Overcome - A Mental Health Podcast

Authoring Your Life with AI: Cristian Cibils Bernardes on Legacy, Storytelling, and Mental Health

• Travis White | Mental Health Advocate • Episode 40

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In this episode of Overcome: A Mental Health Podcast, host Travis White speaks with Cristian Cibils Bernardes about the powerful concept of authoring your life with AI and how it transforms legacy, storytelling, and mental health.

Cristian shares his journey from Paraguay to Stanford and Google, before founding Autograph, an innovative platform built on the idea of authoring your life with AI. He explains how using AI to capture stories, memories, and voices can help individuals preserve their legacy, strengthen mental health, and connect future generations to their family history.

Listeners will discover how authoring your life with AI can reframe struggles as heroic stories, turning obstacles into opportunities for growth. Cristian also explores the emotional experience of hearing a loved one’s voice through AI, why storytelling matters for healing, and how everyone has a unique story worth telling.

What We Discussed in This Episode:

  • Cristian’s upbringing in Paraguay and the entrepreneurial lessons that shaped him
  • His time at Stanford and Google leading to the creation of Autograph
  • How authoring your life with AI helps preserve family memories and legacy
  • The role of “Walter,” the AI interviewer, in guiding people’s stories
  • Why storytelling through AI supports mental health and emotional resilience
  • The long-term impact of authoring your life with AI on future generations

If you’ve ever wondered how technology and storytelling can shape your journey, this episode will inspire you to see the power of authoring your life with AI.

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Hello and welcome to Overcome a Mental Health Podcast. I'm your host, Travis White. This is a place for you to speak about your, tell your mental health stories. I'm very excited for tonight's guest. I'm speaking with Christian Sibyls-Bernardis. Christian is the founder and CEO of Autograph. Christian, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on Travis, great to be here. pleasure is all mine and without wasting any time I'm just going to turn the time over to you to tell about your tell your story or take us on your journey. thank you. yeah, I mean, I think the themes of mental health and overcoming and, you know, how to, constantly improve on where you're at in life has been, been a constant thread in my life. I can tell you a bit of my story, which I think is, you know, there have been obstacles that I've overcome, but I'm really excited to talk about this thing that we're building that helps people overcome their obstacles or limiting beliefs and things of the sort. But I grew up in, I grew up in Paraguay. Paraguay is a very different place to the U.S. It is, I think about it as the shire of the world. You know, if you're a Lord of the Rings person, It's very agricultural, very tranquil. The social fabric looks very different, so nobody ever leaves. And so you have multiple generations of folks who all live within a 10 block radius of each other. And so your concept of family is already baked in. Your extended family means your family. Because everyone's co-located, there's always some family event to go to, whether it be like a weekend lunch or some birthday or some wedding or something. And it's also bigger families. So there's like a constant social pressure to do stuff all the time. And I grew up in a pretty unique household where both my parents were or are computer scientists. you know, like... you may imagine that there isn't much of a tech scene in Parallel. There really isn't. And especially if you think, you you look back to the 80s or something, there was barely even a dream of it. And I honestly don't even know what got into my parents' heads to be like, yeah, the computers are the future, back in the time where there weren't even personal computers. But I grew up watching them. try and retry and try and try and try and try business idea after business idea related to technology all the time. So this was anything from accounting systems for cattle ranches or word processors for node resurfaces or reselling Microsoft Box software. and I should mention not only are they computer scientists, but they're both entrepreneurs of the same business. So they're 50 % partners in the business and even more uniquely, my mom's the CEO and my dad's the CTO, which is if you add the layers of how rare that is, I'm like, how, like the more time goes by the more I'm like, how did that happen? very, very rare. Right. And, and I never thought much of it and, know, like. For the first maybe 14 years of my life, the tension was always there around like, what is this thing that we're working on? you know, I include myself because, you know, if you imagine like the two people in the business, the two partners in the business, they talked about this all the time. Like they would get home and they would talk about. So it would always be like problem solving. Like what is the problem solving thing that we're doing? What like always some fire that needed to be put out. Uh, many a time a business idea that wouldn't work out. And so, you know, would mean recalibrating vacations or recalibrating. Can we even take a vacation? Can we, what are, and, you know, and it was, I think an extremely formative experience because I got to see what grit looks like in them and them, and them staking, you know, the future of the family and betting on themselves. And when I was about 15, uh, things started taking a turn where. they started building out, uh, SMS infrastructure for the telcos of Latin America. this is just like literally getting the AT &T of, of, you know, Columbia to send a text from one phone to another. And, and, and even just that chapter of them figuring out this business idea, and, know, and then. for example, realizing that, you know, they would charge a certain amount of money to implement SMS for a given telco, but then the telco would charge per SMS to their customers and would make something like, I don't know, like 500 times whatever my parents would be able to charge them. so they came up with this thing called value added services, which used to be a pretty big thing back in the early 2000s, where you could essentially build services on top of SMS. m You know, like you could subscribe to a joke and you would send, you know, some short code to some short word to some short code and you would get a joke every day on your phone. and, you'd also be able to do things like subscribe to sweepstakes or vote for American Idol and that kind of stuff. one of the, as this was sort of emerging and they were like, creating this new category of business. one of the things that they did was sweepstakes. And there was a gambling mob that was, you know, this is sort of, um, you know, it's, it's like, you know, the gambling commission essentially was like, I'm sorry. Like we need to, we need to figure out what's going on here. And, my dad