Today on the Mind Over Law Podcast, we have a special guest, Ernie Swenson, also known as Ernie The Attorney who is a prominent figure in the legal and technology fields, particularly recognized for his amazing expertise in legal technology and productivity for lawyers.
He's also the host of The 80/20 Principle, a podcast for attorneys who want to have frictionless, streamlined practices.
And he teaches skills and technology tips that give you light speed, automation, and low cost outsourcing for lawyers so that you could work less, earn more, and relax more.
His mission and his passion is really helping lawyers to use tech better, to serve clients better, and practice law in a more enjoyable way.
And we're really excited to have you here.
Ernie, welcome.
It's been a while since we've had a chance to catch up.
I've been following you for years, and anytime I'm listening or reading something that you send, I learned something more.
So, I'm excited about learning today from you.
But just to get us started, tell us a little bit about how you went from being a commercial litigator in New Orleans to this pioneer and expert in using technology to help lawyers to work smarter and more efficiently and to enjoy life more as a result.
Yes, I think it's two things, and I don't know how many people remember the old cartoon Mister Magoo.
It's one I grew up with.
Mister Magoo was this kindly older gentleman who was blind or semi blind, and he wandered around, and because he was blind, he couldn't quite see where he's going.
And he stumbled into things and somehow, miraculously, everything sort of worked for him.
But he had this kind of upbeat disposition.
And I think that's kind of it.
I think, as I have reflected upon how the hell did I wind up here?
It's really just I was kind of curious how things work.
And I try things out and keep trying them.
If they worked and if they didn't, I'd do something else.
And so there wasn't a lot of strategy.
And so when around people talk about how to be super strategic, I used to be envious because I used to think that's what I'm, quote, supposed to do.
But then I realized, like, it doesn't work for me.
Like, what works for me is just being curious, being open minded.
Yeah, that's it.
That's how I discovered technology.
I love that.
And I have people come to me all the time to be like, you know, I'm trying to figure out what to do next, and I'm just like, well, just breathe and be a little bit curious.
Where does that lead you?
And I think, too, that's a great idea.
When I'm working with teams and people working better together and, like, people have differences, it's like, okay, instead of judging that and getting into friction about it, could you just be curious about why someone thinks the way that they think and why it's different than where you are?
So it's an amazing way and lens to put into the world for many different reasons.
All right, so we could talk about a lot of things because I know you can teach me all of us many things.
But I think right now is everybody's the hot topic is about AI.
I'd love to know what you think about AI and the legal world.
AI, period.
But then in the legal world and what might be some challenges or things to watch out for and what are ways that we could really use it, what are you seeing?
So I have had a good fortune to speak to a couple of different lawyer groups.
Like Louisiana Bar had me speak live at an event with another local judge who's supportive of AI.
And then I got invited to speak in South Carolina to, like, 200 lawyers there.
So I've gotten to see the immediate in person reaction of lawyers.
And I will say that it's kind of disappointing when you see that because they just don't know how to wrap their head around it.
And I've talked to a lot of people about why that is.
And some people in the tech world go, let's just, you know, another example, lawyers can't appreciate tech, but I don't really buy that because at this point, lawyers are buying, they have their computers, smartphones, tablets, they're using tech, right?
That's not the issue.
The issue with AI is, you know, for lawyers is the same as it is for everybody else.
It's very bizarre.
Like, how does this thing work, right?
And when I talk to people who are in the industry and, you know, do this, I can say to them, I'll say, yeah, it's weird because even people who know how AI works don't know how it works.
And they laugh like, yeah, we don't really know how it works.
That's the whole, I mean, they know in general the theory of how it is put together, but it learns on its own, and therefore, you don't really quite know how it learns.
Just like I don't really know how my kids all learned what they learned.
They grew up, they hung around adults.
They learned stuff.
Right?
Like, we don't really know how humans learn.
So I think AI is hard for us to fathom.
We don't understand it.
Nobody else can explain it to us very easily.
But if you kind of step back and just think, well, that's kind of true for humans, so now we can maybe say, well, it's replicating human learning.
So now let's just ask ourselves, what are some things that we can do with it that we'll feel most comfortable about first?
