Transcript:

Ben Smith:

Welcome everybody to The Retirement Success in Maine Podcast. My name is Ben Smith. Allow me to introduce my co-hosts, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to my Elon Musk, Curtis Worcester and Austin Minor. How are you guys doing today?

Curtis Worcester:

Good, Ben.

Austin Minor:

Good.

Ben Smith:

Awesome. I know we're talking technology today, so I thought I'd do a little technology slant with our introduction. So why not drop some of the famous innovators in the tech space? So Austin, why are we talking technology today?

Austin Minor:

Well, Ben, we hear a bunch how our clients are sifting through old pictures, VHS, tapes, DVDs, YouTube videos, et cetera. And are looking for a way to keep memories alive over time. But it all seems unorganized and not coordinated to the people. We ultimately want to give these memories and their context to, which is our families, enter MyArkit, an online digital archival company, preserving the legacy of loved ones and friends.

As we live our lives digitally cradle to grave and we save them to devices or clouds or social media sites that can delete you, sensor you or may get lost due to faulty equipment or careless handling. We have thousands of pictures and videos on our devices that get clicked away with no story behind the images that give them real meaning and emotion. Imagine your great, great grandkids being able to bring up your life in your words and thoughts. People want to be remembered. So this is exactly what this show is about. How do we preserve our memories for generations to come?

Curtis Worcester:

That's right, Austin, and you teed me up here with MyArkit. So our next guest is actually the principal and CEO of MyArkit.com, where his seeds of the business were planted many years ago when actually his two-year-old daughter was slated to go into children's hospital for open heart surgery. He rented a VHS camcorder. Some of you listening may not know what that is, but this is back in 1990 when this was going on.

So he rented that VHS camcorder so that his family would have some precious memories of her just in case. So all went well. Thankfully some years later in the late '90s on a road trip back to Iowa to visit relatives, he then sat down with his dad and again with a video camera, asked him questions about his life. Years later, after his dad had passed away, our guest wanted to hand down these memories to his kids and then to their kids.

So he looked around, they had many photo albums, and of course now being in the age of computers, we have thousands of pictures and videos all over the place on phones, tablets, clouds, cloud storage, all of that. So there was really not a good option to take a picture, add a story to it, and then hand it down for generations to come. So I think that's where MyArkit came from. So with that background, please join me in welcoming Jim Gebhardt to The Retirement Success in Maine Podcast. Jim, thank you so much for coming on our show today.

Jim Gebhardt:

Oh, thanks for having me on. Thank you. This gives me great; I've always wanted to work this in with retirement, with the material legacy, but we also have a huge amount of emotional memory legacy that we really have to tap into and find a place where to put it.

Ben Smith:

Yeah, Jim, I think that you're exactly right. I think as we go through different stages of our lives and we start thinking about in that transition, well, "Where am I in life?" And especially retirement I think is a very big retrospective time and to think about your life, your legacy where we are, but also looking ahead maybe your parents and your grandparents or even going down the road there and saying, "What was their life like?" And looking at their introspection too.

And I think that lends to this whole conversation we're going to have today about preserving not only just us and who we are in our essence and making sure that lessons that we've learned over lifetimes, that we're shared with the people that we love, but also this concept of making sure that who we are is not lost, that we're not forgotten, and that I think that maybe we live on past ourselves, which is a really big theme. So I'm really excited for you to come on and talk to us about that today. But with all of our shows, we always like to start with a little bit about you, Jim, in terms of who you're and get to know you a little bit. So love to hear a little bit about your background and how it's helped you with building MyArkit.com.

Jim Gebhardt:

Oh, my background is just being... I used to be a commercial photographer. I used to be a mechanic. Last 20 years I was a residential electrician and basically, I grew up in the Midwest in Iowa, and you always had the big monster photo albums your grandmas would take out. And it was always nifty to have them point at a picture and tell a story type of thing.

So I've always had that in the back of my brain about stories of memories and Amazon, I'm getting older now, I'm retired doing this business, which I really love because I love talking to people and all you do is ask them a little bit of a memory about something, "What'd you do on your 18th birthday?" Or something like that and boom, off they go on a memory. And that's just how I'd love spending my time now.

