Your Grandma Has a Story to Tell—This App Helps Her Share It

Episode: #018 How many stories from your parents or grandparents are still untold—and what would it mean to preserve them before it’s too late? In this episode of Healthcare Wayfinders, host Zach Aten sits down with Nick Hasty, the founder of Linda AI, a voice-driven AI tool that helps people—especially seniors—record and share their life stories in the form of personal podcasts.

Linda isn’t just a tool for storytelling. It’s a powerful way to foster emotional well-being, combat loneliness, and deepen family connections across generations. With natural conversations, thoughtful questions, and easy sharing, Linda is creating living legacies—one episode at a time.

💡 What You’ll Learn:
✅ How Linda turns voice conversations into shareable podcast episodes
✅ Why storytelling is essential for mental and emotional health
✅ The surprising tech seniors are embracing to connect with family
✅ How AI helps reduce isolation and preserve legacy
✅ Nick’s personal story that inspired the creation of Linda AI
✅ The future of AI-powered memory sharing and intergenerational connection

If you’ve ever wished you could preserve your loved one’s voice, memories, or wisdom—this episode will inspire you to start today.

📌 Check Out Linda AI:
🖥 Website: https://hellolinda.ai/
📱 iOS App Available Now
💬 Try it with your parents or grandparents—and preserve your family’s story

🎧 Tune in now! - You can also find Healthcare Wayfinders anywhere that you listen to podcasts.  

Contact the Healthcare Wayfinders Podcast

• Email us at podcast@grassrootslabs.com

Special Thanks to:

• Seth Aten who produces the podcast.
• Grassroots Labs for sponsoring the show.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] How many stories from your parents or grandparents are still untold, and what would it mean to preserve them before it's too late? Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the Healthcare Wayfinders Podcast, where we are routing you to more accessible and cost-effective healthcare.

I'm your host, Zach Aon, and today I'm joined by Nick Hasty, the founder of Linda ai.

When I first heard about what he was building, I thought, this is exactly what I've wanted for my own family. Linda makes it simple for people, especially seniors, to share and preserve their life stories through natural guided conversations. But it's more than just a way to capture memories. It's also a tool that supports emotional wellbeing, helps combat social isolation and creates meaningful connections across the generations. This episode is all about legacy, mental health, and the power of being heard, and you're not gonna wanna miss it. Let's jump in.

Zach Aten: Everybody. Welcome back to the Healthcare Wayfinders podcast. This is Zach, and I've got Nick Hasty with Linda ai. I am [00:01:00] really excited about this one, y'all. I, when I found out about Linda ai, I was like, this is something I've always wanted to do. With my family members and we'll get into what it is. But to see that they're innovating in the space and making it super helpful with AI has been super cool to me.

So I kinda wanted to just share this with y'all as an extra bonus and you're really gonna love it and I think it's gonna impact your life. So Nick, welcome on. Thank you so much for coming. And tell us a little bit about Linda and what you guys actually do.

Nick Hasty: Cool. Thanks Zach. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate you asking me on. Yeah. My name is Nick Hasty. I live here in Atlanta as well. I've got a company called Lose Labs and we have a product called Linda ai. Linda is an AI companion mostly designed for seniors.

And what it does is it turns guided voice driven conversations into podcast episodes automatically. Like I said, it's voice driven. It's like being on a phone call. It is an iOS app, but it's like a phone call in terms, an exchange of back and forth conversation. It's [00:02:00] powered by, LLMs text to speech synthesis, these kinds of things.

So as you talk to it, it learns about you and it asks questions about your life. And you can choose different topics, love or family or childhood or career or war experiences, whatever, and Linda will guide you through the conversation. She'll ask you questions. She selects follow up questions, and just really pulls these stories out of you.

And when you're done in the background it'll just do some post-processing on the audio. It'll do an intro. Linda will do a, today I sat down with Zach and we talked about his love life. It'll do like a real podcast episode style creation thing and just make it for you and then give it to you.

