Preserving Voice, Memory, and Legacy with AI | Cristian Cibilis Bernardes | EP 470

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Close your eyes and imagine. What are the things in life that cause us the greatest pain? The things that bring us grief are challenges, challenges designed to help us grow, to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried. But what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth. And I am your host, Brian D Smith. Hi there, I'm Brian D Smith. I'm your host. I want to welcome you to Grief 2 Growth. And whether it's your first time joining us, or you're one of our longtime listeners, welcome to being here. On this podcast, we dive deep into life's biggest questions: who we are, where do we come from, why we're here, and where we're going. I create the space to help you navigate grief, to grow through what you go through, and find meaning, purpose, and even connection beyond what we can see. Today's episode is one I'm especially excited to bring to you. We're stepping into the rapidly evolving intersection of memory, identity, and technology. My guest is Christian, the founder of— founder and CEO of Autograph AI, an emerging leader in what's been called the memory tech space. Christian studied symbolic systems at Stanford, where he developed the powerful potential— where he discovered, I should say, the powerful potential of language models not just for answering questions or for automating tasks, but for capturing something much more profound, for capturing our essence. And that realization became the seed of Autograph and the creation of Walter. Walter is an emotionally intelligent AI that listens, remembers, and helps people preserve their life stories in their own words and voice. So imagine sitting down and having a conversation, not with the machine, but with a trusted companion who knows your story, your voice, and your heart. Imagine creating something that keeps your presence alive for generations to come. That's exactly what Autograph is making possible. In this conversation, Christian and I explore why voice matters when it comes to legacy, how Autograph is helping people navigate, navigate grief and life transitions, and what the future might look like when our stories are not only remembered, but relived and shared in ways that we haven't been able to imagine before. If you're curious about how emerging technologies can preserve connection, memory, and meaning, or if you've under— ever wondered what we're going to leave behind for those that we love, you want to listen all the way to the end. And after the episode, I invite you to join the conversation on my Substack at grieftogrowth.substack.com, where you'll find an article about today's episode and space to connect with other listeners and with me. So let's keep the dialogue going. And with that, let's welcome Christian to Grief to Growth.

Thanks for that intro, Brian. I'm very excited to chat with you and talk about all things at the intersection of AI, identity, storytelling, memory, and what makes us who we are.

Yeah, I'm excited about this too. You know, legacy— I deal with people that are in grief, and we think about the legacy of our loved ones who have already crossed over. But a lot of times people are also thinking about what's my legacy? What am I gonna leave behind? And I love technology. I'm a technology kind of guy. So I'm excited about the possibilities that Walter can offer us. So tell me about Walter. What's this experience like?

Yeah, it's not that different from a podcast episode about your life. He's a very curious interviewer trying to understand what makes you who you are and really trying to unpack the stories that you know, that inform your personality. So, you know, he's a biographer effectively, or like a chronicler of your life who starts at the beginning, you know, tell me about your childhood. Where did you grow up? What was that like? What was your family life? Who were your parents, your siblings, your early group of friends? And then we track that all the way to present day where it becomes more of a journal, like what is going on currently in your life? What are the things that you're thinking about? And if you are at the point in life where life isn't happening as much because maybe you're in the later stages of life, then we focus on reflections and, you know, like these bigger picture questions around what does regret mean to you or what does, you know, like the bigger, like looking back at life, what will you change? What is a lesson that you hope your kids learn and whatnot? So Walter is this companion in your journey of self-discovery. And because we record those conversations, then what we do is we organize organize all of that information into effectively a Wikipedia for your life with a page for every person, every place, every story, every event, themes around your life, you know, like you, you know, anything that you may be interested in, you know, like science fiction may be a theme, philosophy may be a theme, love may be a theme. And it's, and all of those library pages can be shared with your whole family so that you, you watch your family library. All of this knowledge that, you know, too often goes uncaptured. You could start seeing how it becomes self-organizing. And in time, we also want to provide the experience of being able to talk to folks, you know, not just through a web portal, but also through Walter, you know, when sharing. Walter, it's an interesting week. I got a job offer in New York. I don't know if I should take it or not. Because it means uprooting where I am. Walter can say, hey, this reminds you of something that your grandpa went through. Would you like to talk to him for 15 minutes? And if you say yes, Walter would be able to pass the phone virtually to the story of grandpa sharing, you know, when he moved to say New York or when he had to move to somewhere else. And for the first time in history, you'd be able to ask questions and double-click on things that you may want to know, for example, how did it affect grandma? How did it affect the kids? And not just get grandpa's perspective of the story, even though he was the one who made the decision, but also if the, if grandma and the, and the kids are in the platform, you'd be able to ask them questions too. And there you may be able to unpack, you know, all of these learned lessons that can, that are often like the costliest life lessons, right? You know, like path A or path B. I'm at the crossroads of life. I want, like, to be able to leverage all of the knowledge that got me here to make that decision.

