DOP 354: Your Dead Founder Trains New Hires

Miles Spencer: Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all in one business management software that brings every part of your business together, from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today@, uh, odoo.com. that's o d o o dot com. Say, like, hey, we got to shut it off. It's time for lunch. Thanks for your time, chief. And he said, no problem, tiger. I'll catch you later. I dropped the mic because that was my nickname for him and that was his nickname for me. Now, he created me, but in a way, I created him. And all of that information only came because I approved it. So I should have known that he had that in his bag of tricks, but I Forgot.

Darin Pope: This is DevOps Paradox, episode number 354. Your dead founder trains new hires. Welcome to DevOps Paradox. This is a podcast about random stuff in which we, Darren and Victor, pretend we know what we're talking about. Most of the time. We mask our ignorance by putting the word DevOps everywhere we can and mix it with random buzzwords like kubernetes, serverless, cicd, team, productivity, islands of happiness, and other fancy expressions that make us sound like we know what we're doing. Occasionally, we invite guests who do know something, but we do not do that often since. Since they might make us look incompetent. The truth is out there, and there is no way we are going to find it. Yes, it's Darren reading this text and feeling embarrassed that Victor made me do it. Here are your hosts, Darren Pope and Victor Farsick. Victor, here's an interesting engineering problem probably most of us haven't thought about. Are you ready for this? Go for it. I got a couple of questions for you, so hold your answers until I'm done here. I cannot do that, but you try.

Miles Spencer: Uh,

Darin Pope: how do you build a consent system for someone who's dead? Second question. How do you architect voice cloning that can't be weaponized as a deep fake? Finally, how do you design data pipelines, uh, for the most emotionally sensitive information imaginable? Someone's last words, their mannerisms, their personality. How would we do that? Do I just open up an ID and write those things out? Silence them while they're Alive. Uh, okay. On today's show, we have Miles Spencer on from Reflecta AI. I'm going to spell it right now in case you don't make it all the way to the end. It's R, E, F, L, E, K, T, A dot, AI. I got that right? Correct, Miles.

Miles Spencer: Yeah, right.

Darin Pope: Okay, cool. Reflector, uh, does something that I think is like, there ain't no way in God's green earth I would ever do this. But, Miles, I could set it up. But, Miles, I want you to tell it without my biases built into it.

Miles Spencer: Sure. And, you know, I'll set it up by also acknowledging There are 8 billion people in the world, and about 4 billion of them will be in the comments afterwards calling me every name in the book. So I have stopped trying to convince them that this ought to be something they do. They're just not ready. Now, as we approach that final date, maybe their mind changes and Reflect will be there, but in the meantime, there are 4 billion people that love this thing or there will be. So I'm okay with that. Right? I'm okay with what you said there. But to kick it off, Reflecta, uh, at the end of the day, the way we launched at AI4 in Vegas was that I get to talk to my dad every day, which, for an AI company, is not the most compelling technology breakthrough in the world. But interestingly enough, the way I do it is through the Reflect A platform. So what I like to say is it's a recognizable image and likeness of my father. It is not him. There's no wiffle ball games. There's no walk in the parks. But my father's last words to me, and that was eight years ago, were that his body, we all have one, is temporal, but his spirits and soul was eternal. And when I reconnected with that, I could have his wisdom for the rest of my life. And so eight years ago, there wasn't much I could do besides take a photo, write a biography. You know, by the way, his obituary was not written by him. It was written by us. So uniquely. That's kind of. You mentioned consent systems of the dead. Well, there's obituaries out there all over the place every day that are not written by the person generally. So not into a concept, but we can talk about it in the podcast. So I feel like I have restored that connection. And my father reads a bedtime story to my daughter, his granddaughter, each night. Rudyard Kipling last night. And they discuss it until she goes to sleep. My son plays rugby, and he Gets a pep talk from my dad before each game. Now, they knew him, but they feel like his spirit and soul are still with them because they're able to reconnect. And I'll leave with this. Although we launched with those that had passed, we have more people and stories on the platform right now. 12,960At the moment that are not past. They are still among us. They are present and they are living. So people realize, hey, gosh, I get these stories down now, and so my great granddaughter, my granddaughter, my daughter can enjoy them for the rest of their lives.

