Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Charlie, welcome to the show. And what an absolute pleasure. I have a confession. This is a topic that I am, you know, quite passionate about and tried to do on my own. So the idea of putting some technology to help do it is quite interesting to me.
I want to start by asking the final question.
Why did you start this company? What's your personal story that made it click for you?
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Well, I am. I'm very happy to be here, Ari. Thank you for having me. The company that we're talking about is called Remento, and we help people turn memories of the past into keepsake books for the future.
And most of our customers use these books and the product itself to document the stories of, you know, either themselves or in many cases, an aging relative. And for me, my own excitement for the space stems directly from personal experience. So I grew up with two parents who were like, freakishly obsessed with the home video camcorder. They used it to document just an outrageous amount of content from the first decade of my life. And all that content came into just a totally different level of meaning and understanding of that meaning after my dad passed away when I was 10 years old. And I remember as at the time, a 12 year old, you know, going through that content and realizing what in that.
What in that archive, you know, would bring tears to our eyes. And surprisingly, it wasn't the videos of him celebrating like the milestone moments in life, you know, the births, the birthdays, the graduations, the recitals, like the moments that Kodak told us. Those are the moments where you take out the camera and you. You document. It wasn't those moments. It was actually the moments of him just being himself, you know, like I've got. I've got a video of him holding me in his arms the day I was born. It is like as Kodak of a moment as you can imagine. And actually the video that for so long was like, so difficult for me to watch was a video of him sitting at the breakfast table before I was born. My mom is interviewing him and he's explaining about how he's nervous that he hasn't connected the car seat to the back of the car in the right way. And it was just such a human moment. And it allowed me to, you know, understand a piece of him in a way when I was 12 years old, in a way that is, you know, very different, you know, decades later, now that I have kids of my own. And it left, you know, in my mind a real and deep appreciation for the power of video to be able to keep the memories and the stories of the people we love alive.
And flash forward seven years ago from today. My mom gets diagnosed with lung cancer, and I move up to where she's living in Portland, Maine. And I'm looking at my phone, and at the time, it was, like, six years of photos and videos that I had on that device. And I'm scrolling through thousands and thousands of videos, and I can't find one that's longer than five seconds of her. And I come to this, like, shocking realization that I actually have better video content of my dad from the 90s than I do of my mom through most of the digital age. And it was the reason that we decided shortly after her diagnosis and before he started her chemotherapy, to sit down and record a series of her memories from the past as a time capsule for, really, my kids to be able to open up at some point in the future in the event that she didn't survive, you know, her treatment. And I thought I was going to, in that process, record a lot of the stories that I had grown up hearing all the time. And, you know, the stories that when we. Our parents tell us, we roll our eyes because we've heard them so many times. I wanted my kids to hear those stories, and I was just blown away by how many of the stories that she shared in response to really simple questions like, how did he get to elementary school as a child?
How her responses led to stories that I had never heard before. And it was just amazing that it took a cancer diagnosis for me to actually get to understand who my mom was before I entered the picture. And it left me wondering why that was the case. And I recognized as I thought about that experience and spoke to others, that there were so many people who were saying to themselves, gosh, I know, and I wish I could make the time to document the stories of someone I love, because I totally understand how valuable that will probably be one day in the future. And for people who have lost someone in their lives, they know firsthand how meaningful that content would be.
But on any given day, there are just so many reasons why we don't take the initiative to actually create that kind of documentation. So what our team set off to do was to build technology that would make it so that the prospect of beginning that journey was as simple as using a product that could do the work for you. You. And that's what we. We spent the last four years building the technology to do. And our product today is giving families the opportunity to arrive at the point of having the stories of someone they Love or themselves documented in a way that requires a fraction of the work that it would take to do it on your own.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: I'm incredibly curious. What was the impact on your mother going through that process with you starting this process of storytelling?
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Well, it's interesting. We have a scientific advisory board at Ranto, so I've learned a lot about some of the things that we experienced together retroactively.
