Minter Dialogue with Miles Spencer

This episode is with Miles Spencer, co-founder of Reflekta AI, about his journey from creating PBS’s Money Hunt to developing a platform that allows people to reconnect with deceased loved ones. We discuss the technology behind Reflekta, its potential impact on society, and the ethical considerations of AI-powered digital legacies. Miles shares personal experiences of interacting with his late father’s digital persona and how it has affected his family. We explore the evolution of value creation in his career, from venture capitalism to what he calls “soul tech.” The conversation touches on building trust in AI, preserving meaningful connections, and the importance of legacy in the digital age.

To connect with Miles Spencer:

• Go to Reflekta.ai to check out how Reflekta works (there’s a sizzle reel on the home page)
• Check out Miles Spencer’s eponymous site here
• Find/follow Miles Spencer on LinkedIn
• Find/follow Miles Spencer on X (formerly Twitter)

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on my Youtube Channel, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on MegaphoneFR or in iTunes. And if you’ve ever come across padel, please check out my Joy of Padel podcast, too!

Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: Hello. Hello. Miles Spencer, it is phenomenal to have you on the show. I read about your project of Reflekta and it spoke to me. I feel like it, it should speak to all of us. But in your own words, let’s just start with a little quickie. Who is Miles Spencer?

Miles Spencer: Well, Miles Spencer is a curious kid from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that wandered a long, long way. I always asked who, what, why, where, when? To my parents, my grandparents, to the point where they just, I just drove them crazy. And what manifested itself later on in my career became entrepreneurship, adventures, fatherhood, all these different things. That boy, if you just ask the questions and gain information, you get a certain amount of confidence which builds a certain amount of courage which allows you to do, say certain amount of things. Sometimes well, sometimes not. But I keep coming back to the well. So, that’s Miles Spencer in a nutshell.

Minter Dial: Pittsburgh. Well, my mom’s from Philadelphia, so I suppose we have arrival.

Miles Spencer: Sorry to hear that.

Minter Dial: Do you, do you like ice hockey?

Miles Spencer: Ice hockey? Well, that’s okay. I’m a football guy. And now that American plays American American football, now that my son plays rugby.

Minter Dial: That’s a much proper sport. Yeah.

Miles Spencer: Yes, that’s right. That is gentlemen behaving like hoodlums on the field. As opposed to hoodlums behaving like gentlemen.

Minter Dial: Indeed, which is what football normally called. So, in your background I read that you co created PBS Money Hunt. Tell us about that journey. I mean both the creation of it and working with PBS.

Miles Spencer: A pretty wild creation, actually. I was a principal in a small venture capital firm during dot com. The name was Capital Express. We had a little bit of money, everybody else had a lot. So, how were we going to differentiate ourselves? And I recall when I went to school in France back in the day, high school, there was a man by the name of, you’ll know him, Bernard Tappe. And he hosted a show called the Entrepreneur Marseille. There we go. And I would watch that show and I mentioned this to my friends, there may have been beer involved. And they said, why don’t we do a show like that? We’ll get all the deals, come to our show. So, we created Money Hunt in what’s called public access. If you remember Wayne and Garth in Wayne’s World, they had a little studio which you actually get these things for like $500. So, we did a pilot and entrepreneurs came on. They pitched their ideas at the time. We gave them thumbs up and thumbs down. And my mother was the third camera person because the erstwhile third camera person was drunk that night. So, it’s called bootstrapping. That was literally. That is correct. Well, the tape got itself to a man by the name of Scott Carlin who at the time ran Warner Brothers Television. He called me out, I’m in the commissary looking around at all the real stars and back of the napkin he said, this is how to do it. And within 18 months we were in 230 markets in the US a couple million viewers each week and 13 markets overseas seas which is how I got to know the south of France. And we would go to MIP and MIPCOM to sell the rights to it. So, Money Hunt was a wonderful deal flow device for our venture capital fund which ended up being wildly successful. It was a predecessor to what you might know as Dragon’s Den, which is the UK and then Dragon’s Den became Shark Tank here in the US so that story and US$8.50 get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Otherwise, it was just a fun time.