Right.
So if you're a lawyer, it'll be, oh, I'm worried that, you know, it's going to take my data, expose my client data.
All right, well then don't give it your client data.
Don't start with that.
Start with something simple like you wanted to rewrite an email that you wrote where you feel like it was a little harsh, or I maybe need to flush this out a little bit.
And if you use any of the models, the frontier models, Claw, Gemini, chat, GPT, they all are pretty equivalent as far as doing that kind of thing.
And the more you use it, the more you learn how you like to use it and how to anticipate whats the next thing to do.
Because I think the first thing that people who didnt use it thought, and I definitely was like this is you think, oh, its like Google, you ask it questions and it gives you an answer.
Yes, it does come back with an answer, but what Google doesnt do is remember the context of the question.
And then each time you ask it a question, youre starting from scratch.
Whereas with chat, GPT or any of these other models, its remembering what you just covered.
And also you dont really have to give it a perfectly formed question.
You can ask things in a kind of offhand way.
In fact, I think thats one of the tips I would recommend people do is treat it.
Lawyers can understand this.
When youre a lawyer, you dont telegraph all of the things youre going to do.
When youre doing cross examination, you kind of hold that the same with chat GPT.
Give it a little bit, enough context, but then see if it comes back with something that looks like its on track.
Okay, its on track.
Great, keep going.
Right.
But if you give it everything at once and go, oh, its going to answer my question the first time perfectly, no, you're going to be disappointed.
And again, humans don't do that either.
Right.
So this isn't like it's a flaw, it's just the way it works.
Yeah, I played around a little bit and it's sort of the sense of what you're talking about and using it with emails or on some of my marketing, that kind of thing.
It was really interesting.
My marketing person was showing me, she's like, see, we can ask it this question and then we can say, oh, make it more in this tone or make it less this, and then it just really fascinating to watch it.
Right.
Right.
And the more you play with it, the more fascinating it is.
I think the biggest thing is to set it up so that you have as many opportunities to work with it really quickly.
Like on Macs now OpenAI has the desktop and you can just set it up, set the shortcut and then invoke it with a keyboard press or two keyboard presses.
And so that's great because now you're like every time you go, oh gee, I wonder what that, what word is.
One of the things that comes up a lot is people will say something and ill think, I just heard an acronym.
I think I know what that means or im not quite sure.
I just put it into chat GPT and instantly I get not just the answer but also some context and explanation and ill ask it.
If I see a word I dont know, I dont use the dictionary anymore.
Ill say, tell me about name of word and itll give me the etymology.
Some use cases and I prefer to read it and learn that way than to look up a dictionary definition because I'm really just, that is what I want to know.
Like how does this word get used?
Where did it originate?
And so it has a lot of power behind it, but the more you use it, the more you're going to discover those things.
I like that.
And I like it like starting simple with something and then you can start to play around with it.
So one of the things you gave, one of the initial objections you're seeing is people saying, oh, is my client data going to get exposed and all that kind of thing.
One of the stories that I saw when it was really getting popular was something about somebody using it to write in a brief.
And then there was incorrect citations and things that were totally made up for different cases.
That lawyer got sanctioned.
What do you know about that?
Yeah, as soon as that happened, I knew that people were hemming and hawing about, well, what did the lawyer do wrong?
I'm like, what the lawyer did wrong is quite obvious.
This is one of these lawyers who said, oh, I'm going to go use this tool and technology ive never understood before.
And ill look at that magically.
It gives me three cases directly on point and I win.
And he doesnt bother to go check the citations to see if any other cases overruled it or in his case, he wouldve found out the cases didnt even exist.
Thats massive incompetence.
People who have that problem.
Technology is just one way that that gets exposed.
So I just throw that out.
Thats of zero relevance to the use of cha TBT.
Now, as to the question of the so called hallucinations, which is kind of a misnomer because sometimes it does straight up make things up.
Not good, right.
But a lot of times what it's doing is trying to give you an answer and it's kind of rounding off the edges, so to speak.
And so it's not entirely accurate.
But again, these are things that humans do.
Like you ask humans for things and they can say, oh, I know this, and with perfect confidence.
