Second Brain Project: The Daily Me

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Web 2.0 innovation collaboration software, metadata 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 363 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 turned the tables on our usual perspectives on generative ai as Tom became the bullish one and I became the bearish one at least for one episode or maybe even a little longer. Check out this episode for new insights and new dynamics. In this episode, we decided it’s time to revisit our second brain project in a sort of focused kind of way and look at one of my thorniest issues, which is how to create and manage a focus feed of information that I can return to on a regular basis. It’s often been called Creating a Daily Me. If you go back through the history of the internet, I’m ready to take another crack at the issue and thought it would be good just to get Tom’s thoughts and add them to my thoughts and see what the audience thinks. Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell:

Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy my report, we will indeed be taking an updated look at our Second Brain project this time figuring out whether the idea of the Daily Me is attainable with our current technology stack, or if something more is needed in the second segment, our old friend chat, GPT, is back to ask us a question that it has generated from our audience’s point of view. 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, we wanted to revisit our second brain project with a specific area of focus that Dennis says that it has been known as on the internet, the Daily Me. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that terminology other than when Dennis mentions it himself.

So I’m just going to say that Dennis is calling it The Daily Me and for purposes of this podcast, that’s fine. For those of you who might not be up to speed on our Second Brain project, here’s a quick update. Dennis and I have been undertaking a journey to define what we call our second brain, that source where we can collect information, curate it, search it, and make use of it as we need it. It’s where we offload all the things that are important to us and either come back to us when we want to write things, when we want to use it, when we just want to refer to it. It’s called a second brain because it takes the place of our first brain, the stuff that we don’t want to put or can’t hold in our first brain. We’ve both selected tools that serve as our second brain.

In our case, we’re both using Notion, but there are many products out there that are useful for this purpose. And in this episode we want to ask the question, how do we get information that we want to put into our second brain? How do we get it to come to us? How do we get the information that comes to us? We’ve talked about this a little bit in general when we talked about collecting information for the Second Brain, but I think we want to dig a little bit deeper into that. And Dennis, I think that we can both a hundred percent agree that the Daily Me part of this project is super difficult. You, I guess let’s start by talking about what we mean by the Daily me and then I think we can discuss why it’s so difficult and what we are thinking about doing to address it.

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, as I get older, my memory does slip, but I do think the Daily Me goes back quite a whi. But the idea is that, and this is like the basic RSS concept news that comes to you. So I want to have a feed that pulls together everything that’s out there that I want to come to me, bring it into one place, and then I see it as my sort of personalized view of the news and information that I want to see. So rather than the daily newspaper you sometimes it’s been called The Daily Me, and so it has potential benefits. Then I have this information that I want that comes to me, but it also means that I silo myself. And the downside is that I only see what I think that I want to see unless I put some sort of random element in just to kind of spice up what I get. And so you can see the benefits and the potential negatives of this, but that is the concept where it’s less that I’m going out to find stuff, but I’m bringing the stuff that I have previously found that’s going to be updated on a regular basis and bring it into the place so I don’t have to keep going out and finding things all the time. Does that make sense?

Tom Mighell:

It makes sense. I don’t really have any elaborations for that. I don’t think that I have any other thing to think about. I mean, and of course the way you described it, it sounds like the tool just made for that is readily available. I mean, it sounds like we can just start using the Daily Me immediately, and I will admit I just am not familiar with the concept being used on the internet. But sure enough, and I’m going to put in the show notes, Nicholas Negroponte defined the term the Daily Me back in 2009. So it’s been around for a while and I’ll put a link to the Wikipedia article. So for those of you like me who might not have been familiar with the concept, you can read more about it. I was

Dennis Kennedy:

Going to say it goes back to the notion of the daily newspaper. So you’d say like, oh, I get this newspaper and I have this information, and the newspaper comes to me and is curated in some way and I rely on that for information and I have some confidence about that. And then you say like, oh, would it even better if I could personalize that even more? So I had it arranged the way I wanted and focused on the things that I wanted. And so that’s that sort of daily me part of it where you say, I would just like when I get up in the morning like the newspaper or maybe in the evening I could just take a look at this stuff that comes to me that will be stuff that I’m interested in. It is not layered over in ads and has all these other things and click bid headlines and all these other things that we live with these days. And that would be just such a great thing. It’d be like my own personal newspaper or magazine that was just there ready for me and it was created for me. And so we’ve had different approaches over the years that have worked. And I think you say, as you said earlier, I think it feels like there are many potential solutions out there, but I just sort of feel they don’t work. I don’t know whether that’s a me thing or that’s something else, but I sort of find it more of a universal problem.

