How To Leverage the Public Domain (Like Walt Disney)
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Welcome to the Marketing Seekers Podcast. My name is Russell Brunson, and I'm what you call a serial entrepreneur, but with a twist. You see, 50% of my time, I'm the CEO of ClickFunnels, helping over 100,000 brands to grow their companies with funnels. And the other 50% of my time, I'm actually in the trenches using ClickFunnels to grow the startups I believe in. During this podcast, I'll take you behind the scenes and show you how we are bootstrapping ClickFunnels and my other businesses from startup to nine figures and beyond. Welcome to the show.

What's up everybody? Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. I got a treat for you guys today. You may or may not know about this concept called the public domain. This is things whose copyright is expired and you can take these things and you can sell them, you can republish them, you can do a bunch of really cool things with it. Happens to be the way that Walt Disney made all his money and it happens to be a way that I'm making a lot of my money with right now with

secrets of success and a lot of things I'm republishing and stuff like that. So about a year and a half ago, I did a meeting with my inner circle and I just showed them all my first edition books and stuff. And then I spent 15 minutes kind of going over explaining how public domain worked and what they could do with it. And I've never published this anywhere or showed it anywhere. So I was trying to find a cool episode to share with you guys this week. And I thought this would be a fun one. So here you can learn the secrets of the public domain, how it works, why you should care and how you can find some really cool things that you could republish for your market. Hope you enjoy it. And we'll talk to you soon.

My game plan is I'm going to talk about a little about public domain. I printed out a two-page thing that you guys all should have on your desk, and it's stapled. So this is kind of the legal side of the public domain, which is kind of cool. Then I'm going to walk you through kind of my vision, what I'm trying to do with the library and the statues and all this stuff. This is the actual print architecture plans for the library that will be built on the land next door. And then we'll walk over to two buildings down and walk you through the makeshift library where we're storing the books until I have a big library to put them in.

And then we'll come back here. And then these are all my first edition Book of Mormons and all stuff. Do you guys want to see them? I'll probably go through them. It'll probably take 30 minutes or so for me to kind of go through them. Do you want to see them? Cool. If not, bail. Either way. But these are so cool, too, I think. But I'm a book nerd, so they're fun. Okay. Is anyone here familiar with what the public domain is? Mm-hmm.

Okay, a few of you guys. So the basic gist is the copyright laws have changed throughout time. And so any book or any work – so not just book. Any work that was published before 1923 in the United States is automatically in the public domain. That means the copyright is expired. That means you can get those books and you can do whatever you want with them. That's how Disney made all their stories like Aladdin and Princess – or not Princess Bride. Aladdin –

Snow White. All the old Disney movies are basically public domain books that fell in the public domain. Walt Disney took them, made a derivative work, and then the derivative work that you make is copyrightable. Frozen is copyrightable. Tangled is copyrighted. But the original story still came from the public domain. And so the majority – not majority, but a lot of their movies and stuff are. And so that's kind of cool. Now, anything published between 1923 and 1963 –

If the copyright wasn't renewed, I think it's –

If the copyright wasn't renewed 28 years after it was published, then it automatically falls into the public domain. So it's estimated that only 7% of works between 1920 through 1963 were ever re-copyrighted. If not, so it's like 93% of things published in that time fell into the public domain. And then after that, it gets all fuzzy. So for me, for the most part, anything pre-1923 is when I get really, really excited. Okay, so just kind of real quick, my vision of what I'm trying to create with all this stuff, because yes, I'm going to build a library. Yes, we're going to build big statues. Yes,

in the library over here. But like the goal and the plan is for this to be a super profitable income center. It's not going to be just me collecting old books. Like I want to do it for worth the reason. How many guys follow Ryan Holiday?

So Ryan Holiday wrote a bunch of marketing books, as you know, and then he got into the Stoic era, and he became obsessed with Stoicism. And so then the next set of books he wrote have all been on the Stoic era. That's the window in time that he was obsessed with the writers and the people back then, right? So all the people he studied were like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and like all of the Stoic philosophers. And so he's taken all their works, which are definitely in the public domain, because that's like, I don't know, 200 or 300 years after Stoicism.