And then you can get in the app and you share it with family and friends. So it's all automated made for sharing.

Zach Aten: That's really cool. So it like, it's almost as if. They're on a podcast and they've got like a professional interviewer and that's just asking 'em about their life and stuff like

Nick Hasty: exactly right. Yeah. And there's, like I said, there's a bunch of different topics in every topic. It has about 10 questions with a couple of follow-up questions, so maybe 15 questions altogether. And yeah, whenever [00:03:00] you complete one of those topics, that's a new episode. One topic will be like love and relationships or work and callings or those kinds of things.

And they're all, about 10 or 15 minutes long a piece. So they're pretty digestible.

Zach Aten: And this is a really simple question, but I've seen people do give your grandma a book that has prompt questions where she like writes out stuff about her history and then they like put it together. Is this is like a super simple. electronic version of that makes it easy for family members to talk about their stories.

Am I summarizing that 

Nick Hasty: Yeah, definitely. We're definitely like. In and around that product market area, 

Zach Aten: Uhhuh.

Nick Hasty: the difference is, we're not asking grandma to write and write a letter or type out an email, once a week and then we, it's, and then it's not a book, right? It's just okay, here's everything about grandma.

That's, it's done. This is what's the least amount of work? And the most amount of information you can get and you get that through conversation and talking and you know the questions are. So I work with a [00:04:00] colleague who's done for StoryCorps and she's worked with NPR.

So the questions are designed but the follow ups and everything are sometimes AI generated. So it's, it ends up being a very natural flowing conversation that feels very real and, that's the best way to really get the whole story behind something. The goal is to take the work away from all this, it's not, to, not to make it feel like laborious.

Oh, I'm gonna sit down and write this book for my family, right? This is oh, I'm just gonna talk and then I'm gonna have a living, podcast. I'm gonna have content that I produce and then maybe I can followers and I'm gonna share it, right? And I'm not just writing a book and, trying to store away all my info before I pass away or something.

It's the opposite. It's grandma's, people are living longer and they feel young on the inside. And this is about giving them, a tool that can actually allow them to create content and, feel a part of this creator economy and all that kind of stuff.

And it's a specialized kind of consumer product that's designed to be easy and for them, right? It's not they spend a lot of time on Facebook and stuff, but Facebook is not user friendly [00:05:00] for this generation, for older generations. And, they just, they don't really use it in a healthy way always, except when they do create, creating writing posts and stuff.

Those have been correlated with feelings of competency and independence, so I'm really just trying to hone in on that, right? How can you give people a tool or a product that makes them feel good and helps them connect with people and gives them, turns them into something, turns them into something different, and then.

Yeah, they can share that story. It's the most, this is not something that could existed in the past. This is like infinitely scalable, right? We got something you can talk through that's intelligent, that has speech capabilities and it could talk to everybody in the world, and then all of a sudden you have everybody's story.

Zach Aten: Is it, how many languages is it in? Is it in English? What, how, who can use it?

Nick Hasty: Yeah, so right now it's primarily English. It unofficially supports Spanish and some other languages. I've actually been surprised 'cause I, I didn't tune the AI this way. It's just language translation is just something AI does really well just outta the box in many cases.

[00:06:00] So I've had seen users talk to in Spanish, even some LIC style languages like Ukrainian and Russian and even some Pacific languages and stuff. And she res the AI responds in English. But it can handle different languages. But that's a near, near term goal. Like eventually I want this to be something that anyone from any background or any area, right?

These are all, like every human life has a cool experience that needs to be shared. And so yeah, I wanted everyone to be able to talk to it eventually.

Zach Aten: Yeah, and like you said, that's something that's available in the underlying technology. It's just a matter of time before it's available. What's like the primary like way I. The user. And I don't want to get too deep into the weeds of the actual tech, but is it meant for somebody who is the person telling their story to download the app or is it meant for someone like me to invite my grandma to, to use or something like that?

Does that make sense? Is it, who's the primary user?