Tom Mighell:

Well, I think it’s absolutely true. I mean, I’ll ask you right now, what do you use for your Daily Me? Do you have a daily Me?

Dennis Kennedy:

I don’t. I’m just going to a bunch of different places.

Tom Mighell:

That’s right, that’s right. And so we’ll go to the next question in your outline, which is why is this so difficult? I’ll talk about why I think it’s difficult. I think that me, part of that is a difficult part because obviously the ME is going to be different for everyone. Everyone’s going to have their different idea of what is important to them, what they want to see and how they want to see it. But I think frankly that there are other factors that also make it difficult if not more difficult. One is the source material. Where is the information coming from? There are so many places that we would want to have information coming to us from everywhere. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed or really hard to keep up with the places. If we find multiple places all over the place, we got to keep up with that.

I remember there was a time when the internet first happened, I kept a folder of websites that was sort of a version of the Daily me and I would visit all 20 websites every day to see what was new there or updated and it took an hour or more to do it. It was terrible. It was not good. Here’s the other notion, which is around the idea of the 20 websites that I used to visit. One is that is publication. Ideally we would want a Daily Me to be on a dashboard. I think you’ve mentioned that many times before. One place where we can go see everything we want. We have compared it in the past to my Yahoo, which I was sort of shocked to realize that it’s still available. There is still my Yahoo page that I have set up that I can go look at.

And frankly, that’s ideal. That’s a great thing because you can have little widgets and you can put this in a widget and that in a widget, but the widgets are limited because my Yahoo was not forward-thinking enough to say, let’s make this somebody’s daily me. And it certainly hasn’t gotten enough money or budget or any type of love and attention to make it grow over. This is an old website. I wouldn’t go to my Yahoo unless you want to catch something there. But that would serve, I think the first problem. It would be the place to put all the sources you want all in one place. I’m not aware that there are any current tools out there that do that. I don’t think that anybody, there has been a loss of interest in how can we aggregate information like this in a way, unless we are coders and we want to create our own tool. I don’t know of a easy to create, hey, it creates your own daily Me. We’ve made it easy to plug in the APIs from all of these websites and create your own dashboard. I have not seen anything like that.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I mean there’s a couple of things out there and I think that my Yahoo model is still feels like it is what I have in mind. I just go to one, I just have one URLI go to, information is updated. I choose the things I want. I have it by categories. It’s great. I can look at it in some limited amount of time. It’s like the daily newspaper, but totally personalized. And so there are a number of things. So it is like my interests are different than yours, so I can’t really just replicate what you’re doing. And then we have all these things we like, oh, there’s stuff in Twitter. Everybody is doing some email newsletter, by the way, the MSU, center for Law Technology Innovation, new Emails, newsletter coming out, be more information about that. But I think that there’s so many sources and it’s so easy to just grab things and say, oh, I’ll subscribe. And it comes down I think a lot to discipline and I just can’t do it. And somebody could say to me like, oh, your problem is you just subscribe to so many newsletters and feeds. Just don’t do that. And I think it’s so easy these days to just do it when it comes to adding more information or subscribing and just don’t do it is actually really a hard thing to do

Tom Mighell:

Well, and it doesn’t solve the problem either because just don’t do it makes a lot of sense to stop the overwhelm that you’re getting too much. But it doesn’t solve the problem of, oh, now I don’t do it. So I’m potentially not getting information to me with the Daily Me and with all the different places that I might find information, there’s a little bit of the FOMO there, which is there a source that I haven’t subscribed to that I might be missing something on? And I need to subscribe to all these newsletters because never know when the day will come that this week I’m going to get just everything that I really need and I’ve been waiting for and it’s really great stuff. So I need to subscribe to all of them. Now I think discipline really comes into that because, and we’ll talk more about this later, but the way that I usually manage it is I will find something, I’ll subscribe to it, but I will give it a period of time to show value to me.