Austin Minor:

That's great. So we heard a little in the introduction about your personal connection to MyArkit, but what was your aha moment, why there's a market for storing memories and generational electronic files?

Jim Gebhardt:

Oh, it wasn't really a aha moment. It was more of a aha. It was a time delay to where you're sitting back and this is back in probably the early 2000 when technology had to catch up a little bit with this idea because we can download with a dump truck, but we upload with a teaspoon. So the more and more and more I started looking at, "What's this? What's that? What's doing this?" The more and more problems I found with I put it into this cloud, if you don't touch it goes away.

If I put it into this over here, well they might not like it for some reason and delete you. So basically, there wasn't really anything out there. So out of necessity, I started brainstorming on, "How to do this?" And I finally knocked around enough and found a really good guy that was an IT guy that used to work with Disney.

And I got together with him, and we started knocking around, "How can we do this, how we do that?" And over the last couple of years, we've been slowly implementing it, getting it better and better and better. I've gotten other services attached to it now, and I also have just a whole bunch more things going on in this brain about more stuff I want to do to it, family trees and all that stuff.

Austin Minor:

That's great. So for our listeners and for us, could you just tell us on a broad level, how does my MyArkit actually work? Could you break that down a little for us?

Jim Gebhardt:

Oh, it's super simple. Basically, you buy your lifetime account, which is 10 gigabytes. So now, you've bought 10 gigabytes of storage. And what we don't do is we don't let everybody go, "Oh, I'm going to take my phone and download my 10,000 pictures up into MyArkit." We don't let you do that. You do one thing at a time, that's one memory at a time, so you can put one picture up there.

We also have the ability to put an audio story to that picture, which is really, really great because I hate typing and doing stuff, but when you put my picture up there, the first car I had, I talked about that for 10 minutes. And so then you basically put a story to it. You put little, short videos, you just basically type in your daily scribe, we call almost like a diary and then you Arkit, upload into your own personal account.

And from that account, you can make albums like a wedding album, pets, anything like that. You make separate albums. Then you also get to choose by inviting them to come onto your MyArkit site who wants to see your stuff so you can get to choose back and forth. It could be very private; you can just make it public if you wanted to. And then also the big thing is if a person passes away, we have an executor that will basically turn your account into a memorial account, which basically locks everything you've put in there where nobody can delete anything, but they can still add stuff to your site.

Ben Smith:

Jim, I just want to ask a question that is obviously people doing one at a time in terms of obviously there must be some idea about all right, their images are typically X file size and then we have an audio file that we're attaching to it. So use your example of, "Hey, here's the car I had when I was 18 years old and I'm telling a big story about it."

So obviously thinking about my memories and if I want to catalog them either on a daily basis or I'm trying to put together these are the meaningful things I want to share in my life. Is there based on that 10 gigabytes, a typical experience like, "Hey, people are typically with the audio and the image." Or whatever that might be with it. It's about 1,000 memories or it's 10 memories. What's the size that's corresponding too typically?

Jim Gebhardt:

Oh, as myself and as an example, I probably got four or 500 entries in mind, and I probably got four gigabytes taken care of. And also, we have the ability to boom, add storage, you add another two gigabytes at a time, so it seems like you're getting used up. Pop another two in there and keep rolling along.

Ben Smith:

Because I know we don't have a lot of our listeners might not be techie enough to say, "Hey, well audio files are typically excise." And all that. So it's helpful to give a context to, "Hey, if I do this well how many more memories am I going to do? Is it like five? Is it 500? Is it 5,000?" Just appreciate that.

Curtis Worcester:

Jim, I want to keep going a little bit talking about MyArkit.com. Obviously, you gave us a little insight to Austin's question, but I just want to ask how have you grown as a company and where are you at today? How many people are you helping with these memories and what are some future plans for growth? I know you teased a little bit of a family tree thing there.