And then you look and find out that that's not at all true.
Right.
So it's just like anything, if the quality of the information matters, because let's say it's a brief, right.
Then you need to be really rigorous in checking it.
And that was true when you were using humans.
And even if you're doing it, you kind of need to go back and check and think, did I get that right?
Did I give the correct citation or did I transpose some numbers?
That's part of just basic lawyering.
A law clerk, you wouldn't just automatically write, it's the same kind of thing.
Exactly, exactly.
So then the question becomes, all right, now if were worried about things like, well, will it take data that we give it and expose that somehow?
If youre paying for chat, GPT, or any of these tools, then the privacy levels are higher or better or in place.
And you probably dont need to worry too much about that because if you think about whats really going on with these tools, because remember, these are large language models.
They feed it amount of words in different contexts.
So think of it like the Pacific Ocean, okay?
It's like that.
Like the Pacific Ocean has a lot of water and whatever you've added is like at best a thimbleful.
If it was a lot of words.
If it's not, it's like an eyedropper, one drop.
And yes, that could get surfaced in some way, but it's probably not going to get surfaced because it's in an ocean of other things around it.
And unless somebody's asking a question for which that little thimble or eyedropper is the only specific answer, and if it finds it, then it might expose it, that would be how it would happen.
In the worst case scenario.
But if you want to avoid even that because youre truly paranoid and want to do the right thing, then just anonymize the data you give it.
You dont need to give it the actual names of your clients and things you can run a search and replace.
And yeah, it takes a little extra time, but this is fine.
Its going to save you a ton of time.
So that extra time that that takes is not a big deal.
So it's really just about using your mind, thinking common sense protection, but not saying no to it just because you've heard these stories about things that could go wrong.
Because if you really want to get bored, we could talk about all the things that human beings have done wrong in the time they first crawled out of the primordial soup.
It's not any different.
It's the same thing.
Yeah.
I'm really curious to know what you see that could be really exciting for lawyers and using it in particular, how it can help them to work smarter, not just from like email.
Right.
But what are some of the things that you're seeing that can be really exciting?
Well, I don't know if these are exciting things, but they're extremely useful.
And that is number one super safe summarizing.
You feed it a whole bunch of stuff and say, hey, look, could you kind of like give me the three takeaways or the ten takeaways?
And what's great about this is because of its conversational nature, when it gives you, let's say, ten takeaways, you can look at one and go, hmm, I want to know more about that.
And you ask it and it'll tell you more.
Right?
Because it'll delve in.
So it's a way that you can ingest information quickly without having to go read all the words from beginning to end.
And what I find is that I will do this even for things in which I know I'm going to go listen or read the whole thing.
Because when you go listen or read something that you were pre ingested, a summary of, you'll remember it better because you're now already aware of what to remember.
And so, and then the same goes with coming back to it later.
You go, oh, you know, I read that thing.
What it was it all about?
You tell it, hey, could you summarize this for me again?
It'll tell you.
All right, got it.
So that way it kind of up levels your ingestion and understanding of information because it's doing it really quickly and you're able to go back and forth with it and ask it questions and dive deep.
I do that all the time.
There's a plugin for YouTube that you can use where it'll take the transcript, which YouTube has a transcript, and then it's got this standard prompt that says, tell me the five takeaways.
I use this all time.
I never watch a YouTube video.
The company's name is Glass Glasp, and it'll work with the free version of chat, GPT, or whatever you have.
And it's just like, I don't watch YouTube videos because I'm not going to invest the time only to find out later, like, oh, you didn't really cover that much in depth.
And of course, everybody on YouTube is trying to get you to watch a lot so that they get their metrics where they want it to be, so they tease things and draw it out.
And I don't have time for that, like, chat GBT.
Tell me what the gist is here.
That's really cool.
That's really cool.
Anything else like that top of mind.
Summarization is one, of course.
Like, people are now sending their robot tools to meetings.
There's otter, AI, there's fathom, there's fireflies.
And these things can come with you to a meeting, or they can go even when you can't attend.
And I recently had, there was something that I wanted to learn where somebody had given me a record access to recording something I could never have attended because I wasn't part of the group.