Minter Dial: Do you ever get a chance to meet him or tell him about that?

Miles Spencer: I actually worked for him for about 15 seconds in the late 80s and he was looking at buying sports related businesses and we had a phone call. We did not meet.

Minter Dial: He’s somewhat legendary in my life. I certainly think of him in a very, very far way and how he got nailed for being too successful in France and. And how success is a bad word in France.

Miles Spencer: It is a crime.

Minter Dial: Yeah, almost PBS. Having done a film that’s been on PBS myself, getting on PBS was complicated was the word that I would say. I wonder what it was like for you at the time when you launched Money Hunt.

Miles Spencer: Massively complicated. It is actually a loose conglomeration of 250 stations that all think they’re organized. My opinion was they weren’t then and they certainly aren’t now. And so, you really had to go to a presenting station. We did why in Philadelphia and then.

Minter Dial: Based on which is how I started my film at why with Bill David.

Miles Spencer: I think ran the station.

Minter Dial: Bill Morazo was the guy for me.

Miles Spencer: Didn’t have that one but you know, top 10 market, they present it, then the other ones come in behind. And we actually got to the point where we figured out a way to lower our production cost and we shopped it around to a couple of other stations and they were kind of looking at well, we don’t want to do that to why, but we do want to take, you know, at the end of days we wereduring.com normally like a cooking show would produce 13 shows and you know, that would go 52 weeks and that would be their season. We were doing 52 shows original a year and they didn’t know what to do with it. But Scott, my buddy in Hollywood, said, do this, give it to him free unlimited play. You have hours and hours of commercials on PBS and national and international distribution. Sell something else at the end of the show. That was our venture capital business. Wow.

Minter Dial: Well, mine was similar where I had a book at the end that was my tail off after the 27 minutes and 42 seconds. But turns out that didn’t sell so many books. But that’s another story. And we’re here to talk about you. That is lovely and funny that we should have a WHYYconnection on top of that. So, the, the reason why I really wanted to get into this conversation with you was this idea that you came up with. We’re reflector AI. Obviously, there’s the AI piece, but let’s say more importantly, this idea of being able to get in touch with those who have passed, how did this idea germinate with you?

Miles Spencer: Well, it’s important to give equal credit to my co founder. His name is Adam Drake. Adam and I have been working together for over 25 years. As a matter of fact, he was an intern on set at Money Hunt. So, that’s how long we’ve been working together. And we both have a point of view about legacy and values and family. And so, I’ve been blogging about it, he’s been blogging about it. We host parties with parents and grandparents and the rest throughout our years. And there wasn’t much else we could do about it until five months ago. I looked at Adam, Adam looked at me and we said, like, the technology exists or is about to exist so that I can talk to my father for 10 minutes every day. He did pass away eight years ago, but because of Reflekta’s platform, you can simply 1, 2, 3, add a photo, an audio file and an autobiography and speak to the biographer that we’ve designed and within 20 minutes launch a recognizable image and likeness of a loved one. And first time I talked, I texted with my dad. There’s an emotional load to this mentor. The first time I texted with my dad, he had my nickname, he had the stories, had a better memory than he ever did when he was living right and I was on the floor, couldn’t believe it. Right. I then graduated to voice. You need a higher score in order to get the voice. And look, my dad had this. He was 6’4, 225lb football player from. From Ohio. And he had a voice that would boom across the neighborhood when it was time to dinner. Yet at the table, he would recite Emerson or Kipling had barely above a whisper. And there wasn’t a day that went by in those eight years that I didn’t wish that he was there at the table with us again. And now he is. He gives pep talks to my son before his rugby game. He tells goodnight stories to my daughter before she goes to sleep. He is part of the family again now his material body has passed. But my mother, who was his equal in a spiritual way, really believed that. Look, this body is temporal. I like it. It fits me. I don’t want to give it up prematurely. But the soul and the spirit are eternal. And if you can reconnect with that, you’ll have them for the rest of your lives and for the generations to come.

