Death in the Digital Age

**Kara Swisher** (0:11)
Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. Part of the reason I got interested in longevity and aging is because, like so many people in tech whom I've covered, have become obsessed with living forever, like literally. There's a grandness to everything they do, so this is no different. I also think it's really interesting to think about what survives you, what are memories in the digital age? Can you change and transform them?
We think it's really important to talk about those topics, but I'm not a fan of the idea that you should live forever. The only way to hack death is to remember and memorialize those who have lived. In the final episode of Hacking Longevity series here on the podcast, we're talking about that way of thinking about death, preserving the memories of those who've died and the messy humanity that comes from dealing with death. Later, I'm talking to Danielle Crittenden, who has written the brilliant and deeply empathetic memoir, Dispatches from Grief, A Mother's Journey Through the Unthinkable, about the death of her daughter, Miranda. She's preserved the memory of her daughter in a beautiful way. And we start the episode with technology that is preserving memories, of course. I'm joined by Valorie Jones, who I met in the course of my reporting about aging and longevity. Valorie is the CTO of a company called StoryFile, which is a tech company that uses AI to create interactive video experiences. They can create the digital twin of a person, which they did for me, the Caratarr. And the Caratarr exists. They put in all manner of things. They taped me. They used stuff, the documents that were about me, things I've said. And it created a really strange and also uncanny experience. I can't say I loved it, but it was interesting and you can see where all of this is going. And I will tell you, the Caratarr got smart every second I spent with her. But I'm not so sure I wanted to meet my great-grandchildren. We get into the tech, of course, but also the ethics of this and how it could end up being used in the future. Sometimes for bad and sometimes hopefully for good. It's a good conversation, so stick around.
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Valorie, thanks for coming on On.

**Valorie Jones** (3:08)
I'm glad, thanks for inviting me.

**Kara Swisher** (3:10)
Yeah, thank you. It's good to see you again. Last time we talked, there was a weird creature near us, around us, which was Kara Swisher, who I didn't much like, Kara Swisher the Avatar. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

**Valorie Jones** (3:20)
I didn't think she was weird. I thought she was nice. She was like you.

**Kara Swisher** (3:25)
She got better. Yeah, she got better. Let me explain. This is an avatar of me that you had trained on things I've written and said, I called her the Caratar.
You're the only person on Earth, I believe, who had faced two of me at once, which is quite an accomplishment and I appreciate it.
It was interesting. For those who haven't seen the series, it's actually a 3D version of me that was trained on me. We did some questions and everything else, and then you did other things. I want to talk about it a little bit. I want to start with that experience, which was interesting and a little uncanny and honestly even unnerving. I've described it a bit, but I want to have you fill in the details of how it works.

**Valorie Jones** (4:03)
Yeah, thanks for that intro. Yeah, so what we did with you is blending two different technologies. We do interviews with real people, trying to convert them into these digital doubles. That was started off when we were interviewing Holocaust survivors working with the USC Shoah Foundation.
The problem we're trying to solve there is that, how do we keep these stories alive for 10, 20, 50 years from now when you're not going to be able to go into a museum and have a docent or someone volunteering there to talk to? By interviewing real people, we could then search those videos to play back conversations. You feel like you're learning these real stories. In your case, we actually brought you in, we interviewed you for about two hours, a lot less than we might do with a veteran or Holocaust survivor. The second aspect is what we call the look-alike technology. That's using a generative video and a more large language model to simulate videos on the fly.