Protect Your Ideas and Build a Thriving Business in the Digital Age #136

We're in an old system that basically says, look, if you want to protect your ip, you really have four ways to do it. Copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets. And guess what? Each one of those take time and money. Okay. Why? Because it's a, it's a bureaucratic system. The number one thing an entrepreneur needs to protect is their confidence. This instant IP is a tool to give you the confidence to keep on creating.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Homefront. I am Jeff Duden and we are on with Kari Oberbrunner today. Welcome, Kerry.

Great to be here, Jeff.

For those who are looking to build a business, protect their IP or just learn from somebody that's really had an incredible journey today. It's going to be very exciting for you. Kerry Oberbrunner, Wall street journal and USA Today bestselling author with 14 books under his belt and the driving force behind Igniting Souls and Instant IP that we're going to dig into today. Helping leaders and entrepreneurs unlock the full potential of their intellectual property. His personal struggles have shaped the leader he is today, fueling his passion for helping others discover their own potential and build meaningful businesses. And from what I reviewed a lot about building healthier lives, more stable lives. I really appreciate that part of your work. So we'll talk today about publishing, branding, protecting ideas, the future of entrepreneurship. And if you've ever wondered how to turn what's in your head into something that the world will pay you for, this is the episode for you today. Welcome Carrie.

I'm thrilled to be here and this is one of my favorite topics. So let's jump in and help your audience.

Awesome. Would you mind telling us just a little bit about how you grew up and who you are today?

Yeah, yeah. So I grew up as a, I joke now, but a bald guy with a girl's name and I, I say, well, I did grow up as a bald guy, I guess, coming as a baby. So, you know, I say that just because I, I want people to realize right out of the gate, listen, we're friends. I don't take myself too seriously. And the point is that I grew up with a slight stuttering problem that really turned into a reluctancy to speak. So back in the day, you might remember this, Jeff, in grade school for me, Catholic grade school, they would pass around the readers and you would have to stand up in class and read and man, that just jacked me up. And so I just had to go to special classes, speech therapy. And that turned into a self hatred like, come on man, why can't you be perfect. And it turned, it started with biting and then in my teen years it turned into cutting. And so I share all that to say look, a lot of self hatred growing up, a lot of high expectations of myself. My parents didn't put that on me. And I get it, man. When people say they struggle with perfectionism or people pleasing, I can sniff that out so fast because that, that was me. And I had to overcome all that to get to the point where you believe that your product is good enough to get out in the world. You believe you are a messenger to get out a life changing message. So I really like encouraging and coaching people because I struggled so much with essentially self destruction as a young teen.

Isn't it interesting that in reviewing your materials it's so positive, it's so on point, it's so purposeful, it's so helpful, particularly the information around igniting souls that you know, maybe it's like for those of us who have struggled, we understand it better than anybody else. And if you haven't struggled to the, you know, to the level that the depth that you've struggled to is you oftentimes see that's the level that people help to and that's I really yeah.

When and Jeff, quick to put a bow in that I tell people that the area of their deepest wound is often the area of their greatest impact. And so I say that because if people struggle and they're listening to this podcast, I think that's all of us. Major hope for you, major platform for you in that previous struggle.

I know that you've referenced, I think you're in strategic coach. I know you've referenced a few of Dan Sullivan's things. You know, I lead with our franchise owners every month. Just a fireside chat with just me and our owners. And it's not about their business. It's not about anything like that. It's more about like in how do they improve themselves personally, how do they become better entrepreneurs? And, and so it doesn't matter what brand of ours they're on. And I recommended reading for our, our December class or December owners only is the gap in the gain. And it's such a, it's such a simple concept. But and, and I, I read it and I thought I get this, I do this already. But I didn't realize that it's taken me 30 or 35 years to understand gap thinking and gain thinking. And then my son came home on the weekend and he's in a very difficult major engineering. He's Overloaded with classes. Yeah, he had an internship that fell through because the company went on a hiring freeze. Nothing to do with his own, but it was his dream thing that it was with a, it was with a Aero. An airplane, an airplane manufacturing company. And he had flown the comp. The, the airplane that he was going to be working at the plan over 400 hours on his flight simulator. He knew this airplane, so it was the perfect thing. And man, like he was measuring himself against a future ideal instead of where, where he was today and looking backwards and, and I had to sit there with him for 30 minutes and say, look at you. Look at where you've come in the last two years and all the things you've accomplished. And I think it really helped to reset, you know, his, you know, his mindset and.

Absolutely.