Nick Hasty: The primary user is your grandma or basically anyone who wants to talk to Linda and create a podcast. I. Yeah, the, the conversation is [00:07:00] like it's, first and second person back and forth. We, and the goal, because that's, the goal is to give this demographic, something that they can have to talk to you, right?

Because one, one in four, one in three, maybe even of people 65 and plus are like socially isolated, right? They don't have. Family members regularly coming by, or they're aging in place and these kinds of things. And so the idea was to make Linda like a companion, like someone they can actually talk to and make them feel like they have someone they can open up to.

And Linda actually, learns about you, right? It records every answer. It stores it, and then the questions and the interviews and stuff, it'll make custom interviews for people. All these things are, generated on the data you share, right? So when Linda, when you come back to it, it's like, Hey Zach, welcome back.

Last time, you were telling me about, your dog and your mom and all this kind of stuff. And I was wondering, here's a new question, right? So it picks up, where you left off. So that's the goal, is to make them feel. Ideally, this would be something they could use anytime they want.

They're gonna go for a walk, they're gonna sit outside, right? And you don't have to look at the screen. You just sit and talk. I think in [00:08:00] practice though, to answer your question, I think the way forward to help really penetrate the market is to get like the older adults, like my age or maybe your age to sit down and say, Hey, I want to hear more about you.

I know we're all busy. We got kids like we're running around. I live somewhere different, we never see each other. But hey, check out this app. You can buy it as a gift and send it to 'em, and it gives them instructions to download it. Or you can sit down with 'em and just walk 'em through it.

And just show 'em how to do it.

Zach Aten: Very cool. that would definitely be something I'm like the. The tech guy in my family, right? Everybody's got one and sometimes you just gotta embrace it. But yeah, I could see myself like going on a Saturday and showing my grandma how to use it and, than just saying Hey, do this whenever you want to and whenever you're free.

And you said it records it as a podcast. Is that it actually publishes it a podcast or how does one access the actual recordings?

Nick Hasty: Yeah. The conversation itself rather is a back and forth ex exchange. And we record the answer is an audio file and the the question is an audio file. In the conversation, just like a real podcast, the user might stop [00:09:00] and ask some questions.

These kinds of things. Like they, it's not always linear, but for the Outputted podcast, we isolate just the questions and the answers. Then we add an intro and an outro. We add music and that kind of stuff. So what you end up with. Is the 20 minute continuous play audio of the conversation with the kind of interstitial stuff, air, mixed out.

Just the questions and the answers to make it continuous flow. We improve the audio. We, you never know what people are recording on and that's always gonna be an issue. But, we do some post-processing. We edit out, silences and these kinds of things to try to make it real fluid.

And so then the episode is delivered. You get a notification, you get an email, you click on it, it's in the app on your own podcast page. You can share it there or you can view it online. So if you click view online, every user gets their own podcast page on the Linda website, like the platform.

So it looks a lot like, like a Spotify or whatever podcast page, right? Where there's the person's name, and then there's every episode. And so for all the episodes, we autogenerate [00:10:00] like a description, like an overview, and we it's got transcripts so you can look at the transcript of the conversation.

You can press play and you don't have to log in or anything to look at that, right? That's just if I wanted to listen to your podcast, right? I could go to the website and I could just listen. That's the same goal, right? It's just a very low friction way for people to listen. That being said, a lot of, we're not making any assumptions about what people want to share and who they want to see. So like we block all web crawlers, we block all AI crawlers, like the URLs are, non discoverable. They're like hard to figure out. So every person's podcast is inherently private in that way.

Like the only people who can never find it is the people you directly share it with. And you can even have, you can even have private episodes. Say you have an episode that. Like some people get really deep with Linda, right? Like I've seen some interesting conversations and maybe that's something you don't want in your normal podcast.

You can make that episode private and it'll be excluded from what people see when they land on your page.

Zach Aten: That's cool. That's a great feature. I'm just, and again I'm just thinking about this from [00:11:00] probably my own perspective of like my, again, my grandma using this. What do you do? Are you able to, I know you can listen to it. Are you able to download it like later or something like that?