After Christ, or somewhere in that window is when the Stoic era was. And he took all his books and he's rewritten Ego's the Enemy, The Obstacle's Away, Stillness is the Key. Those are all based on Stoic principles. And he wrote The Daily Stoic. And then he's done a whole bunch of other Stoic books and projects and everything. He has an Instagram channel of his own.

related to Stoicism. It's got a couple million followers and like, he's just gone really, really deep on that era and that timeline. And so for me, the, the era that I'm obsessed with is from about 1850 to 1950. Um, that is an era that's, it's known as the new thought movement. And it's when people started like thinking for themselves and they started doing the same. And the very first person that was kind of the, the new thought leader, the very first one was a guy named Samuel Smiles. Um,

who was in England and he did a little event like this for some youth and told them that they could think and become better at life. And the people were like, this is amazing. And so he wrote the very first ever personal development book called self-help by Samuel smiles. Um, and there's a ton of copies on my eBay for like 20 bucks. First edition is like 1850. Like it's amazing. Um, so you'll notice that when you go, there's a Samuel smile section, like every Samuel smiles book I found is, is in there. Right. And then Samuel smiles again, that was like 1850 ish.

Um, in the early, like late 1800s, like 18, uh, like 1890s or something, some guy here in America found the Samuel smiles book and he reads it. Uh, and he's like, this is amazing. And so he, his name is Orson sweet Martin and he got all excited and, um, he started a little magazine called success magazine.

And he was the founder of Success Magazine. He then wrote a book. I think it was a 400 or 500-page book he had written. He had the manuscript. He owned these hotels and stuff, and the manuscript was in a hotel. And then one day, the hotel burned to the ground, and his manuscript was gone. Can you imagine, Rachel, what that would feel like right now? I'd just cry. Yeah. I'd cry.

And so he literally is like standing in the ashes of his hotel. His thing's gone. So he walks to the bookstore, grabs a pad of paper, and starts rewriting as fast as he can. Writes as much as he can remember and publishes his first book called Pushing to the Front, which is his first book on personal development. And he ended up writing like 50 or 60 books after that.

and then publish Success Magazine. And so over there you'll see the whole section of Orson Sweet-Martin, all of his books that I've been able to find. Plus I have a whole bunch of first edition Success Magazines, including the very first issue ever is over there, which is insanely cool. And I've got about a dozen that were published in the 1800s and then a whole bunch from the 1900s and beyond.

And then inside of Orson Sweet-Martin, that's where these other guys start popping up like Napoleon Hill and Charles Handel and all these other people who've written all the books that most of you guys are probably more familiar with. Napoleon Hill has got all his stuff. Charles Handel wrote The Master Key Systems. And anyway, so when you go over there, you'll see like we have a Napoleon Hill room. We've got like a personal development room and then I've also been finding all the old business classics.

from all the big business people from back in the day. So there's also like a business room. And right now it's in the middle of chaos. We haven't taken anyone over there yet. So don't judge the thing. The Napoleon Hill room set up, all the rest are kind of like chaotic. But I'll show you guys kind of some of the core things that are cool. We also have a big scanner in one of the rooms. So I'm taking these books. We have a scanner to scan them all into PDFs and turn them into OCR, into Word docs so we can republish them and things. What's that?

So we can all sermon NFTs. Yes. Don't worry, Andy. It's in the, it's in words. Um, so that's kind of the core things. Um, any questions about that at all? Yeah. No. And it is an obsession. I tell you guys what it's called. Hold on. Let me tell you the definition. This is the legit thing. Um, there's a term for this. I found it. Um, it's, uh,

Okay, here's this call. It's called a bibliomania. It says, Bibliomania can be a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder, which involves the collecting or even hoarding of books to the point where social relations or health are damaged. So that's about where we're at. No, so this is how I got into it. So, again, in the –

So the very first old book I bought – so in the Mormon world, the Book of Mormon is our ancient scripture. And the first printing, there were 5,000 printed, but there's only about 350 of them on the planet. And so my whole life I thought it would be cool someday if I could ever afford to get one. So one day I was depressed and I found one on eBay, and so I bought it. So this is the very first first-edition Book of Mormon I bought, and that was the first time I ever got into it. And then a few years later I met this guy who then sold me on all these ones.

