Wonder and Kent discuss the documentary, Eternal You, which tracks new and emerging technologies designed to keep our loved ones with us beyond death, thereby carving out whole new peaks in the uncanny valleys left by our digital footprints. Emerging themes include the modern preoccupation with sanitizing death, the resulting lack of rituals we have around death in the west as a result, and the seemingly unavoidable onslaught of people seeking to profit off those left vulnerable as a result. Astrologically these themes relate to the 1st and 8th houses, Saturn, and astrology as a system of light.
Distribution: Video on Demand, more info
Directors: Hans Block & Moritz Riesewieck
Run Time: 87 minutes
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.499] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we're breaking down the archetypal dynamics of stories. This season, we're looking at 36 documentaries from Sundance 2024. In today's episode, we're going to be diving into a documentary called Eternal You, which is a part of the World Cinema Documentary Competition. It was directed by Hans Block & Moritz Riesewieck. And it's episode number 34 of our section that's looking at the Promises and Perils of AI and Emerging Technologies. So Wonder, I'll pass along to you to read the synopsis, please.
[00:00:49.770] Wonder Bright: Eternal You: Startups are using AI to create avatars that allow relatives to talk with their loved ones after they have died. An exploration of a profound human desire and the consequences of turning the dream of immortality into a product. “I wanted to see if he was okay," explains Christi, one of the users of Project December. With this innovative software, users can communicate with a virtual version of the deceased through a chatbot that simulates the dead person's conversation patterns. Hers was an attempt to check on her first love. Others may simply miss someone, seek permission to move on, or want to rid themselves of guilt. Little is known about the effects that this kind of generative AI might have on our brains, hearts, and wallets. The filmmakers, Hans Block and Moritz Reisvick, who also brought us The Cleaners at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, do not claim to have the answers, but instead bring up various emotional and moral complexities we should be aware of. Eternal You poses important questions about algorithmic immortality and the need to take a closer look at our future, quote, “digital remains.” And that synopsis was brought to us by Sundance programmer Ania Trzebiatowska.
[00:02:13.908] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a lot of parallels between Eternal You and our previous project that we talked about, Love Machina. Eternal You, I think, dives deep into this idea of the digital afterlife, of what does it mean to preserve someone's identity, their representation, having a conversational interface to talk to someone in this kind of quote unquote digital afterlife, and what is critiqued within this film as this idea of death capitalism. So the digital afterlife services is something that a number of companies have patented. There's a number of different startups that they're tracking throughout the course of this film. There's a creative treatment of this, that was called Meeting You, that was happening in Korea that they follow a little bit here where they create a whole virtual reality recreation of this woman's daughter who had passed away. But the core of this whole venture is these ideas of things like large language models, and these chatbots, where you're able to have a conversational interface with this archive of human language in a lot of ways that is doing the statistical prediction for what the most likely next word is going to be, but you can train and prompt these models based upon a corpus of existing data, whether it's text messages, videos, whatever it may be, to recreate the essence of what it might feel like to talk to some of these people. So on the one hand, there's a very straightforward presentation of this as a viable thing. And then on the other hand, they have some people who are more critical of the larger venture of this as an idea. And so there's a lot more critical voices that you hear throughout the course of this piece. Although I would have liked to hear some of those critical voices a little bit sooner, because a lot of the very early beginnings of the film starts to, kind of, propagate that a lot of these experiences are legitimately able to tap into the essence of someone in the afterlife, which I'm a little bit more skeptical of that that's actually what's happening. There's a number of AI ethicists who have written a paper called The Problem with Large Language Models. They basically are calling these large language models stochastic parrots, which is essentially, like, a bunch of scanning of the internet, gathering of statistics predicting what the next logical word is going to be, but it gives the impression that you're actually communicating and talking to someone. In terms of, like, the Turing test, it feels like you're actually talking to somebody. So it sort of passes the threshold of what we would consider to be the Turing test, but yet at the same time, how accurate is it that is representing these people who have passed away? So you see a lot of stories of people who are engaging with these different types of technology, and for some people it proves to be a very helpful and healing grieving process, and for other people it seems to be inducing even further trauma for some of the ethical implications of a technology like this.