would get death threats from, from the mob because, know, they were starting a new, you know, it's not gambling, but it's, you know, like sweepstakes. So like there's randomness associated to it. and so they were thinking of fleeing the country. And, and, know, they shielded us from all of this process till much later when they were like, by the way, this is what happened. but so it was essentially because they were essentially figuring out does this business even work outside of Paraguay that they, oh, it does. And so then they started thinking internationally. They, they were able to, you know, in time, thankfully this really heroic DA stepped in. And eventually sent everybody associated with this whole thing in the gambling mob to jail, which is a whole crazy story. I mean, you have to understand that growing up in Paraguay, like these kind of heroes don't show up, you know, and, not only that, but then it just left this door open for this opportunity for them to then grow the business internationally and eventually grow to 35, 35 countries or so. Um, and so this was all going on basically in my later teens when I was like between 15 to 18. and so talk about a really inspiring, you know, origin story for my parents that I was getting to see like the fruits of their decades of work finally paying off. and so they, you know, they, you know, you know, at some point we were thinking about internationally, I applied to school in the U S and was incredibly fortunate to end up at Stanford, where I discovered this major called symbolic systems. I mean, I went into Stanford thinking that I was going to do computer science. but cause I hadn't seen what it could do. but what I always loved the why, um, probably more so than the how, like, why are we doing this thing? Like, is this thing good? How is this affecting people? How does society change? when we introduce these things into society. know, I guess Facebook and Ned Good are Ned Bad on society. TikTok, same thing. Twitter, you know. And so why are we doing this again and where does it go? And symbolic systems is great because it's like a mixture of computer science with psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, which is the really round, you know, the 360 combo of Why is it good? How does it affect people? How do you communicate with it? And how do you build it? And my concentration was in AI. I've always loved sci-fi, so I came across this short story by Isaac Asimov when I was a kid called The Last Question. I highly recommend it anybody. It's like, I don't know, 20 pages or something. You could probably read it in an hour. And if it takes longer, you'll enjoy it because it changed my life. Um, and so I discovered symbolic systems and, and I've always loved education too. So I taught computer science at Stanford. And, I eventually turned that into a job at Google where I was a software engineer for a few years doing ads. mean, I'm like, Google makes a of money on ads. It's a really well run organization. learned a ton. but after one promotion cycle, I moved over to a different team that was more aligned with what I want to do as an AI education team. And, it was really cool working, like, how do we use technology to help people with their actual learning outcomes? And, it was, it was a great experience at some, and it was, it was a startup that Google had acquired. So it had a very different feeling from, ads, which is like this, you know, like corporate, I don't know why I say corporate because it's still Google, but it's like way more of like it's business business and Uh, app was more like this, you know, a startup nature. Everybody was doing a bit of everything. Uh, and I loved it. And I realized that I wanted to expand my skillset beyond just software engineering. And then the pandemic hits, uh, and, know, I was like, Oh my gosh, is it, you know, probably if it's the end of the world, I would rather not spend my final days alone. And so I decided to leave Google, which is a very hard decision to I moved to Chicago to be with my now wife who was doing med school there and to join my parents company remotely as it was pivoting from SMS, which is obviously not as big of a thing as it used to be, to an investment firm. And so for two years while I was in Chicago, I helped them essentially like reinvent their company to support the next generation of Latin American entrepreneurs and come up with You know, how do we think about our family values in the context in which the kids are all spread out? My sister lives in Buenos Aires. I have another sister who's very fortunately moving to the San Francisco Bay area pretty soon. and obviously huge culture shock going from Google to the family business where your parents are your, your boss. And, and. But it was wonderful. mean, it was really special to, it was this very sense of unity across distance, even though the world was going insane. And at the end of the pandemic, my wife gets her residency match. She's a doctor. She gets her residency match to UC San Francisco. We moved to San Francisco. Within the context of about two weeks, we get engaged. I turn 30. We moved to San Francisco and chat GPT drops. And so, and at this point, two years in, if you've spent enough time with a founder of any sort, founders are a different kind of person. And my parents are like very much the founder archetype. And so they would say things like, you have to think like a founder and act like a founder and like you get your founder instincts. And at some point I was like, I don't think that I can simulate this stuff. think. The only way to really do this is to actually do the thing. And in some ways I was, I always wanted to start my own thing, but I also wanted it to be like, okay, I'm doing this carrying the torch. If you can do it, I can do it kind of thing. So I took some time off to figure out what I was gonna do. And I gave myself three months because it was this almost like the darkness of the pandemic had finally gone away. And we all dealt with the pandemic in different ways. Like I certainly had my laundry list of issues to work through and you know, like really look within that, right? Like what was wrong with the world or what was wrong with me as a participant in the world that I want to improve on. And like when thinking of doing my next thing that if I'm, if I want to, like what is the next chapter in my life going to look like and what am I optimizing for? And so I took three months. And I remember thinking, okay, blank whiteboard, like whatever, like I'm gonna really imagine all possible futures. Like I am not gonna be selective about this. If I gravitate toward being a pastor, I'll be a pastor. If it's a life coach, I'll be a life coach. And you know, all the wild chat, you can come out say, but I know AI, I have this entrepreneurial background, like, you know, like I should, it has to be something with AI. And the only real thread that survived that whole thing was this, around the same time, I also had this idea for an opening scene for a story. like there were these two characters in an alley and they were worried and they had funny names. Like one of them