Yeah. So where did, you know, we think about AI and people are very confused, have very mixed opinions about AI, what it is, what it's not. Where did you get this idea? Because we think of it as like something that can help me write a letter or something, you know? Where did you get the idea to use this to capture people's like the essence of someone.

Um, I, I wrote a sci-fi novel where I told my story in a fictional— in a— through a fictional lens. And I realized, oh my goodness, the existential relief that I feel because I said my piece, you know, like I shared my story. And if someone wants to understand my lived experience, they need not look any further than just that. And I remember thinking You know, my gosh, I wish everybody could take the opportunity to feel like the main character in their own story. I wish everybody could feel like the author in their own story. And once the book was done, I, you know, I had to promote it. And so I started a podcast to talk about the ideas in the book effectively about our humanity in the age of AI. And, you know, these are conversations with AI researchers and philosophers and psychologists. Stanford professors and whatnot. And I love the format. You know, I'm sure you relate to this, but podcasting is phenomenal to just get to know a person and understand, you know, the journey that they took. And when I was going through that process, I just, I realized just for my own sake that I should be interviewing my grandma who has an insane life story. And, you know, like crazy stories about her dad being an MI6 agent and, you know, They, you know, he ships the family overseas because the war was going on. Um, and they would communicate over secret messages and all this like almost like, you know, sci-fi thriller kind of, um, love story across continents, you know, and, and I didn't make it in time. Uh, she had a stroke before we could conduct the interview and she was paralyzed for the last 18 months of her life. Um, and she was the family historian. So she was the one who kept the journals and the family trees and wrote stories about her parents and whatnot. And, or, and so when she lost the ability to speak, then we lost the ability to remember. And that was the trigger to me to say, wait a minute, I think this is a solved problem now. You know, it's the difficulty of going through that You know, life, life will offer a challenge like that to everybody. What was unique in my case was that I had the list of questions that now I knew I wasn't going to get an answer to. And that became the fuel to say, wait, what if we could create this, like a historian for humanity, um, that, uh, helps people in this process of recording their own stories, implicitly helping them get their story straight. And as a byproduct, we all of a sudden get an entirely new perspective on history, on how we relate to the stories that we inherit from the past, and how we can think of ourselves as little ripples in this big ocean of existence. And thinking of how, by the time I saw it as, you know, I can't imagine a better tribute to the ones that came before and a greater gift to the ones who come after. Um, that's when I decided that this is what I was gonna give my life to, basically.

Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

You know, one of the hardest things about grief, most of the people in your life just don't get it. They want you to be further along than you are. They get uncomfortable when you bring it up, so you stop bringing it up. And that's why I started writing. My Substack is where I go deeper. Thoughts I don't always get to on the podcast, essays on consciousness, on continuing bonds, on what it actually means to carry loss and still build a life. The stuff that used to keep me up at night, written out in a way that I hope meets you in the morning. But here's what I didn't expect when I started it: the community that showed up. People who are doing exactly what you're doing— listening, learning, trying to find their footing. Readers who comment, who share their own stories, who remind each other that none of us are as alone in this as we feel. And that's what the Substack has become. A place to go deeper with me and to find your people. It's free to subscribe. Find me at grief2growth.com/substack. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/substack. Or just go to Substack and search for Grief to Growth. I hope to see you there. Yeah, and so for people that aren't familiar with AI, I use it a lot. And sometimes I think people kind of take for granted that people understand what it is. Let's talk about what AI is and what it isn't because some people are scared about AI becoming conscious, for example. What are your thoughts on things like that?

