357: Is Everything About to Change?

Buck: Welcome back to the show, everyone. Today my guest on Wealth Formula podcast is Kary Oberbrunner. Kary is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author of 11 books in multiple genres ranging from business to fiction to technology. He’s also the founder and CEO of Igniting Souls and Blockchain Life. Kary, welcome to Wealth Formula podcast.

Kary: Hey, it’s great to be here. Excited to talk about this topic.

Buck: Yeah, me too. I mean, this is you know, it’s crazy how quickly things are changing. You know, I’ve constantly we I, you know, I try to keep up on this stuff, but it seems like people keep talking about this new digital age that’s happening. Tell me what this new digital age is. I mean, certainly, there’s blockchain, but there’s also, how do you how would you describe this pivot in technology?

Kary: Yeah. So I noticed a change happening. As you mentioned, I have several companies, and about 2019 after running Facebook ads for years. Mm-hmm. 50,000, about $50,000 a month. I began to see like, things weren’t working the same way. And I said, Something’s going on behind the curtain, and I don’t know what it is, but I want to figure it out. And behavior began to shift. And what we began to see is we began to see a pivot from what’s called Web one and Web two to Web three. And when you ask people what is Web three, they get really fuzzy and they can’t be clear, concise and direct. And so I just want to give people a definition.

So Web one is they create they own. Okay. So what I mean by that is like when Domino’s Pizza, they created a website, they owned it and it was information and it was a static menu. And we went there and it beat the Yellow Pages and we would be able to look and see what we wanted to eat and we would order it. But the Internet then was what’s called read-only. So it was informational. Yeah. All right. And then comes along Web two. Web two is we create. They own. So what I mean by that is we became the creators. We began to create the tweets, the videos, the posts, the blogs. We began to essentially shape the Internet, but who owned it?

Buck: Twitter or…

Kary: Facebook? Right. So essentially, what we began to see is like, hey, what’s going on here? We’re the ones who are doing all the work and yet they’re the ones who own everything. And sure enough, you began to see that mobile evolved. So now the Internet became, instead of a static sit at my desktop, don’t bother me, you know, family.

I’m surfing the Internet now. It became bulk. Here’s the Internet and the Internet goes with me. And now instead of multitasking, I’m actually doing switch-tasking, which means that I’m lowering my IQ by 40 points less than being stone because I’m actually here and I’m here and I’m there and I’m everywhere. And essentially the attention residue began to happen and we were not fully engaged.

Now, now we’re really split. And a term called Digital Frontier existed where I’m existing on LinkedIn right now, I’m existing on Twitter, I’m existing on Instagram, I have multiple personas or avatars. And he began to see the psychology shift with people. Mm hmm. I can’t be fully present. And now we moved into the attention economy and we moved into data mining. Okay. Now, now comes Web three. Web three is we create. We own. Mm-hmm. So what is.

Buck: Decentralization? Right? That’s the concept of decentralization.

Kary: Yes. And with your listeners, Defi. Right. Decentralized finance. Sure. So now, instead of having the man or that company or the woman, you know, instead of having a centralized ledger, this centralized tech, this centralized platform currency, I mean, you can go on and on and on. Now, it became decentralized, even down to governance. Instead of having a board of directors, now you have what’s called daos, decentralized, autonomous organizations.

You begin to see fractionalized real estate where we can actually take that real estate and we can cut it up into small pieces represented with Nfts Nonfungible tokens, which are digital assets, where now you can have somebody 300 people own a hotel and how do they verify that they own the hotel, They share their smartphone with their Metamask wallet and the Metamask wallet has an NFT, which is backed by blockchain technology that proves it’s one of one.

And now all of a sudden I might own part of that hotel, but I can also cash in. And as part of the hotel, I might get two free nights. So, so literally, just to use those simple terms, then we can go deeper. Web one they create their own web to we create, they own and web three we create, we own. That’s a really easy way to explain it.

Buck: That’s a really good description. And so with Web three, you know, people often say, you know, I read things about the change. So, yeah, what’s going to change? I mean, what I mean, obviously we’ve we’ve seen some things happen. But is there like anything that will notice or is it all go sort of under the infrastructure? You know what I mean? Like in other words, in other words, it seems like a lot of technologies happen and we don’t really know that they’re happening. They just happen and they’re better and they’re faster and they’re smarter. But is this something fundamentally different that we’re going to see? And I guess along this line in what I want to get into a little bit more is A.I. Artificial intelligence.

