Episode #545: Preserving The Past, With Eyes On The Future with Heather Smith

Welcome to this edition of the million dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

I'm here with Heather Smith. Hello, Heather, how are you?

Hello. I am great. How are you?

I'm good. I hear you've got some busyness going on in your personal life right now.

I do. My daughter is having a baby.

Wow. Congratulations.

Thank you.

And looking forward. It's hard to focus when you've got that hanging over your head like that. Would this be first grandbaby or first first? Well, congratulations and we'll see if we can have some fun and get your mind off of the impending event and also get some information that might be useful for your own story file. You know that. Yeah, the baby down the road will find out about. So, Heather, let people know what in the world you have done here with storyfile and a little bit about the concept, but about how people have responded to it and the kind of impact it's starting to happen because it is, as I understand it, it's just getting traction. This is something that is spread, the viral spread and all of that stuff is just beginning to take over. But it's something that everybody should be interested in. My own personal thing with. In our family, I'm the one who takes the pictures and documents everything. And I did the, I put together the 1500 page Grandmother Wilt your diary with all the pictures from my grandmother. It was her we found after she died. She had been taking notes for 30 years. And so we put them out and gave it to everybody. But then my own mother, you know, I, I tried, you know, I've been working on that when she's been gone for. She's been gone for 12 years and I'm still trying to get the book out on her life, which was amazingly interesting. But if there had been something like story file, it would already be there and it'd be a whole lot better. And so I'm, I'm simpatico to what you're doing and can see how it would save a lot of grief, you know. And also you get live, real answers where it doesn't come through ghost writers and things like that. Because we, that's, that's why that my thing isn't done because we had had the ghostwriter and he would kind of take all the interview questions and put it back in his words. It was like, you know, it was like everybody I'D send out the proofs to everybody and they go, what a pile of crap is this? And so you, with story file, you bypass that as explain to, you know, you've been going since 2017, is that right?

Well, I actually came up with the concept in 2010.

Okay.

And it was essentially to replicate the experience that we were having in the public with Holocaust survivors who would go out, they would tell a little bit about their story, and then they down, they'd open it up to a Q and A with the audience. And it was that Q and A that was so engaging. Think back to the last lecture that you went to and, or next time you go to one, I want you to stop. When they. When they stop speaking and they open it up to a Q and A, the audience changes, the energy changes in the room.

Right, exactly.

And so we wanted to preserve that experience of you being able to ask your own question and just have a conversation and have it lead wherever you wanted it to lead. So we did Holocaust survivors. And it was, you know, we didn't know whether or not it would work as I had envisioned. Ended up working really well, thank God. And the one question I kept getting from the public, we would go all over the world trying to, you know, get people to talk to these survivors this way, and just mostly to collect data, collect the questions that people are asking. And one of the number one questions I kept getting was, can I do this myself? You know, can I, Can I do my grandfather? Can I do the founder of our company, can I do this for myself? Can I? You know, my aunt. My aunt was just diagnosed with a terminal illness. Can I do this with her? And at the time, it was very, very expensive to do. And so what we realized was, all right, if we're going to make this technology ubiquitous for people, it had to be automated, it had to be cloud based. You had to be able to use any camera you have access to, like your smartphone or your laptop or whatever. So in 2017, we saw that technology was kind of heading in the direction that we might be able to make this and create it. And so we started story file.

And so, you know, in sales, you know, you know, most the best prospects in sales are always friend to friend, you know, referrals. And when you're. I've been in sales all my life. And so when you're out there talking to people and say, who do you know that might be interested in? We've got something going right now, and, you know, you're in the market for what we're doing. I don't know if you have any need for it. But who do you just think of? Who do you know that might. We should be talking to, you know, and they said, well, what is it? And then, you know, you've got something good. If at the end of that they say, what about me? You know, you don't. You know, we call. It's like indirect prospecting. But what you found right off the bat, you found that indirect response, what about me? And that gave you the impetus for going forward. Even though probably lots of money, it meant lots of work, lots of money, unproven. And so when you're starting off, I think I know the answer to this, but it's, it's like the answer to most of the things we cover on here. How do you go out and get started with something people have never even heard of? And it's never. There's never been one before. And you're trying to make it, turn that into a business. How do you get traction?

