279. Dr. Kary Oberbrunner | You Are An IP Company

Hello, Book Thinkers family, and welcome to our personal development podcast, Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books. During each episode, we interview one of the world's top authors, and as a listener, you can expect to discover new books, new mentors, and new resources that you can use to achieve more and live better.

Hello, Book Thinkers family, and welcome to our personal development podcast, Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books.

In today's episode, we have the pleasure to interview Carey Overbrunner, author of more than a dozen books, including Unhackable: Close the Gap Between Dreaming and Doing. Carey is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author, award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and inventor. As the CEO of Igniting Souls and Instant IP, he helps authors, entrepreneurs, and influencers publish, protect, and promote their intellectual property and turn it into 18 streams of income. Once a young man who battled stuttering, depression, and self-injury, today he's a transformational leader whose work has been featured in Entrepreneur, Forbes, CBS, Fox News, Yahoo, and more. In this episode, you'll learn why your ideas are more vulnerable than ever in the age of AI, how to turn your books, frameworks, and signature phrases into real IP assets, and the simple smartphone to smart contract in 60 seconds process Carey created so you never get locked out of your own ideas again. Now get ready to learn and enjoy this incredible conversation with Carey Oberbrunner.

Carey, welcome back to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. How are you feeling?

I'm feeling great, man. By the way, I gotta give you a quick shout out cuz I haven't seen you since your event. What a world-class event. If people miss that, they have to go next year. I kind of went thinking, you know, I'm not sure. I don't really know your community a ton. I don't know who's gonna be there. I brought my IP lawyer, Katie Rubino. She's amazing. She had a blast. But I'm telling you, so many good people there. Your MC Christian and I have had a follow-up. I'm telling you, man, you put on a really good event.

And I haven't announced this anywhere else yet, but I'll tell you, I'm thinking we double the length, double the size, And we cut the timeline in half. So July 2026, we'll do 400 to 500 people over a Saturday and Sunday for the Book Thinkers family. We'll put some more information on that in the show notes because I'm like a week away from locking it in.

But tell everyone—

I will.

I mean, don't share yet, but you got to give me the date.

Tell everyone who you bumped into. Steven Pressfield. You got to share the stage with him. He's one of your favorites of all time, right?

It was— listen, I started the talk because your team said, what music do you want to walk out to? And I said Creed, Higher.

Yeah.

So Christian did a great, kind, nice intro. Creed comes on, and then I look out and in the front row is Steven Pressfield. And I told your audience, I'm like, this is crazy. Like, if you would've told me 10 years ago, I would have opened a Creed, you know, not live, but you get the point, um, with Steven. See you next time. Yeah, yeah. But no, the event was amazing. Uh, I liked the shorter time that I had, honestly, because like TEDx talks are— have to be really tight, you know. I actually like that about your, your, um, event. Seriously, um, I've been to events where, no joke, a person has 90 minutes to share and You can just see it, like, unless the— unless they are the best speaker on the planet. And even then, like, we live in a world where you have to engage people. So like, maybe there's workshop or thinking exercises that are being done, but you, you kind of have these short presentations. So it was, it was really cool.

Well, tell everyone a little bit about your presentation because you had everyone in the audience, like, their eyes were bugging out, like, what the heck am I learning about right now?

Yeah.

So I've done a lot of speaking for years, and, and I used to have panic attacks like back in the day. So, you know, I want people to realize, like, if you're a speaker, I'll, I'll drop some tips here. One is I always try to make the host look amazing because I'm their guest. This is their stage, just like today. So I try to make the guest feel honored. I try to respect I try not to sell, I try to add value. So before I went on, I'm a faith guy, Nick. So before I went on, I had a little prayer and I'm like, you know what? I'm going all in today. I said, I'm just gonna take every risk. And that's, you know, usually I hold back. So what do I mean by that? I went up and I just taught like my life depended on it because I really believe that this solution called Instant IP is so essential for authors because here's Steven Pressfield, the man is sitting in the front row and he's talking about the resistance, capital R. And capital R resistance is the negativity or the force that acts against you when you say that you're gonna do something creative. Well, guess what? We live in a world right now that the news headline for authors is AI is stealing your work. So what do you think that does? The person who finally gets enough courage to sit in the chair, wake up early, put the kids to bed, whatever, and they're like, I'm gonna go create. And now all of a sudden you have a voice in your head that's like, well, why are you gonna create? AI's gonna take it anyway. Like, AI's gonna steal your stuff. Like, you know, you see what I'm talking about?

