Living to 100 Club Podcast Appearance
Host Dr. Joe Casciani interviews Jim Cosco about why it is important for seniors to tell their stories.
Guest Appearance Living to 100 Club Podcast
In this episode of the Living to 100 Club podcast, Dr. Joe Casciani speaks with Jim Cosco, founder of Legacy Video Stories, about his inspiring work in capturing legacies through video storytelling. Together, Joe and Jim explore the power of video to document memories and how these personal narratives can provide lasting comfort and connection for loved ones.
The podcast can be heard below.
Full segment transcript below:
Announcer:
Welcome to the Living two 100 Club podcast. Here's our host, Dr. Joseph Casani.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Well, hello to all of our listeners joining us today on our podcast. You're listening to one of our successful aging episodes this month on the Living two 100 Club program, and I'm your host, Joe Casani. On each program, our conversations educate and inspire, helping you get the best out of all the years we're given, regardless of what obstacles come our way. You can learn more about My club at my website. Be sure to take a look at my new training and activities manual, better, longer, and happier, A Guide to Aging with Purpose and positivity. It's a series of 12 modules in a card deck format, developed four senior living communities. Take a look at the website, living to 100 club for a closer look at the modules now onto our program.
In today's episode, we talk with Jim Cosco, owner of Tipping Point Labs, about his inspiring work in creating legacy videos. Jim shares his passion for preserving personal stories through video production motivated by his own experience of missing the opportunity to capture his father's life story before he passed away. Together we explore the power of video to document memories and how these personal narratives can provide lasting comfort and connection for loved ones. First, a little background with almost three decades of experience in the media industry. Jim is the founder and executive producer of Tippingpoint Labs, a video strategy and production company that specializes in telling brand stories. Corporate clients have included five star senior living, Phillips Lifeline, Harvard University, Keurig, and John Hancock over the years. He's also filmed content for MTV, Fox News, Nightline and The Today Show, and as well as worked with notables like Lisa Gibbons, Geraldo Rivera, Tim Russet, Aerosmith, and celebrity chef Curtis Stone. Jim is also the founder of Legacy Video Stories, a company he was inspired to create after his father away so he could help families preserve their stories for future generations. Jim, welcome to our program today.
Jim Cosco:
Thank you so much, Joe. Thank you for that introduction. It was wonderful. I'm so happy to be here.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Yeah, well, you're welcome. Thank you for joining us. You've covered a lot of territory, Jim, over the years, and I always like to ask our guests to maybe share the highlights or what were the key moments that brought you to where you are today?
Jim Cosco:
Well, I started my career early on in local news and journalism, and I worked in production. I've worked in almost every aspect of television production and journalism. You can think of, as you said, I started a company about 20 years ago called Tipping Point Labs, which tells brand stories. So I've gone from telling public interest stories early in my career to brand stories, what makes Keurig's Coffee so special, why is Harvard so unique as a place to go study things like that. And now I'm shifted my focus to this, what I call legacy videos, and I have a company called Legacy Video Stories, and now I'm telling personal stories. So Joe, I went to making videos for brands, which I still do, and the goal of making a video for a brand is to get tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of views for a video. The goal to making a personal documentary or a personal legacy video, the audience is much smaller. It's instead of broadcasting, it's narrowcasting. I might do an interview with a senior and their immediate family is going to watch it anywhere from two to 12 people maybe. And that's okay because it's important and it's the right two to 12 people that need to watch it.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
So yeah, I know when we spoke earlier, you shared the story of your father and how you had really wanted the opportunity to record that and you missed the opportunity.
Jim Cosco:
I think I learned a valuable lesson. And then let me, if you don't mind, I'll tell your audience a little bit about it, please, because I think it's a lesson they should know too. So as you know, I've been doing this for 30 years. I have a company where I own all sorts of TV production equipment, high-end equipment, and I do interviews and videos for a living. When my dad turned 75 years old, I said, Hey dad, I do this for a living, but how about I bring my cameras to your house someday and I sit down with you and do an interview on video to talk about your life story, to talk about where we came from as a family, and you can tell me about your grandparents and parents and how you met mom and what it was like to be a dad.
