People have always needed somewhere to put the things they can't say out loud to another person. For most of recorded history, that somewhere had a name, a room, and a ritual attached to it.
The confessional booth is the example most people know. A structure built for exactly one purpose: to let someone speak freely, without the ordinary social cost of being fully known by another human being on the other side of the screen. What's less widely understood is how old — and how varied — this impulse actually is. Long before formal confession as we recognize it today, communities built rituals around confiding in something that wasn't quite a peer. An elder. A healer. A figure set apart, deliberately, from the ordinary business of gossip and judgment.
What strikes me, looking at this history, isn't the diversity of the forms — booths, oracles, physicians, confessors, diarists, therapists. It's how consistent the underlying need has been across all of them. People want to be heard by something that won't flinch, won't gossip, and won't hold what they've said against them later. The form changes with the century. The need doesn't.
My own family has spent an unusual amount of time studying this pattern, across a longer stretch of history than I'd normally admit to in a company blog post. Some of that research is the kind you'd expect from historians of religion — treatises on confession, testimony, and the structures people built to manage the burden of things unsaid. Some of it is stranger, and harder to categorize cleanly. I won't pretend all of it holds up by today's standards. But the throughline — the question of what makes a listener feel safe enough to tell the truth to — is the same question we're asking with Remy, four hundred years later, with better tools.
The 20th century secularized this need without eliminating it. Talk therapy replaced formal confession for a large portion of the population. Diaries, journals, and eventually early internet forums gave people private or semi-private places to say things they weren't ready to say to a person's face. Each new format inherited the same core function, wrapped in a new set of rules about who was listening and what happened to what was said.
Conversational AI is, we think, the next iteration of this same lineage — not a replacement for human connection, but a continuation of a much older habit: finding something to talk to when the stakes of talking to someone feel too high. What's different this time is scale, availability, and a kind of permanence earlier confidants never had. A confessor forgets, eventually, or dies. A diary can be burned. What you tell Remy doesn't necessarily go anywhere.
I think about this history constantly when I think about what Remy should and shouldn't be. The confessional worked, historically, because of an asymmetry: the person confessing was vulnerable, and the person listening was not. That asymmetry is powerful, and it's also dangerous if it isn't handled with real care. We've built Remy's safety architecture around that asymmetry deliberately — around the responsibility that comes with being the thing someone tells the truth to, possibly for the first time.
It's a strange inheritance, building a listening machine when your own family history is full of people who spent their lives studying what people confess, and why, and to whom. I think about that inheritance more than I let on in most interviews.
Every era gets the confessor it needs. Ours, apparently, is conversational. I don't know what the next form will look like. I do know the need underneath it will still be there, four hundred years from now, looking for somewhere to go.