The Wild World of NFTs

Episode Notes

Transcript

Dennis Kennedy: Before we get started, we’d like to thank our sponsors: Clio, Colonial Surety Company, and Posh Virtual Receptionists.

[Music]

Intro: Got the world turning as fast as it can? Hear how technology can help, legally speaking with two of the top legal technology experts, authors and lawyers. Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Welcome to The Kennedy-Mighell Report here on the Legal Talk Network.

Dennis Kennedy: And welcome to Episode 309 of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor.

Tom Mighell: And I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy: In our last episode, we went into the metaverse and reported back on what we found including our meta face-to-face meeting in a horizon workspace. Check out the episode for more details and in fact, you should be sure to subscribe to this podcast so you don’t miss any of our episodes. In this episode, we continue with a bit of a new tech theme and we’ll take a look at the wild world of NFTs. Will Tom and I be minting our own NFT for our podcast? Tom, what’s on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell: Well, Dennis, in this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, we will indeed be talking about the world of non-fungible tokens commonly known as NFTs. In our second segment, we look at whether new technology announcements are hot or not anymore and as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots that one tip website or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, the rise of NFTs and what lawyers need to know about them. In our last episode, we talked about the emerging metaverse and how people might be using it.

We mentioned that the definition of the metaverse is that it’s something that’s going to support continuity of objects and continuity of payments from the real to the virtual world and so, it makes sense that this week, we’re talking about non-fungible tokens, otherwise known as NFTs because they’re a part of that. They are part of how objects and payments are going to extend from the real to the virtual world. They’re connected to cryptocurrency. They’re making artists, athletes and others a fairly obscene amount of money. Dennis, you have mentioned that people can define NFTs but it’s actually quite difficult to explain them and I guess we’re going to try to do that. Seems like a good place to start, doesn’t it?

Dennis Kennedy: So, NFTs to me are especially interesting these days because we sit at the intersection of several technologies that people have difficulty understanding. So, you know, blockchain, digital art, there’s payment component, crypto, all these other things, and they all come together and they tend to be talked about a lot. People seem to be making a lot of money and there is a tremendous sense of FOMO, the fear of missing out around them. And they’re also so hot that we’re just now starting to get the thing of that where people saying they’re overhyped and they have nowhere to go but down. And so, we’ve longtime listeners that will recognize the classic Gartner hype cycle in effect there. So, we’re definitely in one of those top levels of the hype cycle right now so which it was where it becomes important to really understand what’s going on and to start to sift through what is, let me call somewhat ironically here, what is real and what is not real and what we need to pay attention to and what’s going to last.

So I was looking at some definitions and I have a favorite one because it’s typical of what you see these days and part of the reasons why I said that it seems like it’s easy for people to do definitions but not to explain NFTs. So I love this one. I’m not going to credit it to anybody but it’s non-fungible tokens are digital tokens that are not fungible, period. Okay, so Tom, I have now, as you probably recognized, I’ve reversed our usual roles and now I have thrown onto you the job of presenting some good definitions of NFTs to get us started with.

Tom Mighell: Well, what’s funny is, is that I was going to add the link to that definition into the show notes and then I read it and I go, “This is terrible, why would anybody want to put this in the show notes?” and I understand why now. All right, so it falls to me. So here is my best take at a definition of non-fungible token. Let’s break it apart. Non-refundable means that it is not exchangeable for anything else.

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You can exchange a dollar for another dollar. So if I give you a dollar, you give me dollar back, that’s fungible. It can be exchanged but you cannot exchange, for example, a one-of-a-kind trading card. If you traded it for someone else’s trading card, you’d have something completely different. That is what makes it non-fungible. It is something that you cannot exchange for anything else. And then the second part of that is a token. Token can be anything. It can be something in the physical world. It can be something in the digital world where we are seeing it most often these days is in the digital world, digital works, art and music. We’ll talk about how crazy some of that is getting to be. And then what you do with a with a non-fungible token is you mint it. You create that non-fungible token and to do that, you are creating essentially a digital file that lives on the blockchain. So now we’ve included this kind of economic asset that lives on the blockchain.