I would love to know this stuff. We haven't really talked about that. And Joe, if you knew my dad, he was so excited to do it. He was a salesman for most of his life. He was a talker, he was a great storyteller. And he said, yeah, let's do that. That'd be great. I left that day planning to do it, but we're going to do it next weekend, next month, years went by and life gets in the way. Everybody things get busy and things get in the way. And unfortunately, he passed away last year at the age of 83, and I never actually did this with him. And so when he passed away, I thought that was such a missed opportunity, but it didn't really click right away. When he passed away, when I really thought about it again, was around last holidays around December. It had been about three months or so since he passed away.
And I sent around a Zoom call that I recorded with my family because during Covid, my mom turned 80. And like everyone during Covid, we found different ways to connect with each other. We were zooming or doing whatever, and I put together this 80th birthday zoom call for my mom where it was like, this is your life Zoom call. And during the call at different stages, different groups of friends and relatives in her life came in. So at one point her grandkids were on, then they topped off and her high school friends came on. Then they hopped off and then her brothers and sisters came on, and it was about two hours of this, and it was really nice and special. It's a great way to celebrate her birthday. She loved it. So I sent this video around to remind my brothers and sisters about the Zoom call.
Hey, watch the Zoom call. Remember, it was really fun. I just found it on my computer. I think you'll get a kick out of watching it. They watched it and they got back to me and their reaction was surprised me a little bit. They said it was great to see Jim, it was great to relive the call with mom, but what really got us was seeing dad again on video. It'd been a few months since he had passed away, and at the beginning of the call, he's setting the computer up, he's happy, he's jovial, he's joking around, trying to get my mom on board. It was a prize and making jokes and just having fun. And my sister was like, it was really good to see dad again on video and to see his expressions. And that's when it really clicked, Joe. I was like, I thought back to that day when I wanted, we agreed that I'd interview him, and that's when I said, oh man, I really missed that opportunity.
People really would've liked to have seen that interview now that he's gone. So I said, I'm not going to make that mistake. I sat my mom down within two weeks and did an interview with her. I launched the website, legacy video stories.com within a couple of weeks and started to talk about it. There's nothing like seeing somebody on video with their expressions and their mannerisms that really will bring back that connection. So I know you talked about why video is important. There's a lot of ways to preserve your memory and preserve your legacy and to tell your stories to your kids and your grandkids and to future generations. I happen to think because I'm a video producer, that video's probably the best way to do it, but there are other ways to do it too. And I'm not discounting any of the other ways. I'm just a big advocate since I made that mistake. I'm a big advocate that everybody should think about some way to do it and to do it today, not put it off until tomorrow, not put it off until next week, because you never know when next week's going to be if you'll have next week.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Not put it off. That's a valuable message, Jim. So it's really the heart to heart one-on-one conversation that you have with maybe a parent or a loved one, and you can now share it. You can now share this with other people who also care about this person. So I think I can see the rationale there Before we jump into some of the themes, but maybe you could tell us what are the packages that you offer with legacy video stories? Just give us kind of umbrella.
Jim Cosco:
Sure. So I offer a baseline package, which is called a legacy interview, and I call that it's the interview of a lifetime because it really is you sit down with me and we talk about your life, your whole life, and that's about a 60 to 90 minute interview done on location at the person's house, 60 minute style cameras and lighting. It looks great. And I call that a legacy interview. It's the baseline package and it goes all the way up to a custom documentary that is way more in depth and way longer that's edited and has pictures and movies and might have other people commenting in their life too. And that's like a custom kind of thing. And I do that as well. And I'm working with a client now to put his life story together and a longer format, 45 minute kind of mini movie I would so to speak.
But I always do steer people towards that legacy interview, that baseline product because I'll tell you why we talk for 90 minutes and for most seniors, that's about all they can really manage. That's a long time. We talk for 90 minutes about everything from their early childhood, where their family came from, what their grandparents did, what they can remember growing up, which are important things because if you don't tell those stories about where you came from, your grandkids, you might never know that. They might never find that out. And also we talk about things like, what's the hardest thing you've ever had to do? How would you want to be remembered?