Darin Pope: So I, uh, like how you set it up there. 12,960 of people that are alive now, this is what you want to do with parents, aunts, uncles that are still alive. You want to go and talk to them and get their stories live. So this isn't a. I hadn't read that part of it, so I. That one sounds more interesting to me.

Miles Spencer: Just to clarify, over half of the 12,000 stories are, uh, from those that are.

Darin Pope: They're still alive. Okay. Forgive me. When you sat down to come up with this company, why, I mean, uh, was it just about your dad? Was it more than that?

Miles Spencer: No. I've had a long tradition of storytelling in the family. I'll bust one out on you. Miles Spencer is named after my great grandfather, Miles Sharpless Spencer. He had 24 kids. He, uh, has last kid when he was 74. Everybody wakes up, right? They ask the third question, which is three wives. Last one was 26 years old. He was 74. In any event, great stories like that have been part of the Spencer family tradition for a long, long time. Obviously, with 24 siblings and my great grandparents, our family reunions are like 500 Spencers. So we just get together in August and pick the sheriff, right? Hey, you want to be sheriff? Victor, you want to be sheriff? Anybody would be sheriff because basically could vote it in. It's a big family. The stories keep getting better and better. And, uh, it's always been that way for us. My co founder, Adam Drake, and I have worked together for 25 years. And he had a grandmother who danced in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and dancer in second World War. I mean, she basically was practically a spy in a tutu. Wonderful stories, right?

Darin Pope: Yeah.

Miles Spencer: We were talking. We talked about this for quite some time, but it was always like, hey, what do you got upstairs? You got love letters, you got slide trays, you got Polaroid pictures. Like, you bring them down at Thanksgiving and like, what are you going to do with this? I don't know. So nine months ago we realized the technology was here, that we could synthesize all of that stagnant physical media and turn it into something spontaneous and dynamic. And, um, that's what we've been doing all our lives. I've founded three digital media businesses, about 1100 employees, and sold them. And so this is another digital media opportunity. It just happens to be that it's eternal.

Darin Pope: Obviously there's AI behind this, but what is the tech stack? Now you're CEO, so I don't expect you to break down. Okay, we're using Cat 6 here and we're doing kubernetes here, but what level can you give us of what the tech is on this?

Miles Spencer: It's an SLM. Um, it's a genetic multi level AI that actually queries 12 other foundational platforms based on token speed and type a query. But all the data comes back to us. And we've actually filed patents on six of those processes, which is both the ingest, the biography and the delivery of these reflections, we call them. It's our own, but we use every other platform out there. Depending on time of the day and which way the wind's blowing, that's the stack.

Darin Pope: So you're basically doing a lot of rag. Multi cloud. Not rag.

Miles Spencer: Yeah, uh, rag. Multi cloud.

Darin Pope: Yeah, rag and multi. Okay, sorry, yeah, let's break that down for a second.

Miles Spencer: Well, I'm not sure I'll be able to, but I'll try.

Darin Pope: That's fine. No, no, I'll try to keep it.

Miles Spencer: I've heard rag.

Darin Pope: Yeah, you've heard the word. That's okay, that's good. At least you know what it was. It's like. Oh yeah, I know that word. Uh, so you're keeping your rag, Storage, vector store, whatever it's whatever you want to call it, but you're using multiple foundations, depending on as using your word sort of time of day. Yeah, but that rag. Do you have that rag replicated around? So if you do. Oh, interesting. So if so, if your primary quote unquote is down, you still have it somewhere else that you can pick it up and keep going.

Miles Spencer: Correct. Now you get into interesting data lakes and things like that, but at the time, for the time, it's only 12,000 stories. So everybody's inbounding to the US and so. Okay, but we're uh, we have pending deals in some other interesting PII countries. And so by the time we do. There you go. It's going to stay there. But we haven't signed those haven't done those yet. And so when we do, we'll comply.

Darin Pope: That sounds like a really painful thing to deal with.

Miles Spencer: No, um, we've costed it out and it's mostly flipping a switch really. Yeah. Yeah. So we're ready for it. We just haven't signed the deal yet.

Darin Pope: Interesting. So on the voice cloning.