was called Rabbit and the other one was called Orphan. And I was like, who are these guys? I need to find out. And. So, know, that would be my thing that I could make progress on for sure. know, I'd evolve the story. it's this thing. It's about this thing. And the more like time went by as these three months were going on, it really was all about the story. was like really like, OK, wait a minute. This is this is my story. I'm telling my story and like it's in this really weird way. This is something in my subconscious that is trying to come out. I wish I had like an AI tool that knows everything or like can understand me better than I know myself. to help me write the big next chapter in my story. And I didn't have that tool. And so was like, okay, I'm just gonna write the story. And in the process of writing this thing that became a sci-fi novel, where I put in all my philosophy, it's essentially a retelling of my life story in like a fantastical way, where it's like a secret agent embedded in like uh an AI company that, you know, like all the layers of loyalty that he needs to navigate. I realized that... AI is this crazy new world that we're going towards. And I don't think that we can stop the machine anymore. think that like there's, it's just the genies out of the bottle. And it works in like predict almost like you can understand at a very high level how a human learns. You you feed it a ton of information and it extracts patterns from that information and makes a model of the world that then you can talk to. And so what I realized was in the same way that a human behaves, you know, AI is going to get smarter and better and crazier, and it's going to be able to do more things, and there's going to be more companies that do it. But so long as the data that we feed it is bad, the stuff is going to be bad. And so then I thought, what is the data that we need to put into these systems so that the mind of this machine that we're building points toward the happy future that we all want to be a part of, as opposed to the disconnected dystopian future that we kind of just barely scrapped, clawed our way out of after the pandemic. And so I was thinking this as I was writing my story and I was like, oh my gosh, what I'm really writing is a software update for the mind of digital God. so I was like, oh wow, okay, like let's make that. So eventually this book took over my life as you may imagine, and it became this like thesis. And what I did not expect to find was this sense of agency and relief at essentially becoming the author of my own story. like literally had taken the it. And this feeling of, man, like I've told my story. Like, like I exists in another medium now that someone else can access. And if they really need to understand me, here's here's the playbook. Right. So anyway, I just takes about six months. It's like the most transcendental six months of my life. I'm literally like crying all day, just processing all the stuff from the pandemic about. how society was so polarized and you know, like what is the point if like it's all going to down the toilet anyway and like, and through this exercise of self authorship, I was like, wait a minute, there's something really powerful here. But about seven months go by the book, I finished writing the book and living in San Francisco requires an income. And so was like, okay, I have to start thinking about how to monetize this thing. And so I started a podcast to... talk about the themes in the book and sort of build a little audience that I could then market the book to. And so these were conversations about AI a couple of years ago now with AI professors and psychology professors and economics professors and people building companies and VCs and venture capitalists and investors and poets and authors. Just like what does our humanity look like in the age of AI? where these things are coming at us faster than we can process them. I don't know if you've tried to keep up with AI news, but it's actually impossible. And this is like even experts in the field can't keep up because it's moving so fast. Imagine like, and I was just trying to be like, man, so jobs, what are we going to do about jobs? And what are we going to do about, you know, a sense of purpose that you get out of a job? And how are we going to get sense of purpose? And anyway, just like these really interesting conversations that I thought were really important to put out there. And I also just fell in love with the format. I mean, I love talking to somebody for an hour or so and getting to know what makes them who they are, what tickles them intellectually. And I remember thinking at the time, like, man, if I could interview everybody on earth, I would do that. I would love to connect with every human. highlight the amazing value that everybody brings. I think everybody has an amazing, I think everybody's here for a reason. And I think everybody has a hidden kernel of a secret pearl of knowledge that unlocks this master key that enables the future that we want. So I remember thinking that and putting it in my backpack. And I remember at one point I was like, man, but the person I really shouldn't be interviewing, like all this podcast stuff and AI stuff is nice, but like. I really should sit down with my grandma and get her life story down. My grandma has a crazy life story. Her dad was an MI6 agent. Her mom was Norwegian. During the, I forget which war, but one of the wars, the great grandpa was like, you guys gotta go away from Europe. This place is falling apart. My great grandma's parents, for some other weird reason, had lived in Paraguay before, so they shipped across. The cross the universe basically ended up in Paraguay. They would communicate over secret messages. My great grandma ended up becoming the consul for Norway and Paraguay. Eventually my grandma was part of that too. She ended up getting knighted by the king of Norway. And you know, like obviously lost her dad at a very young age, lost her husband at a very young age. Like basically. raised a family of five kids on her own and like in the middle of a military dictatorship in Paravya, became a prominent industrialist, wrote books about her family history. So she has an insane story. And I was like, grandma, we gotta sit down. Like my great grandfather was an MI6 agent. This is cool. I wanna find out about this part of our story. So he set a date and a few days before our interview, she had a stroke. that left her paralyzed for the last 18 months of her life. that's life, you know, that happens. The difference, I think, was that I had the outline of the questions that I wanted to ask her that now I knew I wasn't gonna be able to get an answer to and maybe has been lost forever. Like nobody else in the family knows. My grandma's sister doesn't know, cause she's, I forget, like six or seven years younger. And my grandma was always the keeper of the family lore. And so my great aunt never needed to do that. And so that triggered something that was like, wait a minute, how do all of these dots connect? Like, is the thing that connects everything? What is a tool that can help me or anybody write