Phones and Gadgets and Gizmos, Oh My!

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Web 2.0 innovation trend 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 379 of the Kennedy Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor, and I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas. In our last episode, we visited with Nicole Morris at Emory Law as part of our ongoing fresh voices in legal tech interview series. We highly recommend that episode as well as all of the other episodes in the Fresh Voices series and this episode, Tom has been wanting to talk about phones and gadgets for a while, and this seems like a good time to do it because I believe this podcast is coming out on Black Friday of all days. Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell:

Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy Mighell report, we will indeed be looking at the phones and gadgets now in our lives and possibly soon to become part of our lives. In our second segment, we’ll be having generative AI ask us a question from the audience’s point of view also about gadgets. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can start to use to second that this podcast is over. But first up, I have been wanting to talk about phones and gadgets. We used to have a lot of fun talking about the tools that we use and talking about what we find works and AI has stolen the oxygen from that particular conversation, so I’m glad that we’re able to talk about, again, longtime listeners will know that I’m a Gadget fan. We’re going to talk a little bit about what we have now, what we’re looking for, what’s on our wishlist. So Dennis, let’s figure out what do you want to focus on about this topic?

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, you sort of mentioned something that I’ve been thinking about is I think there’s, I’ve had lists interest in individual gadgets, not because of ai but because of the smartphones themselves that they do so much and so many things that you might’ve used gadget before. They’ve become this sort of super, super gadget, and so it’s sort of amazing all the things they will do. So if you think about it, you have that smartphone and you say, what are the problems that a gadget would solve? A lot of those things are the smartphone can actually do with apps, but I’m not going to steal your thunder on this, Tom, I know you really want to talk about your new phone, so why don’t you start us off with that?

Tom Mighell:

Well, I’m going to start about talking about two phones and not just one phone because longtime listeners will know that I like to upgrade regularly. I want to see what the latest phones are doing. So I will buy a new phone frequently once a year when something comes out and everyone will know that I tend to be in the minority. I like Google phones, I like Android phones and I have liked the Google line ever since it came out this year I was particularly excited because I have been craving and coveting a foldable phone. I’ve wanted a phone that folds because it looks cool to me. It looks like something I would like. I like the idea of having a phone that opens up to something more the size of my iPad mini so that if I needed to look at a bigger document or be able to read a book in more than a phone screen, I could do it.

It was very intriguing to me. And last year the pixel came out with the fold, which was a slightly different form factor. It looked more like a passport book than a phone. It didn’t have quite the same size and shape as a regular cell phone did. But Google learned from all the criticism it got last year and they came out now with the Pixel nine Pro fold. That is I think, pretty amazing. It’s a great, great phone. I bought it. I really enjoyed the fact of being able to unfold it and take a look at it and look at things and just pull out if I wanted to have more real estate. It was great and I returned it and the reason why I returned it was when it’s folded up, it’s still too thick. I want a phone that is thin like a phone and I think that day will come, but this is not that day and it was still too thick.

It felt heavy in my hand. It wasn’t the light thinness that I’m used to from any phone that’s out there, so I’m not ready for a fold. I sent it back and instead I got the Pixel nine Pro xl. Pretty much Google really did the right thing and made all the phones have very similar capabilities even though they have different sizes. And so this was a great one. The nine Pro is great. The nine is great. They’re all very good phones. As we will talk about here, one of the things that distinguishes the phone, at least from Google standpoint, is the increasing amount of artificial intelligence on the phone. They started last year with the pixel phones last year. They’ve only improved them. Most of it though is still in the area of photography is where they’re really using artificial intelligence. You can now they have a feature called Add Me where you can take a picture of your friends but you weren’t in the picture.

So you can take one picture and then give the phone to somebody else and you can go and stand in the picture and it will add you to the original picture that you took. A little creepy, but okay, we talked about circle to search in the past where all you do is find an image and you circle it and it will automatically go out and find that With Google Search engine, they have a new photo tool that really is kind of cool where you can take a picture that you took and you can add AI to it. So you can say, imagine that a unicorn is standing next to these people and it will draw in a unicorn. Imagine that there are pink balloons in the air and it will draw pink balloons in the air. So really kind of cool. The one area that I’m still not sold on but it’s really interesting to me is a new app that they have called screenshots.

