Preserving Life Stories Before We Die with Cristian Cibilis Bernardes

In this episode my guest Cristian Cibilis Bernardes, founder and CEO of Autograph and I explore how preserving memories can become a powerful part of legacy and end-of-life planning. The conversation highlights why hearing a loved one’s voice and stories can bring comfort, healing, and deeper understanding during grief.

Autograph is a platform designed to preserve people’s life stories before they are lost. Autograph records weekly phone interviews with an AI historian named Walter, capturing real conversations about a person’s memories, relationships, and life lessons. The recordings are transcribed and organized into private, connected pages that map the people, places, and experiences that shape a life, creating what Cristian describes as a living library of family wisdom.

The platform also sets clear boundaries around technology. Instead of creating AI avatars or simulations of the dead, every story is grounded in real recordings to protect authenticity and avoid the ethical concerns that can arise when technology recreates a person who has died.

The conversation explores how documenting memories can support healing, strengthen family connections, and encourage more conscious living. 

01:36 Autograph Explained

03:22 Time Vault for Families

04:56 Grief and Boundaries

06:35 Stories Shape Identity

08:40 AI and Authentic Memory

13:06 How the Platform Works

16:02 Pricing and Access Model

17:28 Don’t Wait to Record

20:12 Christian’s Origin Story

21:56 AI Translation and Connection

24:02 Love Notes for Later

25:51 Kids Change Everything

26:58 Life Is Hard for Everyone

28:01 Authoring Your Own Story

28:51 Screens and Fading Memories

31:33 Why Walter Is Audio

34:34 Gratitude and Mortality

37:20 Measured Optimism as Founder

38:35 Escaping Algorithm Negativity

41:40 Doing AI Companions Right

44:36 Where to Find Autograph

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ccibils

https://autograph.ai

Transcript

Cristian: [00:00:00] There's so many ways to do this wrong, and if you don't do this with the right foundation of love for life and the belief that life has, meaning, then it may be the right fad, but odds are it's not gonna be something that people want. 

Jill: Welcome back to Seeing Death Clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula, end of life care planner.

Funeral celebrant. On this show, I have conversations that explore death, dying grief, and what it really means to live well. In this episode, I speak with Cristian Cibilis Bernardes founder and CEO of Autograph, a platform designed to preserve people's life stories before their lost through weekly phone interviews with an AI historian, autograph records and transcribes memories.

Organizing them into private connected pages that map the people, places, relationships, and lessons that shape a life. Christian shares By capturing somebody's voice and stories can be such a powerful gift [00:01:00] for families, and how easily those memories disappear after someone dies. We also talk about the platform's, thoughtful boundaries around technology, avoiding AI avatars or simulations of the dead, and instead grounding every story in real audio to maintain authenticity.

Our conversation explores legacy, identity, family storytelling, and how documenting our memories can deepen self understanding while creating a meaningful. Full archive for future generations. Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome Christian to the podcast. I appreciate you coming on today.

Cristian: Thank you for having me. My name's Christian. I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Autograph. We are a Memories platform. Essentially what we do is we interview folks. About their lives. Not unlike a podcast every week over the phone where we ask them about their childhood. Is it side quests in life, college years?

Career highlights, low lights. And what we do is we safely store those recordings, transcribe them, and we create a suite of [00:02:00] derivative biographical products from it. So the one that we're having the most excitement around now is this Wikipedia for people's lives where we extract. The people, the places, the stories, the recipes, the lessons, the themes around someone's life.

And of course, if you have more than one person on the platform, you can start to see how these things connect. And it starts essentially building out family libraries. The whole point of the company is that you, the tool for families to accrue wisdom and social capital in a world that seems to have forgotten about family's abilities to do that.

The flagship thing that we do that is we're still figuring out how to exactly show to users in a compelling way is really a gift for future generations. My future kids are going through life and telling Walter, our historian about their life, maybe they have to pick what college to go to or where to take their next job.

Walter can say, Hey, this reminds me of something that your grandpa went through or that your dad went through. Would you like to talk to him for [00:03:00] 15 minutes? And so we'd be able to take the stories and the recordings and create an interactive experience where. Across distance, time, and even language. The future generations may be able to talk to the past and learn from the lessons that got the present to where it is and hope that the future can make better decisions, even better decisions, than the ones we got to deal with and learn from.

Some of the hardest stuff about being human. And of course it gets into this interesting territory of how do we relate? To those that aren't here anymore and how do we do this in a healthy, pro-social way that doesn't encroached into black mirror territory or that doesn't prey on the vulnerability around grief and stuff.

So we're very excited about creating a, a new class of experience where we think of it as a time vault, honestly, where a generation that finds itself with a lot of time. Not as much going on because of later chapters in life. Give them the chance to reflect, give their families the gift of their wisdom and the message for the future.

