The Quest for Narrative From World Travels to Technology with Miles Spencer

Is our digital legacy the final frontier of storytelling?

In this episode, we sit down with Miles Spencer, a serial entrepreneur, world traveler, and the founder of Reflecta AI. Spencer, who co-created the long-running PBS series Money Hunt, has dedicated his career to the power of narrative. Now, he is using artificial intelligence to bridge the gap between physical archives—like shoe boxes of old photos and letters—and a dynamic, conversational digital legacy that allows families to preserve the voices and stories of their loved ones.

Beyond technology, Spencer shares insights from his global travels, including following the footsteps of T.E. Lawrence through the Middle East and mentoring entrepreneurs in Cuba. We explore the strategic importance of "gateway cities" like Havana and Damascus, the surprising similarities between cultures we often view as different, and how human decency often overrides geopolitical tensions.

In this episode, we discuss:

The DNA of Storytelling: How being the 23rd of 24 children in a family of Pennsylvania storytellers shaped Spencer’s worldview.

Reflecta AI: Creating "AI for humanity" through spontaneous and dynamic digital legacies.

The Jurassic Park of Islands: Observations from mentoring technologists in Cuba during a brief window of diplomatic opening.

A "Halftime" View of Syria: Experiences in Damascus between conflicts and the strategic realities of location versus resources.

The Homogeneity Trap: Why the relative similarity of North American culture can make the diversity of the rest of the world feel more remote than it actually is.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

C. Derick Varn 0:49

Hello, and welcome to Moblog. And today I am with Miles Spencer. He co-created and co-hosted Money Hunt, which aired from PBS from 1997 to 2004. He is the founder and CEO of Reflecta AI, a company that uses AI to create digital legacies, which allows families to preserve voices and stories of loved ones in an anecdotal way. And you're a world-renowned traveler.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

I don't know if I'm world-renowned. I've traveled the world and I've had some renown and some repute. So I'd just like to clarify that. But good morning, and thanks for having me on.

C. Derick Varn 1:35

Good morning. And you are the author, well, several books, but the two that are interesting us today are Line in the Sand and Havana Familia, which are parts of your writings on journeys of understanding. Now, I initially, you know, wanted to have you on because you are interested in narrative, and I am interested in narrative as a way to actually get real data from the world and contextualizing what is going on in any given time and place through that data. And I wanted to ask you like, how did you get into narrative as such? Like, that's an interesting thing to build businesses and stuff around.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Yeah. And so I'm gonna credit my DNA for that. So Spencers have been great storytellers as far as I'm concerned for a long, long time. I'll start with this one. I was named after my great-grandfather Miles Sharpless Spencer. And that Miles had his last kid when he was 74. Kudos. He had 24 kids, even better. Everybody asks the third question, and the answer is three wives. Last one was 26. My grandfather was the 23rd of 24 kids. So that in and of itself, hey, pretty cool story, all right? That's why there's so many Spencers in central Pennsylvania, right? You start with 24, and every one of those has 10. Eventually, at the family reunion, you can pick whoever wants to be sheriff for the year because you've got all the votes. So there you go. There's an example of storytelling and narrative and how it really informs kind of who we are. And I've always had an interest in it. And I've had a career in digital media. I've had the opportunity to start and build and sell three companies, about 1,100 employees, but more importantly, there were 30 failures in between those. So my batting average isn't as good as it sounds. Everybody wants to talk about the successes. But you know, I I bring up the point that there are a lot of a lot of oops on the way to the finish line. And storytelling became this opportunity just about a year ago, where I realized, you know, we had all this stuff in the attic, right? Not the metaphorical attic, the physical attic, shoe boxes of Polaroid pictures and love letters and football programs from 1950. What are we gonna do with all this stuff, right? I go see my sister and like every family's got this box upstairs, right? And look, not to disparage the memory devices of the past. We've had them from storytelling to the guerrilla types to cuneiforms to cartouches, you know, you pick it, right? It was all a way to tell those stories and as you say, to contextualize history with data as seen by individuals' point of view. But all that physical stuff was kind of gathering dust and frankly a leaky bucket when it came to the wisdom and the memories and and the stories that wanted to be passed on. Until 12 months ago, and my co-founder Adam Drake and I realized that we could probably build a better way and we could use AI. And so very quickly we became known as the Soul Tech Company that provided an AI for humanity, and that that contributions in the form of you almost said it, spontaneous and dynamic conversations with people in their voice, in their image and likeness, that is remarkably realistic. It's not them, right? But that's pretty darn close. And so that's that's reflecta, but it really is the sum total of my entire life and career as a storyteller, and perhaps the DNA of my family as storytellers.