out their most epic life story? It can interview everybody on earth. once a week, not unlike a podcast about your life where we just get into the stuff that makes you who you are. And that, I mean, the more I started peeling the layers on the onion, the more I was like, wait a minute, there's something here. So this generation, like our grandparents generation, has 52 % of the wealth and 40 % of them feel chronically lonely. And we don't know what the effects of that loneliness are in terms of cognitive decline or like how do you price that into the market? So there was a spark there where I was like, wait a minute, so we can use voice AI to interview everybody on earth and we get everybody's family histories down, but also help everybody just like write their own story in the most epic way. And then on the other side, what's like, well, what do you get out of it? Do you get a book? Do you get a movie? What do you get out of it? And I was like, you can just get the person. Like we can actually make a model of the person that sounds like them and speaks like them and has all their memories. And so the future can talk to us and get to know us and understand our fears and our hopes and like how we try and fail and try and fail and try and fail until we don't fail or until there's nothing left in the tank. And, and, and then I was like, Oh my gosh. This is crazy. Is this something that people want? uh Is this something that there's an appetite for? And I created a little website with a landing page where you could sign up for a wait list. I shared it with my grandma's nurse who was taking care of her. was like, hey, we're building this thing to help people tell their life stories. It creates a digital legacy for them that their families can access even after they're gone. Do you think this would work? And within a weekend it had crossed nine countries. Five languages or so were represented there. And I realized, wait a minute, this is, there's something here. There's like, what's going on? And so then, you know, there was more product iterations. we, I ended up going to raise money for it. I did the whole VC circuit thing, which is extremely taxing. Let me tell you, like I was really at my wits end. you know, like at this point I had been, you know, a reasonable amount of time without an income. So I was feeling the pressure of like, I really need to figure something out. And my best friend since age three, who had just gotten married and just had a kid three months ago, joined as a co as a co-founder and said, like, I believe in you. I believe in this. And his wife was doing her MBA at Berkeley. So they were going to move to the States. Uh, to do that. And, and he was going, it was essentially moving to the States to do this with me. And we didn't have an income. We didn't have anything. We didn't have like, mean, um, and you know, like this, at some point I feel really lucky because this idea blends. My cultural context, it brings my passion for storytelling, my, uh, abilities in AI. It's an entrepreneurial thing. And I grew up in like an entrepreneurial womb and. ah So, like, I feel very lucky that I discovered something that I could pour all my energy into and it gives more energy back than I ever expected. But, you know, you get met with a lot of rejection fundraising, you know? these are, I mean, these are some of the, these are some people who've made billions of dollars betting on kids getting stuff right. And they all sound really smart and, like, they know what is true. And so when you meet with 50 of them and 50 of them say no, it's very hard not to start believing. Right. uh And so you have to keep going. And so you're like, how do you keep. So then I had I found myself having to tap into these different layers of why am I doing this again? I'm doing this because I'm doing this because this is my legacy for the world. This is what I want to meet. And then that gets extinguished really quickly when somebody says like, you don't matter. What legacy what and I was like, oh man, so there's it needs to be another thing. I'm doing this for my kids, you know, like I don't have kids yet, but I'm doing this because I want a better future for my kids. And then that one's like, no, that's too imaginary. And then you get to stuff like, oh, I'm doing this because I'm the guy who realized that my kids are going to be able to talk to my dad no matter what happens to my dad. And I can't forgive myself if something happens to my dad. And I did and I have the solution, you know, and And eventually, you know, it all works out. mean, I was at my very wit's end, but you know, we were able to raise a sizable amount of money to build this thing out. And it's been the privilege of a lifetime to be able to now hear the stories of people who come to us at the peaks and valleys of life. These are folks who like have just had a college graduation or a high school graduation, the kids moving out. And so this is a big life chapter that is starting and parents want to record it. you to us at the opposite end when people get really bad news and they realize that there is a moment at which this becomes too late and they want to get ahead of that and this is illness, this is like cognitive decline and apparent and being able to serve an emotional need for people at those moments in life. and providing them a space where they can feel like the main character in their own story for 20 minutes a week in a context in which society has rid them of that and actively aims almost like by design to rid you of your individuality and the special place that you hold. And even like the time that you get to think about this stuff is just the most meaningful and moving thing I've ever experienced. And so yeah, that's my story. went on for like 36 hours there, but yeah, happy to take it wherever you want, man. have a you have a really like cool background and there's a lot of like really cool history with your ties to your family and everything. So I think the story with your grandma like really stuck out like the fact that you took those questions and came up with this is awesome. Thank you man. mean like I mean it really got to the point where I was like this is a solved problem. This doesn't need to happen to anybody ever again and and you know like you know like you can you can always twist something beautiful into something sad and cynical. You don't start with the beauty and you don't start with like actually letting the feelings in like what does it feel what would it feel like to ask one more question? and to be able to get that answer, especially in the context of your life. One of the things that I'm really excited about is like, it doesn't have to be like, I want to talk to my grandma because I miss her. That's one aspect of it, which I think is important. like, you know, helping in the grieving process, I think is really special. but I'm really excited about the context where I'm talking to Walter. Walter is our AI interviewer. I'm talking to Walter about my life and, know, Hey, I had an amazing interview with Travis today. But you know, while we were having this interview, I got an email about a