Jim Gebhardt:

One of the great services we've been also just got done programming here in the last six months has been called Events. So if you go to events.MyArkit.com, you get the same concept of where you buy a 10-gigabyte space, but now you incorporate it to an event and a perfect idea that it would be like a wedding. And now everybody used to have little cameras and stuff on the tables and things like that. Well, now you basically send it your wedding invitation out to this event and that person just signs up to the event with no charge, but then everybody participates in the event.

Now, you can have people's stories with the events from way before the wedding, after the wedding, you get to have the whole story of the wedding on that event and then the moderator, whoever gets to buys the event, moderates what goes into it. So events is great for that yearbooks, things like that. Going to college, we just expanded our help services on our help page called Archipedia. So we're really expanding our how-to videos. And so people get a little bit all overwhelmed when they want to start this because they have so many things, but it's like that thousand-mile journey. You got to take that first step.

Curtis Worcester:

That's right.

Jim Gebhardt:

And you got to make it simple, and you got to remember this is for a lifetime. So if you do a little bit now, good, you may wait a month or more to do a little bit more. That's fine. You're going to have it forever. It's not a monthly fee.

Curtis Worcester:

I like that.

Ben Smith:

Nice. Well, Jim, I can see why especially you're doing it from an event perspective, I can see why you might want a moderator. I'm just thinking to maybe a few weddings I've been to and the best man may be telling too much of what happened at a bachelor party or something that you maybe don't want to preserve as much, but that's really important. I think that's really a neat idea.

Obviously when I to talk about in terms of today's show, the concept being how do we preserve our memories for generations to come. It's not just preserving them today, but if we go, "Hey, if it's 2023, how am I going to preserve this till 2123? How 2223 preserving it really for hundreds of years is a concept that we want to get into. But obviously before we go forward, I want to go backwards.

So I'd love to hear a little bit about just the history that you've gone through about how do we pass down images of ourselves? How is that backwards? What have we been doing with that in terms of giving these memories and getting these going forward? What have we been doing as a human race to do that going forward and how has that evolved to today?

Jim Gebhardt:

Well, today we're digital. That's what really makes it, we can take advantage of our digital technology now. We didn't have that really 10, 15 years ago and actually within the last five years it's actually become much, much better. We used to pass on things like you get the family portrait or the painting way back before photography, everybody had a painting or something, or actually had a lot of people that were very eloquent writers. We just don't seem to have that anymore.

So we had things we were passing on, but except the normal Joe Lunchbox, let's say, doesn't have that capability of writing his own biography or his own memoirs type of thing. Now, we have the ability in this digital age to take advantage of that where anybody can have a lifetime account and start putting away those little bits and pieces of their life.

And it could be anybody, look at Anne Frank's diary, we would never would've found that or even know what was in her diary from a little girl over in Germany if somebody hadn't stumbled upon it. And it was a fantastic insight to what her life was like. A lot of people out there have that type of feeling in their life that they want to put it down and be able to pass it on.

Austin Minor:

Yeah, that makes complete sense. So you mentioned obviously everything's digital now, so I'm just thinking about options for storing our photos, videos and documents. So how are people doing that today? What options are there? How much do they cost and where do you think that they fall short relative to MyArkit?

Jim Gebhardt:

They all go buy, buy. If you're not touching them, no matter what you buy, no matter what you put in there, they go buy, buy. And or if some systems will say, "Oh, we'll just keep it forever." But then it's like, "Oh, I had a friend of mine that was on one of those other platforms." I hate using names, but somebody hacked his account, used his name and all of his contacts, everything went by, it went gone and he had to start all over again.

My business plan and what we're doing is we want to make enough money coming into the business to where basically it's just we're going to put it over into what we call the Principal Investment Group. I call it the PIG to where that money is there. And the only thing it does is basically pays storage costs and we're going to have storage costs, we're going to go through Amazon Web Services, and then we're also going to double up and go through Iron Mountain. And then eventually within Iron Mountain we're also going to do a cold storage, which everything then gets to be digitized to archival DVDs to where things can sit there for a hundred years and not degrade or anything.

It doesn't have to become a magnetic form. So we're going to try to have it where it's extremely safe in perpetuity because we're a C corporation, like I said, a lot of them... I can't even think of another one really, that if you put your stuff up into a cloud because they expect you, "Oh, we'll give you free cloud storage space." If they don't hear from you, they say figure, "Hey, you're not around. We're going to open up that space." Or, "We have it to where you buy the space. You own the space. This is your space. You get to do with it what you want."