We all take screenshots on our phone. When you take a screenshot, Gemini, which is Google’s AI tool, Gemini is going to process everything in that image. It’s going to provide suggested actions to you. It might set a reminder, it might set a Google Calendar entry. You can search screenshots by voice soon, anywhere you might be on your phone so you can bring things back and say, what was that recipe for this? You took a picture of a recipe once and took a screenshot of it, or somebody sent you something by email and you took a screenshot of that. I view it as kind of a way to store a whole lot more information on your phone that Google is just going to process and make use of. But those of you who do take a lot of screenshots, kind of interesting. Alright, I just downloaded a whole lot of stuff about the Pixel. I am very much enjoying my phone. It is a good step up from previous pixels and it really does what I expect it to do, which is I live in kind of Google’s world and I like that the phone knows who I am, it knows what I want, it anticipates my needs and it’s very good at getting me the stuff I need when I need it.

Dennis Kennedy:

So I have a new iPhone Pro 16 that I just got. I looked at the Pro Max and it was just too big for what I want in the phone form factor. I have noticed some people with the foldable phones, Tom, some of my students, and that was my sense too that it was like this. When I initially saw ’em in their hand, I was like, wow, this is really big, really thick.

Tom Mighell:

Do they have the flip phones or the real foldables, like the book style phones? Are they the flip?

Dennis Kennedy:

It could be a flip. It looks like it folds in a half vertically.

Tom Mighell:

I sort of feel like younger generations go more for the flip phone than the real foldable,

Dennis Kennedy:

But it still felt sort of thick is the term I would use. So I like this phone. It’s similar to my last iPhone, which I let go a few generations because it was doing everything that I needed and I usually do when moving to a new iPhone. I look at it as the platform, so what’s coming on the Apple platform that I would need an upgraded fund for. And so it’s obviously ai, but there’s some other things that I really like. So my experience is screens definitely better. There are other things I notice, but it’s these kind of unexpected things. So I called my dad for the first time and he has the cheapest non-smart phone that he can possibly find and I was talking to him and I was like, oh my God, it sounds like my dad is in the same room with me.

So it’s like the sound quality really interesting, the photos better performance feels a little bit different, but it’s like what it’s able to do as a hub for me that’s become really interesting. So I’m getting way more information in a useful fashion off my watch. So sort of the health related things and it works really well with the AI things I do on there. I can tell that in the bus ride I take to Michigan State, there is an area about two thirds of the way there where reception really drops off and sometimes disappears. It feels like it’s better, I’m getting better reception, which is what I care about. So overall it’s a really good experience, but it’s as sort of my personal network server that I really appreciate this and so I see it as a platform play that has some nice additions and as Apple continues to add ai, I like it.

So this is a long time. I went a long time without upgrading a phone probably as long as I ever had. And so it is a nice upgrade and just a lot of things I like about it. No negatives at this point, but it’s that platform piece of it that is the most interesting part for me. And I guess that’s sort of the way that you think about the Android system as well. It’s not really just about making phones or making phone calls and taking pictures, but it’s sort of like the whole everything else that it taps into.

Tom Mighell:

I will give one example of how it just works for me. If you swipe up on the screen of your pixel, you’ll get your app drawer with all the applications, but at the very top of that app drawer are the five applications. It’s sort of like its own separate line and those happen to be the apps that you Google is trying to estimate what apps you might need to use at that particular point in time. So it’s judging from the time of day you’re doing it. So every morning when I take the dog on a walk, I swipe up and that Peloton app is right there. So I can log that. I’m taking a walk doing it and it’s always there and the next time later in the day that I do it and it’s not there anymore, it’s gone from it. So it knows, it anticipates what I want, which is nice.