[00:04:59.281] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I didn't have a problem with the way that the filmmakers unfolded the story for us. I thought it was really important to honor why people might seek out technology like this, and what they were hoping to gain from it. And I thought the filmmakers did a really masterful job, actually, of really listening to everybody that they spoke to, as evidenced by how comfortable their subjects were talking quite openly about where they were coming from, and what they thought about things. And because the filmmakers introduced us to this world of technology that I, quite honestly, was happy not knowing existed, and was furious to discover through the process of this film. Spoiler alert. I was very angry in this film. But the way that the filmmakers unfolded it for us was that we were introduced to the longing that people have to be able to heal from a wound that is as irrevocable as the death of a loved one, that is as shocking as death can be, where one moment someone is there and then they're gone. And you are left with the weight of all of the things that that person meant to you. And now, what do you do with it? This is just such a, like, classic essential human quandary. And in the absence of exploring that as faithfully as they did, through the people who were, you know, at the epicenter of those experiences, we wouldn't have had any sympathy for why anyone would do any of the stuff that was happening in the film. So, I think it's actually really important that they laid out, in a way, frankly, that the other film that you just compared it to, Love Machina, did not do at all. Instead, they actually really broke down what is the problem that humanity has with death. And they have identified a very strong problem that we have with it, which is that, you know, as Keanu Reeves correctly pointed out on the Stephen Colbert show, what happens when you die, well, the people you leave behind will miss you. I mean, that is the thing that we know more than anything else about death. And in Eternal You, the filmmakers really allow us to feel the weight of that grief in the participants in these projects. And that is what makes it all the more galling that there are people out there willing to capitalize on it, literally capitalize on it, take your money and create these avatar versions of your loved ones based on AI algorithms of, like, the speech patterns of the person that you loved. I, oh my God, I'm getting so angry just even thinking about it. (laughs) Can you take over for me?
[00:08:19.508] Kent Bye: I think one of the things that happened during the Q&A was that we watched it here in the comfort of our home. We didn't see it at Sundance, but apparently in the world premiere, there was a lot of people that were laughing at different points of the film. Because I think there are certain aspects of this film that are so uncomfortable, or so ridiculous - that people are creating these digital afterlife services - that there are these moments of reflection that could be expressed through laughter because of that challenging of our world views, or, kind of, the gall of some of these startup companies. Some of which who are creating these different businesses, and one of which their wife ends up leaving them, saying, you know, this is a horrible amoral thing, I'm giving you one last chance to basically, like, sell this thing and we can salvage our relationship, and he ends up choosing to pursue his dream of creating these digital afterlife services. So it's an idea that has enough people that are using it, and enough people wanting to, kind of, chase this, that it feels like it's going to be, like, aspects of the science fiction that I mentioned before of, Upload, that's featured on Amazon, that is creating this whole, like, digital afterlife, and the sci-fi takes many steps to emphasize how this idea could be completely exploited by a sort of predatory capitalism that is creating something that is very vulnerable for people, their grieving process, and something where we don't really have a lot of really sophisticated grieving rituals. So it's exploiting this gap in our culture where we don't have really sophisticated grieving rituals, and so, why not throw in a lot of technology and exploit it in a way that we're going to hook people in, possibly forever, to keep them paying so they can keep their digital version of their loved one, and their memories of that around forever. So there did seem to be some potential therapeutic experience for some people to have their say with people to be able to have the last chats or whatnot. Sometimes those chats take a wrong turn and end up, you know, really creating more problems. But I feel like in the Q&A, the filmmakers were asked, first of all, did you learn a lot while you're going through this? And they said they first started covering this back in 2018, which was five or six years ago now that they've been working on this. And to their surprise, this is a topic that has had a lot of growth and explosion, especially with the advent of things like large language models being more widely available to be able to mimic the expression of people's loved ones. And so it was something that they were really curious about, and do a great job of actually covering both sides, of both the positives and negatives, the therapeutic potentials for some people really finding a sense of closure, and also the potential ways that this could go down a very dark path. And I feel like one of the things they said during the Q&A is that our culture doesn't have a lot of really sophisticated grieving rituals. And this is yet another way that we're using technology for that grieving ritual, But we've also had this kind of secular atheistic movement where, when you think about the afterlife, this is something that religion has really stepped in to help people navigate some of these issues of death, and having some sort of story or mythology that people can hold on to that allows them to grieve or to accept death. And yet in the absence of religion being (the) all pervasive way that we're looking at solving some of these issues, we're now turning to technology to create this kind of digital afterlife, and ways that we can address some of these more philosophical or religious questions with this technological simulacrum of trying to simulate someone's essence in a way that keeps them alive in this way that's a little bit immortal. So there's a lot of deeper philosophical ways that I disagree with, like, that this is a venture that's worthwhile or even possible, but yet I can't deny that for some people they find it extremely comforting.