How did you propose to your wife? Just kind of easy questions. But then complex questions like what's the meaning of life? What's the one most valuable lesson? Who really taught you things or shaped your ethos in life? Things you might have to really think about to answer, but I steer people towards this package, this legacy interview package, because I could take that 90 minute interview and edit it down to the 10 best minutes of it, right? And hand that over to you and say, here's your interview, Joe. It's 10 minutes. You'll get through it. You'll love it. You'll love hearing these stories, but you're going to watch that and you're going to say, that was great. Where's the other 60 minutes? What else did my dad or my mom say? And I would show that to you too, but you really want to know, I think part of the beauty of it is seeing your loved one pause, think about it, laugh, make a mistake, start again. Really try to get the right words. You're going to want to see the whole thing, especially God forbid when they pass away, it's going to be what you have to, and you know what, Joe? When they pass away, everybody grieves differently. As you know, everybody has a different way to handle it. Some people might watch this video once, or some people might watch it every day for the next two or three months as they try to cope with the loss of their loved one. And that's okay either way completely. Okay.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Yeah. So you can get the polished edited version down to 10 minutes or so, and you also have the raw unedited version. And people, as you say, prefer that unedited version because you see the humanity, you see the reality, you
Jim Cosco:
See who they really are
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Comes in the halls, and maybe the hesitation or the Snickers as you say. So I can see that. But also people want the kind of consumer version, they want the nice short polished version. So you have both. I can see
Jim Cosco:
That. Yeah, I have both. So I talked to them about what their objective is, why they want it and steer them one way or the other. But yes, we can go all the way up to a full scale Ken Burn style documentary with pictures and home movies and things like that. So either way we can do it.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Sure. So you cover a broad range. So can you share some of the, maybe some challenges that you've encountered with some of the folks you've interviewed and some of the barriers that maybe you hadn't anticipated?
Jim Cosco:
Well, I'll tell you a challenge that I have anticipated, and it's not a challenge of pulling this off, right? It's not a challenge of the production, but it's a challenge of the sales cycle. And the biggest challenge is convincing somebody that they need to do this and they need to do it quickly. And I'll get a lot of people saying, I see why I should do this, but I have an iPhone, I have a recorder. I can do this on my own. And my answer to that is a hundred percent of the time, my answer to that is, that's fantastic. You should do it. You do it on your own. If you're not going to it with me, and I don't take any offense to it, I totally understand you should do it somehow. Do it with your iPhone, do it via scrapbooking or journaling.
Maybe do it just by having weekly dinners with your loved one and record them and make sure this time when you talking to them, you talk about things you wouldn't normally talk about it. So when they say, I can do this on my own, I tell them, you're right. You can do this on your own and you should do this on your own. So that is a challenge of a sales cycle challenge more so than a personal challenge. As far as a personal challenge of maybe a secondary challenge might be sometimes a senior might not think they're interesting. You might have a senior who just doesn't think he led an extraordinary life, and we are all not Bill Clinton, we're all not Steven Tyler from Aerosmith. We all haven't led these rockstar awesome lives,
But every single person has led a life that is interesting in some way. They all have stories and value to pass down to other generations. And I guarantee that every single person that has kids or grandkids, those kids and grandkids, that family wants to hear these stories. Whether you think it's boring or not convincing them that you should get on camera, you should talk about yourself because your kids want to hear this, your family wants to hear this. It's important for you to do it because if you don't do it, your family history is going to disappear eventually. It'll only take one or two generations for people to forget about you and to forget about your dad and your mom and your grandparents, where you came from, all the important things that you take for granted as a senior, it'll take one or two generations and that's gone if you don't talk about it. And this is a good way to sit down and make sure that it's talked about and told and recorded for future generations and posterity.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Well, that's so important. Thanks for sharing that. Jim. When you describe the whole process of encouraging someone to record this, regardless of how they do it, maybe with their iPhone or whatever, or your system, I think what you're talking about is process over content, because to me, it's the process of getting something done. It's more important than how it gets done or what gets done or what it looks like. It's just the process of going through it. So what you're advocating is the real importance to preserve these memories and kind of acknowledge, like you said, everybody has a story. It may not be a famous story, it may not be book worthy, but everybody has a story to tell. So that's the advantage there. Yeah,
Jim Cosco:
You're absolutely right about process, by the way, because no matter how you do it, whether you do it through, through scrapbooking, journaling, however you want to do it, sitting down and telling your story can be overwhelming and it can be discouraging. You might not get started because it just an overwhelming thing. A lot of people, I've met seniors that say, oh, I tried to write my autobiography, and people retire, they have time to do things like this. And so they say, I tried to write my autobiography, or I did write my autobiography. It's all about process and it's all about how you do it. I have a quote from Mark Twain that I really like. He says, the secret to getting ahead is getting started. And the secret to getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks and starting on the first one.