Here’s one thing that it didn’t do that maybe my expectations were unreasonable. It has a tool called sleep mode or bedtime mode where you can turn bedtime mode on, it will turn off your calls, it will turn off your tasks, it’ll basically make you unavailable all night long. And it was automatically turning that on for me and I like, how do I turn it off? And I’d go in and it said, it’s not on, it says it’s nope, you’ve got this turned off. So I thought, well I’ll ask Gemini. I mean Gemini should know everything about the Pixel. It should be able to tell me how to troubleshoot this and it couldn’t tell me. And I finally found out that I’m also using a Pixel watch and the new Pixel watch has this amazing new feature that the minute you fall asleep, it detects that you’ve fallen asleep and it automatically turns on bedtime mode for you and then it turns it off the minute that it detects that you’re awake, which is kind of cool. But I wanted to hear it somewhere and I didn’t learn about it. So small issue, but I guess I don’t blame the phone for that, I blame Gemini for that.

Dennis Kennedy:

So it’s that time of year really to talk about gadgets. So I was doing a little bit of research and it’s interesting to me, and we had that episode earlier this year where we talked about n ification of search engines and stuff, but it’s really interesting in if you do the search traditional search on best gadgets of 2024, you see basically the same article over and over again. So they’re all recommending the same things. It really feels like there’s a pay to play thing going on, but maybe there isn’t. But anyway, it was really intriguing to see the same things over and over and I noticed a lot of the gadgets weren’t really reflecting on either problems I had or something that I wanted to solve. And I’ll revisit that later in the showtime, but I think it does make sense to talk about gadgets in terms of categories rather than specific items. And so let me challenge you first to say if you were going to pick a category of gadgets that’s would be like your top of mind category, what might that be?

Tom Mighell:

When I saw your note in the script, I wasn’t quite thinking of categories in that same way. But my first category, and these are gadgets that I may or may not get, I’m calling it other screen devices. So there are three different types of screen devices that I am interested in varying degrees. And so I’ll go from high level of interest to low level of interest. The first one, the one that I’m probably going to get at some point can’t decide yet though, believe it or not, is the new iPad Mini. Over the past year, iPad has upgraded pretty much all of its models to the latest M four chips, M four I guess is the latest, but the chips before. So they have not done anything amazing with any of their iPads, but they’ve just modernized them and the iPad has not been updated in a number of years.

So it was overdue. I have said on this podcast that I tend to use the iPad a lot more than usual, although I’m not doing it that much more. I’m started grabbing for my iPad air and maybe it’s because I’m getting old, maybe because I want to see a bigger screen. I still use the iPad mini to read a book, so I might get that. I think that’s better than any Kindle that I would ever get. It’s a better book reading device, but that’s at the top of my list. Second on my list of screen devices is we’ve talked again on the podcast about Remarkable the writing tablet and they have now the remarkable Paper pro, which is in color. So you can actually write in color, you can view things on pages in color if you have PDF files. I have loved using the Remarkable, it’s what I use now to write on these days.

I don’t write on regular paper anymore. I don’t know if I’ll do this or not, I might, but the real main benefit of the update is color. The one that I’m not going to move to because partially because I just mentioned that I prefer my iPad mini to a Kindle, but I was intrigued at the Kindle Color Soft that came out. So a brand new Kindle also in color, like the remarkable. But now you can get books, you can read graphic novels, you can read magazines on the Kindle. You can see things that instead of being a black and white or gray scale device, it always has been, you can actually see color. It has gotten really terrible reviews so far. I think that the rating on Amazon is somewhere around 3.7, so I’m not even sure I would recommend that right now. I’ll include a link in the show notes, but buyer beware, I’m not hearing great things about it. So those are what are making up my first category. I don’t know if that counts in your world of categories, but that’s where I’m,

Dennis Kennedy:

I like that as a category. So my category is really just like, I call it energy and power. So partly this is in the new iPhone I have, they’ve moved to the USBC cables, so that requires to replace some cables and some chargers and other things like that. And so that’s when I’m thinking the gadgets and some people don’t even call these gadgets, this is where my interest is in. So I have these devices, I need to get them charged, they need to have power. How do I do that? So I have this interest in travel chargers, solar chargers, different types of chargers, better upgrading the cables and then also just flat out plugs to say what’s going to be helpful, especially on travel and at home. And because I sort of move between home and my office at the university and I ride the bus that making sure things are charged and I don’t run out of juice is really important to me. So boring category to some people, but utterly essential because when you run out of battery, you’re nowhere these days.