Curtis Worcester:

That's really good insight, Jim. And I think the premise I know I have, and I think we all probably have this is I think we're constantly just taking photos and videos with our phones, and you mentioned it. I know I pay for a monthly cloud storage on my phone because I don't want it clogging up all my phone memory. And so can you just talk about how this premise of everyone living through their phones, it seems like with photos and videos. How that has changed the digital storage market if you will. How has that evolved and how do you think it'll continue to evolve?

Jim Gebhardt:

That I think will probably just become easier for bigger, easier, more freer type thing. But it's not as expensive as when it's free. So when you have that capability of all the storage space they have out there and people with phones and things like that, I have a lot. So many people sit there, I got to get all that storage. We have our life where we take it. We take that little glimpse; we have fun with it. It's like having a shoebox full of pictures we used to have you go to the old photo mats and things like that. Some old people will know what that means.

And then you look at the picture, you explain it, you go through them a little bit, then you them put them in the shoebox and you might not see them again for 20 years. So we're doing that with our phones now to where you're going to have all these pictures on your phone. Well, what MyArkit wants you to do is... Someplace you're going to have a great time doing something or a picture or whatever, that one spot, okay, boom, take that picture, boom.

Put a story to it, a memory to it, Arkit, up into MyArkit save that. You can heap the other stuff is very important to keeping clouds or have your backup. I have backup drives on my computer. That's always great to have now because there's some stuff you still want to find right now. The good important like the cream of the crop, the prime rib of your life, let's say, Arkit.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah. I love that.

Ben Smith:

So Jim, obviously technology is constantly changing. You talked about this a little bit going from VHS to DVDs or there's probably a laser disc in there as well, but DVDs are then digital and getting on and on, which is-

Jim Gebhardt:

Later they're smaller. Getting smaller.

Ben Smith:

Yes, exactly. And to SD cards and all these things. Obviously, this has only been 30 years and you think about thousands of years that we've been doing a lot of this in terms of civilization here. So going forward where, geez, what 30 years we've gone from analog VHS perspective over to completely digital, like a complete game changer. So just thinking about your obviously business here is very much about technology, how do you envision keeping up with this ever-improving technology over generations? Because not only just 30 years, the whole thing changed, but what about in the next 200 where things just continue to just move at a more rapid pace?

Jim Gebhardt:

Well, what we do is since we do not store anything on site, we use cloud services with Amazon Web Service and say when we get bigger, we're going to use Iron Mountain and stuff like that. Those are the innovators, those are the people that are going to be right at the top of their game of innovating, putting new servers in, new storage devices, keeping up with everything. And what we're going to do is we have our pile of money that we have over in the PIG that if we have to do anything on our end of the spectrum, boom, we'll have the capability to do it and we just keep cruising right along.

Austin Minor:

Oh, that's interesting. On the side of cybersecurity, obviously it's a really big deal and I know many of us, especially in our audience, are concerned about this. How have you thought about risk and protecting these very sensitive files for your clients?

Jim Gebhardt:

I was talking with my IT guy the other day. He said, "Well, besides going through, we just don't take with the small guys." We work with our main host is Bluehost, then we go through Amazon Web Services, and we'll be going through Iron Mountain, which basically uses 95% of the Fortune 1000 companies. So we try to use the best of the best security wise.

And then even my IT guy was saying, "We need to probably sometime in the future here, hire a white knight hacker..." I think he called it something like that, "Where we hire people to literally try to hack in and do something." But since everything is individually put into their accounts and you have to pay to get... Well, not pay to get into it, but you're buying your accounts, and we try to have multiple backups, even if they got into one site to do something, they're not going to destroy your site. You're still going to have stuff in somewhere.

Curtis Worcester:

Sure, yeah, no, it sounds like it's clearly something that's like you said, top of mind and you guys are continuing to evolve there. And just a general question, I think, not to single out our audience too much, but we are talking about Retirement Success. And sometimes Retirement Success and being tech-savvy don't always go hand in hand. So can you just talk about how you and your company have helped people bridge that technology gap or technology hurdle so that they can utilize your services to pass on to the future generations?