But I put it into otter and then I skimmed it, and I was like, okay, I see what this is all about.
Good.
Yes.
I want to check it out.
So it's just the summarizing is the biggest one.
Rewriting is a big one, too, because I'll take things and I'll put it in and I'll say, rewrite this, make it nicer.
But another one is if I don't want it to mess with the writing too much, I kind of know I'm on track, but I just want to know some tips for improvement.
I'll say, you're a copy editor, give me some suggestions.
Or improving this.
Typos, obviously, but awkward phrasing, anything, right?
And it'll just tell you, it won't change.
It'll say in this line, you said this, or, oh, there's a typo, or, oh, and consistent numbering.
So again, all these things are things I didn't think of that somebody told me that.
I said, oh, that's an interesting thing.
I'll try that, and now that I've tried it, I realize it's extremely useful because when you write something, as soon as you finish writing it, you don't really have a lot of brain cycles left to do close editing, but you don't have to because it'll do it for you.
Yeah.
And, like, I'm not a detailed oriented person.
And then when you write something, your brain reads it the way you think you wrote it, so you miss those good things.
So that's really cool.
I like that.
Okay, let's turn a little bit from AI because you have so much that can help us in looking at how do we work better together, how do we work better, more efficiently.
So I know, and we're going to link for our audience that you have, you know, like your top ten texts for lawyers.
What would be, like your top three right now that you would say you should be looking into?
Okay, so number one, well, I'll give you number two.
Number two is any kind of automated scheduling.
And this is like, everyone should know this and do it.
You use acuity.
I use calendly.
I used to use acuity.
It doesn't matter what you use, but the idea of getting bogged down with scheduling and back and forth, no, eliminate that immediately and use the forms in and all that kind of stuff.
So a lot of people have heard of automated scheduling, so that when people say, yeah, that should be at the top, but the one that's above that one is loom.
Do you use loom?
I've used loom, but I also use something called bonbon.
Same thing.
Same principle, same thing.
I don't know how I got hooked on that as opposed to loom.
I like them both.
Yeah, well, bonbon, I think, came first.
Like, it certainly got traction and notoriety first.
And I don't know, because I haven't used bonbon since I started using loom, but loom was built first for the idea that, like, you want to show somebody how to do something, talk them through it.
You can appear on camera or not, but you're showing them your screen and saying, look, I do this, then do this, and they can see and follow along.
And then quickly, even before all the AI stuff started happening, loom added transcripts generated by AI.
So now you get a transcript, you get the video, but you get an instantaneous link that as soon as you finish recording it, you can give to them.
So that eliminating the friction of, oh, I got to upload the video or I got to wait for the video to process.
Like, no, it's immediately available.
You give it to the person they watch.
And also importantly, you're notified when they click to watch, which is useful if you're working with people because you know, okay, they're paying attention to this now.
I probably will hear from them and I know that they're on the case.
So loom in the modern world where people are working remotely, collaborating virtually, and then they need to communicate asynchronously.
This is the power tool.
This is the thing that glues everything together.
Now I'm going to keep using the word loom because that's the one.
I know, but whatever one you want to use.
But loom does have like massive dominance and I think it's because it was the first one to pitch itself as being for that purpose, whereas I think Bondman was more for marketing originally.
Yeah, and you can use loom for marketing or bonbon for what loom does.
But both of them probably, or certainly loom now is starting to move away from saying, oh, it's just about telling people how to do things and they're pitching it as asynchronous meetings.
And this is where people have a lot of trouble wrapping their head around this.
But obviously there's some meetings where you need, everybody needs to be there all at one time.
That's important.
But a lot of meetings are held synchronously only because people dont think that they could do it any other way.
Well, you can, once you get comfortable using loom, you just think, well, if I was the person starting the meeting, id make a loom video, then id say, hey, if you have any questions, let me know.
And they can either comment with thumbs up and those kinds of things and you can go back and forth in a more convenient way for everybody because not everybody has to be there all at the same time.
Plus youve got a transcript and a record and all of those good things.
So I just think in the modern work world, that tool, a video async communication tool is the number one thing.
That'S making, yeah, especially with how we're virtual and hybrid teams and, yeah, so that's really powerful.