Yeah. So when you say AI's going to steal my stuff, what do you mean exactly? How does that happen?

Couple things. One, Biggest court case ever for authors just came out. $1.5 billion. I started hearing about this in the summer and I'm like, is this real? So I went to this website, uh, The Atlantic came out with an article where you could search Meta's AI, and I typed in my name thinking like, come on, you know, I got 14 books. I hope, I hope it doesn't show that AI companies used my books to train its LLM, LLM, LLM, large language model. You know what I'm saying?

LLM.

Yep. Thank you. Um, it's a tongue twister. So I type in my name and it says 6 copies and I'm like, oh, 6 versions of my book have been stolen. Well, right there you're like, okay, what can I do? You know, and the court case wasn't done at that point. Now what I've found out is I get $3,000 a pop, which is okay. But more than that, let's take Simon Sinek's book for a moment. Start with Why. He has something called the Golden Circle, which is one page of the book, and he makes $150,000 per talk based on one page of his book, which is called a framework. So copyright is interesting. Yeah, you can copyright a book, and it's protected for 70 years after the author passes. Well, it's called life of the author plus 70 years, roughly. That's fine, and you can claim statutory damages. But most books that we read— I look at your bookshelf, you know, you take a book like Rocket Fuel by, uh, Gino Wickman, or Traction.

Mm-hmm.

You have it behind you. You flip that page and you're like, Level 10 meetings. You flip the next page and it's like the Vision Integrator Equation. Like, in other words, the whole book is IP. So it's fine that like your copyright is there, but all these individual pieces people license. So you know me, I teach 18 streams of income. Let's take Patrick Lencioni, Working Genius. Well, that book is also a certification. StoryBrand is also a certification. So what I'm saying is like books are rich with IP and you need multiple layers of IP protection. So this is where Apple, the most valuable brand on the planet, roughly, they not only copyright their manuals, they trademark their logo, they patent their processes. And so it's called IP stacking. Does this make sense?

Yes.

Yeah. So what we do is we said, look, that costs a lot of time and money for the average author. Um, I mean, patents are $30,000. Guess how— guess, guess, Nick, the average rejection rate of a first-time filed patent? What do you think?

Oof. 60%.

So it's 86%, 86 to 88% rejection rate after you pay $30K and after you wait 1 to 3 years.

And that's worse than like playing roulette.

Oh my gosh. And then they're like, oh, well, now it's an office action, which costs another $4,000, another 6 months. So I have 2 patents on Instant IP. I'm not against patents. But what I'm saying is you save that for the, like, once in a lifetime idea. Because if you do get a patent, finally, it's a 20-year monopoly. That's great. So that's called like the Great Wall of China around your house. I, I want authors to think right now that when they create a book, it's like a house. Most authors leave their front door open and they say, come on in. And how? Because look at Amazon has Look Inside. Google Books basically has your book up there in sections. In other words, the world is not very friendly to authors. But what I'm saying is, you know, books have changed your life. I love your shirt. Books have changed my life, right? But here's the thing, you have to be smart about your IP. Dan Sullivan, you know him, I know him, like, he's smart about his IP. Disney's smart about their IP. So what we're saying, and here's the biggest thing, Nick, if people are listening and they're like, I don't care if anybody steals my IP. True stories. I could give many examples. Here's the worst. The worst is an author who doesn't care about their IP, who says, I know people are going to steal it anyway. A student of theirs who takes their course or a copycat Takes their IP that's unprotected, protects it, and locks them out of their own invention.

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Yeah, there are so many authors these days who say, oh, I decided to self-publish or leverage a hybrid option because I wanted to retain my IP. And then they don't protect it, right? I mean, I was guilty of that in the past, right? So I mean, there's, there's kind of an education gap where you're saying, hey, there's an easy solution. Tell everybody about the solution.