Jim Gebhardt:

We try to keep it simple. The KISS method. My father-in-law, he's got to have the biggest fingers in the world. When he hits a key, I swear he hits four keys at once. And what we try to do is try to keep it simple to where you want to upload something, you just go to these big, huge click, upload a picture, click drag the picture over click. So we don't have advertise or any of all that kind of stuff that's going to be inundating on your site.

So we try to make it simple. We're also having some videos and stuff I want to incorporate here pretty soon about how to interview people. And that's an important part to where I went to a... what wasn't a class, there was a meeting up at one of our retirement centers, not pretty close to here. And I love seeing, this lady was a teacher for 35 years and she had about 15 people around her that were retirees and it all had to do with memories and stuff like that, and little things she was doing to bring some memories out.

Look at this picture, not one of your own pictures, but it's just like a picture. What does this memory bring back for you? So sometimes it's just as important to have it, the simplicity of just having a phone sometimes somebody asking you a question and just getting a response or even I found a technique really good is you close your eyes, have somebody ask you a question and just have that memory, come back and just talk about it. It doesn't have to be video going into MyArkit. It can be audio. I have a ton of audio on my site. It's just little things you like to talk about. We try to keep it simple and try to keep it private.

Ben Smith:

Jim, I know we've had estate planners on and the history of ours showed here and we've talked about lots of issues around, "Hey, when I pass away and having estate and having a will, power of attorneys, and trusts." And all that. But I know one of the things that's on the mind of the estate planners a lot is not only just having a estate plan for our financial assets, but also for our digital assets.

There's things that we do in terms of our online footprint and the things that we own, our accounts and our logins all that is having this when I pass away, here's the owner of this and that it goes to certain maybe individuals or loved ones or something along those lines. So love to just hear about with the business that you've created here, obviously it's a generational business. Is, "Hey, here's my memories and I want to preserve that going forward for the future." What happens when an account owner passes away and how does that work with maybe several generations of account owners maybe continuing to contribute to an account and passing it down within the family?

Jim Gebhardt:

When you've set up your lifetime account, at the very bottom of when you're setting up your profile, you get to choose your executor and that would be somebody else that would be on MyArkit somewhere. It could even be, we would have what they call View Only Accounts to where a person can sign up for the 30-day free trial and basically if they don't want to sign up for it reverts over to a View Only Account and that person can be an executor.

And if that person who has a lifetime account passes away, the executor goes to their site and just flips a little switch and turns it into a memorial site. And so everything there becomes public because if you didn't have it that way, a person could pass away, and nobody ever see what was in their site-

Ben Smith:

Gotcha.

Jim Gebhardt:

... at some point. And besides you've passed away, you don't care what you've put in there. So you can put in all the things about where you buried the treasure, who you basically bumped off during your life, all those type of things, how many people you were actually married to. You can put all those little secrets in there if you want to.

Austin Minor:

No, that's great. That makes sense too. So let's ask you to break out the crystal ball. Where do you see memory capturing going in the future? What will people value or want to preserve and how do you see that changing?

Jim Gebhardt:

The big thing I see changing right now is an attitude towards social media. More and more people I find in social media say, "Oh, I don't have this. I don't do that." You'll have the people that are really zeroed in on some social media stuff. Your guys is an informational spot. I don't even put you down as social media basically your information. But you have other social media stuff where people just bits and pieces, bits and pieces. They're just trying to get their name out there, how many likes and dislikes, and tweets, and all that stuff.

We're going to get to the point where we're oversaturated with that and it's going to be factions are going to go this way and factions are going to go that way. So there's going to be a time where people will see what we're doing and say, "This is really what I want to use quasi-social media for." Put me out there, put my stuff up there, and if I want somebody to see it, my grandkids, they have accounts. If they put stuff in their account, I can see it in my account, but nobody else can see it.