I mean, but, but it, it's amazing. Like when you're in it, you can't see it.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I do, I do believe that some of us are given the curse of massive ambition. And you know, I tend to be one of those people. And it's not, I'll tell you what, Jeff, it's not for ego because you know, a lot of times people look at you or your son or super successful people and they'll say, come on man, isn't it just enough, like, why do you have to keep pushing? And what they don't get is that for us, there's no place that we arrive. You know, I'm saying like, and it's not in an arrogant way, it's, it's, it's saying like, look you, there's more in the tank and if you're around high performers, nobody's sitting there being like, yeah, let's just, let's just pack it in. Like, I'll tell you what, man, I've, I, from a, from a young age really started pursuing high intensity workouts and, and cycling. You know, I do the French Alps now, the second year in a row and I need a big goal. Like, I need something big. You know, you will not as, as a, I know we're going off script here, but as an entrepreneur, you're not going to attract high level talent if you have this mediocre goal, you know, like high level people are going to be like maybe 10x that thing and I'll get excited, you know, so if you really want to attract great team members, you yourself need to be, you know, putting some high gains out there, but you also, you know, will then attract a team. And that's really what our Team is. Our team is on fire. We're lean, we're mean, we're small. But we are these people who just get after it. And we, we run on base camp and I can click activity at the end of the day and I'm like, oh, my gosh, look at what our team did. You know, today we're launching Shannon Waller's book. And Steven Nooner and Ryan, you know, they did this book called Super Powered. So we actually publish some of the biggest, best entrepreneurs on the planet, and then we don't just publish their book. That's loser thinking. Loser thinking is that your book is a business card. And Jeff, I've heard that all over the place, even from publishers, you know, hey, your book's just your business card. What do people do with business cards? They throw them in the trash, you know, so what we want to do is we want to build a business around a book with 18 streams of income. That's exciting. You know, that attracts some high level authors.

What turned it around for you when you were young? What did you find that helped you on the path to self correction?

That's a great question. Several things. One is, God brought an amazing woman to me. I'm very open about my marriage. It's, you know, we just celebrated 24 years this week. And there's people that have easy marriages. I'm not one of them. You know what I'm saying? Like, I'm in my wife's office right now. She's a counselor. My wife, My wife is a counselor. And. And I'm not a counselor, but we met in graduate school as I was doing an M. Div. In counseling. I thought I was going to be a pastor for life. She was an MA in counseling. What got us through it is she was willing to walk with me in some pain, you know, and up until my 20s, man, nobody knew about myself. Injury like this was not something that I went around, was like, hey, I struggle with cutting. No way, man. I was a high achiever on the outside. Everyone thought I had it all together. I was a pastor who would preach on Sunday and self injure on Monday. Like, wow, is that pretty crazy? I mean, that's a lot. That's a big mask to wear, you know, but people think that self injury. And I would tell, I would, I would challenge your audience. 99% of yourself, your audience is self injury. And you might be like, whoa, what do you mean? Self sabotaging behavior? You know, maybe it's a substance, maybe it's an addiction, but I believe that Pascal said all of man's or woman's evil comes from their inability to sit quietly in a room by themselves because if they would, they would be bored and the boredom would force them to find a way that is more certain to get out. In other words, most of us feel the angst, we feel the boredom, we feel the out of alignment. And rather than going deep into the pain, which is acute pain, we embrace chronic pain. And when we've embraced chronic pain, whatever, binging on Netflix for, you know, all weekend rather than doing the hard work, whatever, you know, I don't know what people's self injury is, but I'll tell you what. It's. It's. It's preventing them from reaching their optimum level. So what else did I do to get out writing? Your audience might be familiar with the psalms in the scriptures. Again, I'm a former pastor. The psalms where David. David was real with God in his writing. And there's some psalms that freak out the, the, the theologians, the pastors. This is where David says, may my enemies be blotted out of the book of life. Like, when's the last time anyone ever sang that in church? On Sunday, Sunday. May my enemies go to hell, you know? But David is a man after God's own heart, and yet he can write authentic, real things. And that was actually what freed me, Jeff. It was for me to be massively real and raw in my writing. And by being massively real and raw in my writing, that was like the place that I first was authentic. And it was private, nobody knew about. It was a private journal. But then my career was me taking off the mask. And I actually got confronted with failing out of seminary because I confided in a professor when he said, look, your grades are fine, but I think we're going to fail you from the class. And I'm like, what do you mean you're going to fail me? And this was a counseling class. He said, because when we watch you counseling people, you never go near people's pain. And I'm like, what? You know, I didn't even see it. I was so blind. It's a blind spot. And they're like, yeah, yeah, when you're practicing counseling, you don't, you don't, you don't even want to go near anybody's pain. Well, of course not, because I wasn't willing to go near my own pain, you know, so that. So they said, well, we think we're going to fail you. And then I. So that. Then out of fear of failing. I went to the professor privately and said, I struggle with self injury. This is my first time being real in my whole life. And guess what the professor did? He sent me a letter that said we failed you. So I'm. True story, Jeff. He literally sent me a letter that said you're not fit to be a counselor because you self injured. So my first moment of authenticity gets me almost kicked out. Luckily, yeah, yeah, luckily the vice president stepped in and he said, nope, we're gonna let you get, get passed, but you got to get to counseling. And that's kind of what led to my eventual breakthrough.