C. Derick Varn 5:57

So this le this narrative drive and this use of data, you have done a fair amount of travel, and recently you seem to be writing about it. And I wanted to get some perspective that you've gotten from, say your travels around the Caribbean, which are things that uh people in the United States are usually fairly they have some knowledge of. So what did you gather traveling around the Caribbean?

SPEAKER_00 6:36

Well, I mean, there's travel to the Caribbean, and then there's travel to Cuba, right? I mean, I I and I think a lot of people, my neck of the woods, that's the Northeast, uh, they're familiar with, you know, uh Antigua and Anguilla and the and the uh the British Virgin Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands and all the way down to Barbados, etc. You know, that's fun in the sun. All good. And then there's like this Jurassic Park of an island, which is Cuba. And for most of my life, I it was just this exotic, unattainable, far-off land that no one ever visited, especially as an American. And then Obama, at the end of his administration, opened it up. And for a short time under Trump, it remained open until it hit the fan. And I was invited to go. Ostensibly, as an entrepreneur and as a mentor to entrepreneurs, to create an incubator there and allow the well-educated kids, I mean that's phenomenal education there, and they're very good technologists. But who knew? They were hidden right underneath our doorstep, right there in Havana. And so got to go once, got invited back, ended up spending a lot of time making a lot of trips there in about an 18-month period until it was shut down. And so I got to know it extremely well, got to know the people, kept the connections, etc. And then recently it's become really interesting again. So we took the opportunity to write about our travels in the second of our books, which is called, as you mentioned, Havana Familia.

C. Derick Varn 8:32

And what are some of the things you observed in Cuba?

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Wow. Well, what hits me right away is how welcoming the people are, the people are of Americans. Now I find this other places in the world where you I've thought, oh, never go to Saudi Arabia, never go to Syria, never go to the insert the blank, right? Because they hate Americans. Well, the reality is they don't, by and large. And the Cubans really, really embrace Americans, what we provide. Look, there's an awful lot of Cuban expats in the United States. There's an awful lot of connection people to people that remains. It's just that, you know, what we see is the news from the top and ain't so keen, right? So number one is the people. Number two, I'm going to say, is the respect and thirst for education is significant there. These well-educated people. Juh Venna and Simpagos and some of the other polytechnical institutes put out some really talented people. It's just they generally never get to share that talent with the rest of the world because they're kind of stuck there. The third would be the resourcefulness. This revolution has been going on for 65 years, right? And they people have had to make do with less and less and less natural resources, food on the table, electricity, you know, some of the basics that we assume are there every day. They have to go find. They have to go find it every day. And so, for an example, we we're cruising around town. Yeah, these cars called almenderones because it's like they look like almonds, right? And they're very colorful. But for the most part, if you're tooling around in a 1956 Chevy, it doesn't have a 1956 Chevy engine in it. They've redone the engine, they've redone the spray, they've redone everything, right? Just to get the thing to run. They're very resourceful in getting things to work and making things work, and I give them a lot of credit for that.

C. Derick Varn 11:03

How do you feel like the embargo has affected the life of everyday Cubans?

SPEAKER_00 11:11

It's been brutal. It starves them, it limits their electricity, it limits their connectivity. It's brutal. And unfortunately, it's not been brutal enough for them to rise up and speak out and say, like, hey, can we have it a different way? And all of this is a siege to effect change at the top. And the top is any of the comandantes that's been that were on, you know, the ship called Grandma that came across from Mexico and landed in San Fuegos, but that's basically Castro and and a handful of his uh generals that even after the war remain in power, remain in control of not just military. By the way, there's no drones there, there's no aircraft there, there's no there are really no boats and get uh very far. So the whole place is on lockdown. And they also control the hospitality, the travel. If there was gambling there, they'd control that like Batista did, but they ran the they ran those guys out of town. Ergo, the name Havana Familia spelled with a G. So it's it's been brutal on the people, but not all the people.