I'm thinking of myself, like I, I build out like our family tree or something like that, and it's like eventually when, my grandma's not here anymore and she's not making new Linda podcast, it's like I'd love to have a way to somehow distill all that down and keep it in. A forever record for like future generations.

What? What's that process look like for you? Do you guys have a solution for that?

Nick Hasty: Yeah, for now you can download all your podcasts and all your transcripts at any point in time. This is your data, this is the user's data, like this is what you've shared. We're not trying to hide it away. And yeah, people want a copy for themselves, right? To keep for their own records and stuff.

So like in the app, you go into your settings, you download data, press the button, we'll send you a link. You can download the whole thing as a zip file and keep it right. Eventually we probably want to have some sort of [00:12:00] custodial accounts, right? Or maybe this is part of sharing or something, right?

Or maybe, some people who you automatically share with, or they co-share an account, they can download that data in case something happens to the user, right? And they're not able to, log in themselves. Just have another way to pull it down. As long as the user approves of that person being able and having the permissions to do that.

Zach Aten: Yeah totally. Probably has this, but you might have said this, it's got like share features. Like if, let's say grandma does wanna share it on Facebook and let all her friends listen to it.

Nick Hasty: yeah. Right now so if you're in the app and you're on the podcast page and you can listen to all your podcasts and scroll through 'em, there's a big share button. You just click it, it pulls up the, the normal share tray, like any app, and then it'll have Facebook and all that kind of stuff.

Drop it in. We have the smart metadata so that Facebook pulls in all the right information. It's oh, listen to Zach's podcast and here's his latest episode. That kind of stuff. And you can share it, if you share it on text or share anything in that. We have pre precept messages check out my podcast.

That kind of stuff. So yeah, sharing is like a major, it's something we feel [00:13:00] strongly about. We want people to do this. This, again, we believe this is helping people create a living record and getting other people to listen to it. And which may be, which is a little bit of different behavior, I think, than the demographic.

There, there may not always be so personal with sharing stuff. But I think that given the nature of the content and the medium, I think it's a different play as opposed to, photos or some. Comment on Facebook. I think if they're much more willing to share things that are not superficial, but are actually have some depth, especially with family and friends.

Zach Aten: That's great. That's great. So you've given us a really good, I feel overview of the service. I feel there's always a. Great founder story behind these types of products, and it feels like this one has to absolutely be the same. What what was your inspiration for building out Linda?

What got you to actually put the work in to make it come alive? I.

Nick Hasty: Yeah. This is like my second startup. I had, I was on the founding team of Gife originally which is like the animated gift sharing platform. And [00:14:00] I had been working there for, I left last summer, almost like 13 years. And towards those last couple years, I was really feeling like the desire to create something new again.

But this time I was approaching it like, who do I want to build for instead of what do I want to build? I have young kids. I was thinking about building for them and I had seen experiments. But then I went on a road trip with my mom. So here's, the very personal story.

I went on a road trip with my mom and this was like coming out of Covid, a year or two. So there's all that kind of stuff, and we had this road trip down to visit family in Miami, and we had these great conversations, right? And as I was going, I was just, had all these realizations. I was like.

God, somebody should be recording this, right? I, this is stuff I wanna learn, right? And I want to record and keep for my family and my my kids and those kinds of things. And I also realized that, wow, she's really letting out, right? She's been cooped up and it's like socially isolated.

She lives alone, that kind of stuff. Like she's really, this is a big deal for her to be able to get these things out and, there's real social. Pressures now that prevent [00:15:00] families from getting together like they used to, because, both parents work nowadays. Kids, every kid is like in 10 different, afterschool program.

And then seniors are, older people are living alone. So I was like, okay what do I do? How can I give her something that, she can talk to it or record all this stuff? It'll help her open up, it'll help her kind of, go trot down some mental pathways that maybe she hasn't in a while.