What that means is, is that it cannot be copied, it cannot be edited, it cannot be deleted, it cannot be manipulated, so it guarantees its authenticity so that if you purchase that one-of-a-kind token, you know that you have the authentic version of it. We are seeing lots of people do lots of things with stuff. I see that Adobe is putting a Prepare as NFT option into Photoshop so you can make an NFT using software you already own. Just as we’re recording today, Instagram is announcing that they’re going to add an NFT option into Instagram, so you can actually mint an NFT while you post your pictures to Instagram. Samsung is going to be launching a TV-based NFT explorer where you can browse, where you can purchase and display your own NFT art, all from the comfort of your living room. I think it’s crazy. Dennis, I think, you think it’s the beginning of a new age of mega investments but where are we headed from here?

Dennis Kennedy: Well, I mean I see it’s the start of Web 3 and I think that part of the difficulty is that with what you were saying, I would say that that authenticity, they can’t be counterfeited. So, in some of these NFTs, because they’re digital, you can copy them, you can do things but they’re their own sort of unique token. So there’s a story where somebody bought an NFT of — let’s call it, I think it was the first edition of Lord of the Rings and they were planning to — and they spent a lot of money, a couple million dollars and their plan was to do a whole new set of movies and stuff with Lord of the Rings. So the problem was they sort of fundamentally didn’t understand copyright law. So what I like to think in terms of NFTs is the problem that they were designed to solve.

So to me, there’s two things. So one is, how do we know that something is authentic especially when it’s digital and then how do we know that a digital object has uniqueness? So how do we know it’s the original? It’s the one that has value because the thing as we move from paintings to photographs, now to digital art, the uniqueness of each object has become less clear, let’s say. So how do I know that I have the original? So it became difficult when he had photographs. And so, how do we value that? How do we know that we have the original when we have digital art? And one of the great examples of NFTs is the NBA is selling NFTs of videos of dunks, okay? So you can go out and you can find like a zillion videos of the same dunk. You could copy it. You can do those sorts of things but if you own the NBA NFT of that dunk, then you know that you have the authentic version of it that has value because it’s certified by the NBA. And so that gets us to the question of like, how do we determine the actual value of that because that’s sort of feels like having a baseball card or something like that. So that’s that uniqueness in the digital object and then also, I think as we looked at — there was actually art that was just digital.

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So like the art in video games and other things like that, and we said it’s really amazing art and there should be a market for it but if somebody can just make a copy of it digitally, then how does somebody who is a buyer know that they have something of value. So NFTs kind of address some of those issue of authenticity and uniqueness over something that is by its nature being digital reproducible in exactly the same way. And then as in the sort of first applications we’ve seen are in the investment area which I think makes a lot of this more difficult because it does seem like we’re in a Bizarro World where you have these things sort of NFTs that you know essentially animations that are worth millions of dollars right now.

Tom Mighell: So I’m going to go on a rant right now because I’m going to push back against your thesis which is I don’t believe the NBA was sitting around thinking we’ve got all these videos of dunks. We have to make sure that we know that they’re authentic. They were not thinking about that. What they found was, “Hey, we just found a way to make obscene amounts of money on these dunk videos. Let’s put them out there and, oh by the way, they’re authentic and we can prove that they’re authentic.”  So this is a solution in search of a problem. I don’t think it’s a problem that’s trying to solve and so let me go on my rant.

So here’s some examples of what we are seeing and I think that this started a couple of months ago with a digital artist named Beeple. Beeple kind of I think that’s where the news started to get crazy where he sold an image. He used to sell prints for $100. He sold a digital image for $69 million. One day, it was worth $100, suddenly as an NFT is worth $69 million. For that, the owner gets the limited rights to display the image but really what they’re getting is the bragging rights to the original and an asset that they can resell later. We’ll talk about investments. We’ll talk about that resale value. That’s where I see the value here as an investment. We’ll talk about that a little bit later. But how does it come to be that an artist who is only making $100 prints now make $69 million prints. I think that’s insane and there is something fundamentally wrong with what we’re doing here. That’s why the other examples are equally insane.