Where did you or when did you find the salvation to embark on the career that you have today? And that was on purpose for you?

The year was 2011. And I was like, I do not like being a pastor because I mean that's what I went to school for. It's not that being a pastor was a bad thing, it was too claustrophobic. I mean, you know, as an entrepreneur, man, we are, we are wild animals, man. We, we got to go out and conquer. We got to go out and pioneer. I mean, we are not meant to be sitting in a church, you know, just chilling, you know, so I, I knew I wanted to do something, but I didn't know what it was. And here I was, a six year old kid, a four year old kid, a two year old kid, three kids, 642 wife, salary, health benefits, free Christian school for my kids. And all of a sudden my coach calls me, this is a true story. He calls me, his name is Chet Scott. He says, hey Kerry, I see you're writing all these books. I see you just got back from speaking somewhere about living your purpose, living your dream. And he's like, I gotta ask you some questions. He says, does your church know about this? Because again, I was full time salary. He's like, I'm like, yeah, my church knows about this. He said, well, what do they think? I said, they're fine with it, you know, because I had been there 12 years. And so they kind of like just said, hey, you're doing good, just we'll give you a big leash. He said, well, what does your wife think about it? And I'm like, she's cool with it. And I. And then he says, what does God think about it? And I'm like, I don't know. And he says, he says, I'll tell you what I think. I think you're full of blank. I think you're scared to death. I think you're Using the church's dime, and you're telling everyone to live a big dream, and you are scared to death to step out. And he said, you can't take the ring and stay in the sh. And then he said, call me back when you grow a pair. Boom.

He drew the line in the sand for you, man. He drew the line in the sand and called you out to it.

Dude. Called me out so hard, I literally hung up the phone. I looked around. I thought I was on. I thought I was being punked or some candid camera thing. And then I. And then I almost had a vomit because I knew I could never be the same. And within 48 hours, I had met with my senior pastor and said, I got. I'm. I'm. I'm. I'm out.

So you believe that he saw it clearly, and he saw you for your true potential and who you could be.

It was tough to hear, though, man. Yeah, this guy Chat. He's a truth teller. He believes that way too many of us use anesthesia in our normal life, where we say, hey, Jeff, you know, this is just me. Hey, Jeff, don't be offended. Hey, Jeff. I kind of see something that might be true, but I could be wrong. That's anesthesia. Anesthesia. Anesthesia. And it weakens the truth. And so Chet's one of these people who uses no anesthesia. It's acute pain, and it's what I needed.

What was the first thing you did? Was it igniting souls, or was it something else?

I tried to. Like most people who have a big dream, you try to get other people to believe you and soften the blow and soften the risk. So I kind of went to some John Maxwell people. I went to my buddy Chet, and I kind of tried to, like, morph my dream into theirs, you know? And this wasn't, like, longer than any. Than any two conversations.

Yeah, you were. You were looking for a model.

I was looking for a model. I was looking for a net. I was looking for something to de risk. And. And luckily, a lot of those doors were shut. And. And I said, well, you know what? I'm just going off on my own. And my wife said, I believe in you, but you better bring home the paycheck. I'm telling you, man, I'm married to a woman who. Who gives belief. But she said, you know, we got three kids.

Hey, you know what? One of the things that's come to me lately that I've. I've really leaned into is the fact that more than one thing can Be true at the same time. People are. So it's either. Yeah, it's either this or it's that. And I'm like, you know, well, you know, I was. I have two business partners on a call, and we were having a debate, and I said, well, that's true, and that's true. And this is also true, by the way. And these are all true. Yeah, man. It's, you know, more than one thing can be true at the same time. And people. And now that can have a. Is it a. Is it a catalyst for decisiveness or is it an impediment to decisiveness? I think it can be a catalyst to decisiveness because now you're not trying to disqualify something. You accept more than one thing is true. So now it's like, now you just have to choose the option.

That's good, man. That is so good. I like that a lot. So to answer your question, Jeff, it started out being all about me. In other words, it was the Carryover Runner show. Let's just be real. It was about, hey, let me help you become a soul on fire. My. My books were about you discovering your identity, purpose, and direction. Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Where those three things converge. You're a soul on fire. So it was very much about personal growth and me helping the person. And I'll tell you what my impact was, was there, but small. The day changed when I said, you know what? Almost like a Donald Miller story brand. I'm gonna stop being the hero, and I'm going to start being the guide. And what happened was people began to say, enough, people. How you doing this 18 stream of income thing? How you writing this book? And then turning into a course and a keynote and a community and a membership and a mastermind. And the first three times I heard that, Jeff, I thought they were just being kind. And I said, ah, you know, it's. It's complicated. So I actually was pushing away business. And because again, I never went to business class in my life, I went to. I was going to be a pastor. So I sat down and said, you know what? Maybe there's something here. So I said to my little group of 75 clients that were doing my personal growth courses, I said, you know what? A lot of you have asked. Let's hop on a webinar. This is a private call. I'm going to see about if 25 of you pay 5k, which, again, it was a lot of money back then. I'm like, wow, this is a lot of money. But I said, if. If 25 of you pay 5k over the next 6 months, I'll stop my. My whole brand, and I'll start a publishing company, and I'll teach you all how to publish and turn your books into 18 streams of income. And you know what, Jeff? I hung up the call, and within 24 hours, all 25 spots were taken. And I'm like, okay, I guess I'm. I guess I'm changing my. That was in 2014.