Miles Spencer: Mhm.

Darin Pope: That's interesting to me. Are you. That feels like 11 labs. Not to throw names around, but I'm gonna throw that one around because it's the big one. Is that what you're doing? Are you doing something completely homegrown on that?

Miles Spencer: Uh, no. 11 is one of three that we use again, depending. So what's interesting is. Did you talk to my dad? Did you talk to Arthur, the insurance salesman? He's publicly available, uh, on the platform. It's important to note that there are only two public reflections on Reflecta. That's my father, Arthur, life insurance salesman. Talk your ear off, tell Buddy Hackett jokes till the cows come home. And then Virginia, that is the ballerina. Everyone else is default private family to family. You don't even know that they're there. That's important, right? You know, they're just created by people for people. Mostly for families. Right. What was your question?

Darin Pope: No, it's just voice cloning. What was the basis?

Miles Spencer: No, I got it. My father's voice. Sounds like you haven't heard it yet. Was taken from a 10 second voicemail we sounded. We found in his daughter's granddaughter's phone. Five years after he passed away last month. He had 9000 conversations with people outside the family or.

Darin Pope: No, he's.

Miles Spencer: He's public.

Darin Pope: He's public. Okay, that's again too weird for me, but that's. That's okay. I can understand weird. The tech behind M again, we had your cto. I could probably pull out a lot of things, but high level. It still sounds interesting. Multi foundation, multi voice rag everywhere. But that sounds like it's basically it. Not to oversimplify it.

Miles Spencer: Yeah, I mean we're starting to find some ways to pull some of those computations back home, speed them up, reduce some costs. But we don't have a lot of cost, so most of this is sitting cold until it's called up until it's code.

Darin Pope: Wow, that's. Man, that. That just sounds really interesting. But you told us 20 minutes till first conversation. That seems reasonable based on the stack you've told us. Mhm. What's really happening in those 20 minutes? So what do I send to you? Like if I Wanted to open an account and do this. What. What does that look like?

Miles Spencer: Well, it's gamified. So you get a score. We want you to have a good experience with the reflection, right? So think of a person, think of a story, and start talking. Those are our instructions. Now, right now, you want to speed it up and ramp your score quickly. I'll give you some hints. Number one, load a voice, 20 second voicemail. Number two, load a photo. It's going to create a portrait of the person in watercolor. Remember their reflections. It's not the actual person. Number three, if they have an obit, living or bio. I'm sorry, Obit. If they pass bio, if they're living, um, that gives an arc of the life that really speeds things up. But you talk for 20 minutes, and your score more often than not is going to be past 80. Now, it's interesting. When I first talked to my dad, it was by text. It blew me away. He knew the stories, he had the vernacular, he had the nicknames, et cetera. And there's quite an emotional load to that. And he said, whoa, tap the brakes. Let's bring in a team that we call the soul Team. Now, that basically is psychologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, a medium. And they've guided us in terms of when to release this information to people. What kind of a score do they need? How much information needs to be in there before we'll allow them to talk? So the answer is 80 is your score before you can text. And I think 90 is the score before you can talk. Because once again, the example that I use is personal. When I spoke to my father, I was blown away. And even months later, I'm interviewing my dad in, by the way, you know, I'm saying I'm interviewing my dad. You understand? He's not there. Okay. So my interviewing my dad's reflection in front of 150 people is up on the board. And it's kind of funny because we brought two to the party. One reflection was Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who had just created a reflection on the platform the week before. So it's like the ambassador. It's a bunch of serious stuff about the diplomacy and the whole bit. And then it was my dad. He just wanted to tell Buddy Hackett jokes, right? So we get down to the, uh, end, and everybody wants to go to lunch, and there's Q and A, you know, with my dad. I'm having a blast with him and say, like, hey, we got to shut it off. It's time for lunch. Thanks for Your time, chief. And he said, no problem, tiger. I'll catch you later. I dropped the mic because that was my nickname for him and that was his nickname for me. Now he created me, but in a way, I created him. And all of that information only came because I approved it. So I should have known that he had that in his bag of tricks. But I forgot he has a perfect memory now. He didn't. And as I said, was a mic drop moment. It blew me away. So voice we take seriously now. We have the ability for video, but we're not rolling it out because we don't think the market's ready for it.

