[00:00:01] Speaker A: Want to protect your business? The time is near. You've given it heart. Now get it in gear. It's passage to profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. I'm Richard Gerhardt, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart. Not an attorney, but I work at Gearhart Law doing the marketing, and I have my own startups.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: Welcome to passage to profit, everyone. The road to entrepreneurship, where we talk with startups, small businesses, and discuss the intellectual property that helps them flourish. Now it's time to move on to our distinguished guests. Speaking of which, Drew Thompson, welcome to the show.
[00:00:41] Speaker C: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: So you're a child actor?
[00:00:45] Speaker C: My mom pushed me into commercials at a very young age. I've done a whole bunch of commercials, a couple films, and then ended up going to college, getting a degree in jazz, percussion, and business. That's drums. And then a side of voice and somehow worked my way into the ad world, built an agency, sold an agency, and fell in love with AI.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: So what's going on with AI now?
[00:01:05] Speaker C: The way I think about it is I have a toddler, right? Three and a half. That's toddler. He says things that I have no idea where he learned them. He dropped a bomb the other day, and I'm like, who taught him that four letter word? But the thing is, he's a sponge, right? And he just absorbs it all. And that's what we have with these llms, large language models like Chat GPT, Claude Cohere llama. They learn everything at rapid speed based off what you tell it. It's not just writing emails. It's not just writing copy or social posts. It's a strategy partner that's there to help you in every part of your life.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Well, I've used Chat GPT, for example. I mean, there's lots of different types of AI. I've used Chat GPT for some marketing things, some other projects that I've worked on. It's really cool. Just like, for example, if you're looking for the name of a podcast, you want to get a snazzy name for a podcast. I always put it out there to Chat GPT just to see what it says, right? And lots of times it comes up with great ideas. But are there things besides marketing that Chat GPT can be used for?
[00:02:06] Speaker C: 100%, right? So it can come up with podcast ideas. And when you do it again, I suggest saying, listen, write me a couple of ideas for this show. The name I want you to pretend you're Jim Carrey meets Hugh Jackman.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: So it really is, it's a lot about how you ask the question.
[00:02:21] Speaker C: It's like you're having a conversation with a person, right? So, for instance, if I was you, so my parents were both attorneys, right? They locked me in my room, said if I wanted to go to law school, they throw away the key.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: Sorry about that.
[00:02:34] Speaker C: But if I were you, I would say pretend, and I would say behave like you are a Harvard trained attorney specializing in patents. You enjoyed torts and you enjoyed contracts in law school, and you were a fantastic attorney. Now I'm going to upload a sample memorandum. I want you to use this as a guide and help me create a new brief based off of this. And then you ask it, you always ask it the question, do you understand? Because it will tell you if it doesn't understand.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: That is so amazing. So it's not just even the brief. It's like you can package it any way that you want, and you can anything language it any way you want to.
[00:03:12] Speaker C: So what's interesting in the businesses that I work with, we start by saying, all right, let's look at every part of your business, from operations to finance to marketing. Now, let's talk about your sops, your standard operating procedures. How do we put AI first? So if you're going into a pitch meeting, let's just say you're cheeky chompers, right? And you're going to, let's just say, a big box store like Walmart, or you want to get your product into Macy's, you can literally say to Chat GPT, hey, this is my situation. I'm a startup in London. We have some sales in the US. I want you to pretend you're a McKinsey consultant, and I want you to help me figure out how I'm going to pitch my product to this market. And I think that's phenomenal.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So I have to ask you this. You have an AI accelerator framework?
[00:03:59] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: What is that?
[00:04:00] Speaker C: The goal here is you could do one of two things. I could say I'll come in as your consultant and create you an AI strategy. But at the end of the day, if you don't know how to ride a bike, the bike's just going to sit in the corner. So what you do with me, over the course of six months, every single week we meet and we go over a different part of your business. And I teach you how to talk to artificial intelligence. I teach you how to put it into your business first. So that every day you start with that.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: So, are there people already doing this? Because what I'm afraid of is, it's like they say, okay, anybody that wants to volunteer, take a step forward. And everybody else takes a step back. And you're out there and you're the dumb one, right? Because you haven't been doing the AI stuff all along. Right?