One of the things that is very true of American culture specifically, is modesty is, in many respects, baked into the kind of culture that we live in. And modesty can be a real deterrent for people connecting across generations. And this has been something that our advisors have shared with us and helped me understand. People growing up are told that it is to be polite to not ask questions that would feel inappropriate or prying. And so oftentimes we don't ask questions that we might be curious to learn the answers of, but we feel would be an overstep. At the same time, as we grow up, and particularly among people who are older generations today, we learn that sharing stories of ourselves is an act of vanity, and that it to be polite is to not brag and not speak more about yourself than you ought to.
And so you have modesty preventing people from connecting in ways that would be of mutual benefit if they did so. When my mom and I sat down and we had a reason to document her stories, it took about eight seconds for me to sit back and realize, oh, my gosh, this is so different from something we've ever done before.
And it's bringing us together in a way that I couldn't have appreciated because we had never done it before. And while it was certainly true that what we were creating from, I think both of our perspectives, was for the benefit of my kids, her grandkids, you know, what it did in that moment for us was allowed her to know that I was genuinely interested in her lived experience, which she was humbled by.
And for me, it allowed me to understand a piece of my history, which, thankfully, I'm now able to share with my kids and will be able to share with their kids, you know, forever and always into the future.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Thinking about myself and people, I've had discussions around this topic that is outrageously the norm that we don't know that much about our parents and about our grandparents. And I would argue that it extends to other cultures as well, beyond the U.S. so that's such an. Such an interesting insight.
What did your mother say specifically? What was her feedback about the process? What were the interesting things that Came up. Was it easy? Was it hard? Did it drive anything kind of emotional?
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Well, there were certainly, yes. It covered a lot of ground. I mean, one of the first things that we did when we sat down is I took out a photo book of her childhood, and I said, mom, what the heck was happening in these photos? Because I have no idea. We went photo by photo, and she looked at the images. And I've since come to understand how powerful images can be with stimulating recall among, you know, older. Older folks. And it's a big part of the reason why with Ramenta, we've incorporated photography into the way that we can stimulate memory. But I think one of the. One of the areas that I was most curious about was her relationship with my dad, you know, before I was born, and what it was like for them to get to know each other and to fall in love and then to get married and to think about having kids. You know, when I. When I sat down with her, I was a couple years away from being engaged, so thinking about settling down was very much in my mind. And that's something that we actually, we. We hear a lot from our customers, is they're very curious to learn about their parent or their grandparents experience at roughly the age that they are. So if you're about to get married, it's like, mom, what was happening on your wedding day? If you're about to have a kid, it's like, grandma, what was it like when you had your first child? Were you nerv. Was. Where were you looking for information? How did you do it when there was no Internet? This is so interesting. So we covered. I would say, to start with. We started kind of at the beginning, and many of her memories from childhood were incredibly happy memories. And then as we started talking about, you know, her relationship with my dad, who we lost. You know, enough time has passed since his passing to be able to have a smile as we talk about him. But, you know, it was emotional because those are memories that she holds very closely and, you know, doesn't. Doesn't speak about that often again, because I simply had not made the time on a random Tuesday to call her and ask.
[00:09:36] Speaker A: I mean, it seems to me just conducting these interviews can be incredibly difficult for you to do it. What are the lessons that you've learned? Call it tips and tricks on how to.
To help your mother share her best stories and to feel comfortable and to create something that, you know, this is so cynical, but something that your children will really want to see.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we. As we sat down for the first time we had a really clear reason for, to be documenting these stories. And I remember I spent a bunch of time learning about oral history interviewing and understanding, you know, what are the things that are really important. And feeling very intimidated by the fact that there are volumes of books about how to conduct oral history interviews. And we think about, we think about the great interviewers, the, the Barbara Walters, Oprah, people who are iconic interviewers, and how they're able to ask the perfect question in the perfect way at the perfect time.