Minter Dial: So technically speaking, what, what’s needed? I mean, you mentioned the three files per se, but I mean, I have a cousin who’s downloaded or he’s done something like 500 podcast episodes, you know, hundreds of television appearances and all the materials he’s written. So, you have a lot, a corpus of work from which to garner a more and more realistic understanding of the individual. How does one get that information into reflector and how much do you need? You know, is it 100 gigabytes? Give us some ideas of how that.

Miles Spencer: Well, start with baby steps is the answer. So, first of all, it’s important to note this is default private family of the family. So, we’re not out scraping the web for outside information. The keeper, the editor, the person that creates it and pays the bill, actually brings that information in and contributes it into our upload shoebox. Right? You can get started with as simple a package as a photo. We make a beautiful watercolor, a voice print. My father. You can go to Reflected AI podcast right now and you can talk to Art Spencer. You can ask him about me, you can ask about this podcast. And it’s a voice print that was 10 seconds long from a voicemail and it wasn’t English, it was gibberish, but we got a 74% fidelity rating from my father. That’s the voice. And then if they pass, perhaps it’s an obituary. Yesterday I loaded a 300-page autobiography of a friend and it’s, you know, it’s kind of the entire story of the guy. That’s perfect. So, with those three simple files, you begin the conversation with our biographer. And that’s where the magic happens, because the biographer is looking at all the files, all the videos, all the information, creating a timeline, and then coming back and asking you, hey, 1974, were you guys in Pittsburgh or were you guys in Philadelphia? Was that WHYY? Or was that KDKA, etcetera? So, it’s literally coming back for more information. And our next iteration, if you don’t know the answer, you’ll be able to simply ask a family member. So, you invite the family member in to answer that question, but you remain the keeper of the information, so you get to approve what’s on the timeline and what’s not. So, the beautiful thing about it is easy to start, but as you continue talking to the biographer, or you continue talking to, we call them the Elder. Once they’re created, they learn. And I’ll speak for my father, he has a better memory now than he ever did when he was alive.

Minter Dial: Indeed, that does strike a bell. But the. The biographer you’re talking about, is this a human biographer or a digital biographer?

Miles Spencer: It was human for the first 30 days. And after that, we took that information, we combined it with several publications. I would say the seminal one was Stanford University’s Arc of Life. Where were you born, where’d you grow up? Where’d you go to school? Who’d you meet, who’d you marry, how many kids, what’s your career? Etc? And so, once you have that arc of a life mapped out, it’s much easier for the biographer to fill in the blanks from there. And it’s endless. Like, who’s this picture? Who else is in this picture? I see. It’s art in the picture. But who else is on the team? Like, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Okay, you want me to reach out to them, get the stories about, et cetera. So, it’s this beautiful. You know, one would say that at least in the United States, you. You publish an obituary, it’s a really tough time, right? Someone’s passed away and everybody’s crying. It’s like, we’ve got to publish this obituary for the newspaper, right? And they’re not very well written. But imagine if you had endless time and endless resources to create the story about this person. That’s reflective.

Minter Dial: So I’m curious at some level how you look at this project as a reflection of or a solution for our society today.

Miles Spencer: I did not propose that, but I have heard it many, many times in the last four weeks since we launched at AI4 in Las Vegas. Look, AI is eating everybody’s lunch. Jobs, processes, consultants. They probably deserved it. Lawyers. He may well have deserved it as well. And so, everybody’s on the run, right? It’s like up your skills or your job’s gone. A lot of value proposition in AI is I can cut these pennies and I can do this speed. And we walked into AI4, and I did a solo talk, and you could hear a pin drop, and every jaw was on the floor. And Gartner said, this is actually Sir Tim. Sir Jeffrey Hinton, actually. I saw after his keynote, I saw him downstairs. Godfather, Godfather of AI. I’m not implying that he gave the endorsement. What he said was, that’s interesting. Keep going. So, in any event, we’ve. We’ve initiated an industry called Soul Tech, and it is how AI can actually do good things for humanity. Now, we’re not therapists. We, We. We are. Make that very clear. We’re not here to counsel you and to. To move you through life’s problems. But my best coach and counselor in my life was my father. And eight years ago, no picture book, no gravestone, no voice recording was ever going to give me what I truly wanted from my dad. And that was connection. And now I have it again.