Okay.
Do you have your third?
Yeah, and it's tough for me to pick the third one, but I'm going to go.
Given the number of cybersecurity incidents we've had with a password manager and the one that I recommend if you don't have one at all, is one password.
It's slightly better than a couple of the other options, but they all basically do the same thing.
And the thing about using a password manager is it's a forcing function.
And by forcing function, I mean it constrains your behavior in ways that make you more secure, even without you realizing it.
So it does the obvious thing.
It helps you manage your passwords.
It helps you have different passwords for different important accounts, which is you must have this.
You can't use the same password for all your accounts and certainly not for any of the ones that are important that have money or that let people get into your accounts that have money.
Password manager having different passwords, it makes it easy.
It's in your browser.
You have a browser extension.
You click a button, because once you've logged into the password manager with your strong, hard to guess password, then that one unlocks everything else really quickly and easily.
And that's great.
But then an example of how it creates security that you wouldn't think about is the biggest problem.
The way that most common attacks happen for most people is through something called phishing, which is spelled p h I s I nde sh ing.
Okay.
This is a very important thing to understand because if you understand the social engineering dynamics, the psychology, and that, then youll be on the lookout more.
So the way that hackers get into your account is they need your device to authenticate them in some surreptitious way.
And the way that that is accomplished is by you clicking on a link.
So you have to train yourself not to click on links anywhere, anytime.
Theyre coming from, supposedly from your friends, supposedly from your bank, supposedly from wherever you must know, like okay, if thats really true that theyre trying to get in touch with me, let me go log in the normal way that I usually do and see if theres a warning there because if theres a warning sent to you, theres going to be a warning when you log in into the account.
And what theyre doing in phishing is they create a replica of the place that youre going.
So if you say youre a chase bank user, they'll have a replica of what looks like the chase website, which is really easy to do and it was easy before AI.
And now with AI, they can replicate a website in seconds.
So they'd have a website, you'd go they go, yeah, that's exactly what my chase website looks like.
I'm going to log in.
You put in your password, and when you put in your password, it'll let you in, but then it's going to go, there's a problem.
And you won't realize that what they did was they stole your username and your password and now they can control that account.
It's any link, or it's a link like, oh, your friend sends you a link and says, hey, I can't believe these nude pictures of you from when you were little.
And you're, what?
Click on the link.
Now the link is going to take you to somewhere and you won't see anything.
And you go, that was weird.
But what you did when you clicked that link was you authorized your device, your computer, your smartphone, whatever, and said, oh, yeah, that place where you're going, just do whatever they tell you to do.
Download software, keyloggers, whatever.
So they're, they're getting access to your device by you clicking on this link.
Now, the reason why it wouldn't work with a password manager is if you go, okay, well, let me go.
If the link was one that simply took you to a place where you were, your credentials are going to be captured, as opposed to they automatically are given access to your computer.
If you go there and you go, okay, I'm going to log in.
You go to one password and you're like, all right, one password.
Do that thing where you fill in the stuff.
It's like one password's like, I don't know the site.
I've never seen this site before.
It recognizes its faith.
Yeah.
It knows it's not the usual URL.
Right.
So it's those kind of things that come from using a password manager that are going to make you more secure.
And there's so many ways that people can nail you.
Once you get nailed, you lose a lot of money, you lose credibility, you lose access to your documents.
All kinds of bad things happen.
So you can't afford to have that happen to you even once.
Yes.
Right.
Okay, great, great tips.
So I'm wondering, what's the biggest mistake when it just comes to technology with lawyers, what's the biggest mistake they make managing technology?
Think of it like a superpower.
Think of it like what you're doing is you're running a digital factory, and your digital factory has communication tools, you know, distribution tools, and its all running off of your computer.
Thats your digital factory.
Well, nobody taught us lawyers, especially sole and small firm lawyers, how to think in terms of logistics and enterprise resource management.
All of those skills that are part of running an organization with lots of different moving parts have suddenly crept in because, yes, its magical and it works, but you cant just treat each one as a separate one off thing.
You have to think of it as synergistic like how do these things work together?