Very difficultly, very slowly. Yeah. Unless you, you know, raise millions and millions and millions of dollars for advertising, it's really, it's difficult. But besides that, you still have the, the educating the public and what you're doing, you know, and getting them to know that it exists. And you can do this. And it's easy. And it, you know, we've all had that moment where some. A loved one has passed away and after, you know, maybe months after, years after even, we think about things that we never talked to them about and we never. We didn't. We don't know because we never asked. So everybody's had that. That sense. So it's trying to, you know, it's getting people to the point where you could tap into that and say, don't wait until that happens. You. Here's a solution. You can record this person and it doesn't take that much time. It's easy. It's an amazing experience for you to have with your loved one to do. It's an incredible bonding experience, actually. And then you have something of substance that you can pass on to generations, like your mother. You mentioned you didn't want the ghost writer to write it in different words and rewrite. And, you know, it wasn't in her voice. This is in your, in your voice. You, it's visually you. There's all the nonverbal cues because it's in video. So you really get the sense that you're talking to this individual. You get the sense that you know them after you've had these conversations. So it's, it's just an amazing process. But yeah, it's, it's really hard when you're trying to change behavior and trying to. And you're, you've come up.

So what practically, what practical things did you do? You know, you did the Holocaust thing. Is that an ongoing continuing project that's still kind of funding that you can piggyback off to launch this thing? Or is that over that?

Well, that project was funded and I left that project. I left it to. I partnered with the USC Showa foundation on that project.

A USA who?

USC Show Up Foundation.

Okay.

It's the foundation that Steven Spielberg started after Schindler's List and he ended up ultimately recording 55,000 Holocaust survivor narrative histories.

And you were involved in that?

It's. No, not in the 55,000, no. But it's the largest audio visual archive of anything, any single subject in the world. And so I needed to partner with them because if this project was going to happen and have a life of its own afterwards and be used for education and preserved for prosperity, you know, it needed to be with that institute.

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So I partnered with them. I left that project in 2018 and because we started Storyfile in 2017 and they, I believe are still taking some, some still doing this concept. They call it Dimensions and Testimony. And I think they're still doing the same concept with some survivors, but they're not doing many of them anymore.

And so you said when we started this. Who's we? That. That went and started Story File.

So the executive director of the USC Shoah foundation, myself and Sam Gusman and a woman named Cecilia Chan at that time, and then most of the team that I had developed this whole technology, like this whole process, this whole methodology, new way of interviewing people, we all grouped together and said, you know, okay, what would it look like if we did make it ubiquitous. So I've been with this team for over 10 years doing this.

So that was kind of a huge moment of kind of an exodus. We're going to be using the biblical terms here of a group of people who were sold on a concept and to make a shift like that, to start a new come. That's. And then you were the leader. How did you get to be the leader?

I think I had. Well, it was my vision. I was. It was my obsession. It was my life's work. And it. We had built a team and we just, I had time also, you know, a lot of the other. The other individuals were still working day jobs during, especially 2017.

Right.

So it took them a little bit longer to actually come on board full time. But just I think it. Time and opportunity and, and, well, the desire to, to lead it, you know.