Kary: I honestly think everything’s going to change at any and that might sound like over-the-top or hyperbole. Let me just give you an example. I mean, even just from I brought a little show intel here. Okay. So even down to the fact that I have a VR headset, Oculus. Now, this is clunky and in about five years we’re going to be like, Oh my gosh, was that dumb? But, you know, let me take another model. And this other model, our Ray-Ban glasses and these Ray-Ban glasses actually have video cameras inside them. Okay, so these look like sunglasses. In reality, I’m actually recording you right now. Right. And I’m actually able to take this content and put it onto my social media. And you might say, Well, that’s what’s so big about that.

Well, Apple’s going to come out with what’s called air glasses, augmented reality glasses, where I could essentially, Dr. Buck, I could look at you and say, Oh, Dr. Buck has allowed me with permissions to see where he went to school. I can see what certifications he accomplished. I can see what articles he’s written. I can see his friends that he has. I can see where he attended things. And immediately we can have a speed of trust relationship where I can say, Oh my gosh, man, you went to the U2 Concert Elevation tour. So did I. Yeah. And immediately, what do people do business with? People they know, like and trust. And so this isn’t just theory. Like on LinkedIn. I have no idea if it’s the real person or not.

Well, LinkedIn is started to incorporate blockchain cred in shows so that when I click on under licenses and certifications on LinkedIn, I can literally click a button and it can go to blockchain and it can say, Absolutely, that person achieved this status or this certificate and it’s verified. So you’re starting to see that, Oh, now trust. But let’s even talk about lack of friction, because that’s anytime there’s friction like Uber. Uber was disruptive because of the friction to actually hail a cab. Okay, Airbnb was disruptive because it was very hard for people to say, Hey, I got a house, I’m leaving for a week, does anyone want to rent it? So any type of friction in the world, technology can massively disrupt it. And right now there’s so much friction with IP protection. Patents three years, 15000 hours. There’s friction with buying a house. What if what if what if, Dr. Buck? I had glasses. I could tour the house. I could literally be preapproved with my metamask wallet. The house deed could be transferred as an NFT. If upon purchase I say I’m in, they can send the deed which would be verified with the state to see Are there any leans on the house? Is it clear? You know. So anything that you see that as friction right now. Yeah. Could could be disruptive.

Buck: I’m curious about that one too is but we’ve talked about that on the show. I mean that is definitely, you know, some seriously clunky stuff, deeds and that kind of thing. But, you know, we’ve been talking about it, frankly, on this show since 2017 when I first got into, you know, blockchain and cryptocurrency. And and I’m curious like, what are the timelines on these kinds of things? So you’ve mentioned a lot of things that make a lot of sense. But are we you think we’re going to see them in the next couple of years? Is that a decade? What’s your take?

Kary: I’m always a fast mover and I like to think things happen faster than they do. But here’s what’s going to happen. Starbucks announces its odyssey. What is Odyssey Odyssey as a replacement to their stars that when you go to Starbucks, you earn stars. What people don’t realize is they’re actually earning nfts now. Right. So this is kind of what’s going to happen.

You’re going to see diplomas like literally universities. You can Google this. Universities are saying, why are we just giving our people a paper diploma? Let’s give them also a digital asset which they can put in their in their wallet. It’s better on the environment. It’s more secure. You can showcase and and demonstrate it because it’s a digital asset.

So I think what you’re seeing is, yeah, you’re seeing Nike issue three types of shoes only digital, which is like my generation, your generation is like, what the heck, why would I buy a Steph Curry digital shoe for $333? But when we unpack that and we say, Oh, we’ll get our kids, well, we drove up to a party with shoes and they were like, Sweet, look at those Air Jordans.

Kary: Look at our kids. Though. Our kids were in the pandemic, they could not go outside. So they’re showing up virtually. And then when you can flex like every population has ever done, look at that Native American with that feather. Wow. Look at that. Look at that settler with that gun. I mean, you name it. We’ve always been a society of flexing a Rolex, whatever you want. Yeah, but now we’re flexing digitally because we are present digitally.

Buck: That’s a big concept. I think that’s harder for, you know, some of us Gen-X types and older people to understand because I think these younger, younger generations have so much value to what’s in this virtual world rather than just physical stuff. So we can understand it. But it they spend so much time in the virtual world that the line between the virtual world and the physical world starts to blend.