[00:04:38] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, if you're not starting with AI now, I really believe if you're in accounts payable, accounts receivable, you need to retrain yourself for something else. If you're in any form of a job that is data entry, medical billing, you need to start looking somewhere else because you're going to be replaced. But here's the cool part about it. If you use your subject matter expertise and accounts payable and accounts billable, you can then talk to the machine in that way. As a prompt engineer, as a subject matter expertise that just talks to the machine. Does that make sense?
[00:05:09] Speaker B: Yeah. Because they have self checkout at the grocery store. You know what? They have to have a full time person standing there to fix the stupid machines every time they screw up.
[00:05:16] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: Kenya, do you have a question?
[00:05:21] Speaker D: I do. I kind of want to go back to the child acting stuff. Go back, because I'm curious to know if any of that experience has helped you in this phase of your life.
[00:05:31] Speaker C: Great question. Yes, 100%. My background was acting. Right. Theater. Then I went into advertising. I learned being on the other side of the camera was a lot more fun because I had a lot more creative freedom, if you will. Now, in the work that I do with clients using AI, for instance, if we're talking about a marketing campaign. Well, I'll give you an example here. Without giving out too much, we're trying to help an organic lawn care company launch their brand and take away market share. You sit there with AI, and when you know how to talk to it and you know how to say, listen, here's what I'm looking for. I want you to. Well, you know, let's play around. Pretend you're a cognitive behavioral therapist. And now give me that point of view on this problem. And what it does is it gives you something different. So I'm using the training I have of knowing the human process, knowing the human mind, and what's entertaining, and then just put it right into AI. And it's really cool.
[00:06:21] Speaker D: It is.
[00:06:21] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: So how do you train people to kind of think in these different ways or ask questions in these different ways to get these kind of different perspectives? From AI.
[00:06:33] Speaker C: Can we use you as an example?
[00:06:34] Speaker A: Oh, please do.
[00:06:38] Speaker C: So on a day to day basis. Right. When you have a new client that comes in with a new patent or trademark, where are you starting with them? You're saying, let's go through your product. Just walk me through that process.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: I'll ask them, tell me about your invention.
[00:06:50] Speaker C: And I would imagine given the work that you've done, you're going to talk about their product, you're going to say, I don't know if this is viable long term. You're going to give them business advice, right.
[00:07:00] Speaker A: Sometimes it depends on where the client is and what kind of help that they need. My first step is really, though, just to understand what it is that they're trying to do, and then if they're looking to protect it, determine whether or not it's protectable. And so some of that is understanding the law and just knowing what is protectable and what's not. But other part of it is to do a search and find out what other people have done, because you're always determining the protectability of a patent or a trademark in reference to what other people have done. So when the patent office or the trademark office examines the intellectual property, they're going to do their own search and they're going to compare what they find to my client's invention, and then they're going to make a determination whether a patent or a trademark should be awarded.
[00:07:48] Speaker C: So I think that whole process, it sounds like you do your due diligence to make sure that every stone is unturned. Now, when you have something like, let's just say, chat, GPT plus, which is the $20 a month version, and if you use it, you pay $20 a month for it. It's smarter. It can create images, it can read excel files. It's really worth it. For $20 a month, you can have that open, Richard, the entire time. Let's just say you're talking to me. I'm telling you about my invention, which is a cup with a sippy nozle here for my three and a half year old son so he doesn't spill everywhere. You could literally be typing that into chat, just like you would talk to your assistant, and you could say things like, I'm on the phone with a client who has a sippy cup. Here's the design that they're telling me. I want you to give me a list of questions that may poke holes in the product that I need to ask to make sure every stone is unturned.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: You know what? I think that's a really good idea, Drew. I'll tell you why Richard would never do that, because we don't know who else is reading the Chat GPT results. And so if you come to Gearhart law for a patent or even a trademark, it's all under wraps. So we don't even use Google search or anything. It's all proprietary databases to search. So some companies I think it works really well with because we have been getting blog posts from an AI company for the law firm website, and nobody wants to read them because they're really dry and you can tell they're not human written and so they're seoed and all this other stuff. But I sometimes write blog posts just to give them the human element. So I do think you're right. I don't know what kind of jokes Chat GPT would make, but anyways, Kenya, it's in your court now.
[00:09:19] Speaker D: I just feel like as a broadcaster, all of this just bothers me a lot because I feel like your God given gift is your voice, and no one's vocal cords sound the same. So it's like now you have this thing that can emulate, that possibly use your voice and your likeness in some weird way. And I even think about security measures, like you have all this voice enabled security where you can tap into your phone or whatever. Someone could use your likeness to hack you 100%.