And if it doesn’t show that value after a period of time, I’m deleting it and I’m unsubscribing to it. So I’m not just going to let them all pile up. And we’ll talk about how I do that a little bit later. But I do think that in the absence of a tool that can help us aggregate all of this, our primary option is going to be discipline, is to be able to manage in a smart way using either a limited set of tools or well, I think that’s really where we’re headed to it, using a limited set of tools, how to control the flow of information of the stuff that we want to see

Dennis Kennedy:

Or just decide to be boring. So you could say that’s

Tom Mighell:

Also a possibility.

Dennis Kennedy:

Like a year and a half ago I didn’t have any feeds, probably any meaningful number of feeds on generative ai. It didn’t really exist. So now I have tons of that stuff and it’s important to me. I wouldn’t have known that in the past. So I think we set out the problem that we’re trying to deal with. And then I started to think about a time in terms of what this sort of notion of thinking of the ideal end in mind approach and say, well, what is it that if I were actually able to accomplish what I think I want to do, what would it look like and what is the purpose of this? And can I use that notion to maybe help refine what it is that I want? And then I ran into this other brick wall that I think is really difficult, which is I think I needed to start where I am at now.

So even my Yahoo is not a bad end in mind where there’s one place I go to and I see this stuff and it’s updated, but to get there, I said, I actually kind of have to see where I am right now. And that means these dreaded words like auditing and measuring. And the thing I think about is there’s so much stuff in so many different places and the measure I do is like this is going to take me so much time to just figuring out what’s going on and just to figure out where I am now, and then it’s another big step to get it into the form that I want. So I don’t know if that’s part of your experience as well, Tom.

Tom Mighell:

So it’s less of my experience and I’ll say that’s because I get the sense and I’m only guessing based on what I’ve heard you talk about is that your information consumption is very much the fire hydrant that it is coming at you from multiple locations and you just bring it all in and you don’t necessarily do anything about it. There was one point in time where we discussed how many Unlistened podcasts you had that you were never going to listen to. It was never going to happen. You were physically incapable of doing it after a certain period of time. You would never finish them even if you lived for another a hundred years. That’s one place that we’re a little bit different is I feel like, and again, we’re can talk about this after we take a break, but I feel like even though it’s not ideal, I have my system relatively in hand. It makes me comfortable and without something out there that is better without a tool that can help me organize this, this is sort of the good enough that I’m happy with. So I can see that if there are other individuals out there who like to capture lots of information and are doing that and want to figure out how to get it under control, I get how it might seem like it’s an insurmountable project for you to have to deal with. So I get it. I just don’t have the same experience.

Dennis Kennedy:

And I think it’s one of those things where you, and I think this is the same thing with any tech or data project is that you say, why am I doing this thing? Why am I taking where I’m at to start this? And maybe this is the question to ask and then we go to break and maybe pick it up after that time. But maybe I just start fresh and just say, declare daily, meet bankruptcy and restart and say, what are the feeds that I really want? What are the podcasts I really want? Even though it’s a big time commitment, the payoff could be much bigger because then I don’t have a bunch of legacy stuff that’s coming to me and I don’t have all these newsletters that I suspect have really great stuff in them that I never read anymore. So many coming into my inbox.

Tom Mighell:

Well, I will give my personal opinion to the idea that when anybody recommends that you declare any type of technological bankruptcy, it is not a good idea. I hate the idea of any kind of technological bankruptcy. Email bankruptcy is a terrible idea unless the only bankruptcy you’re declaring is your personal email that you only deal with personally and you don’t care what happens otherwise, if you do not ever declare email bankruptcy for work declaring daily me bankruptcy from your standpoint means you’re going to have to start from scratch thinking what’s valuable to you. I would, and we’ll talk about this in a minute, I would prefer to come from a place of curation and of cleaning and pruning. And if we do a Marie Kondo, what gives you joy? If we do that type of cleaning out, I think that that’s preferable to bankruptcy. It’s more of, I don’t know what the right analogy is, but I think that it is a kinder, gentler way of dealing with it than just cutting it all off and starting again from scratch. But that doesn’t really answer the question. We will get closer to answers and see if we can figure out for both of us what the daily me looks like. Well, we got to take a break and we will take a quick break for a word from our sponsors and then we’ll be back to discuss more about this.