Buck: And so there’s not necessarily this, you know, this idea that that’s not real. I’m not going to pay for that because it is real.

Kary: It is real. And, you know, I have a son who grew up on Fortnite. So in Fortnite, your characters have skins and those wins are basically saying, Oh, you conquered that boss, or you earn that level. So now it’s kind of like, you know, we had Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts or whatever you want to call it, with patches.

Kary: Yeah. Now we have military with bars, you know, and I’m probably butchering that example because I’m not in the military, but we have a society that adorns whether the at the academy and you have certain threads, you know, with GPA we’ve always done it and now we’re saying because we’re virtual, we’re starting to do it. And you’re seeing a big fight between Birkin bags physically and Birkin bags digitally and du G And like, what I see is I see a lot of these fashion.

I see fashion really big into the digital space. I see experiences. So you started to see with the World Cup, they had a metaverse. They created with the tennis. They had a whole competition like sports, athletes, entertainers. Taylor Swift could have saved a ton of headache and earn a ton more money to bypass Ticketmaster and simply give her Taylor fans an NFT that would have unlocked a token with first to buy access. Right. And if people don’t think that’s a big deal, they almost issued a Congress. So whatever you call it, investigation into Ticketmaster. Right. I think this is big stuff. This is millions of dollars.

Buck: Absolutely. I’m going to shift gears a little bit. Bill Gates just said that chat and we’ll talk about what that is will change the world. Similar to when the Internet was invented. You want to tell us? I mean, because there’s a lot of this suddenly came out of nowhere. And my view is sort of discussed more chatGPT and artificial intelligence. Yes. You want to explain exactly what’s going on with that?

Kary: Yeah. So I’m a publisher. So it would be foolish for me to be like, you know, ChatGPT is going to take away the need for all books because like, I’d be shooting myself in the foot. But I’ll tell you this, I’ll go on record and say, if my company is not exploring how to use ChatGPT In terms of research, you still got to make the book the person’s story. You’re not going to say, Hey, that’s GPT, right?

Buck:

Okay, so what is it though? Like if you want to back up like this might be the first time a lot of people are actually even hearing the words chatGPT.

Kary: So essentially I have it on my computer right now, but what I can do is I can basically say chatGPT I want you to give me the recipe to cook a chocolate cake bomb recipe. I want you to tell me the book’s summary of carryover runners Blockchain life form. I want you to write code for how to do this. What would I do for a video shoot if I wanted to create a commercial on something film? And it’s not just a search like it’s legitimately ordered thinking. It’s it it becomes the best assistant.

Buck: Okay, So it is. And this is all coming from a conglomeration of information. Ultimately on the Internet that’s that’s put together with artificial intelligence. And putting out the most reliable information is that.

Kary: Yes. And you can even say I mean, I’ve been in serious meetings with creators of this, an early adopter is you can say, I want you to write a book on this. And then I and then say and I want it to sound like Dolly Parton bomb. Like, I mean, we’re talking.

Buck: Like it’ll literally write a book for you.

Kary: It’ll write the outline. And now the question is, because I’m in IP space, the question is who owns it? Right? Right. Because if it’s pulling from all kinds of different resources, then you’re giving into that. And I also teach at John University, certain universities are banning it and they’re saying, Whoa, hold on like a student. You can just come up with a paper and you could give it enough nuances that it is new information, it’ll spit out one and then you can say, make it sound more conversational, make it sound like from the English, it’s called props. Dr. Buck. The whole key is props. What are you telling ChatGPT to do? Because that’s the key. It’s like Jenny defeated the right command and then it will produce what you’re asking.

Buck: I guess one of the questions I would have on that is, okay, so what is, you know, how do we, how do we know that what the information is, is reliable information it or that it’s actually real? Because this is in necessarily something that is authenticated in any sort of way. It’s actually, you know, just conglomerated, Right. So like, I can see a potential problem there with nefarious actors as well. Yeah. Talk a little bit about that, if you would.

Kary: You’re seeing people say, and I don’t know where your audience stands, let’s just say left or right, it doesn’t matter. You’re starting to see be biased where you’re starting to ask questions and it now has a slant where you know, tell me about I’m just going to throw out. Tell me about Black Lives Matter and will it have a slant? Tell me about the Republican Party. The Democrat Party. So you’re starting to see, whoa, is it external truth or facts or is it now slanted? But I’ll tell you what, guess what we’ve been doing since 2015, same day. And that’s where the social dilemma, that documentary came out and said Dr. Buck’s screen is feeding him different information than my screen.