Tom Mighell:

I have a very different idea of what categories are Dennis, because I have actual examples and you’re talking just about things in general. So I will call my second category utilities, but I will only offer one gadget that was part of it. And I will say this is similar level of boring as cables and chargers and plugs, but it gets the job done. I have two computers. I have my home computer that I use, but I also have a laptop for work. And now that I’m remote, I largely have both computers at this desk. Most of the time, unless I’m traveling for some reason and forever, I would have the laptop using my wifi, which is pretty strong wifi considering that I have a very fast internet connection. But it wasn’t as fast as if I was plugging directly into it. I will tell you the splitter that I bought for my ethernet splitter that I bought is just about, it was magic because suddenly my computer had the same bandwidth that my desktop computer had and it was just, I mean there’s lots of splitters out there at different kind of cost, but this was probably a $20 splitter.

I’ll put a link to an example of one that I got in the show notes, but it upped my speed on my laptop immediately and it was a great tool to have. So if you have a very fast connection that still requires ethernet and you don’t want to have things that relatively slower speed of wifi, a splitter is definitely the way to go.

Dennis Kennedy:

Splitters, I love these really utilitarian gadgets because sometimes people will be talking about gadgets and it’s really hard to imagine that anybody would actually use the things and why they would actually use them. So my next category is storage in a sort of interesting way. So I’ve been looking at external hard drives, and this goes back to things that used to say Tom, about how you keep a really stripped down hard drive in your actual computer and you have everything, you have much in the cloud and otherwise I have a bunch of stuff and I want to get it off the hard drive on my computer on my Mac mini so I can be kind of lean and mean. So I was looking at the SSD drives and I was sort of camped out on watching the prices on them and they’ve been staying pretty consistent.

And then I noticed and I read a review of this five terabyte Western Digital, my passport ultra drive, five terabytes, $140, and it solves the problem I have. And so now I’m offloading a lot of stuff off of the internal drive on my computer and I have this gigantic drive that I can just throw stuff on and delete it off of the other drive really useful kind of old school and that it’s the standard external hard drive of the old days, but gigantic amount of storage and probably 40% of the cost, maybe even less than that of an SSD drive. So speed is not a big issue for me, it’s just pure storage. And so sometimes you just want to go back to the basics and say, what’s the problem? I need to solve? What solves it cheaply? And the reviews on this thing have been great, works exactly like I wanted it to do, and I’m patting myself on the back.

Tom Mighell:

It is amazing how fin cheap and lightweight storages these days. I really think it’s amazing. Alright, we have more gadgets to talk about, more things that are catching our eye and things we might want to think about in the future. But before we talk about ’em, we need to take a quick break with a word from our sponsors

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back, Tom, let’s jump back into the world of gadgets. Let’s do a lightning round of other gadgets we currently use and would recommend to our listeners,

Tom Mighell:

You shouldn’t have asked me this first because I am going to, I think copy yours unless it’s a different version. But I’ll first start with one thing that I bought recently. I have a standing desk. I like the standing desk, but what I would like even more is if I could walk while I am at the standing desk. So I’ll put a link in there. I bought something called the walking pad. I didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars for a desk that also had a treadmill underneath it, but I have a mini treadmill, it’s relatively affordable and I can just pull it out anytime that I want to use it. I’m not the greatest at walking, but it really works well. So I enjoy that very much and it is already helping me walk a lot more during the week than I ordinarily would.