C. Derick Varn 13:01

You've also done a lot of traveling around the Middle East, West Asia. You even gave yourself the task of following the footsteps of T. E. Lawrence. I've actually spent a lot of time in in North Africa and uh and and Jordan, not so much Saudi Arabia and and Wacaz around there, though. I have been to the UAE. What did you learn from that trip that maybe contextualizes some of the geopolitical issues that you see today? And then we can compare that to what you learned with Cuba.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

Well, one thing that comes to mind is ironically how similar we all are. There's a chapter, I think it's number five, in a place called Magar Osheb. It's in the northwest corner of Saudi Arabia. You can see Jordan, you could you could see Israel from from there. And our guide is saying, you know, Musa did this, and Hagar did this, and Ezra did that right here. Like, hold on a minute. Like, where are you getting this? He says, The current, you know, the Quran. Well, it's funny because we got these stories too. They're in the Old Testament of the Bible. Like, you know what? We're close enough. We got a satellite phone. Let's call our friends in Tel Aviv. And I did call a Tamletic scholar in Tel Aviv, and I said, I'm gonna read 12 prophets that we're talking about here. You tell me how many of them you got in your books. We went 12 for 12. The the stories are similar, the prophets are the same, they're walking around the same desert, and somehow, instead of all the similarities and the commonalities, they've figured out some differences and gone to war. So I found that to be some combination of silly and sad. Once again, the people, especially in Saudi, I mean, we we went, our first trip was just a few years after 9-11. And most people in the U.S. thought, like, wow, you're going into the belly of the beast here of Saudi Arabia. The reality is we were welcomed with open arms by the people there. They supported us, they were thrilled that we were there. To be honest, like, how many Americans showed up in Saudi Arabia, unless they were Aramco or military? We were one of the first and one of the few. And once again, the people were very welcoming, by and large, and it was only a few that kind of ruined it for the rest of them. That's changing now for sure, but that's definitely something I see in common with Cuba on a personal people-to-people level. It's very different.

C. Derick Varn 16:05

Are there you know, we can talk about regional differences, like when you when you were in Syria, which has you know been a hotbed of conflict. I mean, when were you in Syria?

SPEAKER_00 16:19

Right after the troubles, right before right, right before the next troubles. You know, where were we there at halftime um 2006, 2007, 2006? Yeah, no shortage of, you know, they'd like look at our passports. There's always a Kalishnikov in my sternum while they were looking, right? And my buddy Wells Jones and I, we were the only two on the track, and we we had this game of of looking at the clips and trying to determine whether they had blanks in them or not. And they would tape them, they would tape them like green or red, right? And so, you know, like you if you'd sit in there literally looking down the barrel of a gun, and you'd sit there and guess whether the guy had blanks or not. Never tested, right? But yeah, look, that was those those were the border guards, and they're making a show and things like that once we once we got to Damascus. Never had any of that going on. People were wonderful, the food was fantastic, by the way. I spoke French, so that helped. And actually got to see uh some great architectural sites, and Syria has wonderful sites. I haven't been back since the most recent, but yeah, archaeologically, it's a treasure land.

C. Derick Varn 18:00

How how much were you able to to gauge about like internal tensions in Syria other than you know the obvious border guard stuff? Like, what did you see in Damascus?

SPEAKER_00 18:11

We I probably saw repression at its best, right? I mean you'd have the Assad father at that time and son were pretty much on every poster, like uh, you know, not unlike Havana. And there was the presence of military both uniform and undercover pretty much all the time, right? So we were aware, and we were dutiful in what we discussed and how and where. So to the naked eye, maybe you don't notice all that, but we were well trained. And yeah, it was it was there very I tell you, Damascus and Havana, very similar, very similar, very similar vibe.

C. Derick Varn 19:16

I mean, can you go into the similarity of the vibe? I I have been to places that are weirdly like that, like Cairo and North Mexico, a city in North Mexico like Corey, they actually were pretty similar places in a lot of ways, not because of political repression, although there is some of that, but because you know they're both desert cities. Historically, there's a long, you know, long link back to Andalusia that has some some some uh non-superficial cultural overlap. And I mean, literally, when I was with a group of Mexicans in Mexica, in Egypt, locals could not tell them apart from local from from local Egyptians. So it was this, it was it was a little bit interesting in that way. But I think that's uh it's it's interesting to kind of note these similarities between places that don't obviously look similar at all, but often are. So, what are some of the similarities you saw between Havana and Damascus?