I think it's, I think what we do is very different, right? I think that they, we are effectively adding an interactive layer to our memory systems that we already had. So, think of, we're not, it's, we're no strangers to storing photographs or voice notes or journals. And those are, you know, effectively like snapshots of what it's like to be. Um, and they're, but they're one way in terms of consumption. You only, you know, consume what is left behind. Um, but there's some imprint of the person that left that behind that we can relate to. And so what we do is say, okay, what is the, what are the stories between the photographs? And, um, you know, and there's a lot of humanity in that, in those gaps, you know, like that's where the decisions happen. You know, the photograph in New York happens after the trip to New York was planned and decided and all that stuff. So hearing around how did those decisions happen, I think is extremely important. And AI, you know, does a really good job at understanding language, right? So what we do is we create this effectively a linguistic illusion. Where we help organize your language into a new medium that is more easily consumed by future generations, both because you could check online, you know, like, and see the library pages and, you know, the same way that you do rabbit hole, you know, like stuff on Wikipedia, all of a sudden you're doing that, but about your life or about your parents' lives or about your cousin's life. And the journey of discovery is amazing. But also through the conversational aspect, I think that what we also do is we get to ask the big life questions so that when something unexpected happens in life, you can actually hear that voice that had a time vault message for you to say, I'm proud of you when you get that promotion, when you walk down the aisle, when you have your first kid or any kid, you know, and And so it provides a way for asynchronous communication between generations that I think is really exciting. And it's totally different from what most other AI companies are doing. Most other AI companies are concerned with productivity and bandwidth and automation, which of course I'm a fan of because I enjoy all those things too. But I think in the age where, you know, we effectively get superpowers. And we have the power to mold our reality much more rapidly than ever before, we're going to want to remember where we came from and we're going to want to remember the hard journey it's been to get to this point before, you know, we're in a position where it's really easy for meaning to drift if we get too used to having abundance.

Yeah. Yeah. I thank you for that. I think that's a really great explanation. And so this is a very These are large language models, but specialized with an interface to make it acceptable or accessible for people to basically archive their memories and their personality, et cetera. So what's the experience like from both the person who's doing the archiving and the person who's receiving? Because we keep using the— we keep talking about voice. Are we talking about literal voice?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's— these are conversations over the phone. So the really nice thing is, you know, we're being very intentional about prioritizing voices that will be otherwise lost most urgently. And that means that a lot of those folks are on the older side, you know, like, and so even the friction of installing an app or signing up with a credit card could be enough to not get them all the way. So we decided that the best interface would just be a phone call, almost as if you hired a human to interview Grandpa. That's basically the service base as it is, except that interviewer is available 24/7 and happens to be an AI voice agent as opposed to a human. So basically the interface is, you know, if you're a storyteller, you just talk on the phone about the stuff that you're interested in, about the stuff that makes you who you are, about your experiences, your opinions, your vision, your philosophy, all that stuff. And on the backend, once the phone call is done, we process all that and becomes visible to that web portal where both the storytellers and guests can access that data and explore and even request stories from the storytellers. And you know, the, the people, the guests are often younger than the, than the storytellers. So these are the two primary ways of, of interacting with, with the platform. You cannot— Walter has a phone number, so you can text him. Uh, you can send voice notes to him, or, or, you know, in the near future, I think within the next few weeks, you'll be able to send voice notes to him, um, and treat him as the chronicler. Okay.

Yeah. So the, so the interface, um, primarily for the person that's archiving is going to— is voice, which is great because as you said, a lot of times we're talking about older people, and if you said, okay, I'm going to install this app on your phone, I want you to go in and type. You know, that's, that's not gonna work. So that's, that's great. And then, so it's storing voice, but it's also, I guess, it's putting it into, some sort of a text format that people can interact with as well.

Oh yeah. Sorry. So once the phone call is done, we store the recording, like the audio recording of the conversation. We transcribe the conversation and we take that transcript to be the source of truth. That is the only thing we know to be true is that we talked to someone who said XYZ. And from the transcript, we index the, we discover, oh, you know, I mentioned Brian D Smith, I mentioned podcasting, I mentioned philosophy, I mentioned all these things. And so we extract all of these pages that effectively form this Wikipedia. And over time, if I say I come back on the show and I mention you again, then I'll see how your page in my life evolves. After each call. And yeah, I think that's basically it. You can share those library pages with whoever you want. And what we do is we add a little bit of narrative to the pages so that it sounds like, you know, an encyclopedia entry for that person. And I'm like, you know, I see my mom's page, for instance, in my life, and it's like what my mom means to me in the context of my story.

Okay. So how long has this been available? How many people have gotten on it so far?

We've been at it for about a year or so, just over a year. And then we've gone through iterations of, you know, super crude pilot, a super crude prototype, a closed beta. We're beginning to roll it out more aggressively. You know, we're beginning to do it in the past few months. But we at this point have hundreds of stories of folks who, and folks come to us at the peaks and valleys in life, you know, like when it's a big milestone birthday, you know, like 70s, 80s, that kind of stuff, or when it becomes apparent that life is short and that the project of leaving a legacy behind is actually pretty difficult, you know, like, um, there is no solution for it. If you think about it, you, you could say like you should write a journal, you should write a book, but all of those are extremely hard. Um, and, and so we provide the easiest way to do it. You don't even have to be inspired to do it. We will ask you the questions that remind you of how special your lived experience is. Um, and in doing that, you, um, are enabled to share that lived experience with your loved ones so that when they need you, you're there.