So you have to be strategic, you have to be methodical.
You cant just be pushing buttons and trying things and chasing shiny objects.
You really need to have an overall way of approaching it.
So people ask me, what do you do with lawyers?
Oh, you do technology.
Oh, you help them fix their computer.
Im like, no, there are other people who can do that.
I try to help them learn how to manage their digital resources and think about what are best practices, what are things not to do, what are things to do first before you do other things?
And thats where that list of the top ten tech tools was born out of.
I was like, all right, if were going to drop dead and give my last best piece of advice that would work for most people, it would be these are the top ten things that are elements that you need to think about.
Not included are things that are essential.
But I dont need to tell them.
I dont need to tell them to get a word processor, they know that.
Or email.
I dont need to tell them that.
And I also need to tell them, stop using word perfect, use word.
The ones on that list are ones ive just seen.
Lawyers not using it either at all were not enough and not seeing how to thinking about integrating them.
Right.
So we're definitely going to link that on the show page.
But I know that you have an amazing community that you share all kinds of information, especially to small law firms and solo law firms.
How can people join that?
You can go to my website and look at resources and drop down.
I think there's a link there.
I mean, the best thing is just go to my website and get on my email list.
And the way that would happen is, and this is something I developed after my top ten tech tools is I have a seven day free email course where I walk people through this whole overview.
And at the end of that, if you want to join the course inner circle, you can.
But I feel like everyone who comes in there needs to come in with a certain grounding and it's that way everybody can be on the same page and understand things.
You understand this because it's probably the same way with the people you work with, right?
Yeah.
There's certain baseline things we all need to kind of know and then we can commune together on other things.
That's the way to do it.
Okay.
And we'll definitely link that too.
Okay.
So Ernie, I could go on and on and on with you because like I said, I'm just learning so much, but we're going to close it out.
We always close out with three questions here.
So one, what's just something that you're excited about right now that you're creating in your work or doing in your work?
I think what I am most excited about right now is just that I have the time to read books that I didn't have the time for.
And it seems like a simple thing, but it's like reading books as opposed to watching tv shows, which I also enjoyed.
But just reading, being contemplative.
And that's what I do in the morning.
I just read a lot of different books all at once, which is weird, but I like reading.
That makes me excited because I have the time to do it and my kids are all grown up and they've moved away and I don't have all those stressors that you have when you're at other stage of life, so.
Right.
Well, what's one thing you're reading right now that you're finding really interesting?
Oh, this is great.
Okay, so you'll love this.
You know, my dad was a psychoanalyst.
Yes.
And I grew up in this world of the hidden dimension of psychology and how humans think.
And the other day I stumbled into this bookstore and there's this book called attribute to Freud.
It says, attribute to Freud, written by H.
L.
I was like, oh, God, it's going to be one of those because that's how shrinks always, they never tell you the full name.
It's always just initials.
The woman's name is known.
It's Hilda Doolittle.
And she was a poet and she was engaged to Ezra Pound at one point.
Anyway, she's reflecting and she's a writer, so she's a very good writer.
But she's reflecting on her sessions with Freud during the thirties.
Like, yes.
Oh, my God, it is so good.
You would love this book.
It's very short and I'm reading it very slowly because I'm savoring every short chapter and the chapters are like one page or one and a half pages.
And it's just so interesting.
I mean, all of this stuff that Freud came up with, he came up with the Nazis rising to power and all that turmoil between the two world wars, and it's just a fascinating account of a person who is learning to explore their inner self with one of the greatest teachers on how to do this.
It's just fascinating.
Wow.
I'm going to go look it up.
Okay.
Second question.
Thinking about the traditional way of practicing law, what's a way that you would tell lawyers to think differently or a rule to break.
I think the biggest one, which is the hardest one for lawyers because it's just ingrained into our nature that like we need to be very cautious and think about the rules and worry about the rules.
It's going to be Heming Haw and naysay and Nitpick and the world is moving really quickly.
And I think lawyers are going to be, I mean the legal profession is going to be upended by AI and other things because we're just information processors is what we do for the most part.
And all of that information processing is going to happen faster and better with AI and with other tools like that.