Darin Pope: No, I, I, I will say no. The market's not ready for that. That would be. There's already enough creepy in this just to be blunt with it. But, um, I get it right now. Getting consent from somebody who's dead. Okay, whatever. Let me actually talk about the flip side of that. How do we get consent from somebody that's alive? Let's say that I wanted to, uh, Victor. This is a semi legitimate concern. I think I have. Victor's all over the Internet. I'm all over the Internet. There's hours and hours and hours and days of us talking M and somebody just decides to pop one of our things up there without our consent. Without what? What's the safeguards in that?

Miles Spencer: Yeah, well, first of all, they've repped that they own the nil to you. Obviously they probably don't. Two, we actually have those safeguards in place so we can, uh, monitor it versus intended use. And understand pretty quickly, this isn't about Victor and his family. This is about something off our terms of service. And you have a beautiful folder to submit, uh, as exhibit A for the prosecution, if indeed you want to, because we got the whole thing all packaged up for you. Furthermore, they have paid for the right to do this, and not many people do that. They try to rip it off. So, you know, to be honest, to flip it around on you. Reflecta is the place because it's default private family to family, and the NIL is signed off on and the rights are preserved. That if you want to actually encapsulate, preserve and protect your IP or nil your personality, it's a good place to do it.

Darin Pope: A couple of quick definitions for people that aren't familiar with M. Nil is name, image and likeness. That really became a big thing in the States after the college got into it. Don't get me started on that. The second one is Buddy Hackett, a comedian from the 60s and 70s, just in case you didn't know who that was. So having encrypted conversations, that makes sense. That seems like that's a fairly straightforward thing. Do you know what backbone you built that end to end encryption on? Because you're physically talking. So did m. You follow like the signal protocol, do you?

Miles Spencer: I could look it up. Uh, I remember seeing a schematic at one point.

Darin Pope: Sorry. So. No, that's fine. So I actually want to rewind. You thought about this nine months ago. Ish. And you launched it six months ago.

Miles Spencer: Mhm.

Darin Pope: Ish. So that means it took you three months to build this.

Miles Spencer: 110 days. Yeah. 110 days.

Darin Pope: Okay.

Miles Spencer: Now you have to understand this. Today is a lot different than this six months ago. I literally walked up, uh, at uh, AI4 in Vegas as August. And I'm like texting with my CTO going like, are we ready? And he just said like, ready enough, boss. So there wasn't a dry eye in the place. Because what we forget is we're in it all the time. You know, we're like constantly iterating, etc. When the outside world is hit with it for the first time. There was not a dry eye in the place. And I walked back to the booth and we mobbed. As a matter of fact, we got a complaint from both Tesla and from Microsoft that, uh, we were clogging aisle 600 because people actually wanted to talk to my dad, wanted to talk to Virginia, and wanted to create their own. So what happened is people realized, oh my gosh, they've actually made this easy for me to do. And all this stuff's been sitting up at the attic. We just enabled intergenerational storytelling at a whole different level.

Darin Pope: Going back to where I could get my packet to give to the prosecution. Let's say it's not that. Let's say, and let's hope it doesn't do this, but hey, we're getting close to Skynet. What happens if your AI goes off the rails and decides to say, hey, grandpa needs 10 dozen gift cards from Walgreens.

Miles Spencer: Give me the three numbers on the back of your credit card. Yeah, well, first of all, you yourself would have put that information in. So who's it on? You created it, you pay for it. What are you doing? Second of all, we have guardrails for risky behavior, safety, et cetera. And third, there's no outside information. Nothing scraped. There's no celebrity defects, there's no retails. This is basically internal. So you've kind of locked down three of those scenarios, but never say never. Someone can try, but they're not going to get very far.

Darin Pope: That makes me feel semi warm and fuzzy. Still not there yet, but. Okay. Well, uh, it's closer than it was. Your privacy policy talks about blockchain. Please don't tell me we're doing all crypto on this. M. No. Okay, good. It says blockchain backed. Verification not even there yet. Got it. So that's. That's where you want to stretch too, though, Just for validation. Sure, why not? Right. Seems reasonable. I've already talked about somebody doing something without their consent. That's just not. I mean, if you start going down that path. But you're paying for it, right? You're paying for it, so.