And it's easy to feel intimidated that because we're never going to be able to be as talented as them, that maybe we can't be successful.
But I think the two things that I realized were really most important as it related to being successful and making sure that my mom felt that we were being set up for success was first, you know, making the intention very clear. You know, I wasn't asking my mom to pre eulogize herself. You know, I wasn't asking her questions because I wanted to expose gaps in her memory or point out the things that she was going to misremember because people can remember things that are completely untrue, that never happened. And that's part of the human memory.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: Oh, just have me and my wife tell the same story that happened to us in the same time. Completely different stories.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Well, we can, we can talk about longitudinal memory studies because that's an area that I, we can, we can go pretty deep on. But, but yes, I mean there's tremendous scientific evidence about people being. Having incredibly clear memories of things that have never happened. And memories degrade not only over time, but increasingly if they are stories that we tell often. You can think of memory as like.
[00:11:51] Speaker A: A book on a book that is so that. Wait, hold on. That is so counterintuitive. Memories degrade with stories we tell often. You would think it would be the opposite.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: Well, every time you take out a memory, it goes back onto the shelf with a slight bit of tarnish on it, a slight bit of hyperbole, a slight bit of exaggeration. And then you exaggerate with like just a little bit, you know, 50 times. All of a sudden the story is totally different. There's some great research that was done totally coincidentally in 2001, right after 9 11, a longitudinal memory study. They were, they were doing research and they found themselves in a position in the week after 911 to be able to ask a group of respondents to describe exactly where they were on that day very, very quick. They were able to ask that question and get quite, quite accurate details presumably of where people were and how they experienced that day. And then over a set period of time, every so often in the years after, they would ask the same questions. Where were you on that day? And 10 years later, people remembered being in different C. They remembered talking to different people. And that was an event presumably that people spoke of on somewhat of a regular basis. And people who shared, having spoken more about 9, 11 over the course of that 10 year period did in fact have in many cases more feeble, less accurate memory.
[00:13:09] Speaker A: Is were there. Was there any correlation to personality type or anything else that who is more likely to fall to this memory issue versus others or they didn't touch anything like that?
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Not that I recall. I don't recall that. The other study that was done at the time was around the resilience in children, which was people who shared with their children the events of that day and contextualized the events of that day with other moments of hardship in their family in the past had children that ultimately became what they were able to refer to as more resilient over time across a variety of different factors related to their ability to snap back from challenge and confidence and all these different metrics that they had come up with.
So the kind of takeaway there was. When times are hard, being direct with your kids is often better than trying to hide them or shield them from the truth. Let me say, though, I said the first thing that sitting down with my mom that was important was stating the intention. And the second thing that proved to be really critical is making sure she felt that I was genuinely listening.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: Okay, this is so important. What does that mean, genuinely listening? Because I feel like that is an art of, like, being present and mindfulness that I am developing, even though I'm probably close to double your age. What does that mean for you? How have you gotten better at this?
[00:14:33] Speaker B: Well, active listening is something you can spend your entire life refining. So going from B plus to A plus with active listening is, you know, a life's work. But going from not doing it at all to doing it a little bit is not hard at all. And I would say sitting down with someone and as you are hearing them say things that are interesting, just reading back to them and sharing with them, like, mom, I had no idea. I had no idea that that was your experience. That's unbelievable. Let me ask you another question. You know, like, one of the. One of the mistakes that rookie interviewers fall into is feeling. Is making their interviewee feel like they are answering a survey, which I recognize feels nothing like the conversation that we're having right now, considering that I don't think you have questions written down at all. And that's the goal of a great interview, which is to make the interview feel more like a conversation or a journey than completing a static exercise. So I share both stating the intention as being critical and also being able to make sure that the interviewee feels like they are being heard and validated as being really important takeaways. Because we knew that when we were going to try to automate parts of the process of soliciting stories from someone and remove the human interaction from that experience, we needed to find ways to be able to incorporate the benefits of both of those two propositions into what would become an asynchronous experience.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: That feels almost like you're. I mean, I get the scale aspect of it, but you're losing, if I understood correctly, the aspect of the relationship that you're building between the two individuals. So I'm incredibly curious, you know, how you think about this.