job offer in New York and I'm considering it and I may have to move. don't know. making stuff up. um, and sorry, I lost you from my screen. There you go. Um, and Walter can say, Hey, actually this reminds you of something your great grandma went through. Do you want to talk to her? And Walter would pass the phone to my great grandma's autograph, who would be able to tell me the story of how she moved to Paraguay from Norway. And now for the first time in history, I can ask questions and I can say, what was the fallout? What did it feel like when you said goodbye to your husband for the last time? And not only that, I like you get to actually get all the 360 perspective. Like you get to ask the kids what they felt and you get to ask the grandkids what the impact of those decisions were. And all of a sudden, when you make a decision to uproot your life and move somewhere else, this is just one example. It could be a job. It could be a relationship. a, I'm like, I don't know about the thing. And like all these things where like you want like the, the, the life experience that is the costliest. of everybody who came before you, who loves you, who wants the best for you, and wants the best that life has to offer for you, to show up at that moment and say like, hey, maybe this little nugget can help you out. That's the part that I'm excited about. And then think about all the knowledge that is locked up in people's brains that never gets shared, that we couldn't have access to, you know? Yeah, yeah, I can think of a ton on my mind that like I don't share with anybody. So I think this is really cool. What's been the most surprising or moving uh use case you've seen from early users of Walter? Um, so many, man. Um, I'll highlight a couple. one of our first, users was, or is this guy who is in his seventies and had just come out of, Parkinson's surgery of some sort, neuro surgery. And, he struggled a lot with stuttering. so, it was very difficult for him to have with folks because poor guy would take a long time to express himself. And so that would lead to a lot of shame and that would lead to a lot of guilt and so the poor guy essentially got depressed. And his reviews of Walter were, he's patient and he reminds me of where I come from and there are so many things I thought I'd forgotten that remind me how beautiful my life is. I don't know, man. Like you hear that from somebody, it's just so moving. There's another guy who's maybe in his forties and he has a history of heart condition in his family. And he has an autistic son. And he wants to be there for his kid if something happens to him. Obviously the stakes are much higher, you know, like in the case of somebody with learning disability, you know, but the feeling of presence of just like, I will always be with you. I mean, that one gets to me every time. It's really cool. It sounds like Walter though, with the many things that Walter is capable of. It can be a therapeutic thing as well. Totally, I mean, we don't necessarily want to brand ourselves as therapy. to brand yourselves as therapeutic, but... Yeah, Yeah. side effects of, you're, you're almost doing this is the way we sell it now. It's like, uh, you, we market to the gift to the kids to gift it to their parents as a birthday present or the, you know, father's day, mother's day, uh, Christmas, you know, like it's a, it's a lifetime achievement award. We love you so much. We want to record your story. Almost as if we hired a biographer to write your story. Um, but then through the process of. conversation, it actually reveals stuff to you that you maybe had forgotten, you hadn't revisited in long time. And so, and then, you know, like that is an enjoyable process to recall all these things, but then to see it reflected back at you and to see like, this is what Travis means to me, or this is what my significant other means to me, my wife of 50 years means to me. And being able to share that and then. being able to reappraise some of the things like, I've always thought about this thing that happened to me as a, I don't know, like I was painting myself as a victim when I could paint myself as a hero or a survivor, you know? And so it comes as a sort of like, it's a nice side effect out of the box, but I think that just like helping people tell their story is all you really need. And you'd be surprised at how much you get to know about somebody. Tell me your life story. Yeah, and it's like you said before, everyone has a story. But a lot of those stories go untold. I think this just comes to the point where it's like nobody asks or people just don't tell because they're not asked. I mean, and think of all the quiet acts of service, right? The parts of the story that feel like the montage reel, where it's just like, I'm training for the next fight. That is the, that's the, that's the bulk of life. Like most of life is a montage scene to the highlights. And And there's heroism in that. think that there's heroism in the silent acts of love and patience and kindness and care that often go unnoticed and certainly go unfung. And yeah, I agree with you. think everybody's here for, I think we're all writing one story together. Like the story of how we make it and how we keep going. And I think everybody's a special character in that story. know, internally, everybody feels like the author, editor, movie director, executive producer, have their own story. But when you think about the fact that you really are just the story you tell yourself, if you can figure out what the difference is between who you think you are and the story you tell yourself, there's not much difference. But that story you tell yourself is actually inherited. It comes from the stories your parents told you and society told and your friends told you, and like the stories that get repeated over and over and over and over again. And once we understand ourselves as like participants in this giant play that we're all co-writing together, it just, it starts to feel a little different. Yeah, of course. In your mind, how does preserving a person's voice and memories with AI change the way we think about legacy? Um, that's a wonderful question. well, it changes, it changes many things, I think, before we get to legacy either. Like, I think it like changes what we think about the sense of self, uh, back to this idea of like, we're, are we the author? Are we the editor? Are we the executive producer? Are we the, you know, the father, the husband, the business partner, the, we all play these roles, like all the time. And so. One of the really nice things that this does is it really gets you to think about, wait, what am I really? And you can't get to legacy without thinking about who are you really? And you will actually pretty quickly realize that the legacy you have is the ripples in the story that happened after you're gone. You know, like what is the story? Where does the score story go because of your story? And. And then that becomes extremely empowering, right? Because any flap of the butterfly's wings can lead to a hurricane somewhere. And for the first time in history, we'll be able to trace it back. And