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Well interestingly enough, the I I we've we've talked about the repression vibe, right? So I'll do that one again. I'm gonna go to the other side. Like the food was great in both places, right? Like Damascus has this wonderful, look, it's French, but it's also got the you know, it's the center of the Levant. It was the the jewel in the crown of it all during the Arab Revolt. It was the object of desire. It's exotic, it's a crossroads, been a crossroads since the Crusades, right? I I mean, you know, that really kicked it off when Europeans headed to Jerusalem to be uh saved, and slaughtering Jews and Muslims on the way, right? And you know, so it is a city that draws on a lot of cultures. Havana, likewise, Spanish, Americans, a little bit of Russian, Soviet, Venezuelan, etc. So it too was a crossroads, more more ships than camels, but uh that is one big harbor, and that's the last one before the trip across. And so once again, it's you know it's kind of a gateway city, right? And so you got a lot of geopolitical interest in it, and you got a lot of different types of people and cultures as well.

C. Derick Varn 22:05

Yeah, and Syria is similar to Egypt in that way. I have not been to Syria per se, because when I was in the Middle East, it was active civil war as opposed to approaching civil war.

SPEAKER_00 22:19

Halftime.

C. Derick Varn 22:22

But it one thing you realize when you when you like take a plane in and out of anywhere in that region, you realize like, oh, okay, I am admittedly quite far away by by uh terrestrial land animal travel. But like if I have a ship or an airplane, I am near three continents very quickly. I can get to I can get to the the other side of North Africa pretty quickly. I can get to Berlin or even London in three to four hours by plane. I mean, it it just hits you in a different way that that isn't nearly as remote to anywhere. And I can get to you know West Asia also fairly easily. I can get to the various stands. Which does seem to geographically doom a place like that to be both very interesting and also very strategically important. And when you see that a lot of the war issues uh in that region you realize they're not just cultural, they are partially, you know, locational.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Um absolutely. I mean, look, look, I'm a I'm a cook, I like to cook, I like to eat, but there's nobody going to war over the food in Syria or in Cuba. Okay. That is strategic location. Period. I mean there's no real natural resources up for crabs in Damascus or Havana. It's location, location, location.

C. Derick Varn 24:17

So you've been, you know, trying to contextualize these these places as you know, real areas with real human beings, and I I also agree with you. I I was surprised how little personal anti-American sentiment, anti-American government sentiment when I was in Latin America and the Middle East was quite high. But despite what people often perceived, that was never really aimed at me ever. I mean, you know, to give you a little bit of a of a similar narrative, I was there were riots during the re-establishment of the military-aligned government in Egypt. And a local store owner who was a salafist, which is, you know, not a political salafist, so I'm I'm hesitant, you know, to imply anything about that, but like protected me from just getting caught up in something where I could have gotten pretty severely hurt in a crackdown. And it was, you know, there's no political reason for him to do this. It was just out of out of human decency. And it was I think it was really important to live through and see. Now, you know, I was just a teacher there. I'm I wasn't trained. I was just sort of like in in the the in the right place at a very wrong time. Um and these kind of experiences, though, I think are very important for people to contextualize because one thing we uh we who live in North America, uh, even in Mexico, really, we live in these giant landmass states, you know, like hard to get to us. Yeah, it's hard to get to us. And while we are internally diverse, but you know, I don't want to make it sound like we aren't. But like when you're in, you know, Egypt and you go, I don't know, Ethiopia, you realize that, like, oh, I can go the distance of a state, and I'm now dealing with four different completely unrelated languages and a culture that doesn't even a little bit look like mine. Yeah, like yeah, yeah. So I do think we can kind of forget what it's like to travel other places, not because humans are so different from us, but because our culture is, like I said, internally diverse, regionally different, but comprehensible for basically most of a continent.

SPEAKER_00 26:58

I'm gonna go with home homogeneous, right? Like right, you know, more or less past for the same species and the same ethnic backgrounds and etc. And wow, it gets different when you get out there.