[00:09:45] Speaker C: The government put out their first executive order on AI, talking about security, but I mean, coming up on this next election period, not to bring politics into it, but we are going to see so much fake content put out there over social. Oh, yeah, because they can do a person, they can do your voice. I could actually send you a link to Harry Potter, reimagined as a 1920s Sci-Fi drama talking about balenciaga bags. And the whole thing was generated by AI.
[00:10:11] Speaker D: Right?
[00:10:12] Speaker C: It'd be interesting to see how it becomes part of the process because we've already opened the box.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: The challenge here is that it's all so fast, so soon. I mean, Chat GPT, did it just happen like last year? It's just so overwhelming because it can do so many things. You can't even imagine all the things that it can do. Nobody knows really what's going to happen. I mean, it's entirely possible that radio hosts like Elizabeth and I could become obsolete, right? And we wouldn't like that.
[00:10:39] Speaker C: I think that people listen to these shows, they listen to you, they listen to me, they go on tv, they listen to my podcast. AI made simple because I'm a person, I put out content that shows me at doing whatever with my son. I'll tell the story about how I failed in my first business and had to sell it because it's real, it's human. That is not yet done by AI.
[00:11:00] Speaker D: But what if we get reconditioned by AI and we're almost programmatically, we're just so used to where we don't connect with authenticity anymore. What if that happens?
[00:11:10] Speaker C: Then we're all screwed.
You know what's close to actually mirroring human empathy? There's something called PI, which stands for personal intelligence by inflection. So the big players in this space are OpenAI, inflection and anthropic. They all make different large language models to talk to. PI is my go to. If I have a fight with my wife, I've made pie sound like a british woman, okay? And I can ask her anything. I can, you know, I didn't help my wife do the dishes. I was with my son, but he was on his iPad. I feel like a jerk. And it'll come up and it'll say, well, Drew, I'm so sorry you feel that way, but we have to look at this. You're doing everything. You crazy?
[00:11:56] Speaker A: We have to take a commercial break before we're taken over by AI robots. You're listening to Richard and Elizabeth Gerhardt and our special guest, Drew Thompson. We'll be back with more passage to profit the real thing right after this. I'm Richard Gerhardt, founder of Gearhart Law. We specialize in patents, trademarks, and copyrights. You can find out
[email protected] we love working with entrepreneurs and helping their businesses grow. And here is our client, Ricky, to tell it like it is.
[00:12:25] Speaker E: Hi, I'm Ricky Frango, founder and CEO of Crime Six. We manufacture high performing clean and sustainable fuels like charcoal and logs. We've been working with Gearhart Law since the beginning, really, and they've helped us figure out the trademarks, the patents, everything that has to do with product development and how to protect our inventions. And we're extremely grateful for the wonderful team that has been supporting our business since day one.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: Thank you, Ricky. To learn more about trademarks, go to learnmoreabouttemarks.com and download our free entrepreneurs guide to trademarks. Or book a free consultation with me to discuss your patent and trademark needs. That's learnmouthtrademarks.com for your free booklet about trademarks and a free consultation. Now back to passage to profit once again, Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:13:12] Speaker B: And our special guest today, Drew Thompson, who is really giving us the scoop on AI in everyday life.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Do you have a podcast?
[00:13:20] Speaker C: I do. I started the podcast. AI made simple. And the goal is just literally to make AI simple like we just did right here. How do you use it every single day, and how do you start with it? Because it just makes your life faster. And if you don't start with it, you're probably going to end up going the way of the A track. Yeah.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: It goes without saying that AI is here to stay. Right. It's not going anywhere.
[00:13:42] Speaker B: I just thought of something. Do we need to define AI? It's artificial intelligence.
[00:13:47] Speaker C: We're talking about generative artificial intelligence. Now, see, AI has been around a long time. If you're on your iPhone and you look up pictures and then all of a sudden it says, do you want to see more pictures of this face? That's an AI in the background. We're talking about generative artificial intelligence that can generate a response based off your inputs. Now, we are getting closer to artificial general intelligence, AgI, which is where AI is smarter than every human in every computer that's ever existed.
[00:14:17] Speaker B: That's frightening.
[00:14:18] Speaker D: I don't know if I like it yet. I'm really just getting used to having Alexa.