There’s an 18-year-old artist. His name is FEWOCiOUS. His art on his website is selling between $300,000 and $3 million each and its garbage. It’s a garbage art and it is selling for that much money. This is what kills me the most, you can buy a virtual pet rock, an image of a rock, it’s not even a real rock, it’s a drawing of a rock for $300,000. I don’t view that as a problem in search of a solution. I don’t view that as we need to make sure that this drawing of a rock is authentic. It is here. Here’s an image of a rock, buy it for $300,000 and that’s what you’ve got. A reporter for the New York Times unironically minted an NFT of an article that he wrote on minting NFTs and it sold for $560,000. The founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, he did an NFT of his first tweet granted — this is one that it makes sense to me. It sold for just under $3 million. I get it’s interesting and it’s an original digital copy of his first tweet, but the valuation I think of some of these is really unbelievable where I think it makes sense and where I start to see the value of it is that I found one place on the web that provides you with an NFT to rare liquors. So if you are a collector of rare or expensive liquors, you can buy an NFT but it is attached to a real bottle of liquor sitting in a vault somewhere and if you ever want to give up that NFT to be able to drink that rare liquor, then you’ve got it and I can understand that.

I also understand that Adidas is also doing an NFTs. You can buy access to digital image of animals wearing Adidas gear which I think, “Okay, I don’t want to spend $3,000 just on an image of that,” but it gives you the rights to physical gear, gives you the rights to other merchandise at no additional cost, so I sort of get that too. I don’t get the escalation in prices because some of the stuff here I think has been priced wildly out of value and that’s kind of why I’m on the very anti-NFT side of this discussion today.

Dennis Kennedy: Right, and I think that’s where people say we’re at the top of the hype cycle, definitely on the investment side because so there’s sort of a couple of factors at work here.

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So you can say the first artist who sold an NFT at auction, you can say I can see how that has extra value and it could maintain value. I personally want to buy it, but I could see that somebody who invests in art could see the value of that. Other things, it starts to make less and less sense and so you have this market for these things that seems like people are just making tons of money, so everybody should jump in so you have the gold rush piece of it and then people who bought cryptocurrency where they’ve made tons and tons of money are buying NFTs with crypto. So it sort of feels like play money and they’re saying I’m in a market right now as we sit here where we’re all afraid to look at how our retirement portfolios are doing. We know that interest rates are essentially zero and people would say, I’ll take a chance on something that, yeah it might go down even though I’ve never seen it go down, but it could go up in value like many times over, so why the heck not do this?

And so I think we’re going to have that shakeout. It’s almost like they cannot help to be a shakeout of that and that’s why I think we’re at the point where you say, “I really kind of want to dig down into this and see what makes sense.”  You know, if I’m an art investor, then I’m diversifying my art investment portfolio in some ways. If I do other things, you know if I’m a collector, it’s just like another category of collection like baseball cards, Beanie Babies and those things. So I think that’s where we’re at this weird space where the investment hype has kind of surprisingly exceeded even the technology hype.

Tom Mighell: Well, you know I think you’re right. Here’s where I think it makes sense. You know, with digital art and we’re just talking about art, you know songs, artwork, written pieces of work, those types of things, you know in general, a copy is literally as good as the original. I mean for all intents and purposes having a copy, I don’t care that I have a song that I listen to on Spotify. I don’t need a person, one that the artist deems is original to feel special because I’m not that kind of buyer. But for artists, you can sell work that there might not be a market for because you can find a market that’s like that and what’s interesting about NFTs is and what we haven’t talked about is that if someone purchases an NFT of your work and then they sell it down the road, you get a cut of that. You get a percentage of what that is. So you won’t just make money from one sale. You’ll make money from all the sales if the person who bought it or anybody that buys it continues to profit off themselves, you profit as well. So I like that idea that the artists still continues to profit from it no matter what happens to it down the road.

If you’re a buyer, the benefit of NFTs is you are able to financially support artists that you like. Is that you are the fans and this is a way to be the super fans and to say, “I like you this much that I’m willing to do that much.”  I will not ever be that person, so I don’t get it but there are people like that out there. Dennis, like you said if people are collectors then NFTs work like any other speculative asset and you hope that that value increases over time and you have the opportunity to buy and sell those things just like you would any other investment over time. So I get that and it shows that in terms of hype, the report just came out over the past week that the amount of NFT sales in 2021 was over $17 billion and I don’t expect that’s going to change anytime soon. So I think that it is right at the right point of the hype cycle where I expect it to be.

But let me talk and what’s interesting is there’s two areas that I think are problems and I want you to maybe comment on these two Dennis. I think that there’s two issues with NFTs. One of them is that in order to mint an NFT, you are essentially having to mine Bitcoin or mine Ethereum it’s what it’s based on, another cryptocurrency, and there are not insignificant risks to the environment by creating an NFT.