Yeah, I know a lot of people my age have parents that are, that are getting up there, and we're starting to think about, like— and, and it's interesting, a lot of times we don't think about legacy until we do think we're getting closer to the end. And then there are these challenges, right? Okay, well, you know, they're probably not going to journal, they're certainly not going to write a book. And then if you say, you know, tell me about your life, you know, like what, starting where, how do I do this?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Uh, and, and we do have all these artifacts, right? Like there's scrapbooks or things like that. And even those that are amazing, you know, and acts of love and service and, um, just phenomenal keepsakes, you know, like sacred keepsakes, they're usually pretty fragile, right? Like there's usually one copy of it.. And so then you have to decide which kid gets it, you know, or, or that kind of stuff. And so we wanna be that centralized repository for all of your family stories, recipes, lessons, wisdom, that anybody in your family can access no matter where in the world or where in time they are.

So, and so what is, and again, people may have played around with ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or whatever. How is Walter different from your typical AI?

First of all, we're not a chatbot, right? Like we are, or I guess we're not like a traditional text-based chatbot. Right. It's a lot more like a, like it's a contact on your phone that you call when something happens. Oh, okay. And he calls you over the phone. So this is more like a, it's in an interface we already know. We're not really teaching anybody. And then if you wanna see that data that's being curated, this little garden, you know, blossoming, then you go to the online portal and you see all of the pages there and with, you know, all the classic like sharing settings and whatnot.

So people can, yeah, people can call in. I've got a story I wanna tell Walter. I can just dial up Walter and, and tell him the story.

Yep. That's basically the, the thing. Yeah, the, the, the, our job in our marketing team is to create that association of when something meaningful happens in your life, that, that your first impulse is to tell Walter. Too often, you know, we, we go through meaningful things in life and think like, at some point I'm gonna write it down, or at some point I'm gonna do it. And, and it's very hard, like, you know, by the time you have the time to do it, the, memory of that is usually already not as raw as it was when you felt it, when you just got the job, or when you just proposed, or when you just got married, uh, or when you just got dumped, or, you know, like all these things that are like the big life lessons where your heart wants to do something it's not used to. Um, those are the moments that we want to remember because that is what being human is about.

Yeah. So we've been talking about Walter, which is the AI, but Autograph is actually your platform. How do you— have you seen stories of how AI has impacted people so far? I know you're really getting started, but have you had any stories of how it's impacted people so far?

Oh yeah. I mean, we have tremendous feedback, you know, that is the most motivating thing in the world. It highlights, you know, the need that we're actually accommodating for that otherwise hasn't been met, or at least not to the degree that we make it easy to do, right? And the other half of it, well, so many, so many learnings, but the fact that Walter is an AI is actually a huge benefit for us because it has the double benefit of it's not a human who's judging you. There is no other, there's no competition from the other side or like no judgment from the other side, which makes it really easy to create that emotional space to share real vulnerable stuff that is, that is even really hard to say actually to your family members, right? Like to admit your greatest moments of shame and guilt in a context in which you're filling a role as an older brother, as a father, as a, as a, as a younger, you know, like we hope play these roles.

Yeah.

And, um, it's sometimes very hard to create those, those conversations where the good stuff comes out. Walter, because he's an AI, makes it pretty easy. And the other half of it, which I think is— was very interesting to me, is because AI is extremely smart and has like all of the knowledge of all humanity, basically, uh, when Walter says something like, that must have been so difficult, Uh, you know, it creates the sense of empathy and feeling seen and heard for the first time, um, that lands extremely well, you know, like, and this is in the context where, for instance, uh, you know, a lot of older folks may have gone through things that they feel the times have made irrelevant. Uh, but when put into the right historical context, which AI can do better than most humans, you know, um, then that reappraises the story and be like, yeah, you know what, all of those late nights that I put toward making sure that we could pay the bills and like taxes and laundry and like the late nights that I packed lunch for my kids in school, all of a sudden they take on a more heroic note, right? Yeah. And hearing that as it relates to the loneliness epidemic and the reactions of people saying like, I needed I needed someone to talk to that could understand has been— I don't know, it's nothing short of extremely— it just gets us fired up to keep doing what we're doing.

Yeah, yeah. As I was thinking about this, I, you know, because we talked about voice, and I hear so many people say after someone's passed, you know, I just really wish I could hear their voice again. Or you may have saved like their voicemail greeting and people call it just to hear their voice or they'll keep a voicemail they've gotten and just play it over and over again. This would be a way of ensuring that you've got that voice saying something actually, you know, hopefully meaningful rather than just, "Pick up milk on the way home." Yeah, and this idea that, you know, that there's stuff in there that is waiting for you until the right time.