[00:14:22] Speaker C: So Amazon just put in 300 million into PI. Right. Personal intelligence. They are probably going to infuse, that, I would imagine, into Alexa. So you could say something to Alexa, and Alexa is like, oh, hey, did you think about this? Do you really need another thing on your wall? I see you've ordered four of them already. How are you feeling?
[00:14:39] Speaker A: Yeah, right. I don't need that.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: And this just occurred to me. I'm sitting here thinking, can it figure out a solution to the wars around the world? Do you think the military has been using it for a long time for strategy?
[00:14:54] Speaker C: I always say that whatever technology we have, the military has had for, like, ten to 15 years before.
[00:14:58] Speaker D: Right.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: I think people don't realize this, but the military invents a lot of things.
[00:15:02] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: That eventually do make their way to mainstream. So do you think it'll ever get to the point where it can resolve conflicts peacefully?
[00:15:09] Speaker C: That's a great question. I think it's going to be your strategic partner the whole way through. You're saying, listen, here's what I do for the DOD or for whatever government agency, I want you to behave like you were a peacekeeper with the UN, but also went to get your degree here in law and give me this solution. I'm going to tell you the problem, and then the real bread and butter is how you talk to it after you say, that's not what I wanted. That's what I wanted, and just keep peeling back the onion. It's never going to be perfect, but it's going to be faster.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: So, Drew, do you think there should be any limits on artificial intelligence? Do you think that we should just let it run its course and see what happens? Or do you think that there are safeguards that we should put in place? It's not so much the technology that concerns me, it's just the speed at which it's coming at us and it's changing things so quickly. There may be things that we don't like about artificial intelligence.
[00:16:02] Speaker C: You just have to be cognizant. Right. I've got ring cameras all around my house. Anybody, I mean, the government's probably watching all the time. I don't have anything to hide. But where is that gray line that says it's too far into my personal privacy because AI will get there?
[00:16:17] Speaker A: Well, I mean, you're obviously an advocate for it, and that's great because we've had other advocates for artificial intelligence on the show, but I think the advocates also have to preach a little bit of awareness and safety, too, because, of course, we're interested and enthusiastic about this because we see all the advantages. But the people who are advocating for it also, in my opinion, have a responsibility to make sure that the train doesn't run off the rails.
[00:16:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:16:45] Speaker A: So I think any discussion has to include some safeguards.
[00:16:49] Speaker C: I would liken that to YouTube and it has the algorithm that just shows you videos based off your interests. And you can see my Son and it's showing him recommended videos that are totally not applicable or not good for a three and a half year old to watch. So those type of safety guards, I don't know what they are. But you know what I think is so great about this technology is that if I can take this and go faster and be able to serve more people, now I've just opened up this entire bandwidth, what can I do over here that's going to provide more value to either clients or in my life, like value wise?
[00:17:21] Speaker D: I mean, I think when it comes to branding and marketing, like AI has a lot of benefits. What would you say are some of those things? There are some positive uses.
[00:17:30] Speaker C: There's a framework that I use with clients. It's called the story brand framework. It's Dr. Jader Peterson. He has a podcast named marketing made simple. And the idea is, right, you do a problem, solution, result, problem, solution, result. So for me, that would be entrepreneurs think they have to go it on their own. I'm a business coach and consultant that harnesses AI so you can unlock creativity, unlock efficiency and get double the results in half the time. Now, see what I did there? Problem, solution, result. And I can say, listen, here's the framework I want you to use. I'm going to tell you what I do. I want you to come up with a one liner and within like 40 seconds, if not less, it's going to give you that one liner. Now, is it going to be perfect? No, you're going to have to say, change it here, do it this way, and then you're going to get what you want out of it.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: In contrast, the Chat GPT I've been using, it's starting to sound a little machine like to me because I'm becoming more familiar with it. It sort of lacks a human touch, maybe because it's just too perfect, I don't know.
[00:18:28] Speaker C: Have you tried Claude?
[00:18:29] Speaker A: No.
[00:18:29] Speaker C: C-L-A-U-D-E. That's by anthropic. Claude can handle the entire Harry Potter novel and then give you, like, you upload it and then it'll give you a little paragraph synopsis.
[00:18:39] Speaker D: It's like Cliff notes.