Well, here's the. Yeah, I think you probably. You obviously had the most experience and most passion for it and the best instincts because you probably had more hours in it than anybody else in terms of running it and things. You know, people are always looking for takeaways because you know what this is. It's a million dollar mastermind. That's what the podcast is. It's like, how can you organize. The thing is there's 24 hours and we've all got 24 hours in the day. We don't know how many of those blocks of time we've got, but some people obviously, like Steven Spielberg went out there, went to usc. You know, he was just a nerd with a camera, but now he's. He obviously did well and Blockbusters. Now he's got money to fund something like that. He had the same 24 hours a day over the last three decades, four decades, as all the rest of us. He obviously made more things happen. And so when you're looking at how can I make things happen, what are cues I can use and learn is one thing is you've been on the same. You, you got captivated by an idea and got a chance to try it out and you got proof that it worked. You know, real, you know, you're not a professor sitting in a college saying, you know, this would be great. I've got this idea and where you sit around the lounge and you talk and some of the students like it, some of the parents like it. And you do, you know, you do 15 or 20 of them and hey, you know, let's go raise money. No, you were, you, like you said, you're traveling the world. You spent years on it, you got all kind of feedback and I'm sure there was refinements happening as you went is that that's like the product development and the refinements and the insights about how you explain it, how you ask the question, how you get people to be comfortable. All that probably that came and evolved as you went along.

Not as much as you think really. I think that the one thing that did evolve was obviously the tech made certain things easier, made certain things possible.

What tech?

The. Okay, so we had to make it all automated, so everything. And it's mostly in regard to uploading and downloading video and then you had to be able to capture it in real time and that video had to do certain things in real time and then come back to you in real time. Yeah, it's a whole process and we needed a lot of infrastructure. You know, 5G has helped a lot with that, but not everybody has 5G. So how do you work around that and how do you technologically, how do you get around that? The whole. The natural language processing or natural language understanding, we've pushed the boundaries on that a lot in order to get a more conversational, to replicate a true conversation. And it still has a long way to go. Don't get me wrong, there are things that we've got on our roadmap for the next five years. So it will only get better. Everything.

Well, as the progression of AI did that, has that made a difference? Because it sounds like this is an artificial intelligence type project.

Yeah, it's. Well, when you. Artificial intelligence is a kind of a catch all for a lot of tech.

Right.

And so the one. The things that we rely on the most are speech recognition, transcribing accurately and also the natural language processing, natural language understanding component of it. There's all kinds of different little things in between that have to happen. That we're pushing the boundary and being able to put together a more natural conversation. Now, it is all based on what you've said. So we don't edit any of the clips. Like when you go on to the StoryFile Life product, which is the consumer product, and then there's a whole different platform for business that's a SaaS platform. But when you go into the consumer product Storyfile Life, you'll see that you'll be able to record yourself answering a bunch of questions. There are 2,000 questions you can choose from. You can also add your own questions because like, you know, every family has those stories that are told at the Thanksgiving table or you know, when you all get together. Like Aunt Joe will tell this one story that she's famous for, or grandpa will tell these stories, you know, so you want those captured obviously as well. So you have to add, you have to be able to add your own questions, but you go on that and you record it. And so every single clip, when you press record until you finish recording, that stays the same. That we never change that. That's not manipulated. It's not an app. You know, we don't make avatars out of you. We don't change what you've said, nothing. So it stays true to who you are in your own voice. Like you were saying you didn't want your grandmother's words, you know, mixed up and misrepresented. So I don't want my grandmother, you know, 50, 100 years from now talking to my descendants and getting to know that they're, you know, getting to know their ancestors but not hearing it from them.

Let me ask you this.

We can do this now. We can do this. You know, before you couldn't do it. Now we can do it. You can talk to 50 years from now, you can talk to your great, great, great, great grandchildren and they can get to know you or anybody.

Yeah, and that is a little bit sci fi, you know, hard to get, hard to get your, your head around. But it's here, you know, and using easy way.

It's an easy way. Like you said, you probably had to interview ghostwriters. Your, your mother had to be interviewed. You, they, they took hours. It was really expensive, you know. Now it's just, it's super easy. You do this interview with your relative. That is actually an amazing experience for the both of you to do and you've got something of value afterwards. That's it.

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