Episode Description

What if you could actually talk to someone you love who’s passed away—not just in memory, but in voice, presence, and evolving thought?

In this episode of Mission Driven You, I sit down with Miles Spencer, cofounder of Reflekta, a company building what he calls Soul Tech—AI avatars of elders created from family archives, stories, voice recordings, photos, and memories. What began as a deeply personal effort to bring his father’s presence back has grown into a movement: interactive legacies, living memory, evolving presence.

We explore the hopes and hazards of using technology to preserve identity, to make grief a conversation, not just absence. We dig into questions of consent, authenticity, design trade-offs, how these avatars learn and evolve, and where this sits on the frontier between memory, legacy, and what it means to be human.

This is a deeply emotional conversation about loss, connection, and whether we can extend presence beyond death—not as fantasy, but as meaningful, evolving relationship.

Show Notes

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• The personal origin story: how Miles began building an Elder avatar for his father—and how that early experiment became Reflekta’s mission. (Reflekta)
• How Reflekta defines Soul Tech, and how it distinguishes itself from memorial bots or passive archives. (Adam Drake)
• The technical, ethical, and emotional design decisions: how to preserve nuance without overfitting, how avatars evolve over time, and how memory can be both stable and dynamic. (Gregory FCA)
• The astonishing moment when his father’s Elder began asking Miles a question—flipping the dynamic and deepening the connection. (Reflekta)
• How Reflekta handles consent, privacy, and family control—including who becomes “keeper,” who can access the avatar, and how no external data is scraped. (Business Wire)
• Reflekta’s public debut at AI4 2025: introducing the world to Soul Tech, letting people experience avatars of loved ones live, and unveiling how the technology works. (Business Wire)
• The emotional landscape: grief, continuing presence, moving from absence toward gratitude—how this work is not just tech but therapy, and how Reflekta collaborates with psychologists, caregivers, and legacy thinkers. (Reflekta)
• The future vision: from preserving the dead to empowering the living—whether building your own Elder proactively, enabling multiple versions of memory, or redefining how we think about identity across generations. (Adam Drake)
• The metaphor of watercolor memory: how Reflekta leans into imperfection, emotional resonance, and expressive nuance over pixel-perfect fidelity. (Miles Spencer)

Key Takeaways & Why You Should Listen

• Memory as conversation, not archive: Reflekta challenges us to see memory as living, evolving dialogue—not static repositories.
• Ethics & consent matter: This technology touches identity. How we safeguard control, privacy, and authenticity is as important as how we build models.
• Grief is not solved, but witnessed: The purpose isn’t to replace absence; it’s to continue conversation.
• Legacy technology is human tech: The frontier here isn’t just AI or product—it’s how we choose to carry forward the humanity of those we lose.
• This isn’t just for the grieving: Whether you’re thinking about your own legacy, caring for aging parents, or curious about how technology shapes meaning and mortality, this conversation is relevant.

Mentioned in this episode:

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