We get to ask the big life [00:04:00] questions that don't come up often, like what are your biggest regrets? Or What does heartbreak mean to you? What does resilience mean to you? What does service mean to you? What would you have done differently? And what do you hope for the future? What do you hope for your kids?

What do you hope your daughter knows when she walks down the aisle? What do you hope your grandkids learn about the world? When the world that they're gonna live is gonna be so different than the world that exists today? And, and then being able to deliver those messages at the time when they make the most sense.

So when the granddaughter is about to walk down the aisle, there's a message from the past there waiting for her. Or a congrats for a promotion or it's a really exciting kind of universe that we get to play in, but of course fraught with all kinds of subtleties. Uh, that's basically it. About, bit about me.

I was a software engineer at Google. Before that. I grew up in Paraguay, which in the middle of South America. My parents were entrepreneurs. And this is my way, uh, of saying thank you. 

Jill: I love that. It's a thing that I struggle with on a personal [00:05:00] level, whether it would be good for me. To have access to recordings and a way to communicate with somebody, I feel like for some people it would be okay.

I would love to hear my grandmother's voice again. My cousin actually just sent me a video of her voice. I hadn't heard her voice in almost 15 years. It was so lovely to hear her voice again. But if it was one of my children that died, or even my husband, would, that lead to me grieving in a way that would make it harder for me to move on if I was able to hear their voice and interact with them.

And so I'm thinking with your platform though, it sounds a little different than some of the ones that I've heard of where it's like you can have an AI avatar of somebody and you can sit there and chat with 'em all the time. It sounds like it's more that you are pre-recording the messages and then the person can [00:06:00] listen to them when they need either the advice or it's that milestone in their life.

It's not so much designed for them to communicate with it on a daily basis. Am I getting that correct? That's not what you're doing. Yeah, 

Cristian: you're totally right. There's many ways to do this wrong. There are other companies that are trying to get at a similar kind of experience, but they over index on.

Either the technology or I don't know that they understand the use case that well. It's very rare for us to think about, unless you're in a state of grief, to think about wanting to talk with someone who isn't here anymore. I think the real emotional need is to make sure that the things that make us who we are, which is really just the stories that we inherited and keep repeating, have a way to accrue meaning over time.

When my grandma left. Europe when she was 10 because of the war breaking out there and having to make a living in a completely different universe, in Paraguay, in the context of [00:07:00] having a single mom and being two sisters in the middle of a military dictatorship. That those stories that now that my grandma has passed and we don't have her story written down anywhere that, that that type of memory can live on.

I grew up in a very different environment than she did where. Her mom essentially had to choose who to give the ration card to her or her sister, and that is an experience that is completely foreign to me, but it's in my DNA somewhere. The way my parents were raised is informed by little things like you have to clear your plate because you don't know when the alarm might breakout.

And you don't really know how grateful you should be about food. So it really is a tool that have the emotional and existential anxiety of those memories being stored somewhere and being easily retrievable by the people that you love the most at the time that they need it most. That can take on a thousand different shapes.

The way we do it now is this, like we have this library online that looks a [00:08:00] lot like Wikipedia and you can see how everything is connected to each other, and it's really cool. And that is also our memory system for our historian who can remember everything from your cultural context. We can keep adding stuff on top of that, right?

Like we can add photos to it, we can add compiled biographies to it. We can add an audio book version of that biography in the person's voice, or in Walter's voice. So there's a lot of flexibility there. The, the part that we know is true is that all the downstream stuff can wait till the future. Like we, let's wait for our grandkids to figure out what kind of VR world they live in.

And, you know, the part that we can't get back is actually recording the story. This is more AI specific, but in the context in which AI is becoming such a big thing. And we're using all of our data to train ai. A lot of the data out there in the world is about how humans behave normally, where our eyeballs go when Instagram shows us an ad.

And in that you get the messy [00:09:00] relationship between our normal selves and our higher selves. And oftentimes there's a negotiation there of all the times you want to be the best version you can be. And all the times that you are the version that is the Monday morning version of you and. Oftentimes, it's hard to even imagine the best version of yourself unless you're asked about it.

Another way of asking what is the best version of yourself is asking how do you want to be remembered by your loved ones? And there's this very interesting exercise of thinking of choices that I leave behind. If I'm not participating in the show anymore, what will be the little ripples that will carry on to make tsunamis after I'm gone?

And that I think is really exciting because then that forces the introspection of like, who do I want to be and who do I want to mean? And am I closer or farther away in my everyday actions? Like, am I voting for that person? And by doing that, you're implicitly. Showing the future generation of AI how to be a good human that [00:10:00] is concerned about the stories of others, as much as you are about your own story and you know, taking ownership of your role as the author of your story that you know you are holding the pen.

But also you are a side character in so many more stories than yours. You know, like you're a brother and you're a father, and you're a husband, and you're a brother-in-law. And all of a sudden that becomes really interesting and like, how do I relate to the world around me? How do I relate to my own story and my own memories?