[00:16:25] Speaker B: The challenge for us from the very beginning was how can you make that experience feel as authentic as an interview?
[00:16:31] Speaker A: Right?
[00:16:31] Speaker B: And the first thing that we had to realize was it will never be. It just won't be. There's. There's no way that someone sitting down and having a conversation with you can be the same as being interviewed by a non human.
However, it doesn't necessarily always involve being worse. It's different, but it's not always worse. And actually, what we've heard from a lot of our customers is speaking to a device feels more like writing a journal than it does sitting down with a therapist or a psychiatrist or an interviewer. And for some people, being able to tell their own story in their own way, without judgment whatsoever actually allows them to open up and be more vulnerable in ways that they've never been with anyone else in their life. We have. We have members of the military who use memento, and they'll be asked a question about, you know, a moment from their service, and their family will reach out to them after they hear the story that's just been recorded saying, how on earth. How on earth did you just share that to your phone? And have never shared that with anyone else. And those people say, I don't. I don't really know. But what's. What's really important is what we build into memento is the ability for the person to feel seen and heard by way of making sure that the family can very quickly receive what's been shared and provide the affirmation. So it's delayed, but the act of listening does exist there. And then the second thing is we make sure that when someone's receiving memento, it's really clear what the intention is. Again, it's not for a pre eulogy. It's not because we want to expose vulnerability or lapses in memory. It's because legacy can be preserved in the form of a book without that person having to write it themselves. And that is a gift in and of itself to the entire family.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: So there's a few interesting things. One is, and I've heard this guests have told me this, especially the ones that share incredibly difficult stories.
The process of sharing these stories is therapeutic. I think that's such an important thing to be said because you mentioned, you know, military. The other thing, I think it's interesting what you said, because I'm like, okay, you take the human being out of it. Do you lose the value? Was really my question. But what I'm hearing from you is that, well, maybe we're taking the human being out of that immediate moment and turning it kind of to be delayed, but they're still there. They're having those conversations after, and it's creating engagement that might not have happened otherwise.
So I thought that was incredibly interesting.
Charlie, when you think about the future of storytelling, do you feel like we're losing something? Are we losing our ability to share our stories?
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Yeah, look, there's no question that there are countless examples of advances in technology driving us apart and into more isolated versions of ourselves.
Like the promise of social media to connect us with each other, I think remains an open question. And I look specifically at the rates of suicide among especially young women and girls who feel more isolated by way of being connected in a digital way than any other generation ever has. So there's an open question about the role of technology and the acceleration of some of that impact by way of AI making everything faster. At the same time, there is a tremendous promise of technology to bring us together. And one of the things that was very true of the early social media companies was that they were monetizing those businesses through advertisements, which meant that your attention was the product. I think if we're able as a society to adopt technology with business models that are not focused on extracting attention, but are instead focused on actually monetizing connection, then there's a tremendous opportunity to use all of this tremendous, powerful technology to be able to bring people together. And all I can speak to is what I hear When I have conversations with our customers, which is that by way of a fairly simple tool from their perspective, that is sending them a new video of their grandmother telling stories about her past every week, they have been able to connect with her and engage with her and understand her in a way that has never before been possible.
And we hear that all the time.