That's a strong sign.

Yeah, 24.

Pay attention to that one.

That's right. So then that. That turned into this little thing called Author Academy Elite. And Author Academy Elite ended up. Ended up being a big thing. You know, we published a thousand authors in eight years strong. We just closed that down this last spring. Because what we began seeing, Jeff, is we began seeing the DIY and the do it with you people are awesome. I love them to death. But people started coming to us, like big people, people with big, big influence. You know, the Peter Diamandis of the world, the Dan Sullivans of the world, you know, the Justin Donalds of the world. And these people began to say, look, just do it for us. Like, just do it, man. You know, we'll pay you. You take care of it. And our model is very unique because it is a unique model. Most publishers don't get paid, but then they take all your IP and they take all your profits. And so basically, you've seen stories about this. You know, somebody gets a little advance, and then they end up being a slave to the publisher their whole life. And we're like, we're not doing that. So from day one, we never took any royalties. From day one, even in Author Academy Elite, it was always, you own your ip, you own your content, you get all the royalties, but you're going to pay us. And we're going to. We're going to get it done. So that's our unique model. That's the publishing ip and then the promoting ip. We said, look, we're not going to just leave you high and dry. And the promotion we can do for authors is incredible. You know, we're talking, yeah, Bestseller list, but we're talking Times Times Square. We're talking all kinds of promotion. And then last piece, which literally today, Jeff, I'm not even kidding. Today is the day I just. I just ping my team. And I said, after three years, I said, can we start telling the world? And let me go to the exact email right here, the exact message, but this Thing took so long. Three years, patents, you know, potential lawsuits, like, everything. And we are ready now to go to the world with instant IP. And here's the words at 103. As you were giving the intro, I said, can we tell the world? The app builder said, I think you can.

Amazing. Well, let's move to instant ip, because that's the. Originally, that's how we got connected. I heard about you and was very excited. I needed to know more. So tell us a little bit about instant IP and how it helps everyday business owners, content creators protect their work.

It. It's so cool. Here's what it does. All IP is based on time. Okay? So that's really important to know. That's why I don't own the golden arches. That's why you don't own the. Just do it. Swoosh. It's timing. Okay, so all intellectual properties based on time. Well, the uspto, the United States Patent Trademark Office, they have this process that for years. It's kind of like taxis, you know, before Uber. What do we use? We use taxis. We're in an old system that basically says, look, if you want to protect your ip, you really have four ways to do it. Copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets. And guess what? Each one of those take time and money. Okay? Why? Because it's a. It's a bureaucratic system, all right? And there's layers and layers and layers. So the average trademark today, if you think of something and you know, like, oh, I want a trademark, if you use a lawyer, you're looking at $3,000 and you're looking at 12 to 18 months. Now, you and I both know in our world of AI Internet entrepreneurship, 12 to 18 months is a lifetime. I mean, let's face it, you can go to ChatGPT and say, look, let's create a business, you know, and by the end of the day, you have a business and a product line and you have Shopify, and I mean, you can go to market. So I said, you know what? There's gotta be a better way. And, oh, by the way, the better way is not no IP protection. Because we live in a world today that says, just like your property, you need a fence around your property. If you don't have a fence around your property, people are going to trespass. Even without bad motives, they're just going to, like, walk on your property. I mean, we did. We see this in real life. Well, guess What, Jeff, in 1975, the S&P 500 said that out of the 500 most valuable brands in in the U.S. 17% of the assets were intellectual property of the top 500 companies, in other words, 83% roughly was tangible, meaning physical, brick and mortar, land, buildings, etc. The shift started to happen. Why? Because we moved to a digital world today out of The S P 500, conservatively, the intangible assets, the intellectual property is 90%. So my iPhone, 90% of the value is not in the parts and pieces. 90% is in the IP of the value. That's conservatively, it's actually 96. But I don't want to freak anyone out, so I just say 90%. So the point is this. If the most value of any company, we're talking even landscaping, build companies, even shoe companies, even dry cleaning companies. And what happens, Jeff, is most people think they have no ip. You know, you sit down with entrepreneurs or business people and they're like, I don't have any intellectual property. What are you talking about? Well, let's take Taylor Swift for an example. What is Taylor Swift? She's not a singer, she's not an entertainer, she's an IP company. She knows that most people don't. All you need to do is realize she's filed over 300 trademarks, she's re recorded all of her music, she realizes that Taylor Swift is an intellectual property company. Same thing with Dr. Pepper, CrossFit, Orange Theory Fitness, Krispy Kreme. In other words, there's this statement in our new book, you are an IP company that says Taylor Swift does not protect her IP because she's big. She's big because she protects her ip.