And how do I make sure that my memories are serving me and not holding me back or stopping me from being the best version of myself. And it's really, that I think is like a much more wholesome 

Jill: Yeah. 

Cristian: You know, family oriented society, human oriented approach than trying to. Reduce, for lack of a better word, whatever makes us human to bits and bytes.

I think that that's impossible. I think the exciting stuff is in the stuff between the photos, like the photo at the beginning of the night and the photo at the end of the night. That's where the memories [00:11:00] are, and oftentimes that's where the memories disappear. 

Jill: One of the things that really stuck out to me is how you said we're really made up of our ancestors stories.

Right. Like even if we didn't know them, that they influenced the generation that raised us and then we're influencing the next generation. And things are changing so drastically, so quickly. Where like your grandmother, it sounds like my grandmother, similar situation where the world Screwin was totally different.

She lived on a farm, she was born in 1916. They still had an outhouse. They didn't have electricity. Yeah. A whole different world than I live in, let alone my own kids, and so many of her stories are gone. They are lost. When I was growing up, she used to tell me stories of what it was like living on the farm.

That's how I know that there was outhouses and there was no electricity. But my kids have never heard those stories. I don't remember them well enough to really give them. The true story, right? [00:12:00] It's gonna be lost, unfortunately. And I wish that there was some way, and I think at one point I did try to record her myself with like a old camcorder kind of thing.

But again, nailed like I don't have anything to play it on, so it doesn't matter. It's sitting on this like little tiny thing and I'm like, well, I don't know. Maybe someday somebody will figure out how to get it off there somewhere else. But it will definitely just be lost. And I love that you're creating a platform that, like you said, this like Wikipedia definitely helps me visualize and I'm like, oh, okay, that's cool.

So like you can kind of read through and then click the different parts. So that's the thing too. Is it only, 'cause you said they'd get the transcript of like the recording, there's also like written format where we could read the stories and then we could. Click on like a link that would take us to a video that would allow us to listen to the story and then things would get sent to us.

Maybe if I was getting married [00:13:00] or graduating college, then specific videos would get sent to us. Is that the like correct understanding? 

Cristian: Yeah, pretty much. So we do phone call based interviews, so most of it is audio. 

Jill: Oh, okay. 

Cristian: And so we take those phone interviews to be the ground truth. Really what we do is we store the audio pretty much verbatim.

That is the only thing we know happened for sure. What people say is how they interpret their own life, which is where the richest richness of life comes from. We do transcribe those recordings and we use the transcription to serve as the references for the Wikipedia pages that we make. For example, Walter May ask me about my week, and I may say It's an exciting week because we hired someone new.

This person's called. Jonathan and he's amazing. He's an NBA from something, something. And after that phone call, I would get an email saying, thank you so much for your call. This was amazing. Here are the library pages that were created after this call. [00:14:00] And I would see a page created for Jonathan in which it would say, Jonathan is a new hire.

He's an MBA from so-and-so, and it would have a footnote, just like a Wikipedia page has a reference that maps that statement in the Wikipedia page. To the transcript in which I said it. Now, in that context, for example, I may say he's an MBA from Harvard, and it will also pick up on Harvard. And so now I'll be able to see that this person, Jonathan, is connected to Harvard and is connected to the company.

You can sort of go on your rabbit holes there to see how things connect and. He is interested in philosophy and like now that we're connected through philosophy and we wanna tie everything to something that was actually said by a real human because like LLMs and AI hallucinates. And so we wanna make sure that everything that is there is reliable and trustworthy, or at least contextualized appropriately.

People, when they share their life stories, they're very colored by their own biases and perspectives. Some event may be interpreted very differently [00:15:00] by two people, and so we wanna be able to capture that difference like, oh, this Christian said it felt this thing after this event, but Jill felt this other thing.

So that's the main product that we have now. And so every time you log and then you can share these library pages with the family, you can share these library pages with whoever you want, and you can invite perspectives too. So for example, after a wedding or after a bachelor party, you talk to Walter about your bachelor party and you can invite people to add their.

Snippet around. Mm-hmm. Uh, so that it's the audio version of a guest book, basically. Okay. And then the messaging part, we are very intentional about not letting Gentech behavior after the person is gone. I think that's where it gets a little complicated. It's more of a next time that person talks to Walter, there'll be a message for them there that they, you know, may not be expecting.

You know, Walter May say, Hey, Jill, there's a message for you here. Because you're getting married something, something. That's how we're, we're [00:16:00] thinking about it now. 

Jill: Hmm. And so the page is not open to the public. You would have to have the private link that then would be shared to whoever you wanna share it with.

Is it where I would pay you as the person that is like recording my stories and then as many people as I want, have the link to share it. But then do they pay you continuously to have access to it or what happens at that stage? 