Because it’s actually becoming preferential to create engagement. So things I love or hate so that I keep coming back and it got into addictive tendencies in this type of thing. So you are right. Here’s another personally I think just to throw out I’m partners not financially but philosophically with a company called Personally, I get this, I’m a content creator. You’re a content creator. What if you could load all your podcast episodes, all your articles, all your blog posts, everything you’ve ever done into Doctor Buck’s Eye, which, by the way, is possible now, People can literally engage with you and they can get your data with your permission. 24 seven You could offer coaching, you could offer consulting like this is now possible where we each have our own eye based upon our thought leadership is in.

Buck:

That’s like an app or something. Or like how would somebody if I want to do a buck Joffrey carry me around in your family is that, is that like an app or how does that work?

Kary: It is it’s personal. I personally I the founder’s name is Suman. He’s worked with Google. It’s amazing. I literally think what if I’m a business owner, which I am. Here’s what I begin to now say. Not will I use AI?

Buck: But how will you use it?

Kary: And how can we equip our humans to use it to do the boring work or the mindless work so that the humans can do only what the humans can do? So that’s why I don’t believe in this. Like Terminator. Hey, AI is going to just take us all over. I say, Look, A.I. is a tool, just like a smartphone is a tool.

Can it be used for good or evil? Absolutely. You can use this to deal drugs and all kinds of stuff, or you can use it to do incredible things. So just a real quick example. I used to live in the nonprofit world, so, you know, used to be work at work at a church. Guess what? You can ask Chad CBT to write you a new praise song and it will be a theologically correct. I’ve seen it happen. It’s amazing.

Buck: Yeah, that’s pretty crazy.

Kary: Crazy. Yeah, that’s.

Buck: Crazy. Yeah. I’m eager to check it out myself. And you talk a little bit about moving towards a concept called transhumanism. Yeah. Talk a little bit about what that means.

Kary: All right, man, this is scary stuff. So transhumanism is literally saying that humans and machines will integrate with each other. Yeah. In order to create a better being. And here’s what I want people to think at first. People are like, That’s ridiculous. But it’s a spectrum right now. There’s people with a pacemaker and the pacemaker actually helps them live.

We have people with certain hearing technologies, certain AI technologies for seeing what happens. Doctor Bach When somebody loses a leg, which is right now happening and you can put on a prosthetic limb that is controlled with BCI brain computer interface, which is controlled by your mind, and that leg can help you run a one-minute mile and squat £2,000.

Now we put it in the guy because his leg, you know, got blown off in the military or whatever. But now what? What happens when that’s optional? I mean, if you can start telling people, look, do you want to run a one-minute mile? Do you want to squat £2,000 like that can actually happen. Now, I dare people to Google antenna man, man with antenna in its head.

This is a real guy who put an antenna literally into his head so that he could guess what feel colors. He goes to the passport in the UK and says, I want a picture with my antenna on it. They say, No, that’s an apparatus. He fought it. He said, This isn’t an apparatus. I can’t take it off. It’s inside me. They let him have it. He said, Guess what? It was made in Sweden. I want dual citizenship. I’m telling you, man. Like, I really think that our world is on the edge. Yeah. Where our ethics is, is being outpaced by our technology.

Buck: Yeah. Fascinating. Let’s talk a little bit about what you do on the consulting side, because all of this is really interesting and there’s certainly business owners involved here. You mentioned, you know, patents and, you know, intellectual property and that kind of thing. Talk about some of the other things that, you know, you’ve been able to help people do or what you guys provide.

Kary: So right now, if you can Google all this stuff and verify verify it, but we have developed a patent and our patent, why did we use a patent? There’s two times you should ever have a patent. One is if you’re going to sell your company someday. And the other thing is if you’re going to borrow up to half your patent portfolio, you’ve got to borrow money or you sell your company, you should get a pad. Why? Because it’s the nuclear weapon of all IP. I mean, it’s a 20 year monopoly legally on a certain technology. Guess what? It takes a lot of time and a lot of money to get it. We filed ours. Our technology is patent pending. Guess what our technology is, is to disrupt patents. So we got a patent to disrupt patents. I know that sounds a little crazy, but here is why. Because with blockchain technology now think about this for a moment, it’ll be a little technological, but your audience, I know they can dig it. All the blockchain is is a ledger that’s public, that is distributed in computers all over the world so that it cannot be hacked, altered, or have bad actors disrupt, modify it, this type of thing.