Got it?

You see what I'm saying?

Yeah.

In other words, in other words, people say, well what, what kind of IP do I have? I was in London sitting next to Dan Sullivan. He's teaching. There's a guy next to me, I don't know who he is, he's an animation studio guy. And I say to this guy, say, Dan's talking a lot about ip, do you have any ip? The guy's like, I don't have any ip. He says, I work with Lego, Disney, I work with all these amazing companies, they have ip. And I say, you have no ip? He says, nope. I say, well, what, what do you do? And he starts telling me and I say, well, when you onboard a customer, do you have any processes that you use? He says, oh yeah, we have a seven step process. It's why our clients love us. I say, well, what about your employee retention? Do you attract high level talent? He's like, absolutely. And I say, well, why, you know, what kind of processes do you have? Well, we have this type of incentive based thing and this and we start going down the list and finally I go to his website and you know, I see as a logo and his other stuff and I say, do you realize you just named eight, eight examples of IP and his face kind of dropped and he's like, I guess you're right. In other words, most people have IP but they haven't identified it or organized it. And you cannot optimize your IP unless you organize your ip. Most people have in their companies Rembrandts and Picassos in their attic, but they haven't identified it and as a result they're too close to it and they think, ah, that's not ip. So in our book we basically help people identify IP and there is a structure and there's a filter. It's called a harvest. We have a free tool. In fact, Jeff, this is so crazy. With every book you are an IP company. We give them a free instant IP credit and a free course. So like literally when people get that book, they scan the very first page and they're going to get a free course from me on how to become an IP company and then they're also going to get their first instant IP smart contract. And here's what you were.

How much is the book? $1,000.

No, the book is the ebook. Probably at this time the ebook is $2.99.

That is such an incredible value. I mean really, that's an incredible offer. Irresistible. That's irresistible.

Well, I appreciate that because the average patent today and again, I know this stuff down cold because I, I had to write the book. I co wrote it with the Katie Robino, the partner at Caldwell, which is the fastest law firm growing law firm in America four years in a row. Keegan Caldwell. So like, yeah, I might be the IP practitioner, she's the IP professional. The average patent costs $30,000 and it takes one to three years. The average rejection rate of a patent is 88% and you have to reapply 2.6 times. So who's got that type of money every time they think of an idea? So Jeff, what I, what I saw as I saw Blockchain a few years ago and I didn't know what blockchain was, I mean it sounded mysterious, but Blockchain is, is a digital distributed ledger that is global. And it's just a fancy way to say that like everyone can see every transaction on the planet, but Nobody can change a transaction after it's been minted. It's called. And so I said, well, that's crazy. I said, what if we put ideas on the blockchain, which creates an immutable timestamp, which means that it draws a line in the sand. It's proof of use, it's proof of ownership. Okay. And you can never change it, not even the owner. And I said, you know what? Could that thing even hold up in a court of law? Well, guess what? There's this thing that is a law that says that any prior art can invalidate a patent. So literally, our entrepreneurs who are in boardrooms writing down on napkins and whiteboards ideas, they can literally go from smartphone to smart contract with the press of a button, get that to become a smart contract proves that it's now IP and essentially invalidate someone who comes along and says, I got 30k and. And I'm going to steal your idea. Is that pretty crazy or what?

That is insane. So from a practical application.

Yeah.

I wrote a book in 2019 called Discernment, the Business Athletes Regimen for a Great Life through Better Decisions.

Nice.

Recently I saw another book come out called Discernment. Not the same topic. I think it's more spiritual book. Spiritual book, but it's got the same exact main word as the title.

Yeah.

If I were to take my book and want to use instant ip, would it be just the concept of the book? What about all of the models of thought that I've created? Each individual, each individual original idea that I put in there? How would I go through and create the ledger of assets that I could protect out of a single work like that?

I love it. Let's take a guy like Jim Collins. Jim Collins writes a book called Good to Great Inside Good to Great. He has the hedgehog concept.

That's right.

And in so or Simon Sinek, start with why? And inside there he's got the golden circle, which is, you know, why, what, how your book is copywritten. So the moment that in America, the moment someone puts anything into a tangible form, it could literally be on a napkin, on a post. It notes it's technically what's called unregistered copyright. Okay. It's an unregistered copyright. Now, you don't have certain protections with unregistered copyright. It's your word against their word. There's no date. How do we know you invented it on that day? This type of thing. So it really creates a loose canon. This is why back in the day people would Literally write a letter to themselves, seal it, get it stamped and leave it unopened. This was considered a poor man copyright. You can Google this thing. Your book title cannot be copywritten unless it's. I'm sorry, your book cannot be trademarked unless it's in a series. So Chicken, Chicken Soup. Jack Canfield can trademark a series and nobody else can use Chicken Soup in their, in their series or in their title. That's where you trademark a book title if it's a series. The fact that you wrote discernment and the fact that somebody else wrote discernment, that alone doesn't constitute as ip. Blink was written by Malcolm Gladwell, but there are many other blink titles before. Okay, but here's what you can do. You can take your concepts in, in your book and you can put them on instant ip. So for example, if you have a driven framework that can constitutes as seven steps, you should absolutely put that on instant ip. When you put that on an instant ip, I'll tell you what it, what it does. Jeff, we filed something with the United States government that is a superscript ip. You know how you've seen a superscript tm?