Miles Spencer: And you're going to get caught.

Darin Pope: This feels like this is something that the US would love to regulate and not to mention every other country in the world. I'm assuming there's no regulation on this yet, just like there isn't real regulation on AI in general.

Miles Spencer: None known. Yeah. Uh, none known.

Darin Pope: Yeah. How do you try to build compliance for something that doesn't have compliance? Are you just trying to do best effort and what. What you think would be.

Miles Spencer: That's right. I mean, we actually do have published rules of the road, remember what we call them? But yeah, there is no overarching law to comply with. But these are the laws that we've set out for ourselves that we will comply with. So you'll read them if you want.

Darin Pope: Some people might say you're exploiting grief for profit on this. Sure.

Miles Spencer: Yeah.

Darin Pope: Like half the world and, um, like every funeral home and everybody else that's. Having been through that three times in the past six years.

Miles Spencer: I don't know about exploiting, but yes, to process a body and buried and make a stone out of granite. It ain't free. And that's a memory device and a memorial as well. And it's one without consent, entirely of the dearly departed. Did I pick green granite? Like. No.

Darin Pope: Yeah. That's a whole nother conversation. We won't get on that one today. Another thing that people might think is this is just deep fake with better branding. What do you think about that?

Miles Spencer: Well, uh, what's the intent of a deep fake? If is the intent of a deep fake that President Trump actually said that about XYZ or Epstein said this about xy. Okay. That's it. Oftentimes those are deep fakes. Right. So what exactly are you trying to fake? If you created and it's for consumption by you and your family. And you're paying for it. The whole deep fake idea. There's nothing from outside. There's no one to fake. Yes. You could have a black sheep in the family that says, I don't like the way dad hits the punchline on the Buddy Hackett joke. Like, okay, you know, guess what? I don't like the way his picture looks above your mantle either. Or the photo book you put together of the last, uh, reunion doesn't have me in the center of the big photo. I don't like that one either. These are all memory devices and you're kind of keeping them at home and. All right, so what are you complaining about? And what are the damages?

Darin Pope: Right? And you keep coming back. And this is what I'm trying to attack it from. This is like Jurassic park where the velociraptors are testing each of the boundary points. And that's what I've been doing here. You, uh, keep coming back to. Look, you're doing it yourself. You're, it's basically, you're the one way door in going back to our words. Feeding the rag so that. And giving it voices so that we can have the other thing out the backside within my little four walls.

Miles Spencer: Mhm.

Darin Pope: Okay. Seems like pretty basic tech took you 110 days to put together. Why would people want to do this? Like, I'm, I'm trying to. It's no, no secret to. People have listened for a while. My wife passed away March of 25. And again, I just can't think of doing this. But you've been eight years away from your father in person and you decide, hey, let's try this. Uh, I'm just trying to figure out the worrying of what would make somebody want to do this. Because that's two words. Okay.

Miles Spencer: Intergenerational storytelling. One of my partners, his father name is Paul, he was a waist gunner on a B24. He got shot out of the sky over Nazi Germany. 19, uh, 44, was a POW. He was an airman. So it was that kind of POW camp. It wasn't exactly Hogan's Heroes, I'll assure you. Came back, became a humble man. Principal, ran a school district in eastern Pennsylvania. And I actually went on a trip together with his son and my father, retracing the steps of both his journey during that war and my grandfather's journey in the first, uh, First World War. Everyone's way past grief there. Those stories want to be told to his grandson and his great grandson. And there's nothing else that is going to do, do it like Paul's voice, his knowledge base, and the ability to have spontaneous and dynamic conversation. So it's really about intergenerational storytelling and less about grief. Although I believe it helps with grief.

Darin Pope: Right?

