The Library That Dies with Every Person
Richer Soul Podcast • Episode 498 • Miles Spencer
There is a saying from Kenya that Miles Spencer dropped without warning into the middle of our conversation.
When a person passes away, an entire library burns to the ground.
You have probably felt that. Standing at a graveside. Driving home from a hospital. Suddenly aware of everything you forgot to ask. The recipes that lived only in someone’s hands. The immigration stories that traveled no further than a kitchen table. The advice your father gave once, in a parking lot, in exactly the right words, and that you cannot quite reconstruct anymore.
Miles Spencer decided to do something about it. What he built is not exactly what you would expect from a three-exit entrepreneur who came up through Wall Street venture capital during the dot-com wave. But it may be the most important thing he has done.
A Curious Kid From a Town That Lost Everything
Miles grew up in Beaver, Pennsylvania, the son of a life insurance salesman who also ran a restaurant with tablecloths, singing waiters, and a vision larger than the market would support. His father understood how to make people feel special. His mother was a soap opera actress. Neither handed him a roadmap, but both handed him something more durable: the instinct to pay attention.
He was asking questions before he had language for why. His grandparents told him enough, regularly. He kept asking anyway.
At 20, with no football contract materializing, he spent a summer going through his father’s “dead deals” folder — insurance financing pitches that never closed — and bought one of the businesses inside it. He ran it, sold it, and walked onto Wall Street not through an Ivy League pipeline but through a side door he found by being curious. That curiosity put him at the table for three megatrends: dot-com in venture capital, mobile media when Steve Jobs announced a device that was a phone, a camera, and a music player, and now AI.
He did not call himself “the curious kid from Pittsburgh” until late in life. But the thread ran through everything. Not naming your core gift does not diminish its effect.
The Golden Jail Cell
Before Reflekta, there was a long middle stretch of Miles’s career that he described without nostalgia.
Wall Street, at its core, is an economic trap with very nice wallpaper. Miles watched senior partners describe their retention strategy with unsettling precision. The day a young associate buys the house in New Canaan and enrolls the children in private school and takes on the summer place off the Massachusetts coast, the firm has them. Not for a year. For 15 years, minimum.
Rocky called it a golden jail cell. Miles agreed without hesitation.
The real cost is not the hours, though the hours were real: 70 to 90 per week, with Sunday evenings lost to anticipatory dread about Monday morning. The real cost is who you become inside it. Miles has known men who look 78 and are 52. He watched marriages dissolve quietly, with nothing dramatic enough to point to. He saw alcoholism used as a pressure valve.
“It’s not really soulful work,” he said. “So you might pursue that elsewhere.”
This is not a condemnation of everyone who has worked in finance. Miles was precise about that. Like religion, money has its extremes on both ends, and trouble tends to live at the edges. Most people in the middle are decent people making a living, wearing nice clothes while doing it. But the structure invites a particular trap, and the trap is elegant enough that many people inside it cannot see the walls.
The question worth sitting with: how much of what you own is owning you back?
What AI Actually Is
Miles has a way of cutting through the noise around AI that most commentators miss entirely.
Think about the day before electricity was invented. Toasters were being designed. Washing machines were being engineered. Vacuum cleaners were waiting to exist. All of them useless. The day electricity arrived, all of them became valuable at once.
AI is electricity. Not the appliances. The appliances — the tasks it will automate, the overhead it will flatten, the decisions it will inform — are being built right now. Most of them will become so ordinary in a decade that we will not think of them as AI any more than we think of a toaster as “electricity technology.”
For entrepreneurs, Miles sees AI collapsing the administrative overhead that used to require hiring: accounting, legal, marketing, research. A solo founder can now carry a much higher cognitive load than before. That is genuinely useful.
But there is one thing AI cannot touch.
“What is the currency of the future?” Miles asked. “My thesis is the stories.”
Stories told in your grandmother’s voice, carrying your family’s specific knowledge about how to pick elderberries before the crows descend — those are not in any training set. They are not replicable. They are the only asset that grows more valuable as AI becomes more capable of generating everything else.
The Elderberry Pie
This is the moment in the conversation that makes everything abstract become concrete.