Yes.

Okay. So nobody on the planet anywhere can use a superscript IP except for instant IP customers. And when you use that driven framework, superscript IP that tells the world that there's a blockchain backing for that. And we actually give you a QR code. And so now anytime you put on your slide deck, your handouts, anything, people scan that QR code, they go right to your blockchain and boom, that's a fence. All intellectual property is a fence. Okay? And sometimes you need the Great Wall of China, which is a patent, and sometimes you just need a 12 foot tower, a 12 foot fence, which might be a trademark. Other times you need a six foot electric fence, which is instant ip. No fence is not a good idea. No fence. If you just see a laptop MacBook Pro sitting in someone's yard and you don't see guard dog and electric fence, you're going to just, in some neighborhoods, someone's just going to snag that. But all of a sudden you see a fence that says do not enter, there's cameras, there's a, you know, eight foot concrete wall, and then you hear dogs barking, you're not going to trust me. Thieves have said they're not going to exert the work to steal. And that's what instant IP is. Instant IP is a first layer, fast layer. I'm not saying that it holds the same weight with the United States government as a patent. But what I am saying is that it tells the world that here on this date, this time, never can be changed. Jeff had that idea and he owns the what's called the forever license where he can use Superscript ip, you never need to renew it, and you can use that forever and ever and ever. Our goal is to. Our goal is for 97 bucks to give you a smart contract that you can have forever. Most IP is geographical. You got to get it in the US you got to get it in Canada, you got to get it in Europe. Instant IP is global. It's immutable. The whole world sees it. And you also get a QR code, you also get the superscript IP license. So it's really. Dan Sullivan, one of our mentors, says that the number one thing an entrepreneur needs to protect is their confidence. This instant IP is a tool to give you the confidence to keep on creating.

In trademarking, there's one of the hurdles is that you need to be using the mark in commerce. So when I apply for and get an Instant ip.

Yep.

And now that I've got that certificate and the superscript.

Yep.

And then somebody goes without knowledge of my Instant IP and they apply for a trademark under the same or similar IP and the trademark examiner is going through the process to say, you know, and, and there. Are they going to see that there's an instant IP filed on that particular mark and will it affect somebody else's ability to be awarded that mark?

Yeah, that's a great question. I'll answer that question by saying that I changed my company's name to Instant IP 60 days ago. I can't tell you what it was formally called, but I'll tell you this. I went through the uspto, got my trademark from my former company name and was. Then when they grant it to you, they give a 30 day oppositional period. And that 30 day oppositional period basically tells the world if nobody says anything in 30 days, this is carries. So it went through 12 to 18 months, paid thousands of dollars, got the mark provisionally, you know, and then they said here you're in the oppositional period. On day 28, I get a letter from a multi billion dollar company in the Netherlands that says, you know what, we got that mark and you're going to either A, go to court, B, fight us or C, pay us royalties for the rest of our life or rebrand. And I was so devastated, Jeff, because I said I followed all the rules. The US government even didn't catch it. And now all of a sudden I get a letter and what do I have to do? Guess what I had to do? Rebrand.

Change the name and file.

I changed the name. I changed the name. And I didn't yell at my lawyer. I didn't yell at the government. They don't care. But here's the point. All IP has to be defended. So we got instant IP to become a patent. Again, I'm not against patents. I have two now on instant ip. I'm not against trademarks. I think I have four. I'm not against copyrights. To me, all these are IP tools. And the question is, what tool should I use at what point? So if someone has a major brand, do I think that they should also get a trademark? 100%. It's an extra fence. But here's my point. You said, are they going to find the smart contract? They can. The question is, will they? And this is where I feel like every entrepreneur needs to be on the defense and the offense. IP used to be like, defense. I'm going to protect my idea and just kind of sit there. When you really study ip, it's an offense too, you know, like there's an offensive strategy. And they call this patent marking and trademark marking. It basically is saying, like, look, use an R. If you did get a trademark, that's telling the world. Patent marking is putting the patent number on your product. So we are basically saying, use instant IP marking. Use the superscript ip, use the. Nobody's nobody has a QR code. None of the patents, trademarks, or copyrights have a QR code. We have a QR code that goes right to your blockchain. So we're actually taking it massively serious. I want to make sure I answered every single question. I will say this and then tell me if I didn't answer your question. We even have speakers now that when they start their slide deck, they have a great slide that we provide for all our instant IP customers that is very friendly and it says, thanks for having me speak on this topic. You may take pictures of my slides. You probably would have even without my permission. However, please note that any improper use of any of my intellectual property is, you know, is, Is punishable by, by in a court of law. It's protected by instant IP and blockchain technology. And then the QR code is right there.