I can see a lot of the big social media sites, I think getting smaller or there's even a lot more little social media sites, this, this, this, this, this, this. So I think what they're going to have a lot less, "Oh." Say in the matter of what's going on there and we're just trying to make everything as private, secure as possible. Give somebody the choice of where to go to do what we're doing.

And there just isn't that many places out there to even scratch what we're doing. They have some that go around the edges, but we try to... And in the future, we're even trying to do things like I said, like we're doing to the family tree. We want to incorporate time tag where you can send actually messages into the future for your relatives. Somebody has a 16th birthday, 50 years from now, you might have one of those, the moments where you talk about becoming a man or a woman or something like that.

Yeah, we have all the other ones. We're going to have a tag, an emblem where it's like a little stainless steel emblem, it's a QR code and you get affix that to a tombstone or maybe even a house you've built things like that where somebody can come up there and click and all of a sudden the whole story is right there in your hands about that person's life or how they built this house or restored this car or whatever. And then, yeah-

Ben Smith:

Very cool.

Jim Gebhardt:

... so we have a lot of different things they got floating around up here.

Curtis Worcester:

That is super cool. I think back to your answer there, to Austin's question and social media, and to me it feels like you're building this very intimate version of, or progression of that. You really want that connection with people, their memories, the story, not just as you've said, just the photo on the internet somewhere. So that's really cool. Thank you so much, Jim. I do have one wrap up question for you before we let you go. I know you said earlier you are retired, but clearly, you're still very involved with MyArkit.com. Obviously, we are a retirement podcast, so I want to ask you, how are you going to find your personal Retirement Success?

Jim Gebhardt:

If my personal Retirement Success... If I have somebody come up to me in the future and hug me and saying, "Thanks." That's good for me.

Curtis Worcester:

Okay. I love it.

Ben Smith:

Well, Jim, thanks for that. And again, maybe the next time we see you, we give you a hug as well. But-

Curtis Worcester:

That's right.

Ben Smith:

... again, a retirement conversation here. We really appreciate coming on and just sharing your obviously your business and what you're doing here, but also this premise about preserving our memories is I think what we want to do with this show is really to tackle all these things that maybe pre-retirees or somebody that's in retirement, what are they thinking about? What are the things they're concerned about? I think this is when we talk about legacy is something where how do we send ourselves in the future? And I think you have a really great solution for that. So thanks for coming on and sharing that with us today.

Jim Gebhardt:

Oh, thank you for having me on. It's been a blast.

Ben Smith:

All right, Jim, you'll be well. Take care.

Jim Gebhardt:

Take care.

Ben Smith:

So preserving our memories for generations to come. I know obviously we're 92 episodes in at this point and looking at themes and things and I think legacy is something that we've talked about and thought about and that's on our mind. A guest that we had a ways ago, Matt Moran, we just found out, so in August of 23, he passed away from kidney cancer. So putting that together about here's a guest that we had and actually came on and his conversation was gratitude.

And talking about being grateful and living with gratitude hearing his brother did a podcast with him on with gratitude, after Matt had passed. And basically, I think when he came on our show, he knew he was stage four. He knew that he didn't have a long time to be living, so he chose to live with this attitude of gratefulness and gratitude. And I'm bringing that up because I think it's very relevant to what we're talking about with Jim today was preserving our legacy. And if we all have a clock on us and we all know that we're not going to make it out alive, that's a fact of life.

But when we pass, what are we going to have for legacy and what do we want to share with future generations? And I think that was our search for finding that theme and that's how we got connected with Jim Gebhardt was through that. But again, I know we touched on a few things and obviously there's lots of solutions out there in addition to what Jim's offering through MyArkit is there's social media and there's YouTube and things like that, that people can do.

But just to have a conversation about the pros and cons of it and help you wade through it with some of the point of our show today. So we appreciate you tuning in. I know you can find more about us in this episode if you go to blog.guidancepointllc.com/92 for episode 92 and you can find our show notes, and audio, and a little bit more about MyArkit there.

We really appreciate you tuning in, listening to us and being on this journey with us as we discover the definition of success in retirement. If you would like to connect with us, please reach out to us. You can go to guidancepointllc.com and our contact info's there. We'd love to hear from you. But until next time, we'll catch you later.