And then when I am out of the house, and I’ve mentioned this on a podcast before, but I am very much a fan of my shocks Open Run Pro two, the bone conduction earphones. I love them because when I’m out walking the dog, I want to still be able to hear cars that are coming around. I want to hear what’s on my surroundings. I find that they have their use case. They’re great for outdoors. If I’m giving the dogs a bath, they’re totally useless. I can’t hear a thing that’s coming through them. So I use my noise canceling earbuds if I want to listen to something while I’m giving the dogs a bath. But for outdoors, the shocks open run to I love Love them. Dennis, you?

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I have the similar kind of bone conduction headphones that I don’t have in front of me. So it’s an off brand, but I really like them and I’ve actually found that they’re useful in more places than I thought. So I thought I was just going to use them outside. But they’re actually really useful in a lot of places. And like I say, I ride the bus, so sometimes waiting for the bus, somebody will come up to talk to me and I can hear them even though I have something on the headphones that I’m listening to and I can actually sort of maintain a conversation until I realize that I need to concentrate a little bit more. So I think they have more use and they’re kind of interesting, like I said, in places other than the outdoors. So a couple things that I use, there’s something called the Pure Zone portable HEPA filter, which I love to use when I travel and elsewhere I have some allergies to cat and dog dander and then there’s a whole C thing that nobody likes to talk about it anymore.

But having this portable HEPA filter has been great for me when I travel, I just got this wise, which is WYZE, I think scale that connects to my iPhone and keeps track of my weight and body fat and stuff like that. And it’s great. It’s been helping me lose weight. So those are a couple of the things I’m using. And I mentioned before this Gaia top USB fan, which we’re in this world where employers want to make people come back to the office, but that doesn’t mean that they’re making the offers the offices nicer to come back to or that they’re taking care of the HVAC problems that we’ve all come to know and love over the years. So having this little three speed fan, this USBI can use it anywhere and that’s totally awesome. So those are the gadgets I’m currently using that I recommend all of them very reasonably priced and we’ll do some good for you. So Tom, what gadgets are you thinking about getting next?

Tom Mighell:

So mine comes into one category. So the need that I have right now is a little bit related to what Dennis talked about earlier, which is around charging and cables and plugs and that sort of thing. But actually what I want is I want a charging station. I want one place where I can charge everything. I want to be able to go everywhere and there are so many different ways to charge things. My phone has a different charger than my watch does and I want to be able to charge multiple things. So I’m putting a non-tech item in the list. I found a three level table from Pottery Barn that is going to serve ultimately as my charging table for the different ways that I plan to charge things. But I need to figure out exactly there. If you go to Google and type in charging table, you’ll find a lot of what I think are rather cheap tables that have things stuck to the back of them that will have plugs.

But to me that feels a little bit limited from what I want to do. But I did find something on the internet that is interesting to me. It probably doesn’t have enough chargers. It’s called a SAT or satchi, I can’t remember how to pronounce it. Multi-device charging station. It’ll charge multiple tablets and phones and it has a cheat charging stand, so it’ll charge something that it has wireless charging available that looks fairly interesting. And then the other thing that I found that’s related to charging that is probably more interesting to me when I travel than when I’m at this charging station, but it is called the Mag Tame Tangle Free charging cable. And it is a charging cable that is permanently in a coil, so you can pull it apart to stretch it, but then it will always come back. You don’t have to worry about coiling it up and using one of the ties to tie it and worry about tangled coils. It coils itself. It’s really pretty cool. A little prier than usual probably because of that feature. I think they’re about 24 99 for a cord, but I’m very intrigued by it. I’ll probably use it more when I travel than when I am at the charging table, but that’s what I’m basically getting next. Dennis, what about you? What’s next for you?

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, we talked a little bit before we started recording the podcast, but I’m interested in accumulating more paid and professional AI tools. So I’m looking at the Google Gemini Pro version for over $20 a month. Not technically a gadget, but gives you some different insights into what AI can do. So I saw a couple things that are intriguing to me. So I’m looking at USBC hubs because again, having moved to the iPhones in our household that are USBC, now I see the need for that and it would be helpful to have more USBC plugins and hubs. So that’s one thing, actually one of the same brands you talked about that Satie brand is an option there Anchor, there’s a number of good ones out there. I’m kind of intrigued by lighting these days. And so one of the articles that I read about the hot gadgets this time of year is it was talking about these floor lamps that are LED that you can kind of switch the colors up on to kind of customize the light to what you like.