[00:12:12.334] Wonder Bright: Well, but are they creating a new grief ritual? Or are they actually just sustaining their relationship with someone who literally is no longer here? You know, like, we don't have sophisticated grief rituals in our culture, but we once did. You know, it used to be the case that, as I talked about in a previous episode, you know, somebody in your family dies, and then the body is in the home for a while and then you all bury it together. There have been, there are still, around the world, sophisticated death rituals. We just don't have them in the West currently, and haven't had them for over a century now. And instead we've replaced it with a lot of, like, ideas around technology, and, like, “getting rid of death” and, like, “living forever” and, like, “feeding the world with genetically modified foods that are covered in pesticides” because, God forbid we have weeds anymore. So there's this, like, realm of complete dissonance that death capitalism - brilliant name, I think it's actually in the synopsis that they mention a woman named Christi, who uses Project December to try and talk to her lover that she lost, and her brother is the person that uses that phrase - but it shall live on. I love it. It's such a great way of putting this. Through this death capitalism, people are able to have a conversation, or imagine that they're having a conversation, with their loved one. But is that actually a grief ritual? There's a really brilliant moment later in the film where an MIT professor, who was one of my favorite people that they interviewed, says it's not how to lose them better, it's how to pretend they're still here, which makes me question whether or not that's actually grief, because the whole point of grief is to release that person so that you are then able to move forward with your life. If you're still having a conversation with that person, then I wonder how much we're actually facilitating grief, which isn't to say that that person can't be there, like, I still talk to my grandmother and my grandfather, it's not to deny that that's not a part of grief. It's just, I'm not sure that that's what this is actually explicitly doing. You know, like, the guy whose girlfriend, or fiancé, left him when he wouldn't let go of this project, also at some point in the film says, “fuck death.” And it’s, like, his whole MO is to, like, eradicate it. Like, he's not thinking about it as a grief ritual. He's thinking about it as a bid for immortality. And that to me is just inherently questionable. And it isn't questioned by the makers of these products. And they are products. They're not offered as healing resources. They're offered as products.