like, it was this conversation with this, with my mom that really stuck with me, that led me to be a little kinder here, that led me, somebody that made me a favor that actually did it, and then it spirals into this wonderful thing. And that now can be attributed to mom, which historically would have never been able to be attributed to mom. And... And there's very, yeah, legacy and memory are one thing. Like, it's just the stories that get repeated. And now we get into like, I don't know what a hundred years in the future look like, but I'm sure that like anybody who's going through life feeling like they may be less than significant, like I'm sure that there is a kernel in your life story that unlocks a problem in the future that now we will be able to solve because of you. So you're blow my mind though with like just a just this concept of AI because it's like capable of so many things but I've never thought of it like as kind of being a historian for somebody's life. It's really cool. I'm glad you like it. don't think there aren't that many people thinking about it the way we do and it's exciting to be in our own lane for a while. But dealing with AI though, you do see these people that are uneasy about the future of AI and what it represents. What do you say to, how do you address those concerns? I think that the world is going to look very different in the next 10 years. And I think we're going to want to remember what it's like today and remember the analog and remember when we fought over things and remember... No matter what the future looks like, this is like the best utopian future. We're going to want to remember how we got there. If this is like a really nasty dark future, we're going to want to remember the mistakes so that we don't repeat them. And we're going to want to archive all of our knowledge so that at some point we can access it and safe keep. So my thing is talk to Walter. Walter actually is an arc of sorts. know, like it's a life book. For more, for other anxieties around AI, around jobs and stuff and, maybe like how society is getting influenced by AI through the TikTok algorithm or Facebook or what have you. That one's a little trickier. I wish I had an answer for that. And I'm like, I... Part of the reason my journey got me to where I am is because I realized I can't game out what happens. I don't know what's gonna happen to jobs. I don't know what's gonna happen to money. I don't know what's gonna happen to the geopolitical order. It's all up for grabs, you know? It's all like kind of, you know, it's like the only other thing that I can compare it to is nuclear energy and In so far as we don't stifle AI in the same way that we stifled nuclear, it's anybody's guess on where it goes. What I think is gonna happen, like what I really think is gonna happen is we're gonna essentially be able to choose which reality we live in. Like we're gonna have all these AI systems that will just build the reality that we want, whether it's real or virtual or augmented or... And at some point, we're not going to have our phones anymore. And it's probably going to be in our brains or something like that. And so we're just going to be able to zap from one reality to another that is AI generated. And the same way you have AI generated images, you'll have AI generated worlds that now we can live in and spend lifetimes in them. Like you could speed run several lifetimes and then you'll be able to live the lives of your ancestors and what have you. I think that that world has a lot of challenges, but ultimately becomes a really cool world where we find each other. we drift into islands of loneliness and we create these realities and palaces for us and then get bored because what we really need is something else. And so we construct this shared reality together that becomes something that was only ever in the realm of religion, really. This either hell or the kingdom of heaven. And it's one of the two. And, and the other secret agenda in the autograph idea is that if we, if we get enough examples of people telling their story and reflecting on their story and like facing their story and becoming more heroic and generous and kind over the course of a lifetime, and you have millions of examples of this, and eventually that gets used as training data, then the next generation of AI will be kinder and more generous and more and will always be in the process of self-improvement, which that never ends. ah But also more altruistic and empathetic and will understand the needs of others as needs of its own. And that is our only hope. So yeah, use autograph. It's a very cool tool. What I really, the only thing I really hope comes out of it is like it paves the way to this exciting future. and this is a question that kind of ties into mental health a little bit. What emotional considerations come into play when someone hears their loved one's voice through AI after they've passed? yes, this is great one. This is something we think about a lot, you know, how do we honor the memory? How do we not deepen the experience? And so the main thing that we do is that we, when we sit down, virtually sit down with a loved one, we ask them the questions that you really only start thinking about after they're gone. And so, We don't want this to be a tool for rumination, like, you know, like, into toxic behavior usage where it's like, I'm just, I can't let go of the person. I don't think that's what we want to build at all. Like that's the number one priority. The second thing is like, actually you can just think of this as a time vault of the stuff that, you know, that person was able to say about life, about you, about how they feel about you. about what they hope for you, messages that may surprise you at different periods in your life, when you hit different milestones that they may not be around for, and create this opportunity to discover what it felt like to be that person from the inside. Now the barriers are gone, right? There's no ego to care about anymore, and you can have a father admit fear. all these kinds of things that we hold back because they're just like part of the social contract. We want to make sure that when it happens, it hasn't happened yet, we like, thankfully all of our users are still alive. And we hope that keeps on going forever. um That when the time comes to introduce their families to their autograph, that their families get a chance to experience something that... It had been just imaginary in history, the whatever, however many hundred thousands of years of history we've gone through. Now you can talk to something that isn't around anymore. Really cool. And do you think Walter could help us better understand human history, like as a collective, as a whole, and not just individual stories? totally. A hundred percent. mean, if you think about how we think about history as the stuff that got told to us because it was in the textbook and think about all the waykeeping and politics and economic interests and editorialization that goes into a textbook. Just literally just like the printing of the textbook is a, is an endeavor that requires so many things to like be