C. Derick Varn 27:12

Yeah, yeah. So I think you know, I think that often those kind of those kind of experiences are a little bit closed off to Americans and Canadians and and and whatnot because of that relative homogeneity. What kinds of things do you notice, you know, traveling around? Because one thing that that for reasons that probably aren't any individuals' fault, that a lot of Americans don't get to travel outside of the United States very much, or you know, at all. But what are some of the things you notice just when traveling, not like not in a specific area, but like what does what has that done for you and for your worldview?

SPEAKER_00 28:00

Hmm. Well, I'll start with this. Uh I was just a curious kid from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who never quit asking who, what, why, where, when. Eventually drove my parents and my neighbors crazy. So it's a good thing I got out of town. But it was that curiosity that led me to these adventures. But also, what I like to think of is an understanding of another culture that I could bring back and share with others now. Like I'm not stealing the Rosetta Stone anytime soon and bring it back to my museum, but I can bring back stories and write books and share what we've what we've learned. And so for me, it's that curiosity that's led me to travel. It's that curiosity that's led me to that quest for now. When I say understanding, that's a small you. That's not a capital you, that's not a final and complete understanding. It's just a little bit better than the ignorance I started with. And if I can experience those things and bring that back to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the rest of the folks that I grew up with here in the Western world, I think that's a plus.

C. Derick Varn 29:26

I'm gonna ask you a question that is uh a little bit obvious, but I I I want to tease it out a bit. You know, how are these kinds of experiences with travel also informing of what you do with reflecta?

SPEAKER_00 29:43

Well, looking at it in the rear view mirror, it looks like a giant grand plan. The reality was I stumbled and bumbled along and had to use this curiosity to lead myself to adventures that created these stories. And at the end of the day, storytelling and wisdom and understanding deserves to be passed through the generations. And as we talked about before we started, you know, all of that was upstairs in a box gathering dust in the Spencer family. It's like, uh, what's this photo? Is this mom's handwriting? Is this a love letter from dad? Is it what who who gets this box when we die? Like, are they gonna ask the questions that we're asking? Like these memories and this wisdom, this understanding, these family values, they're just gonna be diluted if not lost. And so creating Reflecto was this way to use AI in an intergenerational solution that allows people to have these spontaneous and dynamic conversations in ways they never would. I mean, uh look, I got pictures on my walls, each one of these has a story, right? But you know, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, you're gonna have to piece together those stories and try to figure them out. But with the Reflecta, you can actually just go on a walk with your dog and ask the question of someone that's not necessarily here physically next to you, or here on Earth because they've passed. So originally, look, we've got like 14,000 stories now that families trust us with after six months. And at first it was those that had passed, and you were like gathering up those stories so they don't get lost. Now over half of the stories of those that are are of those that are still present because they want to make sure that their stories are shared with future generations.

C. Derick Varn 32:01

So this is the part that I think maybe is a little bit interesting to me.

SPEAKER_00 32:10

A little bit interesting, a little bit interesting. Just a little bit. Give me the thank you for giving me that. Most people don't say a little bit interesting about Reflective, but that's fine.

C. Derick Varn 32:21

Is I think I think it's obvious that the experiences are going to be different from a memoir, right? Which is, you know, a kind of cohesive reflection by an individual. But how does it work differently from a memoir? Since since it's interactive, you can ask it, it must be indexing anecdotes and fragments of things and all this stuff in the attic, so to speak, in a different way than an individual would to create something like the what they would say.

SPEAKER_00 32:51

Yeah, I mean, look, a memoir that suggests that it's printed. That could be an obituary, that could be a biography, that could be a coffee table book, etc. You know, I think the first problem with that is you look at your your sons and your grandsons and your great-grandsons, if if I'm lucky enough to have them, they're not going to crack that book open to chapter 37, page five, and figure out, hey, you know, how did grandpa get from Pittsburgh to New York City, right? But if they're out on a walk or fishing or bored or just interested, and they say, like, let's dial up. Okay, we've got reflect to open. Hey, grandpa, tell me the story about how you got out of Pittsburgh. Like, what would you like to know first? Like, this is the interactive, spontaneous, and dynamic conversation with someone in their voice with their knowledge base. By the way, it's default private, family to family. So there's no outside information in the knowledge base. It's only that information that's been cleared by what we call the keeper, the editor. So there isn't anything from the outside. There's no deep fakes, there's no hallucinations, it's just like straight up. This is the story that has been approved either by the person that created it during their lifetime or the person that had the NIL, the name, image, and likeness to their parents, et cetera, and have recreated that. So it's it's pretty locked down in terms of knowledge base. And the big difference is it's spontaneous dynamic. Look, people are uploading their biographies and their obituaries and their memoirs all the time to reflect it. Because it does something different. It does something more, and it's going to be accessed for generations. I see. I mean, look, you got lots of books behind you. All good, right? Uh great devices of their time to tell stories or pass information along. But I'm going to take a wild guess that in a couple of generations, people aren't flipping through those for information.