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Tom Mighell: There are not insignificant risks to the environment by creating an NFT. Right now, it has a large carbon footprint. I understand that they are working on ways to reduce that, but right now it takes up a lot of energy just to create an NFT. So if you are a fan of the environment, NFTs may not be for you. That’s kind of hard to conceptualize, so maybe let’s talk about the other one instead which is Dennis, you talk about how the authenticity helps counterfeiting, but it does not prevent fraud. And there’s a ton of fraud going on right now in the NFT world where dealers are minting NFTs to works with digital media that they do not own. They don’t own the work, but they are minting the NFT, and then they publish it on the blockchain, and guess what? The blockchain says it’s authentic.

So well, this must be the right person. It’s causing a lot of problems right now, and I hope that it’s going to get worked out and I see that some of these communities that deal in NFTs are policing it or are trying to find ways to deal with it. But the fact that you might wind up buying an NFT that the person who sold it to you is not really the digital artist, is at least somewhat of a concern right now.

Dennis Kennedy: We can kind of go too deep on this. Typically, the answers to some of those things are like, well, there’s $17 billion, but there are trillions of dollars in mutual funds. So we’re really talking about. It’s very small investment class. The environmental things, well, let’s look at what the oil companies and the coal companies are doing to the environment in comparison, and maybe that’s a better place to focus our attention. There are different ways to look at this, obviously. And I think there is a concern these days that one of the attractive things about NFTs for artists in the beginning was that there’s nobody in the whole world who’s been victimized more in the era of the Internet than artists who’ve had their digital versions of everything they’ve done copied, and other people use them in a variety of different ways. And so maybe the NFTs kind of help artists at least be paid for the stuff that they do, but as you mentioned, the fraudsters and scammers out there have really up their game and they’ve taken advantage of this, so maybe some of those things will start to equalize over time. But unfortunately, in the web these days, we live in the world of fraud and scams, and anything new becomes ripe ground for that.

But I want to touch on two things before we kind of talk maybe about what lawyers need to know. One of the things that’s intrigued me lately is that I’ve been reading and I’ve learned that most of the world’s most expensive art. So like the stuff that sells for $50 million, $100 million, the van goes, all those things are actually kept in these warehouse facilities in Geneva, Switzerland, and they’re so valuable, so expensive to ensure, so difficult to keep in the right environmental conditions and everything that they basically are in these warehouses and owners typically don’t look at them and when they sell things, it’s really like the title certificates are being exchanged. So in a way, NFTs kind of oddly duplicate what’s going on in the real world in art.

And then the other example I like to use when I think of NFTs, this goes to your bottle of scotch example as well, is that I own an electric guitar that’s autographed by Bruce Springsteen and I have something that was printed on a color inkjet printer that is signed by someone that says, “This is an authentic Bruce Springsteen signature on this,” and every time I look at it I go, as long as somebody believes that but if I got that signed guitar and I had an NFT that was associated with it that showed inconclusively demonstrated by showing what happened and memorialize that on a blockchain, then I would feel really good about the authenticity of that, and anybody who want to buy it from me, if I ever wanted to sell it, would also feel good about that.

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So it’s that authentication piece documenting the chain of title, those sorts of things that I think become interesting in the NFT world. We don’t hear as much about that because everything is about how much money people are making and will Tom and Dennis mint their own NFT for the podcast and make millions of dollars. But I think we’re at the point where you sort of want to look at the practical examples. So time to get practical. I mean, I sort of think we always on these new technologies come back to what does this mean for technology competence, but where are we with this and what are the ramifications for lawyers these days with NFT’s?

Tom Mighell: Well, I mean, the idea of NFTs touches so many different areas of the law right now. We’ve talked about several just during this discussion, copyright law, intellectual property has something to do with it. NFTs can easily become part of a family law community estate. They can become part of your probate estate and have to be dealt with there. There are clearly because they are investments, there will be some finance laws that probably come into play somewhere, and because there’s fraud, I’m assuming criminal law comes into play at this place.