Yeah, that's nice. I, I usually try to open with a joke, but I can see where that would work.

And they say with a smile, nice, warm up. You got to Say with a smile, you know, but here's what it does. Here's what it does. We've all seen it, Jeff. I've seen so many sessions where. Oh, yeah, yeah, people are just taking slide after slide after slide. I'm not saying they have bad motives, but I've had some of our clients literally do. The guy's name is Sunny Kala. He's in strategic coach. He does Orlando conference. 500 people are in the room, his competitors, his vendors. And he started that with a smile and then went on and spoke with 100% confidence. I'll tell you what, everybody's value of Sunny Rose, everybody said, this guy takes his IP seriously. I better take it seriously too.

I agree. Yeah, I agree.

But, but did I answer every, every question you had about. About?

I think so. The only thing that I would add, which I recently learned, is that trademarks really don't go hard until five years. So you can be awarded a mark. You can be trading under that mark. You can create hundreds of millions of dollars of value under that mark. And until it's five years old, somebody can still challenge it. And yeah, and it could be some, yeah, small operator that never protected their mark. But if they had first use and they've been using that brand name for a long time, they, they can cause you problems with it and force you to buy them or, or do something.

Yeah.

So it's, and of course, with the ease of, you know, the ability to create, I mean, now particularly with AI, I mean, people are creating companies and look like it is so hard to find a descriptive mark that is available in a, in a, in a normal type service business.

Yes.

Because they, there's some variation of every theme has been, has been filed on or is in use somewhere else. So no, I, I, you know, I'm gonna buy my, my pack. Now, as far as people that want to, want to use instant ip.

Sure.

Is it available right now and now that you've, as of 103 today, you know how many, what would be, how, how do people engage with it? And yeah, I would say buy the book and listen to the course so you know what to look for. And then from there, once you're ready to get started, what do you do?

I'll tell you what, just give it a spin for free instant IP app, instantIP app and I'll give you a quick pick. I know not everyone's listening. You know, some people are listening, but this is how it looks. It says, protect your idea and it says, how would you like to protect Protect, secure. Your idea, photo, text or file. And like, literally, Jeff, it's that easy. So I. I could hit photo and it's going to say, do you want to take a photo? Look at that. See? Or do you want to upload a photo? So it's me. It's meant to go, maybe I'll blow your people's mind here. I did not know what the word abracadabra meant. Okay? Most people probably don't know what abra. They say it, but they don't know what it means.

Now, who owns that mark?

I don't. You know, that was before ip. Abracadabra means I create as I speak. I create as I speak. Or I came to pass as it was spoken. It's made up. It's made up of three Hebrew words. People who have, you know, the Judeo Christian background, they'll be like, they'll say, abba. Wait, Abba, Abra. It's father, son, spirit. Abracadabra is made up of three Hebrew words. Father, son, spirit. Is that nutty or what?

That's crazy.

And. And I thought to myself, what if we didn't create as we spoke? What if we protected ideas as we spoke? And so literally, Instant IP was this idea that started with, hey, we'll protect it in 24 hours. Because we thought that that was pretty slick. And I said, it's not fast enough. I said, that's not fast enough. And you know, the USPTO is still stuck on the day. So if you file the day before someone else, you're. You got it. Instant IP is down to the second. So literally, when you protect that thing, we got it down. I paid a lot of money. I got a lot of Blockchain. Blockchain International technicians working on it. That's why it took so long. I mean, that's why the bugs had to get worked out. But. But check it out. Instant IP app. We give everybody on the planet a free smart contract to give it a shot. You. You're. It's going to ask you to name it and describe it. And that's really what is very important. A name with IP is very important. And then the description. And if people need help, we. We give them a tool called Instant IP Descriptor. It's free and it basically says, look, you name and describe it based upon the benefits it provides. You know, so Simon Sinek came up with the Golden Circle. And if you Google Golden Circle, he's got the image and then he's got a description and the name, and that's how you do ip.

If I uploaded a file and it was the file of my book, 179 pages, then it's. It. Is it going to pick up the stuff within it? Or if there's anything that's really notable, you should probably break that out and file a separate instant ip.