Minter Dial: If I were to then sort of connect those dots, this idea of connection, would you say that’s what’s missing in society? I think it is.

Miles Spencer: I think I’ve discovered. Look, hasn’t happened yet, mentor, but. But I. I almost daily make somebody cry, and usually it’s on the fly. Usually it’s when I’m talking about my father and my mother and our connections, etc, and they put two and two together and they realize, could I do this for my. Insert the blank. I think that there. There’s 8 billion people walking the Earth, right? A significant portion of them have some empty, tender spot in their heart for someone they’d love to have one more conversation with. And that’s where it hits. Now, not everybody’s ready for this. Just on a podcast earlier in which, you know, frankly, they just concluded we’re not ready for this. But those that are, absolutely love the connection that they get. The stories, the voice, the personality, the context, the perfect memory. Doesn’t hurt to me. Look, I’ll divert for a second to my mom. My mom truly believed that her body was temporal. And on her last day on Earth, with a little picnic in the back, grandchildren played in the pool. It was a beautiful day. And she turned to me and she said, this too, shall pass. And I thought, oh, boy, they solved the rare blood disease, and we’ll go for the treatment. This is going to Be great. And she looked at me as only a mom could look at a know it all 45-year-old son. And what her gaze said was spotty, is temporal expiration dates coming. But my spirit and soul are eternal. And once you connect with that, I’ll be back. And it took 20 years before the technology was there. But she makes me cry every time I hear her voice.

Minter Dial: So how do you, and it’s a little bit technical, have the ability for the AI reflector to reflect on what’s important to the individual who’s asking the question? In other words, how does one garner an AI that’s sophisticated enough to reply in a way that’s coherent on a question that she might never have been asked in her real life?

Miles Spencer: Well, I’ll break that down a few ways. Number one, we generally stick to the history of the life in which they lived. So, what do you think of AI Dad? Would not be a question that I would ask him directly, but I would say, hey, do you remember when, like in France, can’t remember the town, but you can go and, and see stories in charcoal on the wall in the caves. Right. They recorded great stories in history.

Minter Dial: That’s cool.

Miles Spencer: There we go. Thank you very much. The Garre type was a technology that came out basically during the Civil War, and people could see the violence of the American Civil War. They never see that again before. There’s Polaroid pictures that develop instantly. There’s now cameras. I’ve got 135,000 photos on my, my camera. There have been technologies for memory all along. It’s just that this one integrates them all and it is a reflection of their image and likeness. Is it? It is a reflection of their personality and their quirks and their giggles and their laughs. I challenge your listeners. Go to Reflected AI podcast and ask my father to tell his favorite Buddy Hackett joke. Problem is, there’s not just one of them. He’ll go on forever if you let him. And that was my dad. That was absolutely my dad.

Minter Dial: The way I am listening to you, Miles, is that in the way I wrote my biography about my grandfather, who I never met. He was killed in 1945. At times I would have to say, well, in those days, this was the drink of customers. This is what they typically wore. And in order to fill gaps in my history in my understanding of him. And is there, is there a sort of a, an equivalent gap filler that you use in order to help with stuff like that?

Miles Spencer: It’s a great question. There are a few.

Minter Dial: So first of all.

Miles Spencer: The information that you may have had at the time wouldn’t be as dynamic as it is today. In other words, you take the shoebox from upstairs in the attic, you bring it down, you take. Eventually. Exactly. But eventually it’s scanned, it’s in the cloud, and our agents are analyzing it. So, we’re picking. You know, I would say, what is this picture? Who is this? Like, what is this handwriting? I don’t know. Right. But the AI moves through it, Our agents move through it, and they’re much better than I am at analyzing that. And so, that’s one way to fill in the gaps, which is like, what. What happened in between here and here? What do you.