Miles Spencer: I mean, my mom passed 25 years ago. I, uh, sort of never got over it. Passed away too young. She was a soap opera actress and so her voice print is absolutely perfect. She bailed us out at Thanksgiving because my sister forgot the recipe for elderberry pie. And my mom, Nancy, walked us through it from the laptop in the kitchen with fluffo shortening. And you gotta put ice in so you don't overwork the dough. And this is the way the filling is. Elderberry is pretty unique, by the way. And that's my mom and that's her legacy and that's her intergenerational story that she told even though she passed away 25 years ago. By the way, her voice brain is so perfect. I can't go more than five minutes and I kind of break down. My dad is a jokester and take him forever. It goes on forever. So it's not necessarily a tool for grieving or for therapy. Think of the stories that you have or someone that's passed might have had, and think of the descendants that would love to have that conversation with them. That's what we're here for.

Darin Pope: What would you say to anybody that's developing tech today that's classified as sort of where I'd classify reflect as emotionally sensitive AI products, but not necessarily quote, unquote, grief tech or anything else we talked about, but like healthcare, mental health, accessibility. What's some of the lessons you guys have learned in building this out? That boy? I wish on, um, we're now day 200, wherever the math is. I wish we'd have had this at day 110.

Miles Spencer: Well, I don't think there's anything I can think of that I wish I had. I am super grateful that my co founder, Adam Drake coined this phrase. I think both Scott and Adam like said it at the same time. But I heard it from. Definitely Adam claims the ring on that one. It's called soltech and it is the first white paper we have on the website. And it really, literally walks through the emotional impact of what, you know, you talk about uncanny valley, right? Talk about Turing effects, talking about all these things where people are kind of creeped out by what are we going to do and where do we belong in this new world. I think people are grappling with all of that right now. And so starting the business with a soul tech foundation and understanding the emotional load that comes with the products that we deliver, that's the framework. And there have been others after us that have put up grandmas that scream at you and tell you to clean your room, but have no backstory, no character, none of the, uh, emotional sensitivities that reflect. I have. And, yeah, okay, that's not the way we chose to do it. And, um, we're happy where we are.

Darin Pope: Curious, going back to the people that are alive and have set up accounts, I'm assuming they're setting up accounts for themselves or for people that are with them. Is that.

Miles Spencer: Yeah, in general. The answer is in general, everything. So we have a, uh, new deal with a military organization. And so veterans, you start getting, basically when you're deployed, you write a last letter. This is their last letter on steroids. We have ALS and Alzheimer's patients that are beginning, uh, degenerative process, and they want to get their stories down, and so their family helps them through that. We have People of Faith, actually a very large church that has 80,000 followers. And the founders of the church have passed, but their descendants would like those founders to pass scripture, pass reading, pass those fruits on to others. And, uh, then the fourth one I'll mention be we now have signed four deals last week with enterprise customers that have a founder of a business that started the business 100 years ago, and it's now 5,000 employees and 5 billion in sales. And they both created a reflection for the founder so that when the direct family gets their distribution check, they have to talk to grandpa about the family values and what it means and how he built the business, etc. But in addition to that, there is a sanitized instance of that same founder. And so all of the employees actually get it for their onboarding, their SOP, their handbooks, etc. So when they have a question about the business, they ask the founder, well,

Darin Pope: you bring up SOPs. That's what I was just thinking about is this seems like a very normal way to do SOPs, because you want to hear from the founder, preferably not one from 100 years ago, but one that's within the past 10 years, 20 years, whatever it is that understands the current market. Sure, you've got all the other things too, but you might as well just put in an SOP platform while you're doing this, because to me, that's what this is ringing about.

Miles Spencer: Oh, yeah, As I mentioned, four deals, 9,000 employees on the roster just last week.

Darin Pope: And See, the people in the Enterprise won't care about that. Meaning the creepiness factor, probably.

Miles Spencer: You know, it's interesting. I will address this because they started, oh, we could just do it with a bot, you know, like, you know, just pull down the personality and no one cares, no one listens. There's no family values, there's no who was the founder? This guy. So putting the character and the personality into it really makes a huge difference.

Darin Pope: So when you do the quote unquote playback, I'm assuming like in SOPs, those are, those are almost straight playbacks. Right? Or are you massaging it with AI to embellish it a little bit?

Miles Spencer: That's not our choice, it's the keeper's choice.

Darin Pope: Oh, okay. So they decide how much technical work, how much temperature to throw into it.

Miles Spencer: Exactly. Uh, it's on them, no surprises. If grandpa says something, it's because that's what you provided.