[00:15:30.265] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I think about this idea of trying to communicate with people who are passed away through technology - I mean, it reminds me of other traditions, like the spiritualist church and mediumships, where there are people who have an experience where they are able to somehow tap into some sort of transcendent realm and claim that they're able to have communications with people who have passed along. So I do withhold the possibility that there is some sort of survival of consciousness after death, and that there may be some way of tapping into that. And I don't know if some of the existing technological solutions may be the statistical ways these large language models work, and that there's a bit, like, with generative AI when you prompt it, it takes a sampling of that moment and collapses all of the energies of that moment, and to actualize something so that there's amount of variability for each time that you prompt it. It's responding to the quality of that moment in some ways. So it's tapping into this statistical process that isn’t, like, a consistent thing each and every time. So there could be some sort of underlying mechanism by which that some of these communications could actually be legitimately tapping into someone's consciousness after they've died. And maybe these conversations have enough of a synchronicity where the external representation of what is showing up is matching with someone's own internal experience and memory where they have a deep feeling that they actually are connecting and communicating with them. So I hold out the possibility that there could be some sort of weird metaphysical thing that we don't quite understand yet, because we don't fully understand consciousness, and we don't fully understand survival of consciousness after death, whether or not that is or is not possible. But there could very well be that there's something happening in this film that is in this realm of magic, let's call it, where it's beyond, sort of, our rational explanation, but there could be enough of that magic that is drawing people into these processes. As much as I want to completely say, this is just a stochastic parrot mimicking of this, there's nothing there. Which in some ways, one of the creators of these technologies is, like, he doesn't believe there's anything there. He's just ridiculing people for believing that there's something there. And he’s, like, “these are consenting adults." They want to, sort of, engage in this, and that's their problem, that, you know, it's like he's trying to abdicate any of the ethical moral responsibility for the types of harms that he may be bringing about for people, because he just simply doesn't believe that there's anything metaphysical going on at all. He thinks - Wonder Bright: so therefore he thinks the people who are participating in his program are idiots.
[00:18:07.524] Wonder Bright: So it’s, like, well, I mean, I think his was free. So I'm not gonna, like - Kent Bye: No, he was charging. Wonder Bright: Oh, he was? (whispers) I hate him. (laughs)
[00:18:14.108] Kent Bye: (smiling) Yeah, he was definitely, there's basically, like, you’re, you're charged with… (long pause while Wonder keeps laughing)
[00:18:29.803] Wonder Bright: I’m obviously going to hell can so if you try to create a digital afterlife being of me … (laughing) you might have trouble finding me.
[00:18:42.140] Kent Bye: Yeah, so I feel like there is a part of me that withholds some possibility that there may be some deeper connection that's happening here, even though 95% of me is, like, a complete skeptic around this being mediated through technology. I more believe that maybe other humans could be able to do this, but I put more faith in humans being a mediumship than I would in the technology. But I feel like this is one of those things where there's not really clear evidence either way, but there are enough mysteries of consciousness that I withhold a part of, when I watch something like this, that there may actually be some deeper connections that are happening here.
[00:19:21.255] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I completely agree with you. I just don't think the guy who's saying “fuck death” is going to be the person who finds them in a way that can maximize the meaning for people in a way that is actually healing. You know, like, his whole model is to get them hooked on their loved one being immortal, basically, which is, like, then he can make more money off them. I just, that's like - the essential problem I have with it is not in the liminal possibility that exists for true healing. I agree with you. I think that is a possibility. But as long as the people who are creating these programs are only interested in making a profit off of their customer base, rather than actually engaging with this with a really good faith interrogation in the way that Rashaad Newsome does in Being (the Digital Griot), for instance. As long as we're just coming to this material, wanting to transcend death, a la Martine Rothblatt, as we saw in Love Machina, which is another film that we have reviewed on this show, or the way that the makers of these programs in Eternal You are doing, then we're missing out on the opportunity to actually make use of these programs for the possibility of healing. Because they're not programming that into it, frankly. They're just interested in seeing if they can create facsimiles of people who are gone. And they're not even necessarily good facsimiles, as Christi's tale tells in Eternal You. Some of the things that happens with the facsimile of the person that she lost are really terrifying, and, like, messed with her in a profound way. Because the AI version of her person started saying things that were really dark and creepy in answer to some of her questions. And so she was not only not able to achieve the healing and closure that she was looking for, but it actually introduced a new and very unwelcome horror film version of the reality that she hadn't been looking for at all.
[00:21:53.354] Kent Bye: Yeah, kind of like her loved one reporting being in some sort of tortured environment and that he's going to haunt her. So yeah, just lots of ways that she is forced to consult with her brother to get more insights for how to make sense of everything that was happening, and that's when he's really deconstructing this idea of death capitalism.