Cristian: No. Thank you. We charge for the interview service, so the ability to talk to Walter to record your story or someone else's story.

You could get it for someone else too, and to receive these messages or to access your cultural context via Walter. The website itself is free for anybody to use. If you stop paying for the subscription, you can still access your data online for free. That is, we wanna be the trusted repository of tribal knowledge, and not [00:17:00] everybody feels that their story has something to add necessarily.

I think it's the most exciting part of my job to remind people that they do have a story worth sharing and. That you don't even realize the depths of what your brain does about living until you get asked about it. And that journey of self discovery is so wonderful that, you know, we're excited to have to give people the opportunity to rediscover where they came from and how.

They choose to write their own story. 

Jill: I love the idea of, we all have a story. I talk to people that are aging, nearing the end of life. And I ask probably a lot of similar questions that you're asking, partially just because I want to know more about them, I wanna learn about them. And it is a way for I think, people to heal, to kind of talk through some of these things, right?

And so many people say that, they're like, oh, my life wasn't that interesting. I don't have any stories. And I'm like, yeah, I guarantee you. Do. You know, like we're not [00:18:00] all gonna have the like grand, like I ran into a burning building and I saved a bunch of people's stories. But there's still gonna be stories that, especially your family and your loved ones are going to really cherish hearing, especially if they could hear it in your voice, which I think is really just, I don't know.

I love that idea. Again, I would love to hear my grandmother's voice again, telling me the stories that she told me when I was a kid. I wish I would've recorded them, but I think that's what happens. She died before I got into this work. It's kind of what like pushed me down this path to get into this work, but I think that's what happens so many times.

It's after somebody dies. And this is why I do my podcast. This is one of my big things that I try to talk to people about all the time is don't wait. Don't wait to do these things. We don't know, first off, when we're gonna die, any of us could die at any point. Doesn't matter your age. And we often think to ourselves, you know, you hear the same stories like how many times Grandma told me that story?

I've heard that story a million times. Oh God, I'm tired of hearing that story. [00:19:00] Guarantee you one day you're gonna wish you could hear that story. And so we need to just sometimes slow down a little bit and. Listen to these things and encourage people to write them down, to record them to do something, because one day when they're not here, you're gonna wanna hear that story.

You're gonna wanna remember those details. And when you work with people, there's no age, right? Like you could be in your twenties, you can be, you know, in your eighties or nineties. There's really no age limit. There's really no age when it's too young, I would think. I mean, I don't know, maybe my like 11-year-old.

She doesn't have a whole lot to really talk about. But again, like if you're starting a family, if you're getting married, you know, why not start a process like this in your twenties of just like, this is how we met, this is where we got married. Because even for me, I got married 20 years ago. And it doesn't seem like it's that long.

But also there's a lot of details I don't remember about the wedding, about planning the wedding, about even when we [00:20:00] got engaged, like any of that stuff, it's kind of fuzzy. So yeah, you know, I'm like, man, I should have written more down or recorded more about it because. I don't have the stories now to tell my kids because I can't even remember it.

Cristian: I was inspired by a similar situation. I have a podcast that I run and I've been interviewing all these fancy AI researchers and venture capitalists and like big deal Silicon Valley people. And I realize, well, I love interviewing and the person I really should be interviewing is my grandma. Yeah. And it was kind of one of those, someday let's make it happen.

Situations. We talked about it, we set a date. And then she had a stroke before I was able to conduct the interview. And so it, it was, you know, it really changes my concept of deadline. Mm-hmm. And the concept of buyer's remorse too, you know, like this is, it's so, the downside is so much higher of not doing this than of doing this.

The, the worst comes to worst. You didn't enjoy and you paid 30 bucks for it. Maybe the, something went wrong and like, I [00:21:00] don't know. It's a very low stakes thing. The upside is that, I mean, it's so hard to even like the, there are so many good things about it. As I age, I know that my memory won't be as sharp as it is today, and I still hold onto some of these memories really sharply and I'm like, oh, my wedding day, a year and a half ago, or our engagement three years ago, or my college graduation.

But I feel it getting fuzzier. And so when I'm 90, I will, that will be my entertainment, is to look back and reflect and say like, oh my gosh, remember that party, or remember that how bad thing sucked. But then eventually it made sense. So for my own agency and my own cognitive improvement, it's honestly, it's a backup for my own sense of identity.

That I can then choose to share and hope to inspire people with, be it my family members, loved ones coworkers. And yeah, it's leaving a trace behind. And in the context, I think it's so exciting. I mean, I'm very skeptical of use AI for everything. [00:22:00] I think there's some amount of hype. I think that there are very serious concerns about what is left of us after AI takes over.

But I think it also, there's also like a really exciting opportunity to do things that have never been done before. Like for example, in the case of immigrant families, where the great grandparents speak one language and the great grandkids speak a different language, now you can have the best of both worlds where the grandparents tell their stories in their native language and the great grandkids listen to the stories in their own language, but with a great grandparents' voice.