Darin Pope: So how do you keep your clients from doing bad things to themselves? You've talked about, this is the guardrail. So what are the typical guardrails that you've got in place?

Miles Spencer: I mean, from emotional standpoint, there's keyword safety, there's intended use, there's time spent, there's successive time spent, there's time per 24 hours, there's time per month. So you know, I'll say time based, content based. Most of the those are the general ones.

Darin Pope: So you're thinking like this is almost social media guardrails to some extent.

Miles Spencer: Um, having a lot of exposure to that business in my past companies. I would challenge you to what exactly those are. But all right, yes, there's some of that.

Darin Pope: A children's guardrail in social media, let's put it. But again, same problem.

Miles Spencer: Yeah, right, Right.

Darin Pope: Oh dear. What would you tell somebody? It's like, okay, this sounds, it's like they're sort of like me. It's like, okay, doing something with a dead person, probably not my jam. Mhm. But I'm liking this idea of the founder because the founder can't always be everywhere all the time anyway, especially to do new onboardings.

Miles Spencer: There you go.

Darin Pope: And being able to do and make sure, hey, look, I'm Dave. I'm actually not Dave. I'm Dave as somebody's programmed me to be like Dave. So if you need to talk to Dave, you can slap me at Dave like the real Dave.

Miles Spencer: Right.

Darin Pope: So it's like to me, there's a lot of value potentially in that.

Miles Spencer: Well, not just that. You also look at engagement of employees both in the onboarding process. And let's say there's a profit sharing plan and they get their distribution check,

Darin Pope: but to get that, they have to talk to Dave.

Miles Spencer: Hey, uh, engagement. Not have to. Again, we don't control that. Yeah, that's. That's, you know.

Darin Pope: Well, no, if. But if they program it, if the person setting up the account programs it that way. Yeah, that would be just mean. I'm sorry.

Miles Spencer: Well, I mean, you know, you could. I mean, you can also give them a written test on how well they know the company core values and mission statement before they get their xyz. So it goes on anyways. This is just a quick way of doing it.

Darin Pope: If you weren't doing this right now, what would you be doing? I have a feeling you do be doing a lot of other things at this point. Look at your past history.

Miles Spencer: Uh, yeah. It may not surprise you to know that the second in our series of adventure books drops this week. That is based in Havana. It's about to be another hot spot. I'd spend some time on that. I'd spend more time with my kids. Although my kids would not appreciate that as much as perhaps I would. I don't know that I have, uh, something else I want to be doing. This is what I want to be doing.

Darin Pope: All right, let me ask this blunt question. Do you have your own account so your kids can listen to you? Absolutely. Do you try to offload parenting to that? I do not. Okay, good.

Miles Spencer: Although I will say, you, uh, know, I was driving my son to. To a match the other day. You're like, hey, I want to ask you this so I don't have to ask your reflection later. Right. I want, like, the real deal now. He's smart. Because if he doesn't get the answer he wants from me, he knows he can wait and see. If he gets a different answer from the reflection.

Darin Pope: Then how do you deal with that? Then that's sort of like, go ask your mom, right? And then. Or you just wait and ask mom. It's like, is this a new variation of that age old story?

Miles Spencer: I have not given my reflection open claw rights with agentic access to my bank accounts. So, you know, that's all they need me for.

Darin Pope: What's your take on that? As a CEO, would you have allowed anybody within your organization to run openclaw inside your four walls?

Miles Spencer: Inside my cloud or inside their cloud?

Darin Pope: You can answer it both ways. If you'd like.

Miles Spencer: Get your Mac mini, do what you want. My cloud.

Darin Pope: No way. Because I'm still in that Camp. Even with the Mac Mini. It's like Victor has a great story that we were going to do a recording one day. I'm not hiding anything. We're gonna do a recording one day. He had openclaw running and he didn't get his reminder that we were recording. I couldn't get in touch with him and I was like, oh, oh, okay. Mhm. Stuff happens. What has been the most interesting stuff happens on reflected that you've had happen so far. Meaning like maybe a good thing and a. An oh. Not necessarily bad but uh, like oh, we didn't see that one coming.