Yeah, yeah. So literally, you go from smartphone to smart contract in 60 seconds. And we hear— we heard for years, trust me, I've been building this for 4 years, over $1 million. I heard people all the time, yeah, but will it stand up in court? Okay, we now have instantip.today/court with 200 court cases of smart contracts and blockchain winning in court. Okay, the point is this: we live in an archaic IP system that is basically running on the horse and buggy, and we're now in the world of AI and rocket ships. And so you don't have the time and money to wait 1 to 3 years. I mean, think about that. There's people today that come up with a solution and they're selling it by the end of the day. You know what I'm saying? So, Nick, what I wanted to do, the word abracadabra, I like it, you might like it, but I don't know if you remember, but you remember what it means? Oh, I remember this. I know you've had a lot of—

Somebody in the room kind of knew it.

I remember that. Somebody in Milwaukee at the back of the room said, I create as I speak. Yeah, so abracadabra means I create as I speak. I wanted an invention that said I protect as I imagine, and that's what Instant IP is. So basically, you take your phone, you don't, you don't go to the App Store. I could have put it in the App Store. I probably would have made more money. I probably would have got more traffic, but then somebody's between you and your IP. So instantip.app is a web app, which means you can access it on phone, tablet, computer. You can literally be in a meeting, you and your buddy Luke, right? Luke, great guy, sat with them. We did a great dinner. Oh my gosh, you had this amazing steakhouse. Jonas was there. Oh, it was a great—

You guys are old buddies too, right?

Great event, man. Oh, Jonas was great. Yeah. And we're talking, him and I, and all kinds of stuff. But anyway, let's say you and Luke are in there and you're like, oh, we should take Book Thinkers and go Book Thinkers Live. And, you know, we should have a framework that when an attendee comes in, this happens and this happens. And that happens, and you create this process on an— on a napkin, and you're like, sweet. Well, you might be like, you might just say, ah, we're not going to protect that. Or you take your little piece of paper, bust out your phone, hit protect, and now it takes that intangible idea and locks it into a smart contract, creates an immutable timestamp, and literally lives in your portal that you can actually license now. You could actually license Book Thinker's framework for doing live events and create a new income stream just from that.

Sounds way too good to be true. How much does it cost?

So we even say, look, try it for free. So we looked at all the models of Uber and PayPal and saw how they scaled, and what they did is they lowered the bar and they're like, look, try it out. So it's— try it for free. Otherwise, it's, it's maximum you'll pay is $97. If you buy them in bulk, they go cheaper. Plus we have an affiliate program where people can literally not even sell people. They can say, hey, I protected my idea free. You should try this thing out. You get one free if you use my link. People share this thing. And now for the rest of their life, as this person uses this tool, income, income, income. We want to share this, man. This is like an idea meant to be shared. Um, so Nick, we are so excited. And here's the coolest thing. Remember I told you how much a patent was? All right, $30,000. Watch this. For, for, for, for Instant IP, you put your little process as a smart contract that now does what's called prior art in the legal world. That counts as prior art. So now if somebody's like, Oh my gosh, Nick created this thing. I'm gonna, I'm gonna copy this and try to patent it. You now, my friend, have an immutable timestamp smart contract, which means it can never change when you protected it. And now it acts as prior art and takes down their patent.

Hmm.

So for $97 or free, if you use the free, you are literally taking down like the biggest thing you can take down in the IP world. And listen, I know a lot of people like IP is kind of like this, but what's interesting, Nick, I'm going to tell you 20 things that are IP right in front of you right now. Okay? So for example, your tattoo artist created art. Are any of those things original or are any of those things like—

I would say they're They're all original, I think.

Sweet, that's great. If they would have tattooed a Disney character on you, technically you could— and I'm not saying you don't admit it if they did, but technically Disney has been known to go into daycares in Florida and rip apart the walls because someone painted the mural. And I know what people are saying, they're like, Disney Dude, they're like crazy. What the heck? Until you realize, do you know how much of a risk that company has to take to take to do a movie or make a character? You know, like, people don't realize that IP protection is actually made for the consumer, not the creator. Let me give you an example. Vitaminwater here. I'm drinking it. What if I come along and I'm like, you know what? That's cool, man. I'm going to make my own Vitaminwater. I'm going to take their logo. I'm going to take your whole idea and make a counterfeit. Okay, guess what? I might not have the same health standards. I might not have the same purity checks, and I might put out a drink that somebody has an allergy to, and now they drink it and die. And so, like, IP was actually created for the consumers so that there would not be brand confusion.

Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I, I need to take this a little more seriously. I know you, yeah, I'm familiar with, with your work for a long time, and time is kind of of the essence. I mean, AI is growing by leaps and bounds, and like you said, there's a big risk to not protecting your IP because somebody else could come along and protect it later, and you don't want that to happen.

I got a friend that I just spoke with 72 hours ago. I'm not going to say his name because he's vulnerable right now, but the point is this: he has one of the best collections right now in a certain industry. I'm not even going to say the industry because I don't want people to steal his stuff. This dude is so successful, and I said to his— I said to this guy, I'm going to call him Jim. It's not Jim, but I'm gonna say, Jim, you're the number one project right now. I'm gonna go to the USPTO and look up your name. I looked it up and it's not protected. And I said, oh my gosh, man. I said, do you know what could happen? Like I said, how much is your company valued at? And it's millions of dollars. I said, any joker could come along, see it's open, rush to protect it, create a fictitious company that says, oh yeah, we were here first. You have no proof. And They can lock you out of your multi, multi-million dollar empire. And his face went white. And I'm like, what are you gonna do about it, man? It's not hard. Like, it's not hard. He could literally protect it on Instant IP. And then when he calls his lawyer, he at least has a lock and a fence around his house.

Do you have a little, a little logo, kind of like a copyright or a trademark?

Oh my gosh, we got us something so cool. Can I share my screen?

Yeah, of course.

This is brand spanking new, man. We, we've always had a cool logo, but this is like, we're talking, this is like fresh, fresh. You see this protected by Instant IP?

Yes.

So we've actually taken this lock. So we got several things. One is we filed with the government a superscript IP. So when you look at my IP for a moment, you'll see here that chart. Guess what I do? I, I, I Put the IP protection comparison chart superscript IP. I should demo it, man. I should— can I demo the tech?

Of course you can.

Okay. Is this a podcast where people see the video too or no?

Yes. Not everyone. Wait, there are a lot of audio-only listeners.

That's all right. That's all right. So you go to instantip.app. Let's take a photo from my computer. Let's protect the 18 streams of income, right? You know, that's a huge part of my business. And look, I don't have the ability to patent everything I come up with. I have hundreds of examples. I'll show you here in a moment, but you got to name it something unique.

Okay?

You cannot pick like Nike. It's already taken. So you can go to the USPTO trademark, pretty easy, and you just search for it. Anyway, I'm going to use test as an example. Nick, if you've been using something like Book Thinkers, you know, for years, just put March 2023, whatever, you know, first created by Nick Hutchinson, first used by blah blah blah. The other cool thing is if you've got a secret project, you can leave it hidden. Hidden is like defense. If it's— if you want public, then you go, uh, offense. Okay, I'm gonna keep this one defense just because I'm demoing it. You use Protect My Idea, use a credit. Again, credits are cheaper if you buy them in bulk. Then you hit submit. Right now it's verifying it, the file. It's acknowledging the, the credit. It's creating the smart contract. It's protecting it on the blockchain, and now it's done. And you might be like, well, that's cool, but what does it mean? All right, let's look at what it means. Here it is. You now have the ability to transfer that, license it, certify people, sell it. Okay? It's literally an asset. You can always edit visibility, but you hit this download certificate and now you have this built-in cease and desist letter that basically freaks the junk out of people because it's saying, look, I created this at this time. Here's my hash on the blockchain. Here's that superscript IP that's now assigned to it. And basically what this does is this is now being sent to people who are infringing and people are being like, yeah, I don't wanna mess with that. I don't wanna fight that because I don't have anything they do. I'm gonna lose. And so now they're backing down.