And the, the, you know, like with all of the cultural, you know, what have yous that are, that are inherited, and that's just the beginning. I mean, like, it gets into this really exciting new place if we do this, this documentation, right. And, and you know, like having used the product myself, now seeing some of these library pages come up and, you know, they evolve over time, right?

So this idea of this character, Jonathan, that would be the first entry because that's when we hired him. But imagine [00:23:00] that we worked together for 10 years and all of a sudden the library page for Jonathan is, is a comrade, a brother. You know, like we've been through so much together and this has already been true.

Like the library page in my account for my wife. Is what my wife means to me. And when seeing that and looking at it, it, it is very hard not to be moved by it because it's an attempt. Of course, it's not gonna be my. Like canonical what she means to me. But it's like the closest thing there has been and, and I, all I had to do was just fanboy about her when Walter asked me about it or some of the stories that we shared, and I was like, oh, this is such a marvelous retelling of this experience that we shared.

And it's very hard not to want to share it, you know? It's like very hard to be like, oh, I want to keep this for myself. We create a very open emotional space. So like when I talk about my insecurities, maybe I don't wanna share that with everybody, but when I talk about how someone makes me feel, or about what this experience meant to me, then of course like I want people to see, yeah, [00:24:00] this is what you mean to me and I'm happy to share with you.

Jill: Yeah. I think for a lot of us, we don't always share what we really think about somebody, so I love that you're kind of like you said, you are like you just got a fanboy about your wife and like just. Tell all those things. 'cause we also, I think I have interviewed people that are a woman that was an archivist, and I think I'm saying that correctly.

I always say that word wrong 'cause it's a weird word, but when we were talking. My thoughts is how much we leave behind in writing. That is not often the positive things. If people journal, we're only really, like you said, we're talking about our insecurities and how bad things might be at that time.

We're not typically we writing the things of like, oh, I love when thinking of my husband. I love that. Like in the mornings he gets up and he makes coffee for me. I know I love. But are my kids gonna know it? Is that kind of information gonna get left behind? Like the little details [00:25:00] of. Our relationship and all these really great things that I'm not writing those things down in a journal.

I'm not recording them anyway. They're gonna get lost one day and that is a shame. I would love for him to know and for my kids to know how important he is to me and how special our relationship is. Again, even like things about when we met and before we were actually best friends, before we even were dating.

So like our relationship went back. A while that our kids are not gonna know any of that unless we record it somewhere. And so it's definitely a good idea, a fan boy or fan girl about your loved one so that they can hear it if they're still alive, but also so that the generations after the casino, you don't have the kids yet, but when you do, that's something they're gonna really love to hear because also your relationship's gonna change once you have kids.

I love my husband dearly. I've jokingly said before that the worst thing that happened to me and him was having kids because our relationship changed and [00:26:00] we, again, we were best friends. We worked together, we did everything together. And then kids came in and all of a sudden it was like, oh my God. And that's okay.

But it's definitely interesting, like our kids don't know us before them, and so I would love for them to have this record of us talking about each other before they ever existed because we were different then. 

Cristian: I think about this with my dad too. My dad is the ultimate example of like the father archetype.

I don't know that I've ever seen him scared of anything. I know that he's been scared. I know that he's human and I know that it's like this unspoken deal that we have where he's gonna be the dad forever, and I don't wanna break that illusion ever. I respected so much that I want to create a situation where he can be the hero and he can also be vulnerable, and also share the stuff that at some point when the torch has to be passed down, that then I can see what's behind in the back safe.

It's super easy to [00:27:00] over or underestimate how much stuff is going on in our lives. Back to this idea of my life doesn't really matter, or similar kind of thoughts. Every human being is doing a difficult thing. Existing is hard. Life is difficult. We're all balancing very difficult values and priorities.

We're making bets all the time, and half of them don't pay off. And the other half you pray. I think just affording folks the opportunity to reflect on how much they're doing. Even if they don't feel like it, and maybe especially if they don't feel like it, I think it's so important. You know, like the little things that you think are meaningless, that add up every day to a life of service and devotion.

You know, the laundry and taxes dimension of life. You are doing it because of something you know, you're doing it because of your family or your future self or your community. If you look. Past the three surface levels that most of the world thinks about most of the time. Then you realize that it really is about who you are for other people, and that is what matters.

That is what lives [00:28:00] on. I think that's exciting. I wrote out a sci-fi novel that was my life story disguised as a sci-fi novel and the existential relief that I felt doing that was what led me to start the podcast, which led me to the experience with my grandma. And so I knew that there was something about this idea of encouraging people to hold the pen and become the authors of their own story that I think is just good for the world.

It's definitely good for the individual doing it, and it reveals so much how you tell your story. It shows you the lens through which you see life and where you put the camera and how much lighting you put on it, and all these kinds of details that I think are so we take for granted. You know, like we think that life is just the thing that happened, but no, you are hand painting every frame.