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back, Tom, how about we solve this problem? Can we solve it ourselves or do we hope that somebody like Elon Musk will solve the problem for us? He solves my Twitter problem.

Tom Mighell:

I wish a tool would come out that would talk about this. And I am, so we talk about on this podcast a lot that the tool shouldn’t come first, but I really in this case feel like the tool has to be, there has to be one tool to unite it all, one tool to be able to bring all of this together and there just isn’t in a way that’s satisfying. So the approach that I’ve decided to take on this is to standardize on the fewest number of tools possible to make sure that I am not going to lots of places every day, so I’m not going to 20 websites every day and looking at things. So for me, and then I think the other piece is is that if I don’t go to everything every day, if I don’t catch up on things, it’s not the end of my world.

I think another piece of the Daily Me is you don’t want to feel like you’re missing out on something. So don’t just make sure that when you have the time, when you have the energy, when you have the inclination, then dip into your Daily me and see what you have. And so for me, the stack looks like this. I think Feedly is the main place for that. We’ve talked about this for years. That RSS is news that comes to you. We’ve talked about that the whole time. It’s the closest thing to the Magic Daily Me that you can get. But because you can say, here are the sources that I want. And Feedly is great because it has artificial intelligence. You can set up feeds with searched terms and have things come to you. So you don’t just rely on the RSS feeds that another website has set up.

You can actually get other things brought to you that might be useful. So that’s one way to capture it. I also will find that for those of you again who use Android phones, this is more of an Android thing than anything else, but Google News on an Android phone is a daily me. It has learned who I am. It learns what I like to do, it learns what I like to look at and it provides me every day. All I have to do is swipe right on my home screen on my phone and I get a daily feed of things that are interesting and useful to me. So that’s actually, if I’m going to scroll anything, and it’s not long, it takes me a few minutes just to scroll through, see if there’s anything interesting new for the day. So I am a huge believer in that that will not, I’m sure pry all of the iPhone users away from their iPhones, but it is a great way to get that information.

I think Apple News Plus also provides a great news experience too, but I don’t know that it’s quite as customized as what Google does. I have moved all of my email newsletters to a dedicated app for that. I use Stoop Inbox. And what it does is is that it is a newsletter consumption tool and they all go there. So I don’t keep ’em in my email. If it gets in my email, I’m never going to read it. However, if it goes into stoop inbox, it’s just like reading other things that I read on my iPad and I just have that as another. I go through my newsletters every day and it’s quick and easy to get to them. Social media, I should consult social media sites, but I don’t anymore. That’s just not part of it. And then the one tool that really could unite everything, but I think it’s really positioned a little further down in the chain of our second brain that we’re talking about is read wise, and we’ve talked about Read Wise a lot here, but Read Wise can aggregate a lot of different tools.

They will do RSS feeds, they will do articles you read, you can upload PDF files, you can put Tweet threads in there too or posts, whatever we want to call them. It will put YouTube videos in there. You can add videos there. It’s a great aggregator. But the thing is is it doesn’t aggregate itself. It’s something you have to populate itself. So it’s really not in that whole Daily Me category. It’s more of the how do we organize the stuff that you find that’s important. But those are my tools. Those are the things that I use on a more or less daily basis to consume. If I don’t get around to all of them my day, I’m okay with that. So that feels like it’s manageable for me, but your Mighellage may vary. So Dennis, how does that compare for you? Well, how might you solve the problem and what are you thinking about doing?

Dennis Kennedy:

What I’m doing now is looking at Feedly, which I use and have used for many years. I’m looking at Apple Notes as a way to capture some other things and then moving things into Notion and then using the Notion AI tools to generate summaries and tags for me. So that’s the direction I’m leaning. And then hoping that Feedly can be one repository that it would be easy to move things out of. And we’ve talked in the past time about using that little share arrow we find on our phones and elsewhere these days and just moving things into Notion. I also use this notion add in that if there’s a website that I want or an article I want, I can pull it right into it to Notion Notebook. And so I’m looking at it a Notion Notebook as being the place that ends it. I’m also looking at to see whether AI can help us or help me.