aligned and I mean, that is one flavor of history. mean, like we, get told the one thing because it has a distribution network. it's very different when you can talk to every single participant. mean, like, it's very different to hear about the causes of a war and to hear about the people in the war and like their stories. What was it like when you had to wait five days for a ration card in London? And that's when you decided to ship your family overseas to Paraguay. You know, that is like, what did the kids' cries sound like? You know? It's a very unique kind of thing, and I think it's a much more honest and decentralized approach to history. I think it all will converge. I think we'll all figure out, oh, the grandpa was tyrannical, and like, yeah, he maybe wasn't the best guy, had some demons they had. You know, like, I think we will all like, come to our own conclusions and like we'll figure out what the shared meaning is. But for the first time, we'll be able to hear about every single participant, you know, like the volunteer at the protest that got hit by the brick that started the mob that ended the revolution. I'm like, this will, it's just crazy. It's all so cool like just it's like light bulbs going off of my mind. I wanna hear about those light bulbs, cause I get excited about... you know, it's just, it's just all over. Like, it's just like, it's just amazes me, like how far we've come with technology and just how far even AI is coming, what five years. Cause I, I'm now starting to use it at work. They're actually pushing us. I'm, I'm an IT project manager and they're actually pushing us to utilize it in every way we can. Like within a specific realm, we can't do anything that's totally out there, but we're pretty monitored, but they're pushing us pretty hard to... yeah. And you do it a couple of, it takes, it's not as intuitive as you think. Like you need to learn how to get it right. you need to, it's, you know, it requires like a musical instrument, you know? uh The key is really to learn that the prompting techniques and to actually teach it to train it. Cause I actually use AI on my podcast to help me like write podcast descriptions and that type of stuff to save me a little bit of time. The first ones like it helped me with they were kind of garbage. I had to go and reword a lot and then Over time I've just trained it and most of them come out really well. No, and it's perfectly suited for that stuff. mean, generating hashtags and all that. Yeah, and do you think that most of the world thinks about AI as a productivity augmentation tool? I think that... I mean, that's where it's going. You know, I mean, I think a lot of the stuff that we do, a lot of human labor is going to get automated, but I don't know that that's necessarily going to improve the human condition. And so, uh, how do we measure the human condition is what we set out to do. Like, how do we. how do we actually understand the subjective lived experience of our people so that we can actually record it and figure out how to improve it? And I'm like, how do we make the world qualitatively better for our kids and our grandkids? Yeah. And so when somebody like starts, you know, telling their story to start interacting with Walter, I should put it that way. What does that typical interaction look like? Does Walter just start asking questions about their life? Oh yeah, well, I mean, we model almost like an interview sequence. If you hired a biographer, they'd be like, all right, tell me about yourself. Where do you live? What do you do? And how old are you? Where were you born? Like all these like very factual kind of questions. Like almost like, let's get to know each other so that I know what we can talk about. And then we go through an interview sequence like, all right, let's start with your childhood. And I'm like, where did you grow up? What was it like there? What was your family composition? Who were your friends? What kind of activities did you do? And we work our way from the beginning to present day. And when you get to present day, by the time we get to present day, we now have all these threads about your life that we can expand on. We can talk about. parents, we can talk about your siblings, we talk about your cousins, we can talk about all your relatives, we can talk about the places that you live, we can talk about college, we can talk about the classes you took in college, we can talk about the classes that you were brought in college, but actually you're really set about to rethink what and I like all these things um and it doesn't really end. The thing like there's like our users have this the power to steer the conversation wherever they want. like, actually Walter, let's talk about, I don't feel like talking about my teenage years. Let's either skip to my adult years or let's talk about Nintendo because I really like talking about Nintendo. Nintendo is great. But what we want to do and this is something that we're releasing this week is this feature called Tribute so that we actually ask your family members. for input on what stories to ask you. So let's say you're gifting this to your mom. You can check out, you you select, is this a gift? And then we give you the option to make a tribute. That means that Walter calls you and asks you like, what do you love about your mom? What do you admire about her? What are the stories we absolutely have to record? And then we send you a link that you can forward to the rest of the fam so that they can add their perspective. And when your mom shows up to the platform, not only do we have the list of, you know, greatest hits that the family wants to make sure are recorded for sure, but also we get to welcome her with a message of her loved ones saying like, hey, like we're, so excited that you're doing this. Like here's why we love you. And this is why we want your story to be in our, in our family vault forever. You know? And you can talk to about whatever you want. He's going to try and always flip it back to your story, but you can talk to Walter about the reports. You can talk to Walter about pretty much anything. awesome, super cool. One of my final questions here is what's one message you want listeners to take away about how AI can help them author their own lives? Something happens when you write your story. Whether you write it down or whether you speak to someone who then writes it for you and shows it to you. Where you start seeing your story through other perspectives that aren't your own. You know, like you write a story and you start thinking about what is my wife gonna think about this? Is this accurate in the eyes of my wife? Is this accurate in the eyes of my father? Is this accurate in the eyes of my mother? And you go through that exercise for a while and it's like, okay, yeah, like my dad would agree with this, my mom would agree with this, my wife would agree with this, my kids would agree with this, my friends would agree with this. And so then you run out of people in your life and you're like, So would a stranger agree with this? Will the future agree with this? Like, will is a story that I think I'm living out