So the gove, GOVE is one example. There are others that are more expensive, like from Phillips, I use water bottles a lot as most people. And I saw this thing that’s called the Lark, LARQ, pure vis self-cleaning water bottle, which has this ultraviolet light built into it to kind of sanitize water bottles. I don’t know whether it works, but I kind of really like the idea of it. And then I guess the other things, we’ll go into the next category, Tom, which is that we know we’re getting some things, but what gadgets might be on our wishlist?

Tom Mighell:

Okay, three things that are on my wishlist, and these are mostly things that I’m not getting just because of how expensive they happen to be. But I will tell you the thing that I really want is I want something for my bed that will cool the bed off. I am learning that sleep is better when you are cooler and rather than have the air conditioning where it makes everybody cold, there are tools out there that will let each person in the bed determine whether they want a warmer temperature or a colder temperature. And there is a device out there called the eight sleep pod that will provide that for you. It will heat or cool to whatever level you want, I assume to a safe level cold or hot in your bed. I’m very intrigued by that. A little pricey for me, not ready to do that.

Likewise, living in the world of Texas where the power grid during the winter time is a dicey deal and when tornadoes can knock your power out anytime I’ve been interested in chargers that will charge multiple devices and large devices. And so anchor, again, there are a number of other sort of generator type tools that are probably more what I’m looking for, but there’s an anchor Sox F 2000 that will power up to 12 devices in your house for a long period of time that I’m interested in. And then my other one is really purely just for frivolity, which is if you’ve paid attention to meta, meta and RayBan have had a partnership for the past couple of years where they’ve devised some smart glasses. The first round of the smart glasses were okay this second round, people have generally considered that they’ve done a much better job.

They look like Ray bands. They allow you to take pictures to listen to music. The hope is is that at some point in the future they could be the augmented reality that we are kind of waiting for. You can walk down the street and get information on your glasses. We’re not there yet, but they’re still very cool and they look like gray bands. So again, something that I probably won’t get because I would want prescription glasses, but it sounds like a fun thing to have on a day when you’re just out and about and you want to take pictures or listen to some music. Dennis, what about what’s on your wishlist?

Dennis Kennedy:

Well, I have a simple solution for you on that to have cooler sleep and cooler bedroom, which is move north and move out of Texas, that seems to

Tom Mighell:

Be even a pricier option than the eight sleep pod. But okay,

Dennis Kennedy:

So a couple of things. So sort of like on the big wishlist is the Apple Vision Pro, which at some point I will get around to doing. I just have to find the time and place where it fits into my workflows and my recreation flows. I’m also interested in because of the power grid we have all across the country these days that I was looking at the Jri portable power stations, which are this combination battery solar that will kind of help you get through and get some charging devices when you need them. And then I know this is going to be silly because I don’t really have hands on these things and I suspect they’re much louder than I think they are. But I’m just thinking, I’m thinking I go into the world of drones Tom here some time for a long and so people are talking about the DJI mini pro three as the entry point, which is small and it’s about $500.

But once you start to look at it, there becomes a part of you that says, oh, I like to have the bigger one instead. So I don’t know that my neighbors in the apartment complex will appreciate either of those. So I got to do some actual research on that. And then Tom, you know that I always go back when we talk about gadgets to the presentations that were done at a tech show and other places, 60 gadgets in 60 minutes. And I always remember our friend Ross Codner, who has passed away, would always come up with the weirdest things as part of his presentation. So I found one that actually I think has some utility for people and it’s the printer S digital tattoo printer. And we’ll do a 3D printing of tattoos, which will last on your skin for one to three days. You can use them for parties or just to say like, Hey, I’m kind of interested in the whole tattoo thing, but I do not have that level of commitment to anything. And so could be fun, could be a way to try out some tattoos before you actually go that way. And as everybody who’s much younger than we are, Tom knows that if you and I are talking about or if I especially am talking about tattoos, that they surely have gone out of style at this point.