C. Derick Varn 34:59

I mean, I would take a pretty well guess and say people in general now aren't flipping through.

SPEAKER_00 35:05

My kids, my kids, my kids will touch that stuff.

C. Derick Varn 35:09

Yeah. I mean, the advantages of this are I am very interested in this because it is you are creating an LLM that is a wall garden, so there's not outside information coming into your data set. And so the anecdotes are limited to base the information off of, which which people might think, oh, that's not good. It's actually very protective against hallucinations, you know, loose data. You don't want all this data out for everybody, etc. etc.

SPEAKER_00 35:45

Bingo, that is the that is a wonderful endorsement for Reflect. That's exactly what we're going for. Thank you.

C. Derick Varn 35:53

And I I guess it does, it is interesting because you are still writing memoirs.

SPEAKER_00 35:59

Um well, you gotta go to you know you gotta fish where the fish, you know, where the fish are, right? And so, yes, those memoirs are actually because pro tip, uh, all of the adventures in the books myself and Wells Jones have actually experienced, aside from one, we don't have a time travel device, that's why it's historical fiction. We're working on it, but we don't have it yet. So all of those are actually in my knowledge base, right? So that's for my family. The rest of the world, you know, they still a few people that like reading printed books. There's plenty of people that like listening to this wonderful narrator, Eduardo Ballerini, did a line in the sand for us. And I I think listening to him is much better than reading for me, even though it's the same words. And I mentioned my my co-author Wells Jones as well, who is also my adventure partner. We do all this crazy stuff together. So the answer is yes, I do distribute my stories in multiple medium, but that's the world.

C. Derick Varn 37:15

Right. One thing I am interested in about this form of of use of LLMs, and it it is you know, I'll get into the controversies of LLMs here. I have a very complicated opinion of its use in education, which I would actually kind of wag my finger at both extremes. Uh but one thing that I think is very useful about it is its ability to bring up relatively complex information very quickly and to recontextualize it in a way that unfortunately very well trained people can can still do, but if you know the stats on like the the use of Google, uh Google is uh a box of infinite information that unfortunately is normally used for confirmation bias reasons. People and it's not even intentional, people just phrase questions in a way that are gonna confirm their own point of view. Yep. One of the things about LM-based AI is it actually can, it often doesn't, but it can push back on that a little bit. And because it can it can intuit your questions if you if if it's got enough data in it and it can adjust your questions, although that could also it can also misadjust your questions and blah blah blah. You have to learn how to prompt it. I was gonna ask you though, what what kind of advantages do you see for this you know narrative information, which one of the things that I think you have implied, it's like okay, I have a ton of books behind me, right? On any given subject, though, even with all these books, I don't necessarily know how to collate that data. Like I might know tons of stuff in my head and still not be able to collate the amount of information I have even read if I was reading on a certain topic, like, oh, which author said that? What was it, what was their their bias, etc., etc., etc. Do you see this kind of technology as being a useful way to do that kind of collation? Because that kind of seems like what Reflect is doing in a very specific context.

SPEAKER_00 39:48

Yes and no. Okay. So, first of all, look, you can go on Reflected.ai and talk to Art Spencer of Virginia like right now, and you won't get any of the knowledge base in the books behind you because they're they're it's an SLM that actually queries 12 other LLMs and then brings all the data back home, but all the data is there with art, big art, right? So it's only his knowledge base is limited to what we've given him. It can increase if those people that he's talking to, or those family members that he shared it with, submit stories and they're approved by the keeper, right? But he he's not gonna have that context that we have in our brains somewhere of every book that he's ever read, etc. Frankly, he doesn't have the rights to it, so he doesn't have it in his he doesn't have it in his SLM. But you know, my dad's opinion on Schaucer's Beowulf is probably not something I'm gonna dive deeply on. It ends up being family history, family stories, uh, and and a decent sprinkle of a of advice and humor. Okay.