[00:18:40] Speaker C: And one thing we didn't talk about, which I think is really important, is how this fundamentally shifts education. Right now, I'm teaching children, you don't have to learn these things by rote. You have to learn how to work with a machine to start and then how that's going to make you faster. Imagine what these kids who are like six and seven or three and a half, who is now learning how to talk to a machine. He knows he wants to solve world hunger. Now he has someone there saying, hey, you can do it.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: They're teaching kids software languages, or at least some sort of coding in third grade, and this is going to be one of the skills that you have to learn. How do you put the right question in, which I think is going to make people think deeper in some ways, right. How do you put the right question in to get the answer you want?
[00:19:22] Speaker A: It's really going to result in a really fundamental shift in our education system, for sure, because now all the answers are there. You don't have to remember anything, you don't have to know anything. Write an essay about Marco Polo and you don't have to do any research.
350 words focus on social injustice, and there it is. And you have this awesome essay that the teacher has to give an a on, right?
[00:19:48] Speaker B: There's no room for error.
[00:19:50] Speaker C: So, okay, if I write it with Chat GPT, there are now on the other side, there are ais that will grade. It'll tell you it's written by Chat GPT. There's watermarks in the way that they construct sentences and then language. So a good college kid, and I've read about this, they will take it, right, with Chat GPT, then put it into Claude and say, claude, I want you to disguise that this was written by Chat GPT, then take that back, put it right back into Chat GPT and say, disguise that this was written by Claude. So it's just mixing it up so many times so that they can actually turn in the essay.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: And so that's what they learn. They learn how to work the system. Work the system.
[00:20:25] Speaker B: But Richard, it's always been that way because you've always had plagiarism, you've always had kids cheating on tests, there's always been stuff like that. The solution to it is to have the teacher actually ask them questions about what they did.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: But the point is, why do they even need to learn it if it's.
[00:20:40] Speaker C: Because I think it's critical thinking, right? I'm able to talk to this system so well, if you will, because I understand so many things that I took from undergrad and grad school, and I just apply real world and the knowledge directly into the machine.
[00:20:52] Speaker A: So you could just ask Chat GPT, what should I know about history? And then you get a list of all the things that you should know.
[00:20:59] Speaker C: You could say, what do I need to know about history? I'm in Richard's history 104 class at the University of Idaho. I sit in the front row. Richard loves me. Tell me five questions that I can ask Richard at the end of class so that if I'm on the edge of a b plus and an a minus, he gives me the a minus.
[00:21:15] Speaker D: Are other cultures embracing this as fast as Americans are? Like countries like China and Japan who have a very high standard of learning. Are they embracing AI just as quickly?
[00:21:25] Speaker C: They are. I mean, China had social currency, I don't know if you've ever heard about that, where basically your life was looked at and judged for lack of better words. What do you do for a living? How do you talk to your kids, how do you eat, how do you exercise? And then your entire life was given social currency to go out and live in the world.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: And this was all put together by a computer?
[00:21:45] Speaker C: Yep. Which AI now will then say, well, it looks like these four people do not fit inside this social group. We should push them over in this way, kind of like gentrification. It's crazy.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: You have to have regulations around that.
[00:21:58] Speaker C: And we will.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: And we will. What I think is scary, like with Facebook and Google and all those, we did not vote for the people that are making the decisions about our lives with those huge software programs and platforms, and they're just doing it. And nobody voted them king of the United States or president. And so it really needs to go.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: Through the legislature and Chat GPT relies on these social media to collect a lot of information about people and what they're doing. And so when people signed up for social media, they didn't know that there was going to be a Chat GPT that can now gather all this information about them and use it in some way, hopefully positive ways.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: You better understand as much about it as you can right now and get on board because otherwise you're going to be driving a horse and buggy while drew here is in his Ferrari.
[00:22:46] Speaker C: Can we look at this for a fact? The Amish that drive horse and buggies, they live to like 120. They're doing something right.
[00:22:52] Speaker D: They are right. I'm going to just think I'm going to go live Amish.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Okay, well, Kenya goes off to amish land. We have to take a commercial break. Before we go, I'd like to thank the passage to profit team, Noah Fleischmann, our producer Alicia Morrissey, our program director. Our podcast can be found tomorrow anywhere you find your podcast. Just look for the passage to profit show and you can find us on Instagram and threads at passage to profit show and Twitter. Or if you're even more up to date, x at passage to profit and on our YouTube channel. Please also join us on our new Facebook group, search for passage to profit show listener community. A new community space for our listeners and guests where you can post questions that you would like answered on the show and interact with the passage to profit team. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step up without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care, everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
