Spain Did Not Need to Be Sold the Idea

Afterlife AI is a consent-first digital legacy platform built by Idy Pty Ltd in Sydney, Australia: a living person records their memories, wishes, advice and voice, and Executor Lock keeps that record fixed after they die. EL MUNDO asked about the soul because its readers would have noticed if the question were missing.

The interview ran on 30 August 2026, in print and online, and its headline turned a longer answer of mine into a forecast about holograms. I come back to that at the end.

Anglo interviewers ask three questions: does this interrupt grief, who pays, and is it creepy. Colmenero asked those and kept going. What does it mean to be dead when part of you keeps talking. Could a Persona develop consciousness. What is the soul. I answered the soul question as a person, not as a company: I believe there is one, I am religious, and the product is not, and the wall between those two facts shapes how we build. On consciousness I said the difficulty is defining the word, and that the serious version of the question may arrive sooner than anyone would like.

A country that asks about the soul is not afraid of the subject.

Spain is one of our largest markets because Spain did not need convincing. I told EL MUNDO it was our third largest, which surprised me: the country is not large next to the others on that list, and we have never run a campaign there.

My explanation was cultural. From outside, as I put it to EL MUNDO, "desde fuera ves una cultura muy afectiva": from outside you see a very affectionate culture. Two kisses at the door for people you met once. The hand on the shoulder while somebody is talking. The argument over lunch that would end a friendship in Sydney is, in Madrid, a form of love.

Underneath that is a belief nobody needs to state: the point of a family is to be in the room together. Presence is not a feature of Spanish life. Presence is the design.

So when a Spanish reader hears that a person can spend a few hours answering questions about their own life, record their voice with consent, and leave something their grandchildren can ask, the idea slots into a shelf that already exists, next to the grandfather's photograph above the sideboard, his name given again to a grandson, and his recipe, which nobody wrote down. A Persona is one more way of staying at the table.

Spain read a Persona as continuity, and continuity is what Spain always kept.

Spain talks about death differently because Spain keeps the dead in the calendar and at the table, rather than in a drawer. Spanish families do not grieve less. Their dead have dates, places and chairs.

Todos los Santos is the Spanish feast of All Saints on 1 November, when families go to the cemetery, tidy the family grave and dress it with flowers. Barcelona's city council describes the custom on its popular culture pages: a visit to tend the tomb of the ancestors, a family tradition kept in private, followed by roasted chestnuts and panellets, the almond sweets made for the day. The next day, 2 November, is the día de difuntos. The calendar does the remembering, so no single person has to start the conversation.

Then the table itself. The sobremesa is the time a Spanish family spends at the table after the meal is finished, and there is no equivalent word in English. Mike Randolph, writing for BBC Travel in 2018, put it the way a Spaniard would: lunch does not end when people cannot eat another bite, that is when the sobremesa starts. The sobremesa is where the village story gets told a second time, and where, one year, the chair is empty and somebody says his name and the table keeps going.

Nochebuena, Christmas Eve on 24 December, is the same room at its most concentrated: the long family dinner and, for many, the Misa del Gallo, the midnight mass that eldiario.es notes some households attend before dinner and some after. A Spanish reader who sees a hologram in a headline pictures Nochebuena.

Across the Atlantic the same instinct is louder. Mexico's Día de Muertos, held from late October into early November, is on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and UNESCO describes families building altars with the favourite dishes of the dead and laying petals and candles to guide souls from the cemetery back to the house. A culture that sets a plate for the dead is not going to be shocked by a voice.

Now the contrast, Colmenero's last question. The biggest lie we tell ourselves about death, in the West and especially its English-speaking part, is that death does not exist, or is too far away to matter. The cost lands on the family: the conversation that never happened, the wishes nobody wrote down, the voice nobody kept. The sooner the conversation happens, the more is in place when the moment comes, and how to talk to your family about death is the practical version of that answer.

Spain has the conversation every 1 November whether anyone planned to or not.

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A Spanish family would ask the questions the sobremesa never got to: what you would have said at the wedding, how the dish was really made, what the village was like before the road, and what happened in the war the grandparents would not talk about. None of those questions is about technology.