There’s a lot of legal angles here that lawyers are going to have to pay attention and at some level, be aware that these things exist. I mean, as a digital asset that has value, I think that family lawyers and probate lawyers are going to be the ones who really need to pay attention to this, because it’s a tricky way to think about it, and I think that more and more people are going to wind up having it as part of their estate or part of their division of property, and I really think that that’s going to be sooner than later for some people.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, there’s going to be tax issues, lots of regulatory issues. I don’t think we’ve seen the full creativity come into play here, like we were talking before the podcast, I had a conversation with somebody who’s in the political world who was looking at NFTs as a way to raise money for campaigns in a very anonymous way that I’m not sure that existing laws would prevent. So you have a number of those things. People have looked at NFTs as ways to do financing of new businesses. So there’s a lot of other things out there. So I think there’s going to be some areas where it comes into play, and there are in what I’ll call the younger generation, there is a fairly large percentage of young people who are experimenting with buying NFTs. So they aren’t necessarily dying, but you can kind of see that in the family law, the estate planning area that you’re going to see that, and I think it’s definitely an area, I think if you’re a lawyer who practices in almost any area, you just want to have some awareness and you shouldn’t be surprised I would say within the next year or so that you would be asked questions or have issues come up.

So I think we sort of answered the question of like, should you invest? Well, it depends on your risk tolerance, right? But I don’t think you’re going to see Tom and I running into it, although I’m kind of interested in the companies that provide as in the Gold Rush era, the companies that provide tools. Should you mint your own NFT? It’s actually a very complicated process that you have to get other people involved in and own Ethereum and do some other things to do that. So I guess the big question Tom is, this is out here and we could teach people even more if they want to buy this fabulous new NFT that we mint for a million dollars. But other than that, kind of where do you think you would direct people to learn more about NFTs?

Tom Mighell: I’m going to leave that to you because you may have some sources that I’m not aware of. I want to cover two things, I want to talk about future uses of NFTs, things that haven’t started yet, but things that are possible. So we’ve talked about creating NFTs of digital artwork, but think about some of these that to me, some of them I’m having trouble even considering.

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But think about this, whether we’ll see fragmentation of NFTs selling a part of it you can’t afford that 69-million-dollar Beeple people artwork, but maybe you could own a share of it like stock. Digital twins there have been people who predicted that all consumer products will have an NFT in the future linking that physical item to a digital NFT will have some authenticity guarantees to the physical item. There are something called intelligent NFTs. NFTs that are given an AI personality that you can talk with them, learn new things, they change their personality, they live on the blockchain. That’s kind of crazy.

Medical NFTs allow you to own and monetize your own personal medical information. What a horrific thought that you could actually do that, considering how private that information is, but you can create an NFT out of your medical information in the future. And then the last one is a well-being NFT. Connect your NFT to all sorts of fitness apps. The more you exercise, the more you meditate, the more you get good sleep, the better you eat, the more the value of your NFT increases. So, these are just a couple of the ways that people are theorizing that NFPs could evolve over the next few years and even though they still don’t make me anymore intrigued to actually go into one, I’m definitely interested to see what happens with them.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah, there’s so much creativity out there that’s just starting to be discussed. And our friend Marty Schwimmer once recently asked the question of like, “What if I had an NFT associated with my house that I sold it and like each time the house was sold in the future, me or my estate would get a piece of that sale so I would get the appreciation.”  Which is kind of an interesting thing if you’re a creator, can I do something where I continue to get the appreciation out of what I produce instead of the seller? That led to the question of like, what if I had — when I bought a house, I had there was an NFT associated with it and that proved up the chain of title. And so, I didn’t have to get title insurance or anything anymore. So, just kind of theoretical conceptual things but you look at that.

So, there are a number of places, and so you’re going to see more of those. There are good videos, there are some podcasts. I look at anything that Laura Shin is doing, and she said who writes a lot on crypto and has a new book out called ‘The Cryptopians’ and she used to be at one of the big venture capital companies. So, there are some things out there, and you just kind of want to get a good overview. I think this is one of these technologies whereas a lawyer, you don’t need to dive deep into the underlying technology. You just kind of want to understand the implications and then learn more as you need it, is sort of where I feel. But it is super new and there’s a lot of hype out there. So, you want to look for people who’ve been around it and I think the venture capital podcasts and videos and stuff, they do a good job of explaining it. And then you want to look to some of the Coinbase and some of the other long-standing crypto resources and marketplaces for information on that, but you got to be critical in what you read. So, Tom bullish, bearish, or —

Tom Mighell: Why don’t you start and I will finish it out.