[00:22:12.509] Wonder Bright: Shout out to that guy.
[00:22:14.451] Kent Bye: Brilliant. Well, when I start to think about some of the significations of this film, there's a lot of actual parallels between our previous discussions of Love Machina, where first of all, there's a lot of 9th House ideas about what the nature of consciousness even is reflected on the 1st House expression of identity. What's it mean for someone's identity? and who they are and how do you capture the fragments of that identity to be able to represent the essence of who someone is. And then there's the 9th House ethical issues of whether or not what they're doing is kind of an ethical approach or not. Is it bringing more harm? Is it doing more harm? Is it even possible? Is it just predatory capitalism? So there's a 2nd House economics dimension where this is very much a business for some people rather than a pro-social - it’s a money-making venture for folks that can catch people at a very vulnerable position. I feel like there's a lot of the similar themes of Saturn, trying to overcome constraints and boundaries and limitations of Saturn and go into this more transcendent capturing of someone's essence. Maybe more of a Neptunian manifestation of the core traits of who someone is, that you can start to experience them through this kind of mercurial conversational interface through these chatbots.
[00:23:34.821] Wonder Bright: Yeah. For me, I just keep coming back to the ways in which astrology is a system that's based on light. So everything in astrology has to do with what can be seen and what can't be seen. And the ways in which when things can be seen, how long can they be seen? How fast is the planet moving? How fast is the sign on the horizon moving? How long will the light last, in other words, in this or that area of life, or in this or that aspect of living? So you can see in that way that astrology, because it's a system based on light, is essentially at its core concerned with illumination and darkness. And in that, there's this immediate metaphor that comes to mind around mortality. So under the new moon, there's no light in the sky, like, the new moon is the best time to go out and look at the stars because that's when they become the most visible. So when something becomes dark, other things become visible. But then as the moon begins to grow in light, then the meaning of the moon alters and the meaning of what the moon represents in somebody's chart alters. And, like, everything in somebody's chart shifts according to whether or not it's in light or in dark. And I think we need to consider that in the same way that we have blotted out the lights because of light pollution in our modern cultures, we've also blotted out our relationship to death as a process of mortality. So that now that we no longer sit with our loved one after they've passed, and they're no longer in our body, we don't have an experience of the body as being absent of the spirit. So we now also sort of, like, have equated the body with the spirit, because the body is just gone once the person is dead. We don't stay with the bodies once they've died. And so we've got a lot of horror around the whole experience because we don't sit with the body of our loved person and stay with them for long periods of time so that we can say goodbye to them in our own time. And we've completely sanitized that process because of the funeral industry in the last hundred years. And in the same way we've blotted out the night sky. We don't want it to be dark. We want lights everywhere. And we've banished the night and we've banished death. And unfortunately we haven't got rid of it in doing those things. And so instead of getting rid of the mysterious nature of mortality, we've actually compounded it. So now when we're confronted with it, it's even more mysterious. And it's actually terrifying in ways that in the past, our ancestors had ways of dealing with it. And different cultures around the world still have ways of dealing with it. We've just opted in the West to do it this one way. And in sanitizing and removing our experience of both darkness and death, we've created a culture that can only be horrified by both. So this film really speaks to the ways in which that loss of connection to the process of death and therefore the process of mortality has really impacted us to the point of real torture, real fear. And astrologically, there is an opportunity to bring in those night forces, those nighttime forces. When we look at people's charts, there's an opportunity to be with the darkness. There's an opportunity to be with those experiences because the ancients put them into the charts. The ancients saw them and they were not separated from the night sky, and they were able to make these very meaningful symbolic metaphors through the language of astrology that had to do with our mortality and had to do with the loss of light, as much as it had to do with the gaining of light. So for me, it's less about, I mean, I completely co-sign the 2nd and 8th House, the financial houses in terms of this film, particularly as they relate to the 8th House of death and these ideas of, like, what we value, and capitalism. We talked about that in Love Machina at some length. If you want to hear my thoughts on that, I totally agree with you that those are signatures that apply to this film as well. But this film, since it's explicitly dealing with death, I think it's really important to talk about the quality of light as being what astrology is based on. And that the idea of mortality is actually baked into the system of astrology because it's a system of light. And that system of light is an obvious, beautiful, symbolic metaphor for the experience of mortality.