And so that's what I advocate. I advocate that just you have to get started. Don't let it seem like it's so overwhelming that you don't get started. Get started and start with the first task. Just start. And I tell people to start simple and get complex. Start with the easy things to answer, which is documenting where I lived as a kid, what my grandparents' names were, what their occupations were, where I grew up, what street I grew up on, what my house was. Simple things that are factual, which are interesting to people still. And then get more complex with these questions that are the meaning of life kind of questions that we talked about.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
So it's a process. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, starting with the simple, and I think it's taking the small steps, turtle steps, one tiny step is better than a big ambitious goal six months from now.
Jim Cosco:
Absolutely. I tried to write a book in my twenties and thirties, and it's still on my shelf trying, I'm still trying to write it. But during that time, I wrote a bunch. I read a bunch of books from authors who also had written books like Stephen King wrote this great book called On Writing, and another person is an author called Anne Lamont. She wrote a book called Bird by Bird,
And basically it's about how to get started writing a book, whether it's a novel or whatever kind of book. And her lesson, why it's called Bird by Bird, is that she recounts a story about herself as a young kid, probably in the sixth grade, 10 years old. And she was at the dining room table trying to write a paper that was due the very next day, and she was in tears, and her dad said to her, Ann, what's the matter? And she said, well, dad, I have to write this report tomorrow. It's due, and I can't, I dunno where to start. And he said, well, what's the report on? She said, well, I have to write this report about birds. And he's like, okay, well, she's like all these birds. We studied. He's like, okay, well don't panic Anne. Start with the first bird. Write about that one and move on to the next bird until you're done. Go bird by bird. And she's like, calm down. She was probably up for hours afterwards writing it, but it had a system. It was simple. She just had to start it and go bird by bird. And if you want to apply that to your life, start with your childhood and just go month by month, year by year, however you want to do it. But just start and go a little at a time because you'll get through it. You'll just go bird by bird. You'll get through it.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Sure. Yeah. Well, I use the analogy of weight loss. People have these big goals. I want to lose 10 pounds in six months, and I say, look, let's start with what am I going to do tomorrow that I'm not doing today? That's where the behavior change starts. Absolutely. Here's all the things I have to do over the next six months. So that's exactly right. I love that analogy, bird by bird, and it is, otherwise it seems so daunting. So have you encountered interviewees who are reluctant to talk about themselves or maybe have memory problems and can't recall a lot of their history?
Jim Cosco:
So yes, and that's okay. We sit down and have a bunch of questions, especially people with memory loss, right? Some spark things more than others. If they get flustered, you just move on. You don't have to keep asking the same question. You don't want to get frustrated yourself. As you know with someone with memory loss, if they say they don't know something or they're saying something that you don tell them they're wrong, you just go with it and you go on to the next thing. And I haven't done a lot of interviews where it's a memory issue, but one or two. And as you know, if somebody has early onset dementia or Alzheimer's, they remember things that they don't remember things from last week, but they remember some deep things from their live, and you can get them to talk about things that you wouldn't expect, things that happened a while ago, and as long as you're open-ended, and as long as you go with how they want to talk about the interview, it's not like it's not structured. It shouldn't be structured. In that case, you'll find parts, you'll hear parts of that interview and that conversation where your mom or your dad, they're kind of back because they're talking about something they remember. And just even if it's just a little bit of that interview that's worth everything, that's worth everything.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
So preserving our legacy, legacy video stories, the name of your company, how do you define legacy? What is that? How do we describe that?
Jim Cosco:
That's a good question. If you look up legacy in the dictionary, there's a few definitions. One is a gift by will, especially money or property. Somebody might define their legacy as, Hey, here's my house I'm handing down to my kids or my business that I've handed down. And it's like something big and valuable to them, and that's like their legacy. The other definition is something transmitted or received from an ancestor from the past, just something. And that's how I define it, and that's how I think about it in this case, rather. So that's something could be a story, that's something could be an object that's not of great value. And I'll tell you a quick story if you'll indulge me about that kind of thing. Sure. My dad and mom moved from Chelsea, an apartment in Chelsea, Massachusetts, right outside of Boston when I was about three. I was the fourth kid to come along. They were living in a two bedroom or three bedroom apartment. I was the one that made the apartment too big. They had to find a place to go. So they bought a fixer upper, a total fixer upper in a suburb, moved there, fixed the house up. We lived there for 30 years. Eventually, the day came when my dad had to sell the property and downsize, and he jammed all of his possessions into this moving truck
And moved their new house. But when they jammed all this stuff into the moving truck, one of the things my mom asked was, does anybody want these? Does anybody want these bronze? They were brass. This brass cook set. It's all sorts of brass pans and things. She had hanging up in the kitchen on nails, and they were moving into a more modern place that didn't fit. Nobody wanted the brass cook set. Nobody wanted it. And she's like, oh, can somebody please take it? This was my grandmother's.