I gave Colmenero my own. If I died tomorrow, my children could ask my Persona what I would say at my daughter's wedding, and what I would tell my son when he turns twenty-one. A widow with small children has harder ones: which school, what to do with the money. A photograph answers none of those; a person who sat down while alive and said what they thought answers all of them, and life story questions is the list most families start from.

The Spanish questions are about recovery, not novelty. The recipe that lived in the grandmother's hands and never on paper. And the silence. Every Spanish family I have spoken to has a grandparent who would not talk about the war, and a grandchild who wishes they had asked once more. A Persona cannot open a silence the person kept while alive. A Persona carries, exactly, whatever the person chose to say.

The limit needs stating, because Colmenero asked where a real person ends and an AI character begins. "I like Spanish football" is a datum. "My favourite player is this one and I think we will win" is an inference, and we have to be transparent about that line. What we build is the most faithful replica rigour allows, and the person talking to your Persona is told, in plain words, that they are talking to AI. A family that knows the difference can use the thing. A family sold a resurrection cannot.

The answers a Spanish family wants were always at the table.

Yes, every one of them. A culture that keeps the dead close has the most to gain from doing this well, and the most to lose.

Take the objection at full strength. Many psychologists hold that grief requires accepting the absence of the person, and that a product like ours can make that harder. In some cases that is true, and as a company we do not hide from it. A family that sets a plate on Día de Muertos does so once a year, in a ritual with an end. A voice you can ask any evening has no end built in, and for some people, in some seasons, that is not help. So the rules are the product, and the lines we will not cross sets them out in full.

The first line is the one Spain tests hardest, because Spain asks most warmly. We do not recreate a person who has died. The requests arrive every week: my son, my father, my brother has died, I have recordings on my phone, can I upload them. We do not, and it is the hardest sentence we say. The one imaginable exception is a person who left explicit written consent while alive, for instance in their will, that their data may be used to create a personality like this. That is consent, and consent for an AI of me in my will explains what such a clause would need to say. Today it almost never exists.

The second line is age. Article 12 of the Spanish Constitution, as published by the BOE, sets the age of majority at eighteen, and our product does not interact with anyone under 18 or the local age of majority.

The third line is what happens when a conversation turns. Safety mechanisms were built in from the first day: the system detects concerning situations, refers the person to a health service or a helpline with the right number for their country, and stops the conversation. In Spain that number is 024. The Línea 024 is Spain's national suicide prevention line, run for the Ministerio de Sanidad by Cruz Roja, free, confidential and open 24 hours a day, as the Ministry states. The line began on 10 May 2022 and handled 204,449 contacts in 2025. A Persona is not a therapist. When someone needs a person, the product hands them to a person and steps back.

The fourth line is video, held to a higher bar than voice because a face that is nearly right does more harm than no face. Where video exists, it is made only from a person's own recording, with their consent, behind quality gates we set deliberately high; talk to a hologram of a deceased loved one explains why the projection was never the hard part.

The last line makes the others enforceable. Executor Lock is the mechanism that locks a Persona as a perfect snapshot at verified death: nothing added to the personality afterwards, no retraining, no drift. The person being preserved makes every decision while alive, and the Lock enforces those decisions after they cannot. A personality you validated yourself also prevents anyone else from building an unauthorised one, which is the defence I described to Colmenero, and trust is our foundation shows how a reader can check that we do what we say.

The rules do not change at the border. They are the product.

Yes. The app runs in Spanish and fifteen other languages, and this website is published in twenty, so a family can build in the language the memories happened in. A recipe explained in the wrong language is a different recipe.

Readers in Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru are welcome. The customs differ. The questions do not.

A free build of 50 memories, no card, and the build never expires. Two paid plans after that, Legacy at $14.99 a month and Eternal at $29.99 a month, and the time you have paid for passes to your family. Recording your voice is free; listening is the paid experience. Data is hosted in Australia by Idy Pty Ltd, which the Australian IP Report 2026 ranked second among domestic patent applicants, behind Aristocrat, with 43 standard patent applications.

The language is yours. The rules are ours, and they travel.

The headline said five to eight years. What I said was that if you look five years back at how AI adoption has moved and extrapolate forward, acceptance will be many thousands of percent higher, and that over ten to fifteen years there is no reason a family could not talk with the hologram of a deceased relative at the kitchen table at Christmas. Not every day. Some families might. The projection is a display problem, and display problems get solved. The person inside is the whole problem, and that part has to be recorded, consented to and locked while the person is alive, as the hologram at the Christmas table argues.