And then also format it in a way that anyone could hear it. Hey, here's mom's latest podcast episode. Have a sister overseas. Like we can just share it. She has kids, and so there's we can all learn about her and, but in an asynchronous way. We were driving.

I was like, okay, look, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna build you something. I'm just gonna give it a try. And she's okay. And so I built a v one of Linda that was like a web app, and she talked to her for 30 minutes and then, it crashed and burned out. But I was like, but she was like, I like that.

And I was looking at the data, I was like, this is cool. So I was like, there's something here, right? She's gonna sit down with this thing for 30 minutes. There's something here. And from that, I started hacking on this platform and, going different [00:16:00] user interfaces. I did a lot of first, in-person testing with older people to see to see if it's good.

'cause this is one of those things, right? If you don't, and I'm not saying I've got it right like this. This version, this out now is almost like a prototype, right? I'm still making it better, but I, the stakes are high with AI and AI companions and voice especially. And if you get it wrong, people are just gonna dip out and not come back.

Because if it doesn't feel, if it doesn't sound like human, if it doesn't, if there's any kind of weirdness or artificiality then, or confusion, like you're just not gonna have people who are gonna use it. So it took a while to really get to it, to a point where I'm like, okay, I can let this out to a lot of people.

So yeah that's the background, and I guess, as I was researching I started with that immediate problem of like my mom's situation and I realized we are the norm, right? This is not a special case. This is every family, this is every parent. And this is this crazy demographic shift where, you know, this inverted pyramid of population size and.

I, and then people are living longer, and I was like, [00:17:00] wow, consumer tech has completely ignored this demographic, right? These are, I think the stereotype is, and look, when you talk about people 55, 65 plus, it's a whole lot of different people with a different backgrounds and different capabilities in terms of what they can do with tech.

But boomers, that generation who are like 65, like they're all phone natives, right? Like they don't have. Any trouble, they can all call and text and use platforms and stuff. And so the realization was there's a whole bunch of people and no one's making anything for them. And they're dealing with, like there's TikTok and there's Instagram, and they're just made for completely different types of people with different values and different content preferences and different technical capabilities, right?

And I was like, this is, there's nothing out there that's made for this demographic. And so I was like, wow, this is. This feels like something, 

Zach Aten: yeah. No, that's great. I've also had a couple of trips with my dad, talking where I felt the same of I wish I was recording this now.

Nick Hasty: Yeah.

Zach Aten: It'd be so much easier to do something like that. That is really [00:18:00] cool. And I'm glad that it's, such a personal, obviously passion project for you.

I feel like the products always wind up. It's so much better when it's like that. I just a couple of random things that I just thought about while you were talking. I know that you said that Melinda, there's some scripted questions that have been written by some professional interviewers, but then it listens to you and then asks follow up questions.

How deep does that go? Will Linda keep talking to you? As long as will grandma call me at two in the morning and be like, I just kept talking and we just had the greatest conversation. What how's that work?

Nick Hasty: yeah. That's a great question. So right now there is depth, but it doesn't go it's, the AI's kind of on some guardrails. Because when I really started building this, LLMs and these other things were, they had much more hallucinations and there was like just less like.

A little less confidence in terms of what their capabilities, I, with the assumption built in that it's all gonna get better. Also thinking about the output being like a trajectory like of a conversation and as someone who listens, right? You want to have [00:19:00] that kind of content narrative trajectory.

The interviews usually are, they move forward to questions, right? So there's like a primary question. And that question is contextualized, it's based on what the AI knows about the user it is just phrased in a way that feels personal and relevant. And then there's follow up questions and that AI can choose from, or sometimes it'll make up one if it finds one, and then once you do those, then it moves on to the next question.

So it definitely has goal oriented, right? In terms of. Getting, hitting the high points and producing a podcast episode that's has a trajectory. That being said, I think that some people wanna go deeper. Yeah. And I'm feeling, at this point, the technological capabilities are certain there, certainly there where you could really drill in.