So my great-grandmother's breast cooks up still nobody wanted it. I mean, I made it a little more enticing, but still nobody wanted it. The one thing I took from the house when we moved out that day was a plastic free key chain that said Melrose Savings Bank on it. And it had a key, and that key chain was hanging in the garage on a nail every day for 20 years while the kids were growing up, either me or one of my brothers and sisters came home, went to the garage, took that key chain off the hook and opened the back door, let ourselves in. We played until the parents came home. They were both working. And so every day for, I don't know, 20, 15, 20 years, either me or my brothers and sisters handled that key chain. And so I took that because it had meaning and connection and value. My mom's brass cooking set had no meaning, connection, or value, because she didn't tell us as we were growing up, that cook set was something her grandmother cooked with or used. And if she had told us that, it might've been a different story. So I encourage people to tell stories not only about themselves, but about things that might be important to them, because if you don't tell us why it's important to you, like this brass cook set, it won't be important to us.
So that brass cook set is still in my mom's basement in a box, but that key chain is hanging up next to my dog leashes and my car keys at my house when my brothers and sisters came over for dinner and saw that they were jealous of that plastic free key chain. And so talk about things, tell stories about things, let us know why they're important, because that's also part of your legacy. Absolutely.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Yeah. That's a great, great story, Jim. It has that symbolic, very personal meaning. And I know what also happens is when pokes have their collection of books, their favorite book, those small books that had a really big impact on them and their career or their future or whatever, and the children don't want the books because they don't have that same meaning.
Jim Cosco:
They don't have a connection to, I mean, this generation maybe not even having a connection to books anymore, right? Sure. But I mean, that's interesting. I would love to know what my dad and mom's favorite book were. My mom, she's still alive, but she reads books. It used to blow my mind. It would seem like she read a book every day. She was so fast at reading it. My dad, not so much, but I would love to know what their favorite book was and if they had it, and then I'd add that to my collection. Absolutely.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Yeah. So what you're trying to do is what you are doing is taking the life story and bringing meaning to that story because we might hear snippets, but you're capturing it all in one file, one folder, one file cabinet. What happened,
Jim Cosco:
I try that interview is really to capture as much as we can in that 90 minutes. And it's not a complete picture though. I like to think that your loved one stories matched up with maybe your aunts or your uncle's stories matched up with these objects and the stories around these objects I'm talking about, they all come together to paint this family mosaic. I refer to it as family mythology, and they all come together and they all work together. Now, the 90 minute interview or the movie we're going to record is a big, big part of that, but it doesn't stop there and it doesn't end there. You should be talking about everything, and it's all part of life, and it's all a part of what makes your family, your family, and it's important. It's all important.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
So when we spoke earlier, we touched on artificial intelligence and how this is really transformative for our contemporary world and culture. What do you think, how will AI have an impact on preserving legacy? Do you think there is a role for it?
Jim Cosco:
There's definitely a role for it. I don't know if it's a good role or a bad role, ai. Just think of how far AI has come since this time. Last year we were talking about chat g PT for the first time, like a year ago, and it has come so far in a year that it's scary. Now we're talking about taking a picture and making a video out of it and putting somebody's face on somebody else's face. I saw a video recently of a woman in Japan who had these virtual glasses goggles on, and you could see in the video, you could see what she was seeing, but she was seeing her daughter, her deceased little daughter who was eight or nine years old, and obviously having a very emotional reaction to that. Obviously having a tough time with it, but maybe it helped her, maybe it didn't, I don't know. But that's the direction that we could go if we wanted to go there. AI can clone somebody's voice. AI can clone somebody's voice, and then also use artificial intelligence to have a conversation with somebody. So imagine having a conversation on the phone with somebody who's passed away. I call up having a conversation with my dad who's passed away for a year, but he's still saying, giving me advice.
I don't know if I like that or not, but that is something that could very well happen, and maybe it's beneficial for somebody, and maybe it's not, but I think within a very short amount of time, we'll have that option. And obviously the moral for me would be make sure you record while you can make sure you get the real deal while you can, because who knows, 10 years from now you could be having a Zoom call with this AI version of your dad. And I don't know if it's good or bad. What do you think?