Tom Mighell:

I got to say. That’s very interesting and it looks like it’s at a very reasonable price too.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I don’t know what a real tattoo costs, but if the it is that you could just print ’em out,

Tom Mighell:

I mean the fact that you can print ’em out and get multiple tattoos, then how would you not buy something like that?

Dennis Kennedy:

It makes the case for itself. I mean we might as well order them right now.

Tom Mighell:

Exactly. Alright, well we’ve got to move on to our next segment. We’ve spent far too long talking about gadgets. So in our next segment let’s talk about civil lord gadgets. But first we need to take a break for a quick message from our sponsors. And now let’s get back to the Kennedy Mighell report. I’m Tom Mighell and I’m

Dennis Kennedy:

Dennis Kennedy. We want to 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 generative AI tools 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 here’s the question for this show. There’s a new wave of focus enhancement devices hitting the market from noise canceling earbuds that claim to boost concentration to desk lamps that supposedly optimize cognitive performance. Given how much our profession depends on sustained attention, have you found any of these actually deliver measurable benefits for legal work or is this just wellness theater?

Tom Mighell:

Well, Dennis, as I have said on previous podcasts, I start to get skeptical about the nature of these questions and this one makes me a little suspicious that perhaps you have something you’d like to talk about and the generative AI read your mind. Here’s the reason why I’m suspicious. I’ve never actually heard of such gadgets and I want you to talk about it more. I’ve never tried anything that helps with concentration or cognitive performance. The closest that I’ve come is a website is an app called Brain fm, which is kind of a cool tool that what it does is is that it creates sound patterns for you to study to or for you to focus to or for you to sleep to whatever makes the most sense. And it varies between nature noises and electronic noises and it goes at different wavelengths and frequencies to be able to help your brain do better.

I’ve tried it before when I needed to sit and focus and do a lot of work and I’ve never absolutely actually noticed. Wow, I was really in the flow there and I was really doing great, but I won’t say that it distracted me either, so okay, great. I think all noise canceling earbuds to some extent are reducing distractions because you can’t hear anything. So arguably that would increase concentration. But are there earbuds that do anything different from that? And I am aware of the lights that will treat seasonal affective disorder or sad. Those have been around for a while. I don’t know of any lamps that make it easier to concentrate. So I’m a little skeptical about there being gadgets out there that are actually able to help with focus in a way that current gadgets do not. But prove me wrong. Dennis, what are you aware of that I haven’t seen?

Dennis Kennedy:

I think there are tons of things out there and I use ambient background music a lot. So I think that whether you’re shutting sound out or you’re enhancing the soundscape around you to help you focus, I think they make a tremendous difference. The Gove LED lamp I mentioned also is another way where you can kind of tune the lights scape around you to help you concentrate. I noticed this a lot because I like the lighting setup I have in my home office and when I go into the office at the law school and I teach at the law school and the classrooms, those overhead fluorescence are the opposite of optimizing cognitive performance and I really struggle with that type of lighting. I think you also see some things around, there’s the aromatherapy, there are other things that you can do. And so I think there are a lot of devices out there and you can kind of tune what you’re doing to what works for you. I definitely think that there’s ways to try these and to experiment with them. I think the brain FM thing is great, ambient sounds, they’re tuned for certain things is another way to start, but I think it is a great area worth exploring. And believe it or not, Tom, this is my prompting is improving because this one I did not tune it to anything I wanted. I just asked it to come up with three questions that were unique about different aspects of gadgets these days. So

Tom Mighell:

I’ll only quibble with one part of the question, which is the very first part of the question that says there’s a new wave of focus enhancement devices and nearly every single thing you mentioned has been around for a while now. So I stand by my original answer. I’m not familiar with a new wave, but I totally get that there are those devices out there and I think it’s good that we mentioned ’em.