Whether or not that, has a podcast output. I'm not sure. Maybe there's just like a personal Hey, I just need to chat kind of thing, which is, which look, if people like, I'm totally open to that and adding that.

Zach Aten: That's awesome. That kind of leads me, into my next question, which is, and you've hinted at different things, but what's like your roadmap for going [00:20:00] forward? What do you want to see? See Linda become over the next couple years.

Nick Hasty: Yeah, so the way I feel about it now is, I'd really like to see it become like a platform itself, right? In terms of like a podcast platform for this demographic or for its users, right? This demographic, they already listen to all three and a half hours of audio every day.

And they prefer spoken word content more than any other demographic. They love news, they love, talk shows, that kind of stuff. They haven't really hit the podcasting thing yet. I think largely that's just an issue of discoverability and just having the right tools in front of 'em. But I think once they do, especially if it's content.

That they find interesting and personal. I think they will. So I think you could build a whole platform around this, right? This first year is like getting the interviews and building the content library, and then depending on what users wanna participate or how public they want to be, right?

Then you build a whole platform that's just like all these stories, right? And you can have like radio stations based on. Certain interview types. Let's hear all the Korean War [00:21:00] stories, like I want to hear cool phishing stories, that kind of stuff. We can feature, we can curate, you can do anything with the content that you could have within any kind of media platform.

It's demographic. They spend a ton of time on YouTube, but they never make YouTube videos like less than 5% or something of YouTube videos. But I think, if you take away video and it's just talking and it's personal. Then you have a content format that's something they can relate to and they will create and they will build that whole library out.

But the other way I'm thinking about it too is, AI and Linda can be the primary interface to whether you want to create or consume, right? If you took the Spotify interface and gave it to a 75-year-old person, like it would I find it overwhelming, right? There's like everything and nothing is there, and I, but if you gave it to them, like it's just too much, right? There's like texts and buttons and stuff everywhere. So get rid of that, right? This is what theory are these things always promised to be right? Hey Linda I want to hear some phishing stories. Okay, gotcha. Boom.

And there's just starts playing like all the best fishing stories or all the best, like I want to hear more people talk about their [00:22:00] experiences in Vietnam or when JFK was assassinated or when the challenger explosion, like nine 11, or anything other people who grew up nearby me, do they have memories?

You could talk to the AI about it. All this content, searchable, indexable, you just pull it up and give it to 'em, right? And then they don't have to. And this, these behaviors already exist. So I got google Home, connected to my Spotify and my kids my, my girls. They just walk around all day hey, Google play X, Y, Z.

Like they're already used to talking and getting content for them. and then they get interfaces and they're like, Ugh. They're frustrated by it. So I think that's, I think voice as and then like with an intelligence, the other side is where things are going.

Zach Aten: That, that sounds really cool, Nick. I was getting excited when you were talking about

Nick Hasty: I think so.

Zach Aten: Oh, man. Hey, is there anything else that you wanna talk about?

Nick Hasty: Yeah, I think I appreciate you bringing on me onto like a healthcare style conversation because I haven't really positioned Linda in that way largely because, I didn't wanna oversell it or be snake oilier or whatever. But yeah, I would say like my, it's very [00:23:00] informed, like in my own experiences with a therapist, like a remote therapist on the phone, and and there are studies out there of life reviewed therapy.

Like I do believe that sitting down and talking about things, whether it's your history or whether it's how you feel today or whatever, creating that narrative has a very positive psychological and emotional effect. And, yeah. Yeah. I think I'm gonna lean into this more, so thank you.

Zach Aten: No. Yeah, you're great. You feel more connected to your past. You feel more connected to your family. The people that are listening feel more connected to you. And it could be the genesis of so many other questions and conversations that, that will just create more connection between people and family members and loved ones.

So yeah, I just, I love what y'all are doing and I hope that it's super successful and helps a lot of people and really appreciate you. You coming on the podcast, Nick.

Nick Hasty: Thank you for having me. It's been a real pleasure.