Well, personally, one, one of the things that I'm learning in Strategic Coach in my next session is all about unique process. And so within Book Thinkers, we have all of these unique processes that are differentiated other people on the market. And what I need to do next is name those processes and frameworks, protect them, and then create some type of visual representation maybe that's sexy for the website. And I'll put the little superscript IP on there.

Absolutely.

And, uh, and what I really need to get for the back of Rise of the Reader, my book, is the, the lock logo with the QR code.

Yeah, well, and here's a couple things why I'm glad you said that. If people are like, yeah, but that takes time and money. Okay, I'll tell you what takes time and money is when somebody is sitting there in your keynote and you've seen this click, click, click. They're literally taking your slide deck, they're copying it, and now they're essentially crowding in on your market share. At a minimum, they're competing against your own IP. At a maximum, they're locking you out. That takes a lot of time and money. So what else is pretty— yeah, go ahead.

No, I was going to say, yes, it does. Uh, there's an opportunity cost to not protecting your stuff. And, and kind of as you were saying before, well, here's a slightly—

yeah, yeah, go for it—

from left field thought. But I've heard a lot of people talking about how attention is its own form of currency these days.

Oh, absolutely. You know, here's why, here's why. Pay attention.

Yes.

We even use the term pay attention. It's currency.

Yeah. Money goes where energy and eyeballs flow or whatever the saying is. So, but, but IP is its own form of currency and it will only become more valuable over time. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Strength of that currency is improving.

But here's what I know. Even though you are a bargain rate for what you do, when you start taking your IP seriously, Other people start taking you seriously. It's actually one of the best marketing tools because here's what people do. They say, oh my gosh, like Nick's process is named and protected. This thing is totally valuable. Like, why do you think EOS can charge when you become a franchised implementer? Because they've— and this is really interesting, Nick. EOS's model is take all of our tools for free. But we protected the junk out of them. And you might be like, what is that model? Why are they giving away all their tools and they spent this money protecting it? Because here's what they do. People use the tools and they're like, I get it, but I totally need an implementer. So then they hire an EOS-certified implementer who pays money to be able to charge for the tool. You see what I'm saying?

We have our first session on Monday. Book Thinkers is implementing EOS.

I think I met your, um, your, uh, integrator.

Yes.

Yeah, we were unloading things. He's like, everybody knows you, by the way, who I'm like, how'd you meet Nick? We were friends in school. We were, you know, like, you, you've built this amazing team from your childhood, it feels like.

Yeah, I have. I'm very blessed in that way. I had another quick thought to share with the audience. You know, I saw a video a while ago that Alex Hormozi posted, and he said the fastest way to provide more value to your customers, like perceived value, is simply to charge more. And what he meant by that was a higher price in general, just it makes it feel like what you're providing is more valuable. And so I think the fastest way to provide more value is just to protect your IP.

I mean, dude, You need to protect that on Instant IP. That's it. But seriously, that is an amazing quote that you should protect. The fastest way to increase your income is to protect your IP. Yeah, it's true though, and here's why.

I'll license it to you.

Oh yeah, we should.

You should.

Um, no, but how many times have we had that where we have a quote like that, right? Um, uh, we could go so many places. I've been using a quote for years Okay, if you Google who— who—

I—

can you do this? Are you in front of your computer right now?

I am, yeah.

This is, this is going to be fun. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what Google is going to say. Say, who coined, who coined clarity attracts, confusion repels? I don't know what it's going to say, but who coined clarity attracts, confusion repels? You.

That's what it that's what it kicks back. I'll put it up. You know what?

You know, you know why it says that? Oh, look at that. By Carrie.

By Carrie Oberbrunner.

All right. You know why it says that?

Only first wrote the phrase in 2003.

You know why it says that though? Yeah. Because back in August, I didn't have that show up, and there was a there was an influencer with two million followers. who took my phrase that I've had in books. If you go to Goodreads, it says Carey said it, but that's about it. Here's my point. I don't need to be acknowledged for that. But what I didn't want this influencer to do with 2 million followers is take that phrase and then lock me out of it because she's a business coach. So get this, Nick. In August, I start seeing this person, this person, this person, this person, this person using it. And I'm like, what happened? Because I've been using this on my business cards and everything for decades and nobody's even thought of it. An influencer took it and went online, and now all of a sudden millions of people have been exposed to the idea. And if I didn't act when I did— luckily it was on Instant IP— but then I also added more layers, and now Google shows up and it's all over the place so that I can actually not be locked out of my own brand.