Dennis Kennedy:

Oh, well, there are some new things that in terms of devices that are in the, what I call this sort of massage category and other things like that that are new and that are tuned more toward concentration and focus. And I think it’s really important, especially if people have to go back to office and you’re in that open office concept, you have to do some stuff that’s going to help you focus or you’re just not going to get any work done.

Tom Mighell:

I’ll tell you, if you put a massage thing on me, I’m not going to focus at all. I’m going to sleep at that point.

Dennis Kennedy:

That’s a different type of focus.

Tom Mighell:

Of

Dennis Kennedy:

Course, you can call it meditation. So now it’s time for our parting shots, that one tip website or observation you can use. The second this podcast ends. Tom, take it away.

Tom Mighell:

So as we record this, we are seeing a lot of migration and movement to a new social media tool called Blue Sky. And I’m one of those individuals and I’m taking a look at it, but when I go to a social media tool, I want to make sure that there are apps that can do the same things that I’m used to doing with the tool that I may have used in the past. And fortunately, there are some tools that are becoming to appear for Blue Sky that make that possible. I remember that when Twitter was around and before it became X tweet deck was a great tool that allowed you to see columns of tweets based on categories or people that you followed. And there is one now for Blue Sky called Deck Blue and it looks like a fairly full featured copy of Tweet deck.

So if that’s something interesting for you and you’re using Blue Sky, then go and give it a try. But I usually access and accessed in the past Twitter on my iPad. And fortunately there is an iPad app for Blue Sky. It’s called Skeets. Skeets is the name that the users of Blue Sky are trying to give to the names of posts. And the jury’s still out for me on that one. But the app Skeets is actually a pretty good app and it works well on your iPad. It still has a little bit of work to do, but I like it in general a lot. So Deck Blue and Skeets, if you are now finding yourself in the blue sky ecosystem, Dennis

Dennis Kennedy:

Blue sky, man, I don’t know. I was early, early, early on it. It went nowhere, did nothing for me. Now in the last week, I see I’m getting notices of hundreds, literally hundreds of people found me on Blue Sky. I can’t even imagine what they’re going to get out of it. But hey, good luck to you. If it proves to be useful, maybe I’ll jump

Tom Mighell:

As we’re recording this. It’s getting about a million new users a day

Dennis Kennedy:

And I’m sure most of ’em boughts and it’s more power to people who want to try these things.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, grumpy old man, we’re going to try it out.

Dennis Kennedy:

So I don’t know, maybe I would say do your homework on the company behind it and try to understand what you’re expecting from this because it isn’t like the magic version of Twitter. So like I said, good luck to the people who are on it. I’m willing to watch, like I said, I tried, it didn’t work for me. So I just want to give people an idea of something new you can do with generative AI as you’re starting to explore it and you want to try something new. And it’s essentially what I’m doing in the B segment, which is to say, can I look at generative AI and prompt it in a way that it acts as a standin for an audience or some other group that I want to understand. So for example, there are lawyers who say, let’s have the AI assume that it’s the jury and how is it going to react to these things?

Can it be a standin for a panel of judges? Can it be a stand in for different groups? And I think that it is really interesting to me directionally to see what insights it gives you and perhaps it has utility for you could produce something useful and ways to things to explore as opposed to saying, no, here’s what I think, here’s my belief. And then maybe you can take that. But easy prompting to do, just ask the AI to give an opinion from a group of people and see the results you get. I called it Stand-ins. You’re using the AI to stand in for something else, but a technique I’ve been using and I found really good results from it.

Tom Mighell:

And so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mall report. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Networks page for our show. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to our podcast in iTunes on the Legal Talk Network site or in your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can always reach out to us on LinkedIn or remember, we love getting your voicemail so we can feature it on our B segment. Please, please give us an episode where we don’t have a question from our generative AI friend. You can leave us a voicemail at 4 4 1 6 8 2 0. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell. And I’m Dennis Kennedy

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. And 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 Bio Report on the Legal Talk Network.

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