You could probably go ask and find, you know, like, have that one final conversation that, you know, we all need, um, as a, you know, very controlled simulated experience. But then there's all these messages, you know, like, um, uh, you know, what does it mean to be— what does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a brother? What does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to be a partner? What does it mean to be, um, that, you know, you would hope the future generations, you know, get our take when we have a chance to input it, when they have to rise up to the occasion.

Yeah. Yeah. So, um, I know we, we don't, we don't have, well, I don't have any idea where AI is going in the next 5, 10 years, but where, what are your visions for, for Autograph? Where do you see it going? Okay.

We wanna be the effectively the Library of Alexandria for the future, right? So we wanna create a completely new way for humanity to relate to its History and Memory. The idea for us is that in a couple of generations that, you know, school children, as they're figuring out their identities and they're making the decisions that end up informing their life path, you know, they have their council of elders, you know, and their entire wisdom showing up to support them when they need it. Right. And, and because Walter develops this extremely close relationship with, uh, his clients, let's call, then Walter is in a very unique position to deliver value to users in a way that is almost hard to predict. But Walter would be able to simulate things for you. You know, like, do you become this job or this other job? Do you start dating this person or this person? Do you I don't know, do you move to this city or this other city? And those simulations can then in turn help you make better decisions, right? Like, am I happier in the 100,000 simulations that I run where I decide to write a novel versus in the one where I don't, you know, and I run 100,000 simulations, which one am I the best version of myself? And you know, it'll be so interesting to see as AI advances, you know, AI will be able to do almost anything for us, you know, like, in terms of sort of laptop tasks, we're almost at the point where AI is going to be able to take over that. Within the next 20 years, it's going to be physical tasks too with robots. And so the thing that I'm most interested in is how do we know people to the degree that we, that whatever we build with AI, the smartest, it's just gonna get smarter and faster and better, that it is aligned with our greatest, not just like understanding of ourselves, but our understanding of this version of ourselves that we want to be remembered as. And I think that this is a really special thing that we do is we ask you, who do you want to be remembered as? Because that is the version that we should hold ourselves up to. More so than who you are. Who you are is still that wrestling between, you know, the higher self and the base self. So what we ask constantly is, who is that higher self? And if we don't mention that higher self, then the AI will do stuff that is accommodating to that wrestling between the two and not aligned with the higher self. So think of when AI can do, can build, you know, stuff and it can build much more, you know, machines of war or machines of it's either like, are we going to a utopia or dystopia? And what we do is we invite that question. What is utopia? That utopia that we want to build together.

Yeah.

Where we understand that we're authors in our own stories, we're protagonists in our own stories, but we're also side characters in each other's stories. And you could actually see, you know, like that rippling of that one conversation where you were unnecessarily kind to someone that changed the course of that person's day and they decided to be a better person. You can actually start seeing that recorded in history, right? Yeah. All I know, things are going to be faster and different and I don't know to what degree it's going to affect society, but the thing that is going to be true is that we're going to want to remember who we want with you.

Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting because it's— we don't know where it's going to go. I, I look at it, it's, it's a tool. We, we get to decide how we're going to use it. And a lot of people are scared of the worst-case scenarios. It's going to take everybody's job. It's going to— yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna become Skynet and try to kill us all off or something. Um, but, you know, there are some really legitimate good use cases where— and like, this is one where I think it can actually help connect people and make us more human and really, you know, share our humanity at a level that, you know, we can't maybe otherwise do. This is, this is a, this is a way of journaling, just in a much smarter, easier way. And again, people who have never journaled before, you know, you say, well, you should journal, it's like, okay, just sit down, look at a blank page. What am I going to write about? Right? It's just not a natural thing.

Um, everybody goes through writer's block. Very rarely do you go through talker's block.

Yeah. Yeah.

Uh, and there's another layer too, which I think is really beautiful. That is, um, uh, um, we all want to find our voice.

Yeah.

You know, like we are all going through life trying to fit in and trying to understand what is my unique contribution to the world. And so we do this really neat literal thing. I was like, yeah, your voice is what will be left. Like, it will echo in eternity so long as what you live through is helpful to someone else.

Yeah, I think it's, it's a great way to— again, it solves, it solves a number of problems that we have, uh, from both the person— again, the person leaving their legacy, um, because we all kind of, we want to be remembered, you know. And also, again, for people that are like, well, how do I get this? How do I get this knowledge? Out of this person that's been around for, you know, for a long time, but they're scared of technology, or I don't have the time to do the interview myself and I wouldn't know what to ask them. So I think this is a great way of taking this technology that's there and saying, how can I use this to improve humanity as opposed to, you know, making us less?