Well, the beauty is, yeah, you can upload. I mean, people could take 500 pages of their IP and protect it all at once. But here's what we say. That IP is sellable. When you read, when you read you are an IP company, you're going to be like, oh, my gosh, Katie is smart. Like, Katie is really smart. When it comes to, we come up with 47 ways to monetize your IP and it's all proven. So the fact that you might upload your whole book, what happens if you want to break apart apart sections of your book and sell it off and say, look, that framework that we created called the seven step discernment framework, you know, that's a whole piece of ip. So we encourage you to, you know, sure, do a book, do a video, do a documentary. You can do video. But every expression of IP should really be its own smart contract, because it does take it from idea to asset. Like, this is literally a digital asset. And back to. I know what your one question was that I didn't answer first. In commerce, every smart contract that, that you upload is technically sellable from the moment you. You create it. In other words, a smart contract, by its very nature is a digital asset. It goes into a digital wallet. We create a general wallet for you, but you can transfer it into your own personal one with a few clicks anyway, that asset, when, when companies go to sell and they say, let's look at all your assets that you have, each itemized piece of IP is, is its own asset.

Is this what you mean by becoming unhackable? That you are, or is that a different concept?

Unhackable is my book about digital distraction. I'll go really quick on this for two minutes. The point is this. We always thought that hacking means unauthorized access of a computer or system. That's the definition of getting hacked, not a shortcut. People say, oh, well, give me a hack for washing my hair. Which isn't hard for me, right, because I'm bald. But a hack is unauthorized access to a system or computer. When I wrote that book in 2020, it was right before the social dilemma popped and I began to say, you know what our brains are made up of? Our bodies are made up of Systems, circulatory, respiratory, you know, pulmonary. And our brains are like computers. Humans are getting hacked. Humans are gaining unauthorized access to a system or computer. We as humans are getting hacked by digital distraction. So the whole book is a great 30 day journey on how to become unhackable and with the ultimate goal of achievement and human productivity. And it's a really cool read because I believe most people are getting hacked. They have a dream, and then they get hacked along the way.

Thank you for that. I have two questions for you.

The.

The first one is, I believe you're going to make billions from this and I think you will have earned it. And if you did, what would be the impact that you would want to make in the world with those kinds of resources?

Fourteen months ago, an opportunity came across my path. It was an old dream that I actually got rejected for in 2005. In 2005, I said, you know what? I'm three years into the pastor thing. I don't think it's my thing. Maybe it's a professor. So I applied at Cedarville University and they rejected me as a Bible professor. And I'm really glad that they rejected me because it wasn't the right time. There's this great quote that says people's rejection is God's protection. I like that. That's not my own. But anyway, I then said, you know what? I'm going to become an entrepreneur. Fourteen months ago, they came knocking at my door and they said, you know what? Would you be an entrepreneur professor for us and be the chair of entrepreneurship at Cedarville? And by that time, without any knowledge, my son had committed to Cedarville two months before and said, you know what, I'm going to go there, dad, because mom went there. So this is funny here. I got shut down in 2005. Now they 14 months later come knocking. And Jeff, I said, you know what? I'd love to consider being a professor, but I'm running two companies, I don't have time. And they said, what if you keep the companies and you only come in a few days a week? And I said, you guys would be up for that. And they said, yeah. And I said, well, what happens if I take some of my salary? You're going to pay me and hire an assistant so I can only come in and mentor and teach. And then my assistant does, like, you know, some of the busy work. They said, great, it's a perfect relationship. So I literally, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I go into Cedarville and then I run my companies Tuesday, Thursday. But here's the thing, Jeff. I get entrepreneurs that are at day one saying, we have an idea, but we have zero money. And I say, here's it. Here's an instant IP credit. You keep rolling. And we literally have. Even in just 14 months, we probably have eight businesses that have started. And these people are making real impact in the world. And so what would I do with billions of dollars? I really believe I would structure it for entrepreneurs. And that might seem weird, like, why won't you give it to poor people or whatever. I really believe that entrepreneurs are the people that create solutions for the world. And I believe that's how we then help an impoverished world, is by giving it to the people who are actually creating solutions. It's the old teach a man to fish and teach and give them a fish. What do you think?

I love it. I heard an interesting take on immigration. Is that immigration? We think that it helps, but it actually hurts because we're taking the best and the brightest away from the places in the world that they really need them.

Oh, so they're the entrepreneurs that are coming and trying to start it. That's interesting. Yeah.

We would leave them there and plant them there and resource them there rather than bring them here. They would be able to help the people that they're leaving behind.

That's deep. Wow. That's deep.

Yeah.

Wow.

Listen, I got one last. Last question. Last question. I know. We gotta go. If you had one sentence to. To speak into somebody's lives to make an impact, what would that be?

I believe in you.

I love it. Perfectly said.

And I'll tell you why. Because a stranger said that to me when I was literally suicidal at 17, 18. A guy named Carl Munsmeyer, he didn't know me. He heard my story and he said. He wrote me a card and said, I believe in you. And he also put 500 bucks in there because I had my bike stolen and it changed my life. It changed my life. And so if you can hate people you don't love. I'm sorry. If you can hate people you don't know, you can believe in people you don't know.

Carrie, I believe in you, and you will continue to do great things. And I'm so thankful that you spent this time with us today.

Thanks for having me, Jeff. Thanks for all you do.

All right, Kerry Ober Brunner, you have been with Jeff Duden and we have been on the home front. Thanks, everybody, for listening.