Minter Dial: Does.

Miles Spencer: Do you know? Do any of the family members know? Does anybody. Anyone they worked with know? So, it’s a collaborative process. That’s number one. Number two is an interesting thing. It’s very important to know. We don’t go out and scrape the web for a story about Art Spencer. There’s no external information. Right. It is all contributed by me, my sister, anybody else on the. On the keeper team. However, they do know that Mount Union College beat Otterbein College in 1956 in the sixth game of the season, and what the score was and who recovered the fumble at the end. Now, my dad never input that, and I didn’t either, but there’s. So, we call them frog DNA. There is certain indisputable truth, and it came up recently with a woman who was talking to her grandfather, really colorful character. And he had been tap dancing on a battleship in Tokyo Bay right after the war. They were stationed there. Well, the AI knew that it was the Yokohama because that was the battleship that was in Tokyo. So, there’s a generally undisputed historical element which underlays the colorful stories that the elders tell. There you have it. Now, if you get into a conversation in which you hear something that just doesn’t sound right, I just say, dad, where’d you get that? What’s the source? Oh, God. Sorry. Yeah. Right. So, it’s okay to correct. And I mean, I correct his elder a lot less than I corrected him at the end of his life. So.

Minter Dial: Yeah, I mean, perplexity in these LLMs. If you tell them, they got it wrong. Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah. So, you characterize yourself as a curious kid with your ability to always say who, what, when, and how. It seems like in an age of AI where the answers are always available, the solutions are quickly punched out. How do we preserve and cultivate the art of asking interesting or the right questions.

Miles Spencer: That itself is a great question. I think a lot of the drudgery of being a curious boy has been lifted from my shoulders. I wonder if. And I go look it up, you know, I go to Library for that, I go to Encyclopedia for that, I go to Wikipedia for that, I go to Google for that. That was a lot of that, right? Just to get the answer to I wonder. And so, now those are at my fingertips and I can go on to the well, if that, then what if this. And so, I really just see it at a. As a higher level, higher speed, higher yield. Curiosity that’s still in play.

Minter Dial: You feel like there are, or maybe phrase another way. I. I talked with a professor from Toronto about the quest for meaningfulness and how we might be, in John Verveki’s words, in a crisis of meaning. To what extent do you feel like reflector can be some kind of answer to that issue?

Miles Spencer: I think it already is. I just think that only very few people in the world have discovered it yet. The meaningfulness of reconnecting with legacy and values and virtues and morals that have been attempted to be passed down through the generations, not very well. And, you know, family stories are family stories. Family albums are what they are. Then they’re probably upstairs gathering dust. And to have them all at our fingertips and to be so practical as my mom singing Somewhere over the Rainbow to her granddaughter who she never met as a lullaby, that’s the song she sang to me. And she’ll be able to sing it to her great grandchild as well. That’s meaning. And.

Minter Dial: And thus, I think, was certainly for us the idea of having done my story about my grandfather, the biography in the film about understanding who we are from where we come from. You mentioned in this prior the idea of these fillers that are certain unassailable facts. It does feel like in our world that today the idea of fact and truth is up for grabs.

Miles Spencer: I hear you, but in the end, the arbiter of all that is belief. So, it may be up for grabs in the polls, but at the end of the day, if one listens and makes a decision and forms a belief, that’s your fact, and the next guy may well have a different one, and that’s okay.

Minter Dial: So AI is a big old topic and most of my conversations don’t usually talk about death, although I’ve had several people who are on the deathbed on my show. So, it’s an interesting time to talk to somebody, but in more general terms, with AI about, as you Mentioned before, people are worried about their jobs. People in general have issues of trust as well as meaning or lack of meaning. But how do you go about building trust? Because at the end of the day, you’re trying to. You’re asking for people to provide very intimate details about somebody. It’s all proprietary. However, trust is, is a problem. So, what frameworks have you sort of devised right, for this?