Dennis Kennedy: I’m bearish in the short term, bullish in the long term, but I think we’re going to see the real value of NFTs coming from things that we don’t see right now.

Tom Mighell: So, I would be more bullish if we were seeing work that deserve to be celebrated making the money that it’s making. But you know, that Depo Print, it made more than a Monet painting and I’m sorry, it’s not that great. It’s not that great of print. I think some people are treating NFTs like they’re the future of fine art collecting, which means playground for the mega rich. Some people are treating NFTs like their Pokemon cards which makes them more accessible to normal people but also to the mega rich. So, I think I embarrassed for myself. I’m just not an investor and I think, what it comes down to me ultimately is, I work really hard for clients throughout the year and some guy can draw five pictures of a rock and make multiple times X of what I’m making through the year. And there just seems something wrong about that.

(00:35:01)

So, I’m intrigued to see where everything goes, but ultimately, I weep at how people can make so much money to do so little. It’s just amazing where we are today.

Dennis Kennedy: And which is Tom’s plea for our audience to beg us to pay us a million dollars to create an NFT.

Tom Mighell: But that’s true. If anybody here is willing to pay us that money for an NFT, I will jump into that pool today. In the meantime, though, let’s take a quick break for a message from our sponsor before we move on to our next segment.

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Tom Mighell: And now let’s get back to The Kennedy-Mighell Report. I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy. And it’s time for another segment of Hot or Not. We pick a tech topic in the news and decide whether it’s hot or not. We’ll probably not agree in our assessment, but it’s a fun way to hear our perspectives on tech topics. So, we recently had another Apple product announcement, and there are more consumer tech product announcements on the horizon. We also saw new legal tech announcements at ABA TECHSHOW in Legalweek 22. Tom, do any of these announcements turning our heads anymore or just part of the general landscape that we’re driving by? So, how high our actual tech product announcements anymore?

Tom Mighell: I don’t have a ton to say about this, Dennis. I’m going to say the heat level here is a necessary level. I think it used to be that when the major tech companies and I’m thinking more consumer technology, not necessarily legal technology. When they made announcements of new products it was huge news. It was something that everyone stopped and they all went to go watch the announcement. Not to say that a lot of people still don’t watch announcements these days, but I would say that the temperature and the level of interest on watching those announcements has decreased with time. Maybe it’s because there are just so many announcements and we see this happening all the time and we’ve kind of gotten tired of seeing them. But the Apple made announcement, the stuff that they announced looks really cool. Looks really great stuff. So, there’s no denying that the stuff is great although not all tech announcements are great. I would say a lot of legal technology announcements are to me not that interesting, but that’s where I get to where it’s a necessary level of heat, which is I think it’s necessary. I think they have to make tech announcements.

If you are not making an announcement about a new technology, you’re not relevant. You’re not evolving as a company. You’re not listening to your customers. And so, despite the fact that it’s not really that interesting to me. I think it’s something that companies need to do; they need to make these announcements, they need to show here’s what we’re doing as an organization to what’s the next new thing for us, how are we continuing to serve our customers and get better and do cool new things. So, for me that heat level I would say is a good steady one but nothing burning. Dennis?

Dennis Kennedy: So, what I found and Tom you knew that when I saw this new Mac Studio, I told you like, “Oh, my God it’s so amazing.”  You often say on these announcements that they are evolutionary, not revolutionary. I feel like the temperature has gone down in this and part of it is because nothing does seem revolutionary more.

(00:40:00)

It feel like it’s all really cool. I think part of it is we wouldn’t know what revolutionary was if we saw it anymore, you know, sort of my question. Like when I saw what the Mac Studio is doing by kind of zippering these two processors together, I had this sense that that was something pretty amazing, but I can’t really comprehend that because that’s not where my interest in technology is. In the legal tech side, I sort of feel like we’re in this thing where you’re right, people are now seeing products and they’re talking about features and stuff and there’s nothing that feels compelling and I think it goes back to we’ve reached this point in technology where even basic technology is pretty darn close to magic compared to what we used to have and the features have become so esoteric that we don’t really understand improvements, you know like so this is 80% faster than something else. I don’t really even know what that means anymore or why I would care about it. And so I’m more interested in like say, what are the benefits of this? What are the outcomes I can expect? How does this make my life easier? And in the product announcement world with videos and all this is cool stuff, you kind of leave with the feeling like I don’t know what the benefit I have and this is super cool, but I don’t know why I would want to spend thousands of dollars on this.