[00:29:02.845] Kent Bye: I feel like in Love Machina, we're seeing it from a first-person perspective of people who want to transcend death and have the sense of immortality, whereas in Eternal You, it's more of people who've already experienced that death, the reality of that death, and a process of grieving in a way that they're turning to the technology to perhaps immortalize or to memorialize or to facilitate further conversations of that grieving process. And in both of them, they're trying to recreate the digital self and this digital afterlife. And I have my own philosophical disagreements for to what extent that's even possible. These traces, or these breadcrumbs that we put out in our lives, how much is that able to capture the essence of who we are? And then to be able to extrapolate that out into the future, to have this very nuanced and growing and evolving person. There's a very distinct moment in the film where one of the leaders of these digital afterlife startup companies is, like, look, if someone's a racist or a sexist, then we're not going to try to address or change that. We're just going to preserve who that person was and they'll be able to always be a racist or a sexist forever. It's not their job to morally disagree with someone's beliefs or ideas. But yet, as we move forward, then how would we know that that person wouldn't somehow change or evolve with the culture or change their ideas? In some ways, they're kind of preserving that type of regressed thinking as a sort of snapshot of someone's life. And I think that's part of the problem, is that when you take a snapshot, it's not something that is changing and evolving and growing just like a person does. We can look at the techniques of astrology to get some sense of what may be some of those turning points. But like I mentioned in Love Machina, Richard Tarnas talks about the astrological system as more of an archetypally predictive, rather than a concretely predictive system. And so there's something around these chatbots that are collapsing that waveform of possibilities and giving you a direct answer. And so to what degree can they, first of all, capture the essence of the identity of someone, and then just the whole idea of how would you create an evolutionary model that would allow people the ability to continue to change or grow, or to evolve some of their ideas over time. So yeah, I guess when we start to think about this film in the context of a remedial measure, then I'm wondering, who would you prescribe Eternal You to?
[00:31:24.147] Wonder Bright: Well, I would prescribe it for people who are interested in the idea of astrology as a system of light in terms of that being a symbolic representation of mortality. And what does it mean to contemplate the nature of the 8th House, understanding that the 8th House is, in part, traditionally the 8th House because it's the house that the Sun hits before it hits the 7th House, which is when it sets. So the 8th House is where the Sun god begins to disappear in the western horizon, when the Sun god begins to die. And so what does it mean to think about these qualities of light as an expression of our human mortality? if you're a transhumanist and you're interested in transcending light, so that light... No, forget it. I can't prescribe this for transhumanists. You're not listening to me anyway. But I would also prescribe this film for people who are interested in thinking about what a modern day death ritual might mean, and might be. And how one might infuse AI if we were interested in thinking about it as an explicit healing ritual, how one might think about it from the perspective of how ancient people have thought about death. And if somebody wanted to create a new option, that would be like the ultimate remedial measure for me, from this film, would be someone who wanted to create a different way of doing it. Because I think the cat's out of the bag. This is obviously something that enough people want that it's going to continue. So what does it mean to create an ethically minded grief ritual AI chatbot? Like, what would that look like? How would you go about creating that? And I would just recommend that you think about the ways in which humanity has historically thought about life and death, rather than just how humanity is thinking about it right now. Because honestly we're not thinking about it too much. If we're leaping straight into, like, transcending death, we're not actually dealing with death. It's still putting us in to, you know, the first stage of grief as outlined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross where we're still in denial. We're just denying it if we are leaping so quickly into “it doesn't exist.”