And getting a chance to see it and reflect on it and then share it, I think is so special. 

Jill: And we do take it for granted. Unfortunately, now I will even find myself doing this, which is really frustrating to me, where [00:29:00] sometimes I will be anywhere. And I'm like looking at my phone and sometimes I'm looking at old pictures that are mine.

It's like I'm so in this world and I'm trying more and more to be very conscious of that and to really exist more here where I'm at, because I'll even realize how goofy it is where I'm like, why am I so concerned with this thing? Whatever is happening in here and not. Looking at what's around me and realizing that this is my life.

This is life. And if I'm not here for it, if I'm not present for it, it's just gonna pass me by and I'm gonna have nothing left. But memories of other people's Instagram feeds, right? Mm-hmm. Like that's not what I want. And I've actually wondered about this, how my children, you know, unfortunately. I'm sure fortunately they are so tech savvy, right?

I mean that's, it's [00:30:00] hopefully gonna be good for them as they get older, right? That's the future whether we want it to be or not. But I do sometimes wonder if they're really gonna have any actual memories from this age in their life. My son's gonna be 15, my daughter's gonna be 12. Because so much of their life exists in Roblox or watching YouTube or like doing these other things, and they have it constantly.

I mean, it's like, again, they're just like everybody else. They're always on their phone. If they're in the car, they're on their phone. If we go anywhere or they're on their phone, and I do wonder if they are gonna have any actual memories or is it all just gonna be this blur of. I don't know, entertainment, I guess.

And there's really nothing I could do about it, you know? I don't agree that, yeah, forcing them to be Allstate all the time. It's like anything else. If I force my children, you could only have it for one hour a day, then they're just gonna leave my house and go to somebody else's where they could be on [00:31:00] it all the time.

And then they're gonna be sneaking it and it's gonna turn into an even worse addiction than it is. So I just try to be reasonable. I try to monitor a little bit what they're doing. Sometimes you, yo. Really look over their shoulder, but I'm kind of looking over their shoulder, right? Just to see what they're looking at.

But that does bother me a little bit, that there's a whole generation that I don't know what they're gonna actually remember because I don't think they live in the real world because none of us really do anymore. Unfortunately. 

Cristian: No, that's so true. By the time I realized that this was the project worth doing, there was so much already in the landscape around, you know, is social media good or bad?

Like, what are the incentives that these companies have and what information are they putting in front of everybody? And back to this idea of it's not gonna be the information that connects you to the higher self necessarily. It's gonna be the stuff that gets the most engagement and the tickles, the reptilian brain to [00:32:00] distract our us from the stuff that matters.

And part of the reason Walter is a, a audio first experience is because we didn't want to add more screen time. And because also audio allows you to connect the world to the world while still doing this. So you could be cooking and talking to Walter. You could be walking the dog and talking to Walter.

And that's even more exciting for us because we're actually getting a sense of like the slice of life. You're walking and we hear the sounds of the city. And I think that's so much more important. Most companies are trying to give the heroine version of content, you know, like addictive, short form, meaningless, forgettable.

We're doing something much harder that is like, Hey, actually let's connect to. This thing that nobody wants to talk about, but that that is a sobering reminder that there's TikTok and then there's the clocks, TikTok, and which one of those do you remember more? And then I do think maybe this is the romantic optimist in me, but I do [00:33:00] think that contact with reality is.

The most engaging and addicting and moving and valuable thing in the world, making something that matters, that yields thanks. Then it was for somebody to say thank you for something that you put your effort into and reasons why you did what you did matter, and this is the outcome of that. Nothing beats that, nothing comes close.

There are so many distractions, but making something that matters. And I do feel that given the opportunity. To have that experience. It is a no turning back kind of situation for. The future too. Kids that are distracted on phones, it takes one of these experiences to be like, wait a minute, maybe there's something else.

And you know, hammer down like a couple more and then it becomes a pattern. And that's kind of what we're trying to get at, you know, is remind people of the kernel of, you know, those moments in life where things could have gone very differently. For better or for worse, you know, this could be a missed opportunity and like a sale that would've changed your [00:34:00] entire year that you weren't prepared for and you lost.

Or it could be the bullet that you dodged and my gosh, that accident. And what did that accident make you feel? And that's what the reminders really are. You know, like how lucky, blessed, grateful. I don't know. We're doing this and this is crazy. This is crazy. And I think that's what motivates us, you know, is getting to be soaking in these feelings all the time, but also giving people the opportunity to engage with these feelings that are so great.

They're so great. Life is great. 

Jill: Yeah, no, I, I have really gotten to the point now and for sure it partially comes from understanding that one day I am not gonna be here, understanding that one day everybody I love is not gonna be here. If nothing else that my ability to do the things I do now are not gonna be here.