So the one thing I found that AI is not helpful at is if I just ask it to in a bunch of different ways to help me solve this problem, it just doesn’t come up with anything that really, really helps me. But there is a piece of ai, but there are aspects of ai, especially summaries and other things that have become really interesting to me. And one thing I’m looking at a lot is if this, then that, which we’ve talked about at different times and even though some of, again, I’ll go back to Twitter, I had these great if this then that things that the APIs got broken on, but if I can use if this and that to kind of aggregate things from different places and then output it to a document, an email that’s like it’s my own newsletter or to send it to different places and then save those things into notion, use the AI tools.

That becomes really interesting to me. And I have the suspicion, although I don’t use it yet, that the Microsoft once copilot becomes integrated in a lot of things might also be a way to optimize this. But I think the thing is getting things in then getting them into Notion and then using the AI in notion to help me. That’s the flow I’m looking at, but I sort of feel that there’s some missing gaps and like you said, Tom, there’s this part of me that says the podcast thing when I hear something new, this is your thing as well. I hear something new and I go like, oh, I’d like to listen to that episode or maybe listen to one more. And then you have a whole bunch of podcasts in the queue and you go like, I’m never going to listen to these things.

Tom Mighell:

So what I’ve been doing with podcasts, and I can’t remember if we’ve talked about this on the podcast on our podcast before, but what I’ve been doing is if I like the podcast, I’m doing one of two things. There’s one podcast I listen to that does very, very detailed show notes and I’m going and I’m capturing those show notes and putting them directly into Notion and putting them into read wise so that I can search them and do all sorts of things with them. But assuming they don’t have good show notes, I’m actually taking that recording and I’m feeding into, I’m not feeding it into copilot, but I’m feeding it because it won’t necessarily take that much audio, but I am feeding it into Microsoft Words transcription tool. And so I am transcribing it, although frankly I’ve also been using a subscription to DS script to transcribe as well, and they both do great jobs of transcription and then I just take that transcription and upload it so that I have it.

I will generally take that transcription and run it through read wise and highlight stuff that’s interesting to me. So then I’ve got my highlights and what’s important to me as part of that. So that’s generally how I keep podcasts. Now I know that there are some of those apps that we’ve talked about before that you can highlight a certain sentence or words or things that people say in a podcast and people can click on it in social media and listen to it. I never found that was particularly useful to me, but transcribing them so that I have that forever is I think really super and powerful.

Dennis Kennedy:

So the hesitation I have when you say that I am looking at a tool called, it’s like in one of these funny, the way it’s spelled is funny, so I don’t know how to pronounce it, but it’s N-O-T-T-A, but I’m looking at these AI transcription tools and part of it’s just for my own audio, like my own recordings, my own video, my classes and stuff like that to say I would just like to capture that. But part of my thing is with Notion and looking at this as a second brain that I go back to, I don’t know that I want to keep so much. I feel like it’s going to be this huge amount of stuff. So that’s why I’m saying can I do something with AI that would help me to get it more like a summary and condense what I’m doing and keep the key information and not just build up gigantic mountains of text?

And that’s why if this and that AI tools are kind of interesting because there is the ability to grab some of these things and have if this and that, do this quick little summary, keep the link and then throw it into an email that you could schedule so it gets sent to yourself. So there is just one email that comes to you or there’s a Google spreadsheet or something else like that where you just say it’s going to do the work for me and it will do it sort of automatically. And that’s the nature of the if this and that. So I’ve been looking, is there a way to do some automation and then to not have to create the second brain that’s super messy and hard to find things in by using ai, like I said with the summaries and the tags and other things like that,

Tom Mighell:

I think I would have to feel more comfortable that the summary was going to return information. That was really valuable to me because I think it’s one thing to have a summary of what that’s about, but I’ll give the example that I do. I listen to a doctor podcast talking about health and longevity and in his show notes he has lots and lots of great advice on here’s what to do here and here’s what to do there. How do I know that the AI is going to properly pull out the stuff that I want to keep track of and is not just going to say, and the doctor stresses that it is important for you to do A, B and C without actually telling me what to do. So that’s why I really haven’t taken a deeper dive into using AI to do the summaries because I need to find a better way to train the AI to do better summaries. And right now I’m not happy with that. So I might get there, but right now I’m all for the mountain of text.

Dennis Kennedy:

So two thoughts there Tom before we wrap up. So one is that I’ve created some very structured prompts to give me summaries with the outputs that I want.