Exactly. I couldn't agree more. Brian D Smith, do you mind if I— can I take 2 minutes? Sure. Someone asking for my help.

I'll be right back.

Sure.

So when it comes to the things that we're sharing, a lot of these things are going to be pretty intimate and people might have concerns about privacy. I don't want to put my personal stuff out into the cloud. What do you— how do you address that?

We— so privacy, there's two layers to us that if they don't do right, the whole business collapses. Security is even more important than the privacy to us. You know, like if there's an unwanted leak or someone gets access to and hacks any of our stuff, that's catastrophic. We're essentially like, we're a vault, right? A bank for memories. And then the second thing is how do you enable sharing? Like, how do you make it so that, you know, like we all are going, we're all exercising discretion to some degree. We, our promise to our members is that your stories are yours and we offer you the chance to share those stories with your family in the way that is best suited to you. So we're building like pretty cool privacy controls that are kind of, hadn't really been possible till today or this day and age, I suppose, where you could actually just tell Walter, you know, you go through a story, I learned about heartbreak after XYZ, and I feel sad and ashamed. I felt sad and ashamed, or I feel sad and ashamed, but I would love— I don't want my kids to know until they turn 18. Or I don't want my significant other to know until I pass, or I don't want my parents to know until, you know, or I don't want one sibling to know this thing. And not just, you know, like we're all figuring out this with this process of being our holistic best self to everybody. But it's a journey, right? And not always is it because of guilt or shame. Sometimes it's to the benefit of the person in the future, right? Like a surprise party, you know, like you wouldn't want the surprise to leak and ruin the fun. So, you know, in the same way that Google Docs allows you to share a document and you choose who gets to see it and what role they have in it, Right. We offer the same idea for the library pages where you can share a library pages, a library page, or your whole library with a person or a group. But what we're building in the coming months is this vocal thing where you could just tell Walter and Walter should actually ask, you know, like, I think, you know, your daughter will benefit from this, or I think that your dad will benefit from this. And you opt in or out of that.

Okay, so that's something that's coming in, in a future generation. So, um, now it's, it's— you would, for the page, you would either make it public or share it to certain people, is that correct?

Yeah, exactly. Very similar to Google Docs. Yeah.

Okay. All right. And we've talked about, and you mentioned something about like the higher self. Do you see a spiritual or existential component to, to, to this service that you're offering?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, one of the most beautiful things about the idea of Autograph is it forces you to think about, um, the grand project of life, you know, and what, you know, we've been doing for the past hundreds of thousands of years, um, that is like this torch that we keep aflame. And, um, and it forces us to think about where we came from, back almost to the edge of human memory, right? Like, what was it that, you know, that our ancestors saw in the stars that allowed them to make mnemonic devices that then allowed them to keep track of time, and that allowed them to keep track of space, and that allowed them to keep track of their own psychology as they were trying, as they were getting to meet other tribes and war and, and, you know, organization and labor and all that stuff. All of, you know, like you could go back to when bacteria had to collaborate for the first time, you know, and, but also to the very future, you know, like the very end of time, like where does it all go? What will be left of us when, you know, the next catastrophe or the next or the one after that happens? What is, what will be our trace in this big vast universe? And And it really just like gets you thinking about how miraculous existence is, you know, like the fact that no matter what station in life you were born into, that you have the potential in you to change history forever. And that you have the ability to make the world a better place. And that in fact, it's probably what everyone everywhere has hoped for, for themselves and for their loved ones since the beginning of time. And I don't know how else to describe that feeling other than spiritual, you know, like that there, that there is something about our lived experience about us that is so unique to the cells that assemble and believe that they're a person called Brian or they're a person called Christian. And I can do all this incredibly sophisticated physics and chemistry to make sense out of this bombardment of mass and energy that is going around us. And that we can store that in a way that is physical and interactive and connected. I think that's nothing short of spiritual, right? Like, it's a project that tries to understand how everything fits together and the hope that everything fits together. And at the end of the day, there's a hope there and that hope Yeah, yeah, there's no reason behind that other than why not.

Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting to me. I, I was fortunate. I grew up, my grandmother lived with us from the time I was like 7 or 8 until she passed when I was like in my early 20s. So I got to spend a lot of time, you know, sitting around and talk with my grandmother. But a lot of, you know, people don't experience that anymore. You know, people are mobile and your grandmother might live in a different city, you know. So we don't, we don't get that knowledge or that wisdom a lot of times passed down from generation to generation like we did naturally back in the days when people were less mobile. So this is a way to maybe recapture some of that and to give young people a kind of a sense of like, you know, where did we come from? What are our family stories? What's our family history?