I have, uh, can, can you give a few examples? Like, I have a keynote presentation.

Yeah.

That I want to protect. I have some phrases and terms.

Yeah.

Related to my personal brand, but also Book Thinkers. I have frameworks and processes that I need to name and then protect. Uh, what are some other examples of things that someone in the audience might be wanting to protect today.

Okay, we have a lady named, uh, the No Flip Clip. Okay, um, so again, this is for entrepreneurs too, right? So the No Flip Clip— interesting, this is interesting. She's got so big now. I'm gonna share my screen. She's gotten so big that now she's on, on websites here. Um, No Flip Clip for Flags. Okay. Anyway, here's, here's her, the Feel Good Local Shop. But she came to me and, and here it is protected on Instant IP. This is kind of cool. Um, she protected on November 19th, 2024. We can see, look at this. Is this cool or what? We can see that it's located on the blockchain.

Oh, so it's discoverable.

It's discoverable. Ooh, that's pretty hot. Nick, we're finding things out, man. But here's, here's her, here's her, uh, smart contract. But what she did is she uploaded her entire plans. Do you see that? Um, that's her. I know it's small, but that's her entire plans. She wanted to go to market with this idea, and she knew that she was gonna have to pay 3 grand, 30 grand. Um, and now here it is. And it's a, it's, it's an invention.

I need that actually.

You see this?

You see this?

Yeah, I've been dealing with flag-related issues since I bought a home.

Absolutely.

Years and years.

Absolutely. So she was gonna do a patent and then she got into it and she's like, oh my gosh, this thing's like a few bucks. I don't have the money to do this thing. So she went on Instant IP, protected it, and then she went to market and now I just Googled her name. And she's like in different stores and it's amazing. That just thrills my heart. That thrills my heart that now someone is making money off an invention because she just had enough confidence. Yeah, we have musicians, by the way, who've protected songs. I mean, I could go on and on.

Yeah, the AI music space is crazy too. Uh, I, I, I see so many potential introductions to make for you, just different people to partner with to accelerate the adoption of this amazing platform that you've built. But for— since we're getting close to wrapping up here, for people in the audience that want to take advantage of getting their free piece, how do they do that? How does somebody try it right now?

Yeah, well, listen, I want them to use your affiliate link.

Me too.

So I'm not going to name a URL. I'm just going to say you're going to put it in the show notes.

Okay. Yes.

And here's why.

And here's why. Like, I want everybody to not only protect their IP, but I want everyone to have a piece of this. I believe this is the one idea that I've been entrusted with that is supposed to change the world, especially in this moment of AI. So I'm like, look, everybody be an affiliate, everybody share this. And now we have, instead of the machines winning, I love AI. It's a great tool. But Nick, I'm really scared of people who go into chat or anything and type something and it grabs other people's IP and serves it to them without citing it. And now the person's like, sweet, this is my invention. Look at all those books behind you. Those took so much time, blood, sweat, and tears. And when an author is not honored for their work. It really, it really eats me up.

It eats me up too. I have something I want to talk to you about in 30 seconds, but, uh, as we wrap up, just thank you again, everybody in the Book Thinkers family. We will have my link in the show notes. Go get your IP protected for free. You get one freebie. And if you have any questions, of course, you're welcome to reach out to me. But Carrie, thank you again.

It was great to meet you in person and I'm going to come to your live event again, man. I'm coming to it. I'm coming to your event.

Good.

Yeah.

All right. Thank you, man. That is a wrap. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books. It would mean the world to us if you could write a review and share this episode with a few of your friends. I mean, these books truly have the power to change people's lives, and by reviewing or sharing our podcast, you're helping us make an impact. If you have any recommendations for future guests or any constructive feedback for us on how we can improve our show, please feel free to submit a form on our website, www.bookthinkers.com, or send us a direct message on Instagram @bookthinkers. With that, I am signing off, and I hope you have a wonderful day. Don't forget, Go read something.