Tom Mighell:

I haven’t had time to do that

Dennis Kennedy:

And so that does make a big difference, but it’s still summary stuff. So I describe it as MP three files that they’re lossy, you’re going to lose some things. It’s going to look like a good summary, but you’re going to lose some focus and some quality just because of the nature. It’s the summaries same way you do in a music file, but it will sound good enough for you. The other thing is that I’m more and more thinking if it gets me above some percentage of helping me, and I don’t know how big a percentage that has to be. It doesn’t have to be 80% good. I’m not even sure it has to be 20% of what I need, but if it just gets me something and gives me some tags and stuff, then I can go back when I’m ready to work with it and use that.

Or I can say like, oh, this is interesting. I’m now ready to dig deeper, but I don’t think I want to, especially in these days of click betting and making the headline stuff and then making you read through the entire article to get to one super simple point that you wouldn’t have read if they would’ve just structured it the same way they used to do newspaper articles. I don’t think it’s a great, it’s great just grabbing all this stuff. I think the summaries in a lot of cases are fine until you’re ready to dig more deeply. So I don’t know, that’s sort of where I am Tom, but I’m sort of feeling as we reach the end here. In a way, this episode for me is starting to feel like a large public cry for help

Tom Mighell:

A little bit, which means we’d like to hear from you. Although I would say that Dennis’s last bit of advice, which is don’t let perfect the enemy of the good is probably a good set of advice for everybody. But if any of you have ideas for the Daily Me, please let us know. You know how to find us. We’ll mention our phone number a little bit later so you can leave us a voicemail, but if you are doing something that we need to know about, please let us know. This will be an ongoing issue for us and we may talk about it in a later podcast, but now we need to take a quick break for a message from our sponsor. And now let’s get back to the Kennedy Mall. I’m Tom Mighell

Dennis Kennedy:

And I’m Dennis Kennedy. If we want to remind you to share the podcast with a friend or two that really helps us out in our new B segment, we are prompting Chad GT four, I should say. I am prompting Chad GT four in a sophisticated way to stand in for our audience and ask a question that our audience might want us to answer that would make us think and maybe push us a bit. So once again though, chat GPT has doubled up on a question to us. So here it is, with the podcast now celebrating its 18th birthday, how do you both feel the focus or direction of the show has evolved since its inception in spring 2006? Also, have you considered refreshing the show with a new intro in music or do you believe it’s important to maintain the original branding for continuity?

Tom Mighell:

So first of all, I want to say woo-hoo. Happy anniversary to the podcast. Happy to know that we are 18 years young, we’re now legal in most states, in all states. But I think the second thing I want to say is that I am still struck with how similar the tone of the chat GPT questions are to your own thinking, Dennis, it just sounds as almost as if it were coming directly from you, but I’ll trust that chat GPT asked this question. But here’s the interesting thing, I’m going to answer the second question first. I agree we need a new intro, but to be real honest, I only came to that conclusion recently because I never listened to the intro. So confession, I don’t really listen to our podcasts very often and I certainly don’t listen to the intro. I skip over it, but then I did and I realized it still says Web 2.0.

There are a bunch of technology terms and one of them is Web 2.0, which in itself is reason to get a new intro because Web 2.0 is not, I mean, it is sort of a thing, but it’s not really a thing. We’ve done a podcast on Web3 0.0. So Web 2.0 really sounds out of date at this point. So legal talk network producers, if you’re paying attention, we really need some help with refreshing that intro. As for how the podcast has evolved over the past 18 years, I went back to look at some of the episodes that we were initially doing. And I have to say I’m either embarrassed or proud to say that from my standpoint, I don’t know that we’ve changed a lot and here’s why. Well, I’m embarrassed because maybe we haven’t done much to change how we structure the podcast, but I’m proud that we know how to stick with a good thing that we know what a good formula is for doing a podcast.

I think we’ve always been talking about topics of interest to lawyers, primarily with an internet focus that hasn’t evolved. Although the tools have evolved and the ways we talk about ’em might have changed, we tend to discuss newer topics before a lot of lawyers or other podcasts are talking about them. We don’t talk about a lot of technology topics that other legal technology podcasts discuss, and I think that sets us apart to a certain extent. One thing that has definitely changed us, it changed over the past 18 years is the significant uptake in guests to the podcast. We traditionally have not had many, and I am happy that we are featuring other voices beside our own on the show. And I think while we have tended to be sort of grouchy over the years, I think our grou is evolving, maturing, although I think we tend to be consistently optimistic about the value of what technology can bring to a lawyer’s practice about as consistent as we’ve been grouchy that many lawyers out there will still be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. So I’m not answering your question very well because I sort of think about the ways in which we are still kind of doing a lot of the same thing, which I think is good. I focused a little bit more on that than what has changed. Dennis, how about you take over and talk about what you think has evolved?