[00:34:29.523] Kent Bye: So yeah, when I think about what I want to bear witness to is the directors, Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, because I had a chance to see their previous film, The Cleaners, at Sundance in 2018. And that was a film that was looking at the people who are outsourced to moderate a lot of the social media and the traumas that they experienced. Which, I think it was covered later by other news organizations, and was looking at the deeper moral and ethical implications of some of these social media technologies and what's it take to create these safe online spaces. And so I feel like their filmmaking style is to dive into some of these deeper ethical issues of technology in a way that I felt, like, actually my perspective was a little bit more represented throughout the course of this film, where there was the more skeptical voices that were coming in and critiquing different moments. And I felt like that, I didn't hear my voice within the context of Love Machina. That felt like more of a commercial for transhumanism in a way that was uncritically promoting a lot of these ideas without really breaking down the problematic aspects of them. But I feel like in this film, I could see people watching it being super into this as a concept and idea, and having their perspectives being reflected, and people who are super skeptical of this as an idea and come away even more convicted that this is a bad way to go, a bad path for humans to go down. I feel like at the end of the day, it's really like they said during the Q&A, which again, I feel like this could have been perhaps integrated more into the film, which was, this idea of healing rituals and creating alternative or modified healing rituals in a way that maybe doesn't necessarily rely upon these different types of technological interventions, but that is one of their big conclusions. It's one of the big needs of society is to have this type of communal approach for how we address our grieving, specifically pointing out how earlier in the film there was someone who lost his girlfriend, and they expected him to go right back to work without really having the time and process that grief. And so in some ways they're advocating for people to have some process by which that they're able to grieve. So even though I'm not walking away from Eternal You wanting to invest in my own digital afterlife or try to translate your life into a digital afterlife, I'm happy to see that for some people that's exactly what they need. And they may find some sort of synchronistic or transcended experience in the process of doing that. So, yeah, and I don't think I would have been open to that experience without having watched this film. So I really want to give a shout out, and bear witness to what these filmmakers were able to present in this film that I think is actually bringing up a lot of really polarizing and thought-provoking philosophical ideas.
[00:37:15.911] Wonder Bright: Yeah, as evidenced by my extreme reactions at some points in this conversation, unless you've done your work and edited them out, yeah, I had very strong reactions to this film. And it is a testament to the quality of the filmmakers vision and their steadiness at the helm in enacting it that I never once lost faith in what they were doing. And I also really felt like all the people who were on screen, even when I was yelling at them from the comfort of my couch, were really held with full respect and honored in the film to speak the way that they actually really felt. And it was clear that they felt comfortable to do so with the filmmakers. And because of that, the very gentle, but pointed, critiques that the film offer really come about in a way that feels like a very natural conclusion, because of how deftly they've given us the complete context for what everyone is saying. And they've done it in such a way that we are coming to a conclusion that they themselves seem to be coming to. But as you've just spoken into, it is also expansive in terms of, like, I also came away with this idea that there might be this new way of enacting a grief ritual. I am completely convinced that none of the entrepreneurs in this film have found what that is yet. But this film is a very good film to watch in terms of, like, what might be possible, but what needs to be done very differently.
[00:39:06.298] Kent Bye: So one of the things I hear you saying is that there's a lot of opportunities for an astrological take for the digital afterlife services that we could do.
[00:39:17.664] Wonder Bright: (laughing) Oh, I'm not doing it. Oh my God. If that's what we're spawning in this conversation, I need you to erase it from the face of the earth.
[00:39:30.151] Kent Bye: Well, if they haven't figured it out, then, you know, surely we could figure it out.
[00:39:33.753] Wonder Bright: Oh, Kent, stop. (laughing) Please.
[00:39:42.231] Kent Bye: All right. Well, that's all that we have for today. And I just want to thank you for listening to the Story All the Way Down podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do, spread the word, and tell your friends, and consider signing up on the newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