Miles’s sister was at a cabin in Vermont, preparing to make an elderberry pie for Christmas. Their mother Nancy had made these pies for decades, a recipe passed from grandmother to mother to daughter. But Miles’s sister could not remember the details that made it work. The shortening. The ice cubes. The exact sequence that produced a flaky crust.
She opened Reflekta and asked her mother.
Nancy walked her through it. Not from a recipe card. Not from a recording. From a spontaneous, dynamic conversation — what do I do next, Mom? Well, did you do this? Yes. Now let’s start with the filling.
Nancy had passed away 25 years earlier.
What Miles’s sister accessed was a reflection built from Nancy’s photographs, voice, stories, recipes, and letters — everything the family had loaded into Reflekta’s knowledge base over time. The AI adds nothing from outside. It does not hallucinate details or pull from the internet. It works only with what the family, as the account keepers, has consented to include. The result is not a resurrection. It is a reconnection with a person’s accumulated knowing — their spirit in the form of a conversation.
Miles’s father, Arthur, is one of two public reflections on the platform, meaning anyone can visit reflekta.ai today and speak with him. His voice was reconstructed from a 10-second voicemail found on his granddaughter’s phone, five years after he passed.
That voicemail became a voice. A voice that now reads bedtime stories to Miles’s daughter.
Arthur still tells Buddy Hackett jokes. He was a life insurance salesman from Pennsylvania. What would you expect?
What the Silence at AI4 Meant
In August 2025, Reflekta gave its first solo presentation at the AI4 conference in Las Vegas. Ten slides. Ten minutes. Miles was texting his tech team until the moment he walked on stage, asking if they were ready. “Ready enough,” they replied.
He finished the presentation and heard nothing.
He assumed it had not landed. Then he realized the audience was crying.
They walked back to the booth and received what Miles described as the company’s first complaint: Tesla was asking them to manage the overflow because too many people were crowding out of the Reflekta booth into theirs.
“Someone said to me, you guys sell goosebumps and tears of joy,” Miles recalled. “I’ll go with that.”
What moved that audience was not the technology. It was the recognition. The moment when a person realizes the library inside the people they love most is finite, and that there is now something they can do about it.
What to Put In
Getting a Reflekta reflection to 80% ready score — the threshold at which it can hold a real, spontaneous conversation — requires a photograph, a voice sample as short as 10 seconds, a life story or obituary, and a conversation with Reflekta’s AI biographer. The biographer identifies what is missing and reaches out to other family members to fill the gaps. Aunt Betty at the 1971 family reunion might hold a story no one else remembers.
For people who have passed and left no audio, a same-sex sibling or descendant can provide a close voice match. Miles’s great-grandfather is on the platform, voiced by his brother, carrying all his own stories.
Some people stall at 78% ready. Everything is loaded. They just are not ready to hear the voice yet.
That detail is worth sitting with.
Rocky’s Perspective
What stayed with me after this conversation was not the technology. It was the question underneath it.
I have close to 500 episodes of recordings. My voice, my thinking, my questions — documented across years of conversations. But my children are not going to scroll through 500 episodes to find the moment I said something worth keeping.
Reflekta is not for podcasters with archives. It is for the grandmother who never had a microphone. The grandfather whose stories lived in the kitchen on Sunday mornings and nowhere else. The parent whose hard-won wisdom will not fit in an inheritance document.
What I keep returning to is this: the act of preserving a story also forces you to decide what matters. You cannot capture everything. You have to choose. And that choosing is not a small exercise.
One Question to Sit With
If the people who made you who you are were gone tomorrow, and someone you loved could ask them one question — what would that question be, and is the answer anywhere anyone could find it?
About Miles Spencer
Miles Spencer is CEO and a founder of Reflekta.ai, a Soul Tech company that turns family stories into spontaneous, dynamic digital connections. A three exit entrepreneur, investor, and storyteller, he is also the author of A Line in the Sand, Havana Famiglia and former co-host of PBS’s MoneyHunt.
Links
Website: https://reflekta.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milesspencer/
Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@richersoul
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Any financial advice is for educational purposes only and you should consult with an expert for your specific needs.
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