C. Derick Varn 41:13

How do you how do you feel about it replicating someone's sense of humor?

SPEAKER_00 41:17

Yeah, do you mean replicating his own sense of humor or or borrowing from Buddy Hackett, which is one of his favorites?

C. Derick Varn 41:24

Oh, got it.

SPEAKER_00 41:25

You're right. I mean, he'll tell you Buddy Hackett jokes, but he will credit Buddy Hackett all day long, right? That was his favorite. A little bit of Rodney Dangerfield, but mostly Buddy Hackett. And that's very art, it's not necessarily PC today, but hey, you know, that's him. So yeah, I wouldn't recommend him for a senior thesis in English literature. Um, you could go to a couple other LLMs to get better for that. But you know, if you knew the guy, it's quite a cool way to reconnect, and that's what it's there for. All right.

C. Derick Varn 42:09

So I guess my last question is gonna be like, how optimistic are you about the ability to pull up this kind of knowledge and contextualize it without people being flooded with with information that may not be useful for them? I mean, this is one of the other issues with Google, like like are any sort of search index of the internet, is you're gonna get everything on a given topic, and it's all treated equally. So you have no idea unless you are already more than a layman on how to parse that information that's been given to you. So you have this kind of paradox of I have infinite information on a topic that I want to know about, but I already need to know a significant amount of that information to parse the valuable information for me. There is some reasonable optimism that you know, like Refrect is very specialized in what it does, but these kinds of technologies could help with that choice paralysis slash prior knowledge problem and sorting information on whatever you know a given topic is. I mean, and like you implied this already when you were talking about you know, you write a memoir, your kids have it. One, they may not like books, it's not technology they're familiar with. Two, which is weird to think about books as a technology, but they are it's media, yeah. And then two, they don't like they just want to look up something. I mean, I literally have a family history book over here. Like, grab it. Actually, it is right here. All right. Uh I have read it once.

SPEAKER_00 43:57

Okay. Well, I gotta make the point, and I'm gonna make the pitch right here, Derek. Like you, I'll work with you, you load that to Reflecta, and you know, if if you have everybody anybody else in the family that actually wants to access that real time in a spontaneous, dynamic conversation, we're up in 20 minutes, ready to go.

C. Derick Varn 44:18

And it's a lot more indexable that way, right? Because I'm I can't just have a question and be like, okay, where exactly man, I gotta figure it out. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 44:31

You just made you once again, thank you. You just made another Reflect uh commercial because that book, it's great. It was the technology of its time, it's wonderful, right? But the reality is if I ask you a question about the fam and you had to cite Chapter and verse, it would probably take you about forever to find the page in which you got the information. Reflect reflect that you just ask the question and you have an answer in that person's voice with that person's personality and character instantaneously.

C. Derick Varn 45:11

All right. I guess, you know, as this is a podcast, and uh I I do want to ask, what are some of the concerns people have with Reflecta? Like in that sort of access.

SPEAKER_00 45:24

All right, there's eight billion people on the planet, right? About four billion of them are not ready for this, and they've expressed uh their opinions on every podcast I've ever given. So it's digital necromancy, it's uncanny valley, it's ghostbusters, it's black mirror, it's upload, it's scarpetas, the new one, you know, you're conjuring up spirits. You should okay. That's at least half the world. And then the other half is like, this is the greatest thing I've ever experienced in my life. I mean, my product is one in which my customers pay me money, thank me, and cry. Like, how many businesses are like that? It's very fulfilling for us and the team to have delivered a project, a product, and a project like this to mankind.

C. Derick Varn 46:22

Well, I'd like to thank you for your time. Where can people find your work?

SPEAKER_00 46:26

Hey, Derek, uh, thank you for having me. Reflected.ai is a cool place to go. Talk to my dad, art. Ask him about me, continue the conversation. As a matter of fact, if you've got a book like Derek, uh you can load it and end up having a spontaneous, dynamic conversation with a loved one. So, you know, that's that's the place to go for all great stories. A Line in the Sand and uh Havana Familiar available on Amazon. And I'm sure your links will be in the show notes. So there you go.

C. Derick Varn 46:58

All right, thank you so much. Have a great day.

SPEAKER_00 47:00

Thank you, Derek.