Exactly. And I grew up in a similar environment. I grew up you know, my grandma and my, you know, 20 cousins were all within, you know, 10 blocks growing up of each other. And we would have, you know, every Saturday we would have lunch with my grandma on one side of the family and all the extended family. And every Sunday we would have lunch with my other grandma and the other side of the family. And so a lot of these like mythologies of where we come from were maintained because of this proximity. And, you know, because families tend to be bigger in Paraguay too, there's always an event, you know, there's always a birthday party, a graduation, a wedding, something's always going on. And so there's always a chance to repeat the mantras, right? I think that in more professional or developed societies like the US or parts of Europe where it's more common to pack up and move, yeah, for college or for a job, then that frequency of interaction diminishes from once a week to twice a year. Oftentimes, right? And then when you hit to, you know, those like, you know, Thanksgiving dinners where you have to recalibrate and understand like, okay, oh yeah, Uncle Jerry's a little bit like that. And you know, Aunt Jessica works this way, you know, we want to make it so that that is virtually the same as if you were in a co-located position where you're constantly sharing, you know, attributes of being born into the family that you were born into, right? Yeah. I don't know. But most importantly, I think that it's just a way to express care for each other. You know, like it's at the end of the day, that's the main responsibility of a family is to be the first line of support for a person. And this is just a tool to express that constantly. Like we're here to support each other. We're here for each other. Like my knowledge is for your benefit. Mm-hmm.

So I'm curious if you know this, what's your client mix like of people purchasing for themselves versus someone purchasing for someone else?

We started with purchase for yourself and pretty quickly got feedback that, you know, a lot of folks just want to gift this to their parents. And so we built the functionality for gifting it to the parents. And then we started running ads on it. And it's by nature of any ads, I suppose, the vast majority of folks are people who tell their own stories for their kids, as opposed to kids who invite their parents. But it's also a function of, it's also a bit more of a stretch, right? You're selling to someone who then has to sell it to someone else. But we're also ramping up our marketing efforts for that second use case. So we'll see where the numbers end up. Today it's more like 80/20, which is very surprising, but I see a future where that changes. You know, I think it's probably going to be closer to 50/50.

Okay. So now it's more people purchasing for themselves to leave their legacy to their children or to their grandchildren or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah.

So When you— when people sign up for it, we kind of talked just a little bit, but I want to walk people through it again just so they really understand. So from a, from a perspective of like, I'm the person that's, that's telling my story, it's going to be primarily by phone. Um, I can call in, or, and/or Walter can call me on a regular basis and, and prompt me, I guess, like tell me about something important that happened to you or something like that.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And from the perspective, so I would, I would purchase it as a, as a user, and I would, I would be like, and then I could invite people to my page that's going to be created, and I could send it to my grandchildren, my, you know, whatever, my cousins, whatever I want to send it to.

Yep, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, it sounds like, um, I think it's, well, there's definitely a need for it. Like, people are trying to figure out how do I How do I archive? How do I, you know, do this stuff? And I love when I hear people that are saying, taking creative things that we can do with this big scary thing that we call AI and saying, okay, this is a tool that we can use to serve us. So, Christian, tell people where they can find out more and where they can find out more about you.

Oh yeah, of course. And we're also, you know, constantly improving the product. We want to make sure that this is, you know, that the vision that we have is matched in our users' ideas, imaginations too.

Yeah.

So if you want to be one of the first brave pioneers to like sign your name in the pages of history, join us at Autograph.ai. I mean, we're in a sprint every 2 weeks to make sure the product is as good as it can be, to make sure that our members feel as special as we think their lives are. And if you want to follow along, we're also on social media, you know, you can follow me on LinkedIn. We'll probably link to it in the show notes or X. That's where you get a little bit more of like the philosophy and like how, what was the sequence of stories that got us to this point. But the vast majority of it, I mean, to me, the real journey and pleasure is helping you listener out there in, in your journey of self-discovery, understanding, um, the unbelievable amounts of effort that it took to get to where we are.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. And I can imagine as people are doing this, because again, most of us don't have to take the time or have the time to journal or anything, but this would be kind of also an exercise in journaling and discovering about yourself, you know, as Walter's asking you questions. Prompts you to think about, like, again, where you are. But like you said before, more importantly, where do— where am I going? What legacy do I want to leave? So you don't have to be a, you know, person on your deathbed to benefit from this. You could start doing it much earlier.