Right. Yeah. Hopefully I will age. I'm not gonna die anytime soon. Hopefully, you know, when I'm in my [00:35:00] eighties and my nineties, am I gonna be able to walk the way that I do now? Am I gonna be able to move my body the way that I'm gonna be able to eat, the way that I right? So many things that we do take for granted that I now appreciate in a way that I never did before.

And like you were saying about like sometimes you dodge a bullet and we don't even realize it. So many experiences that I do look back on in life that at that time there was part of me that was like, oh man, like I didn't get whatever it is I thought I wanted. I didn't get it. Or I got something that I thought I really wanted and later on was like, that was terrible actually.

And so now I really have learned to. Just kind of live my life where I'm like, okay, it is what it is, right? Overall, I'm happy. I'm healthy, my kids are happy and healthy, whatever. I didn't get the thing. Okay, it will be fine. Life is still really good and it is sad when I [00:36:00] see so many people still, and of course some of it is online, which is a whole weird world anyway, but you just see so many people that are just.

Miserable and unhappy. Yeah. And they just complain about everything and I'm like, sure there is definitely things in the world right now that suck that are really shitty that I would change if I could, but does that mean that this moment is shitty? No. This moment's great. This is like you said, this is super cool.

Like I don't even know where are you? You're in, not in New Jersey. 

Cristian: No, I'm in San Francisco. 

Jill: Oh yeah, so you're in San Francisco. That's actually where I got married. We lived right on Powell Street, right by Union Square. I love San Francisco, but I'm all the way over here now again in New Jersey where I moved to take care of my grandmother.

Left San Francisco to move back home to care for grandma. I stayed here. This is super cool that we can connect and we can talk like this and see each other and hear each other. There's a lot of shitty things happening in the world right now. There's also a lot of [00:37:00] really, really super cool things, and we can exist with both of those things.

We could hold both of those things, and it doesn't mean that the shitty things, we're ignoring them, but also we need to stop ignoring the good things and really kind of say, yeah, life is okay. Life is pretty good. So yeah, all of it can be true all at the same time. 

Cristian: I agree. I mean, I've been thinking a lot about this, not only because of the job, but also in the position of a founder.

You know, like you have to be an optimist. Uh, it's too easy to be a pessimist and then we know the outcome, you know, like, oh, fine. You know, just fast forward to it. Why suffer? And this idea of what is the right amount of optimism to have, or like the reasonable amount of optimism to have, I think is so interesting because, I mean, it forces you to take the entire accounting of what is true.

And about 90% of the stuff we think is true isn't quite. True the way we think it is. This [00:38:00] belief that I have is actually informed by this other belief that is informed by this experience that I had. But if I reinterpreted the experience, then maybe this belief doesn't work anymore. And so this belief doesn't work anymore.

And so I have to actually deep down go and say, actually this belief. Isn't true. It's just not true. I was 16 at the time and I thought I knew how the world worked, you know? And turns out maybe I don't. But it forces you to stay real, right? Like what is a measured amount of optimism that is just enough to keep me going in the right direction, but not enough that it keeps my head in the clouds and also distracts from the real contact, you know?

No, but I totally hear you and I do feel very sad that these algorithms tend to favor negativity. Because it's easier to trigger that emotional reptile brain response through negativity. That's a psychology thing. We need to figure out at a planet scale, in a world in which AI is gonna be amplifying the speed of everything.

So if anything, I think that what we're doing is a little arc where on this little [00:39:00] space in the cyber sphere is about you. The good stuff in life, the people that you love, and the reason why we're all here and how can we make the experiences of those that come after a little better than the one we got.

Jill: All of us have those moments when we're like, maybe, I don't know. Everything that I think I know. Hopefully we all have those moments, right? I think that is part of the problem in some ways of the world that we created with social media. Like you said, it gets more engagement around the negative things, and so then so many of us are just stuck in these cycles of feeding what we already believe to be true.

Especially the really bad stuff, right? Yeah. The really negative stuff and. I hope that we can learn from the last 10 years or so that sure, we can't continue to keep going this way. Not if we want to have a happy or healthy society because, oh yeah. I do feel like it is [00:40:00] becoming almost a mental illness where so many people are only in these feedback loops that are reinforcing.

Things that aren't really true, even if there's like a little kernel of truth when you're just in this bubble that is reinforcing and reinforcing and reinforcing the negative and all these things, and it happens across every, it doesn't matter what culture you're in at this point, like political, it doesn't matter.

We're all stuck in these loops, and that's a big problem. 

Cristian: I had to go through this very intentional exercise of detachment from. Whatever I consume, I just don't believe anything anymore. I had to switch like the default of I trust what I see to, I don't trust what I see, and that's very difficult because you're sustaining tension.

