What Stories Are You Waiting Too Long to Ask For? Preserving Family Stories with Brad Koch

Notes from the Edge

Lisa Lacy interviews Brad Cook about his newly launched passion project, The Story Project app, which helps families easily record and preserve stories from elders. Inspired by his wife's regret over

Key takeaways

• Brad Cook launched The Story Project (storyproject.app), a subscription-based platform designed to collect video and audio stories from family elders without requiring them to download apps or manage passwords.
• The app's core mechanic uses automated text prompts that allow VIPs time to reflect before recording, with all clips compiled into an edited year-end memory video.

Main topics

• Family legacy preservation
• Grief and memory processing

Notable quotes

"We only learned what was passed down through a story."

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates how intentional storytelling serves as both a tec

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:04) Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir, Notes from a Certified Madwoman. Welcome to the edge. Speaker 1 (0:34) Hey, hey, my friends. Welcome back to another episode of Notes from the Edge. I am your host, Lisa Lacey, and this is the place we have the conversations we should have been having all along. Guess what? You ain't talking about it. So today we're gonna with our special guest, Brad Cook. Brad is a business coach, entrepreneur, and former United States Marine whose work focuses on helping businesses regain control of their business so that it can help them with freedom. And he now, as an entrepreneur with all that experience, has a passion project that he just launched. And we're going to be talking about that because after working with so many businesses to get them to a place of true freedom, because isn't that why we start them? He has started a new one that I think is going to bring a lot of us some deep understanding. of where we came from. So Brad, welcome to Notes from the Edge. How are you today, my friend? I Speaker 2 (1:35) am wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. Speaker 1 (1:38) Yeah, well, we were kind of doing a podcast before the podcast, and everybody missed that because we weren't hitting the record button. So tell us about what you have just launched and kind of the origin story of about how it came about. Speaker 2 (1:57) Sure. So the name of the passion project is called the Story Project. It has officially launched in a founder's capacity now, and the URL is storyproject.app. Speaker 2 (2:17) What it is simply is an easy way for families to request from their elders, I call them VIPs when I talk about the Story Project, to share memories and stories from their youth, lots of times before they had kids. So you get to know them and know how they are the way they are. Many years ago, my wife had the brilliant idea of bringing our video camera, and back then it was huge. Speaker 1 (2:54) and kind of Speaker 2 (2:55) hiding it. And we had a conversation on a patio porch with my mom's mom and dad. And we just started talking and recording and asking questions. And one story would lead to another. And we really didn't understand how great this was going to be. But at the end, we had this beautifully raw. you know, archive of my grandma and grandpa. And we made copies and gave it to obviously my mom and my brother and their family. Speaker 2 (3:33) We did it a couple more times, but not in that kind of way. And then never thought of it again. Two years later, or two years ago now, my wife lost her dad. And one of the first pieces that I could just see was the regret that she didn't have more video, audio of him. like we are today, being able to see his face and hear his voice and his mannerisms, the way that he would stroke his face. And we just reflected and said, there's a better way. There's a way that we can be proactive. And so that's what birthed the Story Project is this desire to help families easily get stories and memories from their VIPs. Speaker 1 (4:29) I love it. I love it. Well, Brad, why do you... think we learn better as humans from stories rather than like a here's five frameworks or here's we learn better as humans from stories some of our greatest teachers have used stories to teach us why do you feel like stories hit us differently i Speaker 2 (4:51) i think it's part of our dna um you know i'll put my business coaching hat on for two seconds and as a marketer Stories is what moves consumers to make decisions about brands and purchases. And those that can use story well end up doing very well in business. I think that stems from our hundreds, thousands of years ago, depending on what your belief is. We only learned what was passed down through a story. Speaker 2 (5:31) I can speak for personal preference in school and just in general. I tune in at a different level when it's a story. I can see myself in the story. If the storyteller is doing a good job, then I can really see myself walking alongside of them as opposed to just this linear, like you just mentioned, framework. One, two, three, four. You can do the same thing, in my mind, as... passing on that framework information. But if you do it as a story, it's going to resonate and it's going to stick. And I think that person's going to be able to recall it much better. Speaker 1 (6:15) Yeah. Yeah. And I think the key is what you said. If we can see ourselves in it, we are actually having an experience of it. And there's where we're pulling the lessons from. So the reason I'm so excited about your passion project is I too lost my father and he was this tough, badass biker dude. And everybody was kind of scared of him. And he had written me letters while he was on the road doing whatever it was he was doing. And I never opened any of them. And I didn't open them up until after he had passed. And what I discovered was he was not the guy we thought he was. He was a prolific writer. He was a poet. He was a sensitive. And he loved me very, very much. So my third book. will be a memoir and collection of all of his letters. So yeah, when you told me, hey, let's make this about my passion project, I was like, absolutely, heck yeah. And why do you feel like that's important? And I loved that you pointed out being able to remember their mannerisms and the sound of their voice and what they looked like even. Like we forget over time it feels Speaker 2 (7:38) like. We do. It won't be long before technology allows us to add another sense, the sense of smell, into stuff like this. So he was, her dad always wore Stetson. He wore way too much. But he would walk in a room and two weeks later, it would still be wafting around. But it's that smell just. Speaker 2 (8:09) I catch my wife going down the cologne aisle and just smelling it just so she could be taken back. Speaker