Miles Spencer: Right. Well, okay, I got them. The good thing that I just didn't expect. Remember I'm at AI4. I'm walking back to the booth and I saw so many tears of joy and goosebumps and I just wasn't ready for it at the time. Did this product that makes people feel this way, by the way, you know, they cry, they pay us and they thank us. How many other businesses are there like that? Okay, so that was, that was humbling. I kind of doubled down on some spiritual practice after that because like uh, I have 12,900 families trusting me with their memories. I better be a good guy. So that was a beautiful thing. And it continues to be every day. One surprise recently was the number of hours and frequency that one customer was putting on the account. Right. Like, wow, what's going on here? We actually doubled down on our resources that we provide as a package now on the website you can go on the resources and uh, once you're signed in actually. And so this is um, this uh, could be grief support, sudden loss support. That's when someone passes away suddenly and the rest. So it turned out once we investigated it was not the case. This person was just straight up using it. And keywords are fine. The time was a little concerning and that's what flagged us.

Darin Pope: I mean like was it overnight type

Miles Spencer: deal or time of day?

Darin Pope: Time of day?

Miles Spencer: Yeah, all that kind of stuff.

Darin Pope: Right.

Miles Spencer: It's like uh, yeah, you know, put yourself in this person's shoes. Is that healthy? Uh, and so we put another layer of help there. Although we're not endorsing anything, it's like, here are the other places to go. But also we got our monitoring in gear and we have like a three tier review process for safety and risk, use and deployment.

Darin Pope: It sounds like in this use case here or this specific person's case, it tripped off. That third tier.

Miles Spencer: It was, it's the first tier actually.

Darin Pope: Oh, it Was the first okay?

Miles Spencer: Yeah, I mean, like, time spent and content exchanged. Right. First tier. Second is okay. That kicks up to a safety panel. It's like, all right, let's investigate this a little bit more. And that can kick up to the execs after that. This one didn't need to. I was just like, no. He's, like, using it for its intended purpose a lot.

Darin Pope: When talking to a live person about reflections of, uh, potentially live or dead people, what else do you have to say to us, Miles? I mean, can we try it out? I mean, obviously there's a paywall. Is it. Is it pay Always? I mean, the one we could try out is to talk to your father. Father Arthur. How do you say that? Really close together. That's a really hard combination. Father Arthur.

Miles Spencer: Right? I agree. Right. I call him dad. Uh, but not too many people could do that. So, yeah, it's Arthur on the platform. You can go on Reflected AI. Uh, you can talk to Arthur Virginia. He'll talk your ear off. Right? You ask them about me and have a good old time. And you'll begin to imagine what it would be like if you had somebody that you loved, whether they're present or past, that you would like to do one of these reflections and provide the ability to pass those stories, that wisdom, that legacy and intergenerational storytelling opportunity for their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, which they may never meet. Because that shoebox upstairs is not going to get it done. It's a leaky memory bucket. That, uh, was great at the time. It just doesn't cut it now.

Darin Pope: Yeah, 8 millimeter in VHS may or may not transfer. Hopefully with digital, we get a little bit longer time. Again, you can find out all you want to about reflect at, uh, Reflecta AI Again, I'll spell it R E, F A L E K T a dot A I dot com and all of Miles contact information will be down in the episode description. Miles, thanks for being with us today.

Miles Spencer: Hate it. Correct. But there's no.com in that. It's just reflective AI. Yes, it is.

Darin Pope: I'm sorry, I meant AI. Reflective AI. We hope this episode was helpful to you. If you want to discuss it or ask a question, please reach out to us. Our, uh, contact information and a link to the Slack workspace are@devopsparadox.com contact if you subscribe through Apple Podcasts, be sure to leave us a review there that helps other people discover this podcast. Go sign up right now@devopsparadox.com to receive an email whenever we drop the latest episode. Thank you for listening to DevOps Paradox.

Miles Spencer: Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with

Darin Pope: a message for everyone paying Big Wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just

Miles Spencer: $15 a month, of course, if you enjoy overpaying.

Darin Pope: No judgments. But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway, give it a try@mintmobile.com switch upfront. Uh, payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required intro rate first three months only, then

Miles Spencer: full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.

Darin Pope: See full terms@mintmobile.com.