And so I bought all these and that's when I had the idea for like, oh, I need a place to like, like right now they're sitting in a safe. This is stupid. Why are they in a safe? Like I can't show them to people. I was like, I need a library and we bought this land. I'm like, we should put a library. I could put them in there and put them under glass and it'll be this cool thing. And that was like, we could have a religion section, but I'm like, what other things am I passionate about? I'm like one passionate about personal development. Like I should have a section of personal development and then one on business and then one on stoicism, all the health and fitness, like all the things I'm passionate about.

And I was like, well, I had these really cool first editions that would be cool to have under glass in those sections. But what about the personal development section? What do I put there? And so I started – that's when I started eBay looking for first edition personal development stuff. And you guys will see it today. I think some of you guys saw it last time. But the first edition of Napoleon Hill, Laws of Success, was on there for $1.5 million. I was like, that would be the piece that would be in the personal development section.

And then when I got to know the guy who owned that, that's when I flew out to his place and I bought his whole 20 years of collecting. And then that's where – and then it was a slippery slope.

I was telling Rachel, like I was reading, like I read the polio magazine. I'm sure reading, I'm like one page into it. And he's like, he's like, I met a millionaire today and the millionaire told me to read this book called the goldfish. I'm like, what? So I'm like, are you being like the goldfish? I found the book. And then I see the author's name. I'm like, did he write any other books? I type that in and I find all the other books. I buy all his books there. And like within 15 minutes, I'm reading like three verses into our three paragraphs in the magazine. I bought another like 22 books.

And that's like how it keeps growing. So anyway, but it's been so much fun. And so it's, it keeps growing. And like I said, there's 31 boxes from Joe Vitale's library being dropped off here tomorrow, but it's not same era of like when they're learning about personal development and business and, and sales and hypnosis and mindset and like all the, like,

All the things around that, it was like this time where everyone's minds were just popping up and new ideas were being created. And it's like the most fascinating time in the world. And you'll see these guys are doing direct mail. We have a whole bunch of the first ads and things like that. It's fascinating to me. So that's kind of what it is. And yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so a couple things. Number one is NFTs. My goal is to do an NFT launch that will pay for all the costs for the library and the statues and all that kind of stuff. Hopefully it's summer, maybe a little later on this year. But on top of that...

Like I said, some of the first edition stuff, we're printing them and we're scanning them and stuff like that because we'll be republishing them. My next book is a success book, and so I'm creating a MIFGI offer for the success market, which is going to have a whole bunch of Napoleon Hill stuff that even the Napoleon Hill Foundation doesn't have. So we'll be bringing people into continuity through that. There's a whole bunch of different ways we'll be doing it. But all my favorite authors, there's – one of my – I feel like one of my callings is –

I had this conversation with somebody. Oh, I was talking to Rachel Hollis last night about this. Like, I don't, I've never really considered myself an author. Like that, that word never like, I don't know. I wouldn't say I'm an author. Um, but I think I'm more of a curator. It's like,

If you look at all my books, they're curation, right? I spent a decade trying to figure out marketing and I curated all the best things and put them in order and then doodled them. And I was like, this is my understanding of this topic and this topic and this topic. And so I'm kind of the same way. Like I have Charles Hanel, who I love. He's got a dozen books he wrote that nobody knows about anymore. I want to go through all those books and then curate and have one book that's like, this is like...

This is Charles Handler. This is the master key system like you guys – and like Napoleon Hill, here's all the stuff. No one else is going to geek out and read all of this stuff. But it's like if I can curate and like this is the thing that – like the essence of like what he had or Orson Sweet-Martin. Like there's so many amazing things, but no one besides me is going to go buy eight of his books. But I can go through all that and curate it and be like this is the thing.

And all the books have like cool stories and cool VSLs. And anyway, it's going to be fun. So that's kind of the game plan because most of the stuff that we're collecting all is in the public domain. So we can republish the majority of the things, which is cool. So anyway, just a lot of – I'm trying to create a lot of fun front ends that aren't like my face. So if I can leverage this huge brand and this huge movement and bring people from that into our world, it just gets really fun.