In other words, information is verified. It creates a block which then creates another block in another block. And to actually hack it, you’d have to go back and hack all these computers and go back through the blocks. Okay. So when you mint something on the blockchain, it’s essential and this is where I want people to rise like this technology layers.

Cryptocurrency is not blockchain, but crypto needs blockchain to be verifiable. Okay, so this is blockchain is like the railroad essentially. Well, guess what? We’ve created a process with our patent called Easy IP, where if somebody says, Hey, Kary, we’ve developed a unique process logo, PDF book concept, we can go and we can essentially throw our technology, create a smart contract around it, which creates a permanent timestamp that says that in this point in history, immutable, no one can change it ever. Doctor Buck was the first to file and first to use that IP.

Buck: Now does it make it easier to actually get the patent legally or does it?

Kary: Have to be called a pre-patent? Okay. Because when you file, you know, first of all, I don’t think everything should be a patent because, look, I produce books. If everyone had to publish a book and then in that book on page five is IP and page ten and you know, it would cost a lot of money and a lot of time, but there are certain things that should be patentable.

And I think for that, yes, you need the nuclear weapon and great, you have the United States backing you. But guess what? January 25th, I testified on a Congress commissioned study with the US PTO to talk about how NAFTA is are disrupting IP. And this is this is true like it’s it’s actually being disrupted because it’s a digital asset that is created that nobody else can copy.

And it’s proved by a blockchain and it’s immutable. And so where this goes. Dr. Buck, to make it really practical, in 1975, I was born in 76, in 1975, and there’s a great chart on this. Okay? But 16% of all IP was intangible. So this tells me that my dad and his generation there, the S&P 500, was made up of enjoyable assets, right? Land, cash, inventory, buildings. You look at the arc in 1990, I’m sorry, in 2020, it’s 90%. Well, 90% of the S&P 500 today is made up of intangible. We’re talking apples. Not valuable because of this. Apple’s valuable because of all the IP around it. Right. So all your listeners, they need to realize that if they follow the trend of the S&P 500, 90% of their company is in their IP and therefore protecting their IP becomes one of the most important things, especially in this digital world, where things can be copied incredibly easy.

Buck: Is a focus of your consulting on the legal side and or or are there other things too?

Kary: I mean, I’m not I’m no lawyer. I’ll never present myself that way. I would say that what I do is, is I help companies create a metaverse and Web three strategy. And I look Chase Bank. Chase Bank a year ago put up a bank in decentraland a metaverse y because they realized traffic is there, people are there and so they’re not doing a lot of chase management. Yeah, yeah, they’re not doing a lot chase banking metaverse. But here’s what they do and here’s what I think is really smart businesses should have a web 2.5 strategy. We’re not clearly at Web three where everyone’s walking around with VR and they are goggles, but we’re no longer at Web two where people are saying, look, there is no such thing as blockchain or NFT. We’re in a web two, five. And so I would encourage companies to say, look, how can we use Web two five to be a bridge to get our customers to the next version of the Internet.

Buck: Fascinating stuff. Carrie Ann I could keep going on and on and on here, but in a stop somewhere, you know? So if people want to get in touch with you, first of all, you’ve got this book, Blockchain Life Making Sense of the Metaverse and Nfts cryptocurrency, virtual reality, augmented Reality and Web three, obviously, that I’m presuming is available everywhere, Amazon, etc..

Kary: It’s everywhere. I wrote it for my 72-year-old parents and I say that with all the love in the world that says, Look, they were asking me, What the heck are you doing? And I wrote it so that we could understand it in other words, the chart here and it basically says Web one, Web two, Web three, and how do we use it? Yep, That’s where I think people are going to have a lot of success.

Buck: That obviously would be very useful for people interested in this world. Also, you mentioned, you know, some of the services you have. How do people reach out to you if they’re interested in potential consulting?

Kary: Yeah. So I would just go to I got three Web sites, my name karyoberbrunner.com, theblockchainlife.io and then ignitingsouls.com. And so either one of those are great. Essentially, at the end of the day, what do I do? I publish, protect and promote IP and turn it into 18 streams of income.

Buck: Fantastic. Kary, thanks again for being on Wealth Formula podcast.

Kary: Thanks for having me.

Buck: We’ll be right back.