The tension of it could be true or it could be not true, and your brain is like having to compute both worlds at the same time. And, but honestly, and that gets so hard that most of the time the filter is like, does this even matter? Does it change? Does, is it gonna change how I relate to my friends? Is it gonna change how I relate to [00:41:00] my community?

Is it really gonna change how I relate to my parents or my employees? Most of the time, it doesn't matter. Most of the time the problem is so far away that. It's basically irrelevant. Some of the problems are very local. Some of the problems are very real. You know, like you walk down the streets in San Francisco and you see stuff and you're like, how do I feel about what I see and whose fault it is and who do I blame?

And I won't feel angry, but I'm angry at the whole thing. You know, like I'm angry at this misery, you know, angry. Like, well, why did we let this happen? I don't know how I would be able to operate a company if I didn't do that. If I didn't say like, actually that. Most of that irrelevant. Most of it is irrelevant.

Back to what you had mentioned about other companies trying to do similar things, I think that back to this idea, there are so many ways to do this wrong, and if you don't do this with the right foundation of love for life. Love for family and love for friendship, and the belief that life has [00:42:00] meaning and that that meaning is contributing to something.

And we can't shape what that is necessarily. We probably can't put labels to it, but it points somewhere, and that is what you build on top of. If you don't do that, then you're building sandcastles and it may be the right fad. It may be the right technological demo. It may be cool, it may be disruptive, but odds are it's not gonna be something that people want.

Jill: Yeah, and it sounds like you are doing it right, which makes me happy because again, I've seen some things that I was like, Ooh, I don't know. 

Cristian: Makes know me a little uncom uncomfortable. I know. I know exactly what video you're talking about. I've never seen anything get so much hate online from a brand video or like a product video like that.

It was actually shocking to me to see some of the responses, like true vitriol, where I was like, oh boy. You know, like, I don't know that you have to take it that far either. You know, like, I hope you die. You know, like [00:43:00] that kind of stuff. 

Jill: Oh, I know. 

Cristian: But that video got something like 40 million views because people like to hate it and people's like, oh my God, did you see this thing?

Black Mirror is real. And I kind of feel kind of lucky that there's a prior arch for this thing. This is how you do it wrong, but actually it gets engagement and this is the right way to do it. But yeah, no, there's no shortage of these. There's a few different flavors of it that could be just as bad, like if you index on companionship too much and the role of the historian starts to creep into the role of boyfriend or girlfriend or friend, and that's where I think it starts to get really messy with these ideas of AI companions where the incentive of a company making the companion isn't.

To teach you to be a good member of society at all. And if anything, it distorts what your relationship with your real friends is like because your real friends are gonna call you out on your shortcomings or they're just gonna stop talking to you and the AI is gonna stop talking to you. Yeah, it won't.

[00:44:00] The only incentive for the ag company is that you keep talking to it. 

Jill: Yeah. 

Cristian: We put in a lot of thought on it. We put in a lot of soul and thinking around how do we make this in a way that doesn't step into any existing social relationships, and that creates this audio journal experience where this is a safe space.

You can share whatever you want. Nobody sees this except you. Or the people that you choose to share it with. And if Walter is on the project of getting to know you, you might as well buckle up and enjoy the ride because the journey of self-discovery is for you. That's the best part of it. 

Jill: It's so cool. I love it.

I love it. Well, we are at the time too, when you get to share with us where people can find you, if you have social media, the website, anything that you wanna let us know, and I will put links in the show notes so people can easily click it and find it. 

Cristian: Well, the number one place is if this has made you think of somebody who's sort, you wanna preserve.

autograph.ai is where we're at. We keep building Walter. He's a pretty good conversationalist, but we wanna make him the best [00:45:00] conversationalist in the world. And of course, like the library pages, we're still building those out. Any kind of feedback is greatly appreciated. We have an awesome team of folks who just work really hard to make this mean what it means to us.

Jill: Thanks so much, Kristen. I appreciate you taking the time. 

Cristian: Of course. Thank you, Jill. This was a wonderful chat. 

Jill: If you've been listening to my podcast for a while and you hear me and my guests talk over and over about how important it is to create a plan for the end of life, and to have the conversations with your loved ones about what's important to you, and you're thinking, okay, maybe it's time.

Maybe I should actually sit down and figure this out instead of just hoping it all works out later. I get it. These conversations can feel overwhelming or scary or just like something you'll deal with another day, but you don't have to do it alone. If you want help creating an end of life care plan for yourself or for someone you love, maybe if you're aging parents, a spouse, whoever it is in your life, you can book a complimentary 30 minute call with me and we'll just talk.

We'll get clear on what's going on for you and what the next right steps might be. There's no [00:46:00] pressure. Just support the links in the show notes. Whenever you're ready. And if this episode made you think of someone, a sibling, a friend, or another caregiver, feel free to share it with them. Sometimes these conversations are easier to start when someone else opens the door.

First, thank you for being here. The fact that you're even willing to listen to this kind of conversation means a lot.