So I think I go to a cooler thing that it’s kind of cool off and I’m not sure how it would heat up again. So it’s just kind of we’re in an interesting place these days on what we take for granted with technology and what’s going to make us feel like we’re seeing something magical again. So now it’s time for our parting shots, at Onetip website, our observation you can use the second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell: I’m going to go to a tip that I wonder if maybe I’m the last person to know about this and if I am, then duh on me, but I would bet that a lot of you don’t know about it and that is, are you aware of using super paste on Windows and Windows getting super paste means that you hit the Windows key and V and it brings up a box and it brings up a box that contains the last, I don’t know, 15 or 20 things that you copied to your clipboard. So that if you copied a password and then, “Oh my gosh, I need it later and I’d already copied and pasted five more things,” you can still go back and get it. Now, it’s always safe to have those passwords on the clipboard, so maybe a good idea to clear that every now and again. But guess what, you can clear the clipboard from the super paste but it also has places for emojis, for symbols, for GIFs – okay, sorry that’s GIFs is the correct pronunciation of it, but it has all sorts of other things that you can search for and then copy and paste from that clipboard. It’s a super easy thing to do. I didn’t realize it had all that stuff that was out there, but it’s really cool. And you can also, if you go into your Windows settings and go to system and then clipboard, select clipboard to sink and it will sink that clipboard across all of your Windows’ devices if that so interest you. So kind of a cool feature that I had never known about.

Dennis Kennedy: Yeah. I think it’s one of those things that from time to time, it’s just like a nice where you say I copied something and then I got distracted and I copied something else and they say, “Oh darn it, now I have to go back.”  This can be really helpful and also I think that I used to do 60 tips. One of my tips was like to learn like the stuff you can do with the Windows key — I guess it’s the Mac key or the command key on a Mac. But there are a number of things there that you don’t have to learn them all, but there’s a couple of things that can be really useful. So, what I have is, you know we live in this world where things come up and we don’t know anything about them. And you can go on Twitter where you know people who are experts on, virology yesterday are now experts on the Ukraine and on World War III. Today and tomorrow, they’ll be experts on something else.

So it’s hard to get great information on things but sometimes you just want to know the history or some basic science and things like that and there’s been a company that’s been around for a while. It used to be called Great Courses, now they’ve changed their name to Wondrium, so W-O-N-D-R-I-U-M. So they have these courses that are taught by professors who are really great teachers in their video and audio courses and you can go deep on the topic or you can learn some specific things. So say you want to learn about recent Ukrainian history, there’s definitely going to be a course that would allow you to do that and you can actually probably just go right to the class of something that you wanted to learn and they’ve been doing this for a long time, so there’s a lot of great courses.

(00:45:15)

They also have a newsletter called Great Courses Daily that kind of gives you some access to — the Wondrium is paid thing and it’s very reasonable, like about $200 a year. And the Great Courses’ newsletter will give you access to some sample lectures and there’s some pretty cool things available for free right now, but like a nice update and it kind of reminds you like, “Oh, here’s an area where I once knew something and I’d like to learn more. I like to refresh my memory of that.”  It’s a really useful tool especially these days where you realize you don’t know as much as you thought you did about geography or history or virology. So highly recommended.

Tom Mighell: And so, that wraps it up for this edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Network’s page for our show. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or on the Legal Talk Network site where you can find archives of all of our previous podcasts along with transcripts. If you would like to get in touch with us, you can reach out to us on LinkedIn or Twitter or leave us a voicemail. That voice mail number is (720) 441-6820. So, until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy: And I’m Dennis Kennedy, and you’ve been listening to The Kennedy-Mighell Report, a podcast on legal technology with an Internet focus. If you like what you heard today, please rate us in Apple Podcasts, and we’ll see you next time for another episode with The Kennedy-Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

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Outro: Thanks for listening to The Kennedy-Mighell Report. Check out Dennis and Tom’s book, “The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart ways to Work Together” from ABA books or Amazon and join us every other week for another edition of The Kennedy-Mighell Report only on the Legal Talk Network.

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