhere deep in the terms of service she had agreed to all of this. There are rules already in laws against using the likeness of people, you know, so it seems, and again, it may be, maybe not for an extra background artist, but for somebody like Brian Cranston, that seems unlikely. Is it, I mean, like when I hear Cranston, you know, who delivers all of those lines fantastically, but I'm listening to like, hey, let's go break those looms. You know, he was on 44th street, let's just go over to the garment district. Then, you know, there's a bunch of sewing machines that are really, you know, screwing up how, you know, how much more money we could make per base or something like that. I don't know, you know, it just seems so far-fetched as to be kind of risible as a main focus of, of anxiety. I mean, well, of anxiety. I think there's a lot of anxiety because your industry is going through a massive restructuring. And as you were saying, Rob, nobody knows how this is going to play out in any meaningful way, but like that particular concern strikes me as odd, you know, theater, you know, actors have been around since, you know, before Christ. And they're probably going to be around after he comes and, you know, and wasn't an actor who killed Lincoln. Let's, let's, let's, yeah, right. I hear you. I understand, yeah, I think I understand what you're saying. I would say there are probably two, there's two levels here and the top level anxiety is something you also see in the writers, which may not be connected to the immediate threat, but is sort of, is indicative of the general anxiety, which is that these, all of this, these technologies are designed to remove what I do, which has always been subjective and was already incredibly risky and to take me entirely out of the, out of the, out of the business. Right. And then on a, for the actors on a fundamental or closer level, part of, especially, I mean, any actor, but I mean, a big actor like Brian Cranston, but anybody else is that when a project goes over or when a project needs reshoots, which they all do, they got to pay you by the day. And for some people, if you're at Brian Cranston level, that's a whole lot of money. That's actually, that's a big part of, it could, can be a big part of your annual income. And if you're a mid-range actor, they need you back to reshoot this or reshoot that or whatever they need you back for. And if they don't have to bring you back, if they can kind of within the context, even in the context of one title, the same title, you know, whatever that movie was or project was, you're still there. They don't have to pay you for additional work that they've created in the box that isn't effect work, but is in fact just error correction or whatever. That's a bad road for the actor. That's a bad road to go down if you're an actor, and that's something you probably want to protect. So it isn't quite so much that you're breaking the rules. Again, it's completely understandable that actors and writers, you know, want to get as much money as they can for the work that they do. I, you know, that, but then when you pull back a little bit, it just seems like other industries that have automated other industries that have, you know, used technology, they figure out a way. I mean, and it seems like Hollywood, you know, for lack of a better term is the last industry that is going to be like, you know what, you've seen Brian Cranston already. We're going to give you a, you know, a fake Brian Cranston and you're going to love it, you know, because, and if you can, if you can replace Brian Cranston and Breaking Bad with Brian Cranston from a Mac book, then maybe, you know, maybe there's not as much magic going on or it just strikes me as it's a, it's a heavy ask to, you know, regular people who just are watching TV or going to movies who are paying more every year, et cetera, you know, to like, you know, but the important thing is that Brian Cranston get that extra check because that's what's fair in the world. Well, what's fair is if you, I mean, the difference is that if you were making, you know, if you're a famous sweater knitter, you know, then you may not like the loom because it makes sweaters a lot cheaper and faster than you can knit them, but you, and you really can't say much about it, but you can say if some I'm selling, if I make a sweater in a loom and I say, this is a Nick Gillespie, you have every right to say, no way, no way, that's not Nick Gillespie. Nick Gillespie is the guy who knit the sweater and I didn't knit that sweater. And so this isn't really anti-technology. It's more like, okay, you can make, you can make a movie now and AI is a fake person and it'll probably look pretty good. You could make your own movie star if you want. You just can't call that movie star Brian Cranston. Yeah. Well, I think I mean, certainly from a libertarian point of view, that makes total sense because then we're talking that fraud or misrepresentation and there's no moral issue there. But I also, I suspect that there'll be an aesthetic issue where it's like people, you know, people will want the real Brian Cranston. They'll want the authorized edition of what they'll have to, they should pay and Brian Cranston should make whatever the opportunity can. But I say also, and even now it's the studios and the streamers that have brought us to this position, right? Because they're the ones that have created so much content in this ridiculous war they're having for streaming services that makes no financial sense, financial moves they have done. And the only way, and I say it kills me as a writer, but the only way for them to distinguish one project from another is with a star, like a recognizable face. That's how you get people to watch. So Brian Cranston's stock and every other good actor stock went way up as it should have because he's got something special. Now you can't say to people, well, we're going to take that special thing away. No, you created the conditions that have created this. Now you have to live with your own bad business modeling. Speaking of business models. Can I just register just by one worry with it because I can totally understand where Brian Cranston is coming from and especially some of the people who aren't at Brian Cranston's level who might be afraid that their image is going to get exploited over and over again. But what I worry about with kind of an overreach would be that Hollywood I think sometimes has a tendency to draw boundaries or gatekeep a little bit too tightly with whether it comes to the use of new technology or intellectual property. These are all tools for creating new things. And if you're going to gatekeep access to those tools, you're inevitably going to make it harder for the upstarts, the people who don't have a lot of institutional backing to use them. And there have been a lot of fights over the years to expand fair use protection of repurposed material. That's a fight we fought a lot because we're in documentaries. And so we will be commenting on other material and then you'll get take down notices and Hollywood's been a major force against that. So that is what I worry about with kind of over defining like what is AI, like what is generated by AI, what is my image is if it's sort of based on an image of another person, but it's not really them, is that going to be covered by this prohibition? Those are kind of like the margin call type cases that I guess I worry about the most. I don't know how it's all going to resolve. And there's certainly arguments on both sides. But that's kind of what looms large when I think about it. Yeah. I have a solution. Okay. Because if you go back to the glory years, right, when there was more independent film, there was true independent film. When is this? Well, you know, pick up, you know, sometime in the late 80s, we'll say 80s, right? So. Okay. The tail end of the studio system kind of fell apart. I mean, you know, from the 1920s on a block booking went and the feds got involved and then TV and then the feds gotten re-involved where they had a financial interest and syndication rules. And then that kind of like, you know, they started to be deregulated. And so around the 80s, people started to like, you could really make a lot of money with an independent film. And you could really make a lot of money as a small studio. An unaffiliated small studio, by the way. That is the solution for innovation in almost every industry, but definitely innovation in show business, or at least to keep the doors open or more open for change. The irony is that the very people who seem to understand that sort of in their DNA, which are the technology people from Silicon Valley, the minute they got into the 310, 213 area code, they completely threw it away and they decided, oh, I want to have a vertically integrated studio with both my exhibitors and my studio doing the same thing. I want to eat what I kill. And nobody in show business has ever made any money eating what they kill. You eat what that guy kills a little bit and you give him some of your stuff and everybody kind of gets rich. And they didn't do that. And if they did that, we would not be here in this position. That was an excerpt of our reason live stream with Rob Long talking about the writer's guilt strike and the SAG after strikes. If you want to watch another excerpt, go here. And if you want to watch the whole thing, go here. And make sure to come back next Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time when reasons live stream will be talking with somebody who's very interesting saying stuff that you definitely want to hear.