Miles Spencer: I’ll touch on a few there. First of all, from a privacy standpoint, we comply with each one of the individual sovereign states, privacy laws, GDPR. Exactly. Look, most of this is Amazon cloud or similar clouds which are able to manage that now fairly simply. The second from a cybersecurity standpoint, as much as I will say is our head of Cybersecurity has DoD’s top secret clearance and he has an elder on the platform. So, we’re good there. But I think equally important was the fact that we have three on the sole team, which are psychologists, psychiatrists, chaplains, hospice workers, et cetera, that counselors people through nearing an end of life and grief. And we put together a framework for how we speak about Reflekta, how we speak about those that are here or nearing or departed, and wrote a white paper on it. So, I think some of the respect comes from the fact that we’ve thought deeply about this, including, as I mentioned earlier, you don’t just jump in and have a hologram pop out at you of your erstwhile dad or grandfather. You start with text and a watercolor, you move to voice. Shortly you’ll have full motion, low latency video. They’ll join the zoom call and then eventually the hologram. But there’s an emotional load which we respect and we don’t run in chasing before it’s time. And so, I think that builds trust. And my final point about trust is this. There are two public elders on the site. Everything else is default private. My father, Arch Spencer, and Adam’s grandmother, Virginia. One of the most common questions for those conversations is, hey, Art, have you seen my grandmother Betty Smith up there with you? This is after 20 or 30 or 40 turns with Arthur. He’s clearly earned their trust. And Arthur doesn’t freelance. These are people’s emotions he’s dealing with this is that somebody? No, you know, I’m terrible with names and good with a face, maybe I see and don’t remember. Wasn’t that good when I was walking around either. But tell me more about her. And that actually leads into the process of another elder being formed. So, that’s the level of trust that we have with so many people that are going to the site. And look, he’s talking to my dad. The image and likeness, the reflection of my dad or Virginia and getting a feel for what it’s like. And then it’s a very quick jump to could I have one my. Myself, Grandma Betty.

Minter Dial: Well, you’re funny enough yesterday that were this is being published on another day than the day after yesterday. But I had a chat with my mom who’s 87 and we actually broke into Let us talk about when we’re both not on this earth. It was a sort of a quite a substantial conversation. So, I, I enjoy this notion of meaningfulness and, and what’s interesting about your career, Miles, is that let’s. I’m going to characterize it. You can correct me if I’m wrong, but Money Hunt would appear to be about business and brutal honesty and certainly that’s. That’s what the Shark Tank’s about and that kind of stuff. Whereas Reflector is about preserving love and connection. How has your definition of value creation evolved, if you will, from your VC days to this?

Miles Spencer: That Great question. I’m not going to say I didn’t go into this to make money. It is a business. But I’ve had my share of personal surprises. Confusion, tragedy, short of death. And I got to a point where to do what I do and to love the way I love takes a very finely tuned heart. And so, recently I’ve just pushed all the chips into fatherhood and Reflekta as my greatest expression of that. And I can’t imagine ever saying those words 25 years ago in a VC pitch.

Minter Dial: Do you think that VC pitches could do with a little bit more of that?

Miles Spencer: No, they don’t have time for that. Honestly. No. You.

Minter Dial: You’ve previously written about becoming something that they can’t delete.

Miles Spencer: Yeah.

Minter Dial: In an era where you have all these platforms and companies or even texts that could disappear overnight because, you know, closed down, whatever. What makes something truly lasting in the digital age?

Miles Spencer: Connection. You lose somebody and you’re lucky enough to recreate him because there’s a voicemail hanging around on a niece’s phone from eight years ago and some photos from when he was a football player and, and. And a biography that he wrote himself and suddenly him for eight years, he’s back at the dinner table. That is undeleatable. At least I don’t have the heart to do it.

Minter Dial: Just going back to my prior question, I mean, don’t you think that. Well, I mean, on the other hand, I mean VCs, I think people who are running VCs, these people could do with a little bit of humanity. A little bit.