So I think the biggest thing for lawyers is to stop looking backwards and stop worrying about how things could go wrong and just try things.
Its funny, the judge, I went to work for two years at a law school.
He was very rigorous and he was a type a personality and he wasnt somebody who was like, yeah, lets just make stuff up and try it.
But he would say, his secretary was very nervous and she would tell me when she went to work for him in federal court, he would say, oh, Miss Doetell, dont worry so much about this.
Anything I do, I can undo.
I think if lawyers would think like that, anything you do that isn't the way you want it to be, you can undo.
And the worrying that we have, like, oh, I asked the wrong question.
So what?
You're going to make mistakes.
You can't avoid that, right?
But all that hand wringing keeps you from moving forward in ways that aren't obvious.
If you're not moving at a fast enough pace, when you pick up speed, you can go, oh, this isn't so bad.
I'm moving faster, I'm fixing things, I'm keeping up.
That's good because lawyers have to keep up.
I mean, the days of slow moving adoption.
No, it's over.
Yeah.
Okay.
Love that.
And our final one, other than have an amazing time to read books in the morning, give us a practice that you've adopted into your life that helps you to be a better, happier person.
Okay, so you probably know about this one.
It's journaling one.
Like, I like writing things down and I do that every day.
And the type of journaling I do has modified slightly according to my whim over time.
But it started with just like with meditation where I said, okay, Im going to just do this every day.
And the way I really picked up a lot of steam, and I highly recommend this for people, is theres a book called the Artist Way by Julia Cameron.
Its my favorite.
I love the morning pages.
Yes, the morning pages blew me away when I did it.
And Im done the twelve week the exact way she prescribes it for twelve weeks twice.
And then ive just done it sometimes here and there or whatever.
But I was blown away at this stuff that came out of my brain when I sat down and just learned to let go because she says, oh, if you don't think of anything, just start writing anything.
And that feels so weird.
And it felt, I don't know, weirder to me but I journaling, I was like well I'm not just going to write stuff down like the thoughts in my head, the thought in my head is like I don't have anything to think about right now, just write that down.
When you start writing that down, invariably something's going to come in your head and you're going to start okay, that's what I need to talk about.
And then the things that came out of my head on the days that I thought I had nothing.
Oh my God, I highly recommend that practice.
Yeah, I think it's an amazing practice.
One when you just said like, you know, I don't have anything in my head, well you just had a thought was in your head that you just said you didn't have anything.
But it brings in such awareness of like you and I have talked about meditation practices and all the things and I think the more aware we about how our thinking is, then we can improve our life is and how we're experiencing life.
Right.
So I think that's a really great thing.
I've sort of used morning pages in the evening for a different reason at the end of the day of just taking the same amount of time and just writing everything that's in your mind.
I think in a way it helps your brain dump so that you're not processing all that when you're trying to sleep.
I find it like a powerful tool of just letting go at the evening time too.
I'm going to try that.
I mean other people have mentioned that and always thought, but you see, here again is the resistance part of your brain and it is a resistance.
And this is the thing about the whole psychoanalysis.
It's like you have an ego and the ego doesn't really want itself to be examined.
So it comes up with all these wonderful rationalizations that it easily supplies you.
Oh, that's not going to work.
Oh, you don't need to do that.
That's not going to be a big deal.
And if you just try these things and the way that, I don't know, trick myself into it is the right way of putting it, but it feels sort of like I'm tricking myself because I'll say, you know, I know I dont think that this is going to make any sense, but if I think for a moment how many people that I respect in different areas, realms of life, writers, lawyers, whatever, say that this works, why wouldnt I at least give it a shot?
Well, you know, there goes the curiosity, right?
Well maybe I should try it just to see what it does for me.
And then ill also say like, you know, all these things that we talk about, the different practices you can do to help you and even like the idea of the different things and ways of using technology, it's just try it and see what adopt what works for you, what works for you, maybe somebody else.
That's okay, right?
You had an experience and then you move on.
Yeah, totally.
Awesome.
Ernie, thank you so much for your time today.
It really has been amazing being able to catch up with you and to learn some more.
I really appreciate it.
Oh, thank you.
That was great.
Talking to you.