consistent with what the future will, how the future will judge me. And something really strange happens when you realize that there's actually an infinity of ways that you can write your story that are true in all those ways. So many of the obstacles that you faced and so many of the battles that have beaten you can be reappraised into this empowering, inspiring, almost like transcending interpretation so that, you know, like whoever reads your story leaves with something, leaves with a part of your soul. And There's something when you go through that experience and you find yourself in the seat of this external observer, like I am history looking at my story and you get to take a piece of your soul and you get to reacquaint with it. That is a priceless feeling. That is re-encountering who you are. That is rediscovering why you're here. That is rediscovering the reason everybody's in your life, the effect that you can have on people. And It's really hard to do without AI. It's really hard to do. mean, like, just figuring out the motivation to do this is really hard, you know? The fact that we have a system now that can call you to check in on this grand project of discovering who you are and what you're meant to do is just insane. So if anything, like, it is possible. Like it is possible to think of your life as a story, a heroic story, and you are the hero. And you are going through the hero's journey, whether you accept it as such or not. autograph is just one of the tools. That's probably the first of its kind that is designed to do this. And it's actually pretty easy. You just answer Walter's questions. It's really cool. And I think of like what you've been explaining compared to like just journaling or something. Cause I'm the type of person that I need the prompts to kind of be pushed to tell my story. Like, you know, I've tried journaling type stuff for like therapeutic reasons. And if I don't have a good prompt, it's like, I can't just stop writing. man, mean, Riders block is a very real thing. One of the things we discovered is that nobody gets talkers block. Yeah, this does for sure. One more thing here. This is kind of just a generalized question that I ask everybody that comes on the show. I love to hear the different responses I get. In your mind, what is the biggest stigma when it comes to mental health? Mmm. I think there's an underlying insecurity that mental health or someone with mental health issues reflects back at you about your own mind and your relationship to your mind. I think the projection that we feel, if I weren't in control of this aspect of my mind, I would feel shame, would feel wilt, I would feel ostracized, I would feel... And so it's really this mirror neuron kind of thing where like, if I were in this position, I would feel this way. And so then I can't let myself empathize with this stuff because I guess if I empathize, I would have to feel those things that I know I don't want to feel. If you project that into the person, it actually comes across as you feel ashamed of that. uh But it really is you are ashamed of your own shame that you would feel if you were in those shoes. I mean... health will be the most important kind of health. all the responses there's there's honestly like you want to think it but like everybody has such a different opinion or thought on that it's really cool to hear That's a really good question. Makes me want to go see a montage reel of all the answers that you get. I should put something together. Yeah, I think that's a great idea. We can do shorts. I mean, that's a great idea. Yeah. Let's see. Sorry, my kids are screaming in the background, so I apologize. It threw me off there for a second. in the conversation I was going to ask you if you had kids and then I heard that and I was like, no he has kids. Yep, have three young kids. So five year old, three year old, and one year old. So it's pretty busy here. And they're like right outside my door. it's just, and then the one is having a moment. So I was like, I have my thought and it was all gathered. And then that happened. was like, it just throws me off. But where I was going to was, where can people find you? Oh, you can find the best way to get like to find out about autograph and stuff is autograph dash AI.com or autograph dot AI. We just migrated to our new domain, which I like a lot more. But I'm on X. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Instagram. My handle for Instagram and LinkedIn and uh X is life underscore of underscore CCB. Life and CCB. And that's where you get to see some of my more philosophical thinking and like how I think about where AI is going and that kind of stuff. And autograph is where you hear about the company updates and how we're doing and some of the milestones we were crossing. And last but not least, we've just covered a lot of ground here tonight. Is there anything that we did not discuss that you would like to bring up? yeah, we didn't even get to the simulation part. This is probably for another time, but if we have a faithful enough digital representation of someone, we can simulate stuff. We can simulate a career, we can simulate a marriage, can simulate a business partner, we can simulate a sales pitch, we can simulate a weekend, can simulate a vacation, we can simulate stuff just for entertainment sake. How would you do in medieval Rome? You can simulate imagery that otherwise would have been impossible, like imagining your grandparents meeting on the other side, and one of them cropping. And then it gets in like, wow, actually, is not about the past. Autograph is about the future. Future. Very, very cool. then it seems like we could have a whole other conversation about the simulation part of it. Oh, sure. Yeah. And how we're totally absolutely in one. No, yeah. I mean, it doesn't end, man. Like we keep discovering all these new, oh, wait, so this is, this is a pretty core thing about how we think we are that, you know, now we get to revisit and reanalyze. So I excited to keep the conversation going when, the time is right. Awesome. Well, I love what you're doing. think the whole autograph or yeah, autograph, I said it right. And Walter and everything that you're doing with AI is really cool. And like to be able to have AI uh that can keep history of somebody's life. It's there's I think there's so many cool things that AI is going to be pushing out in the next like two or three years. So thank you so much for spending an hour of your time tonight with me. of course. Thank you for having me, man. This was great fun. I appreciate you and the work that you're doing for the show and anything in the service of mental health and helping people transcend their current situation is a beautiful thing and excited to spend 60 minutes of my time with you. Awesome. Thank you. And thank you to all those that listened. If this resonates with you, please share it and follow us on Instagram and YouTube. That's where we push most of our stuff. And also you can find us on any podcast place out there. Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Please subscribe and thanks again for listening. Until next time.