Dennis Kennedy:

I find myself really agreeing with you that the premise we had for the show has really kind of stood the test of time. And it’s one of the things we tell people when they ask us about, they say, think about doing a podcast and what to think about. I always say think of it as a show first. You got to get the show format and the structure, and if you get that, then you can have the longevity with it and then you have freedom. We built this originally with the idea that we’d be free to make changes in it because of the structure that we had. And so I think that’s worked and that’s why we could seamlessly go to interview shows and other things like that because we had this existing structure. I do agree with you that we’ve gone to definitely more interview approaches, and I’m always trying to say how close to the leading edge can we stay, which I think we’ve done a really good job of.

But that’s sort of where our interests are, and that was the original idea and that the audience, our audience would be people interested in kind of skating close to the edge on topics and learning about them from us. So that’s been one of the funnest parts of the show. And I would say the focus is we might originally conceived of it as being totally focused for lawyers and legal technology. I think now we really feel free to run with our own interests in technology generally, whether we might tie it back to lawyers. I think we were really explicit about that in the beginning. Now I’m a bit less concerned about that. And then I want to talk about the intro music because I think Tom, and I don’t know if this will surprise you. I think this is a fantastic opportunity for us to try an AI tool that actually generates intro music of that gives the vibe and the style that we would like.

Tom Mighell:

I have a tool for that. So let’s talk about that. I’m excited to think about that.

Dennis Kennedy:

So now it’s time for our partying shots at One Tip website or observation. You can use the second. This podcast ends time, take it away.

Tom Mighell:

Okay. My parting shot is a totally random website that I came upon and I’m excited. I think it was in a newsletter that I read somewhere, and it’s called Power Outage Us, and it is a website that aggregates, it collects and aggregates power outages all over the country. So you can see at any given time. So as I’m looking at it right now, it tells me that currently in the United States, the state of Illinois has 7,160 customers who have the power out. It doesn’t look like there’s a lot of power outage right now in the United States, but for some reason, I’m just fascinated just clicking on the states to see what counties are having power outages and where it is. And it is constantly being updated by the services that provide this information. This may be of no use to you, or it might be something you’re interested in if you’re having power outage issues in your area, but it makes for an interesting look, power outage. Us Dennis,

Dennis Kennedy:

Tom. This illustrates the daily me so well because it is say if I had that daily me and I was just able to do a power outage US plugin, that would be so awesome a hundred and I’d see it in one place. And I would notice there were things, trends and stuff happening. So my parting shot is a little bit of a blast of the past, although it’s kind of historically important because the guy who created Unconferences and Open Space technology, Harrison Owen just passed away recently. But at Michigan State College of Law, we did an event called Revisioning Law 2024. And I decided to do it as a classic Unconference. And the Unconference notion is like what’s cool at conferences happens in the hallways and the conversations, it doesn’t happen in the sessions and on the exhibit floor. So why don’t we just do an event that just has the stuff that people like and do it as an unconference.

So we did it. We had a bunch of cool people show up, they kind of self-organized, and it was really fun. I love doing it again. And the best part for me was at the end there’s a group of people, some alumni, some people were sort of thought leader types, but sort of experienced in the world who sat down with a number of our students and just said, ask us whatever questions you have about your career or what you might do in legal technology. And they just self organized. It was such a generous thing that people did that makes me just want to keep doing unconferences forever.

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 to Networks page for our show. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes on the Legal to network site or in your podcast app of choice. If you like to keep in touch with us, reach out to us on LinkedIn. You know how to find us on LinkedIn, or as I mentioned before, we love to get your voicemails for our B segment that remember, that phone number is (720) 441-6820. If you’ve got something on the Daily Me, please let us know. 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 an Apple podcast. As always, a big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing and distributing this podcast. We’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

Speaker 1:

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 a 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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