100%. I mean, the earlier you start, the better, because then you'll also be able to track your evolution over time. I used to be like this, and then this happened, and now I'm not like that. And you don't know when you're going to need a pick-me-up or like a cheerful message from a past version of you, you know, when you were a wide-eyed young college kid setting out to make your mark on the world. And once things get tough, you may need to be reminded of that enthusiasm, right? And 100%, like a lot of these questions that we ask are stuff that we don't dare ask ourselves because we're too busy.. And, but they're so important, you know, like, they're, they're, it, Walter's great at getting you to think about your life in ways that are very constructive. And that's a benefit I wish on everybody. And, you know, and there's another class of users that we have that are, you know, the high achievers in life, you know, the founders, athletes, artists. These are the folks who are already in a path usually extremely lonely where they're making sacrifices and by all accounts often feel misunderstood because of this thing that they're going after, legacy or greatness or glory or impact or what have you. And to be able to record that journey while you're in the middle of it and get your making of documentary crew following you along, is a tremendous support system, right? Like it is, and so it's been really interesting to see that aspect of it too. Certainly we feel some of that as users of Walter ourselves, right? We're in this big project to record everybody's lived experience. We want to create something beautiful for our kids and grandkids and the future of humanity. But oftentimes we make it, it's like, you know, nobody's doing what we're doing. And so we have to figure out what, You know, how do we even think about this space? And oftentimes, some of the best insights come from questions that Walter asks.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, Christian, is there anything that I haven't asked you that you would like to get across?

I don't know that there's anything immediate, but I think that, you know, I've been thinking a lot more about the use case of Walter to remember folks who aren't around anymore. The original idea was record your life story so that you can be remembered. But, and you know, we're prioritizing users who we think are more vulnerable to those stories being lost. But really there's an even more interesting layer on top of that, that is like, what are the memories of the people that you've lost that are worth preserving?

You know? Yeah.

And so, for example, I think about this with my grandma, you know, or, you know, what are the stories of her that if I don't go through the effort of memorializing, that I, in 10 years when I want to remember, like, what was that thing? Like, what was that thing? That it may be too late, you know. And of course, like, you know, these are extremely heavy human subjects. And so, you know, like we work tirelessly to make sure that we honor the emotional space that we find our users in, right? And ourselves in. And so essentially, like, how do we facilitate remembrance in the most wholesome and holistic way, I think is something that's been like really top of mind for me. Yeah.

As you said that, it made me think of, you know, someone who's lost, like, maybe even a spouse, and they've got children, or they have potential future grandchildren, and you want to capture that, you know, while it's still fresh in your memory and have it available for them. So is that something that Walter would be adaptable to? I could say, totally, I want to remember Mike, um, and I, and I— so we could, like, call and start asking questions about about Mike?

100%. Okay. So we have all these templated interviews about people, places, all that stuff. And you can always say like, I want to talk about Eric, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And Walter will know a few things about Eric if you've mentioned him before, but he has a list of questions about, you know, the rest of the stuff that you don't know about Eric. But I think this is a tremendous exercise. Like, for families to do if they didn't capture those stories while still alive, right? And we all have different flavors of remembering a person, you know, like one person can say that, you know, Eric was funny. Another person could say Eric was an inspiring leader. Another person could say Eric was very punctual, you know, whatever it is, it helps round out this character. And, you know, what was the impact that they had in their community and why is it that the community is deciding to remember?

Awesome. Awesome. Well, Christian, thanks so much for being here today. This has been awesome. I love technology and I love when people find, you know, great ways to take these very powerful tools we have and to use them to benefit us all. So I'm really excited about what you're doing.

I'm glad to hear it, Brian. Thanks for having me on. This was a great conversation.

All right, have a good one.

You too. Bye.

Grief doesn't follow stages, timelines, or rules. And if you've ever wondered, am I doing this right? You're not alone. That's why I created the Grief Check-In. It's not a test. There are no right or wrong answers. It's simply a gentle way to understand how grief may be showing up for you right now. In just a few minutes, you'll gain clarity and language for what you're experiencing. Without judgment, labels, or pressure to move on. If you're wondering where you are in grief, this is a safe place to look. Go to grief2growth.com/checkin. That's grief numeral 2 growth.com/checkin. Hi there, I'm really excited to tell you about my latest ebook. It's 4 lessons that you can learn from the near-death experience without going through all the trouble of dying to learn them. I've been studying NDEs for several years now. I am completely convinced that not only are they 100% real, but that there's some very universal wisdom that we can get from the near-death experience. And I've distilled that down in this book into 4 short lessons. And I've also given you all the reasons why I believe that NDEs are absolutely real. So go to www.grieftogrowth.com/NDElessons to pick it up for free. www.grieftogrowth.com/NDElessons. I hope you enjoy it.