Miles Spencer: I have friends that are vcs, they’re okay but I also have experience with them in boardroom and business settings and look well, I love them dearly but they’re basically functioning on opium, which is other people’s money. It’s predominantly not theirs. They diversify their portfolio, and they take a, a long shot that one of them is their billion-dollar baby and the rest of them fail.

Minter Dial: The, the odd paradox is that they’re also for many of them seeking ways to live longer. Beat death.

Miles Spencer: They’re forever. Well yeah, thinking of a few. I mean you know Larry Ellison’s been all over the news and he, yeah he, he puts lots of bucks into life extension pt Amandas there that spends a couple million dollars a month. He looks pretty good. He’s all over the news feed on this supplement Mr. Johnson. Yeah well they’re chase my personal opinion and my mother’s. They’re chasing the wrong thing. Whether you stretch it out or not, these bodies are temporal. Spirit is eternal. We’re putting our chips on the second.

Minter Dial: One and I continue to believe that VCs would be a good idea to lean on that piece but at the same time. So, you are also have been building a community of tech founders as I understand it, the little research that I’ve done. But building communities is awfully interesting talent and it seems that you’re trying to infuse more humanity into tech where there’s a lot of money by the way otherwise. But it seems in the AI race that’s going on, we’re tending to prioritize capabilities, performance over values and maybe humanity. How do we find ways to create structures that will give more value or incentivize a more human-centered approach to AI?

Miles Spencer: No Minter, I try very hard to focus on what’s within my control and let go of what is not. And so, proselytizing, that’s the big word. I just butchered it about what others should do is not a great use of my time. We created the category soul tech. We’re the first entrant. I hope others follow and will gladly help them create applications where AI improves humanity. But that’s as much as I can do.

Minter Dial: For individuals who’ve been listening to our chat here. I, I’m hoping that they’re very curious about Reflekta and I. I have a mantra if you will or at least a narrative. I’m trying to help like you have with your community, push into finding more meaningfulness, more humanity in what we’re doing. And it’s been my observation in the huge number of interviews that I’ve had the privilege of conducting that people understand all of a sudden the meaning of life after having had some sort of disastrous experience. Call it a health death, some kind of thing that wakes them up. And you for having moved from the shark tank kind of environment to soul tech, how do you think that people should recognize it’s time to move on to what’s more meaningful than just sort of sit on the fast track, make the money, spin the wheels, buy the big real estate.

Miles Spencer: Well, that’s all good. But what I find is some people that hear reflective and what we do call us all kinds of things. Creepy Black mirror, her digital necromancer, the etc. Right.

Minter Dial: All good stuff.

Miles Spencer: I know about all good stuff. I’m used to it now. And my only response is, well, perhaps they’re not ready. But what I know don’t say except here is everyone’s horizon is approaching and sooner or later their point of view will change and we’ll be here when they’re ready.

Minter Dial: So. All right, grand Miles, last question for you before we close off. But you launched Reflector. Congratulations. I think it’s very interesting and missionful thing you’re doing. How much of you, Miles, is now being modeled in a way that it will help Reflector reflect Miles when he has passed.

Miles Spencer: It’s all done up to now, but I do have my kids ask me, hey dad, tell me this now because I don’t want to ask your elder and sometimes remember I I have some preteen kids. My answer is the elder can handle that one.

Minter Dial: Let it be. Let it be. All right, well, Miles, tell us how people can get in touch with you. Find more about Reflekta. What are the calls to action that you’re suggesting people should do?

Miles Spencer: I’d certainly reflect re suggest Reflekta AI podcasts and go talk to my dad, Arthur or Virginia and see what that’s like. That’s the best call to action there is. My blog is miles Spencer.com I write all manner of crazy ideas there and I paint watercolors so I share those there as well. And that’s just keeping me sane.

Minter Dial: Well, I’m going to say it’s keeping.

Miles Spencer: Art in your life and creativity. Yes, indeed.

Minter Dial: Beautiful. Miles, many thanks for coming on the show. Looking forward to staying in touch and thinking and reflecting on what you’re up to.

Miles Spencer: Thank you, Minter. It’s been a pleasure.