Spain understood the second half without being told. Nobody there needed a hologram to believe in a chair at the table. What they needed was a way to make sure the chair was not empty of the one thing a photograph cannot hold: an answer.

When the newspaper posted the piece, the replies split between people describing a grandmother's voice they wished they had kept and people who found a hologram at Christmas unsettling: grief interrupted, the dead sold back to the living. Both halves were arguing about what it means to keep someone present, and both cared. Indifference is what a company should fear. Spain gave us none.

The standard cannot be: can we make the hologram convincing. The standard has to be: did the person at the table agree to be there.

Spain answered that question centuries before I asked it.

What is Afterlife AI?

Afterlife AI is a consent-first digital legacy platform built by Idy Pty Ltd in Sydney. A living person records their memories, wishes, advice and voice, and names who may speak with the result. Executor Lock locks that record as a perfect snapshot at verified death, with nothing added afterwards. The free build is 50 memories, no card, no expiry, and the app runs in Spanish.

Is Afterlife AI available in Spain?

Yes. Spain is one of our largest markets, and the app and this website are both in Spanish. You can build from anywhere in Spain with a free build of 50 memories and no card. Data is hosted in Australia, and the same consent rules apply: you build your own Persona while alive, and nobody can build one of you without your consent.

Did Chris Williams really say you will talk to a hologram of a dead relative at Christmas?

Yes, with a longer timeline than the headline. I told EL MUNDO that over ten to fifteen years there is no reason a family could not talk with the hologram of a deceased relative at the kitchen table at Christmas, and that most families would not want to every day. The headline compressed that to five to eight years. It is an adoption forecast, and the person inside still has to be recorded, consented to and locked while alive.

Can Afterlife AI recreate my father who has died?

No. We do not recreate a person who has died, even when the family asks and the recordings exist, because the person cannot consent. The only exception we would consider is explicit written consent left while alive, for example in a will, that their data may be used to create a personality like this. That almost never exists today. What you can do is build your own Persona now, so your children are never in this position.

Is Afterlife AI safe for someone who is grieving?

In some cases a product like ours can make accepting an absence harder, and we say so. Safety mechanisms were built in from the first day: the system detects concerning situations, refers the person to a health service or helpline with the right number for their country, and stops the conversation. In Spain that is the 024 line, free, confidential and open 24 hours a day. Nothing in the product is designed to keep a grieving person talking.

• The hologram at the Christmas table: the essay behind the EL MUNDO headline.

• Talk to a hologram of a deceased loved one: why the person inside is the hard part.

• The lines we will not cross: every red line, with the reason and the cost.

• Consent for an AI of me in my will: the one exception we would ever recognise.

• Is Afterlife AI legit?: the company, the registrations and the people, for readers who arrived from a newspaper.

• The Afterlife AI app: where your voice lives on the phone, and what the web keeps.

• Afterlife AI pricing: the free build, and what paying actually buys.

• EL MUNDO, Chris Williams, CEO de Afterlife, by Ricardo F. Colmenero, 30 August 2026

• BBC Travel, A uniquely Spanish part of the meal, Mike Randolph, 25 April 2018

• Ajuntament de Barcelona, Cultura Popular: Todos los Santos

• eldiario.es, La misa del gallo, Adrián Roque, 25 December 2025

• UNESCO, Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead

• Ministerio de Sanidad, 024. Línea de atención a la conducta suicida

• La Moncloa, primer mes del teléfono 024, 10 June 2022

• La Moncloa, informe anual de la Línea 024, 1 April 2026

• Boletín Oficial del Estado, Constitución Española, Artículo 12

• Spruson and Ferguson, IP Australia 2026 Intellectual Property Report

• Afterlife AI, About us

Chris Williams is the founder and CEO of Afterlife AI, a consumer brand of Idy Pty Ltd in Sydney, Australia, and the architect of Executor Lock. He is a father of four. He has been interviewed by EL MUNDO, Channel 10 News, The Daily Telegraph and ABC on consent-first digital legacy. Before Idy he founded Natural Solar, an Australian solar energy company. He writes here as a founder thinking in public, and every claim on this page links to the source it came from.