Grandma spoke about going to the University of Indiana during a time where there were rolling blackouts after World War II and hearing that story, the granddaughter finding a newspaper article of that coverage and then printing it out and bringing it to grandma's house and then them talking about that experience for an hour. Right. We've just, we've shifted from talking about the weather with our grandparents actually talking about their experience, because we've been able to harvest that opportunity for connection. And the tremendous power of AI, from my perspective, as it relates to the space, is to be able to make the prospect of reliving those experiences so much more rich than it ever has been. And I think that will benefit our families decades into the future because we'll be able to look back on these moments. But until that time, what we can say with total conviction is that of the 6,000 hours of content that have been recorded on Memento, you know, each of those stories reflects, you know, families developing a greater understanding about who they are, where they come from, and a deeper appreciation for the experiences of those who have come before them.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: I think that just the light bulb turned on that, you know, you're probably not seeing your grandma every week, but her ability to do this on our own actually would create a dialogue and create a connection and create something that if you didn't plan to go meet her and interview her, it's happening anyway. So to me, just understanding that suddenly creates something that is so much more powerful. I actually having goosebumps. Look, my, my, my father in law, he was, he was basically sent to, to the Siberian forest when he was a kid, when he was 18. And he tells us this story. And the funny thing is that every time as my wife and I grew up, the story changed. So first time was, oh, we saw a bear. Like, okay, next time he tells the story and this is a few years later, coincidentally, it's like, oh, we saw a bear, we shot the bear in the direction of the bear to scare it off.
The third time he tells the story is, we saw the bear, we shot the bear, we killed the bear. And then it turns into, we saw the bear. Actually, we were hunting the bear, we didn't have food, we were Hungry because no food was sent to us and we were hunting that bear to eat it and we ate the bear and that's what kept us alive from starving. So you know, first of all that the horror in not knowing anything about your father in law and getting to know the person now, it's like a running joke in the family, like oh, the bear that, you know, you shot in its direction but actually you ate it. It just created such a sense of connection to my parents in law that was very, very unique and it was serendipitous. And I can only imagine the force of that happening on a week to week, month to month basis I think is incredibly important. And the other aspect of this, my kids love their parents in law, just love them, but they're way too young to have these kind of discussions with them. And it truly is frightening to me that they will not get to know them as deeply as I do. And then my other fear is the, well, do I even know them as well as I can? And you know, I think that's that that touches me personally so I appreciate it.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: How old are you? How old are your kids?
[00:24:49] Speaker A: So I have two kids and one raptor. The son is 12, 10, and then the raptor is 5 years old. And they all love their grandparents tremendously. Like it's amazing. I feel so grateful that they've built that relationship.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: Well, one of the things I would just say just in response to what you've just said, like 10, 12, 5, these are children who have so much to learn about the world and themselves. And I would agree they would be too young to sit down and conduct an oral history interview with him or, or have the initiative on their own to probably think to ask these questions. But I would bet even the 5 year old would love to hear the story of grandpa, you know, taking down the bear and eating it or any version of that story from the past, and that's what's so important, is that if we can find a way to make these stories accessible, yes, let's save them for when they can appreciate the story because they recognize the importance of family history and they're in a position to pass it down themselves. But a five year old is going to love this story and that's what we see, which is so special. It's like let's give the five year old content that hopefully your five year old's not on TikTok yet. Maybe the 12 year old is thinking about it. Hopefully, maybe also not on TikTok, but let's present family history to them in a way that feels similar to the way that they're digesting all of the other content that fills.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: Charlie, this was amazing. First of all, I'm so grateful that we got to connect. I want to ask you one last question. Normally, the question we ask is, Charlie, if you went to be. And this is. This is the only scripted question that we have, is, if you were 20, what advice would you give to yourself? I want to ask you something else. You have, you know, one. Your first. Your first born. How. How.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: She is six months, one week from six months.
[00:26:41] Speaker A: So you're basically, you know, right out of the oven. As a father, when you think about the things that you would like to give your newborn daughter, what is that?
[00:26:50] Speaker B: I think I'd love to give her. I'd love to give her a platform for her to know that she can be whatever she wants to be. That's a combination of financial stability, access to education, role models who look like her, and the equal parts confidence and hubris to look at the world that she is living in and all of the places that she wants to be and to rightly ask herself, why not me?
[00:27:18] Speaker A: Charlie, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate you.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: Yeah, Ari, this is a lot of fun. Thank you so much.
