So what's your first kind of experience around IP? Go back to the childhood and then we'll get to where we are today.

Yeah, I mean, I think that the story that I tell about how I got into licensing, a lot of people in licensing can appreciate it and relate to it because everybody kind of falls into licensing.

So my story is that, you know, I was I think about 19, 20 at the time and I was doing a job that I didn't really love and I had had enough one day.

I went home and I kind of sent out my resume to a lot of companies and one of them said, was called Haven Licensing in Melbourne, Australia.

And they said, come on in for an interview.

It was a very junior role.

So the next day I walked in and there was this big door at the front of the building and standing at the front was SpongeBob SquarePants.

Do you have an example of that that you can share? I know you have a lot of client disclosures with the clients you work with, but…

So the biggest brands, the most lucrative ones, are very careful about their reputation and how they use their likenesses and et cetera.

Yeah, absolutely, and it doesn't matter if it's the advertising side or the product, the consumer product side, there are very layered processes for approvals.

So that's the other thing that a lot of the licensors are considering, is their resource, and licensing teams are less and less, uh, resourced these days.

It's, it's, it's a real problem.

So what they are looking at is that not only are they thinking about, "Is this opportunity a good brand fit?" But they're also thinking, like, "Should we be spending time with this company instead of another company?" Because particularly the product development process, when you're talking about a physical product, you need to submit concepts, you need to submit pre-production samples, production samples, and that can be over many, many, many months, and if that does not go well, it can be a real painful process for-A licensor.

The big licensing companies are dealing with thousands and thousands of submissions on a daily basis, and so it does really start to become a resource issue, particularly when you've got a lot of consolidation happening in our industry right now, and they just have to be extremely selective with who are they going to be spending time with.

We like to ask, uh, David, what was your first awareness of IP rights? Was it positive, a negative, or neutral? When were you first aware of the, the notion of intellectual property?

You know, I think it's a great question because when I was a child, I had-- The day that I was born, I was given a Care Bear, and, uh, it was Swift Heart Rabbit, which is one of the Care Bears' cousins, and I was given that toy, and it was, like, my favorite childhood toy, and I never really knew that my favorite toy was a licensed toy.