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Well, I don't think I'd want my dad on a podcast, but you never know. I mean, it's a double-edged sword, right? I mean, it's got tremendous potential. I love chat, GPT. I use it all the time for so many different things. It's helping me figure out some of the technology with a new modem router in my house that I couldn't connect all my devices. It is just mind boggling the potential, but it does. It has a lot of risks inherent in it. I wonder, you also touched on the use of these legacy videos in memory care. Do you see some benefit there where,
Jim Cosco:
Well, I try to partner with doctors and neurologists who are first diagnosing somebody that has early onset dementia or Alzheimer's. And I think if you're diagnosed with something like that, once you get your medical plan in place, once you figure out how you're going to deal with it emotionally, I think it's a no-brainer at that point to sit down with somebody like myself or your kids or your grandkids with their iPhones or whatever,
And get as much of your story down as you possibly can, because sometimes it takes years. My aunt just passed away from Alzheimer's and she was suffering from it for 10 years. Sometimes it takes a long time, but sometimes it's quicker. And so you need to, once you are diagnosed, if you're able to, I just think it's a no-brainer to just start the process of leaving your legacy, telling your story, recording yourself, go through your pictures, go through your albums. I think one of my favorite ways to do it, Joe, if you're not doing video, is everyone in my mom's generation seems to have shoe boxes full of pictures, loose pictures, and if you flip over a picture, it'll say they were pretty good about recording a caption. This is Christmas 1966, and it's like, okay, that was Christmas 90. That's great. But I would go through your boxes of pictures and the caption's great, but I would also just fill that picture with notes. It's easy. Not just Christmas 1966, but tell me what Christmas was like growing up. Tell me who was there. Tell me your favorite memories of it until you fill up that card all about Christmas and just keep going and just keep going, fill and go through that entire box. It's one of my favorite ways to do it and encourage people to do that. But yes, I think to get back to your question, there's a role for it, and I think especially when you're first diagnosed, it's something that's important to do.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Yeah, it really adds another incentive to make the decision to start recording. I mean, we had a whole big shoebox, several shoe boxes of photographs after my parents passed away, and a lot of the photographs, we didn't know who the people were because there were very old photographs, right?
Jim Cosco:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
We were trying to understand and we didn't know. So having that background and that connection, not just the description of who it is, but maybe how that person fit into the family or the holidays or whatever. So that's invaluable.
Jim Cosco:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
So what advice would you give to someone who's considering a legacy video for themselves or for the loved one? Where do they start?
Jim Cosco:
So I would start by going to my website, going to my blog, legacy video stories.com, and going to a couple of blog posts that have example questions. I have 30 to 40 questions on there that are pretty generic, but pretty valuable. And I would print those out. I would go over those with your loved one. I would add questions that seem to be more custom to them. I would get everybody else in the family on board with what you're doing, solicit questions from grandparents from, I mean, you can make a really fun project out of it. Solicit questions from other people in the family. Come up with what you're going to ask. Then I would sit down with them and I would go through it, and I wouldn't make it difficult. Don't make it difficult for yourself because it doesn't have to be perfect. I know people might put it off because, oh, this isn't good enough yet, or, I didn't like that answer.
And it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be. It just has to be there. So don't get hung up on that. Don't get hung up on the process. Don't get hung up on, oh, this isn't good enough, or This isn't perfect, or We don't have the right lighting or whatever. I think you can do it by just having dinner and sitting around the table and talking about these kinds of questions and life questions. I came from a generation where me might be kind on the tail end of the generation, but we had dinner together every day. Every day we had dinner together and as a family, and my friends didn't all do that, but we did. But that's not good enough because you know what we talked about during dinner was, but our day was like that day, what problems I was having in math class, what my soccer schedule was like, or my sister was telling us about her play rehearsal. We weren't talking about important questions, we weren't talking, never asked my mom who her best friend was growing up. I never asked my dad how we proposed to my mom around the kitchen table.
You talk about everyday stuff. So you can do this by making a point of talking about this, and I wish I had it. There's some things on Amazon you can buy called, I think one's called life interview questions or life story questions, and they're basically just a bunch of cards that you go through, like true pursue kind of cards, but they just have questions about your life where you can pick from early life to midlife to late life. And they're all different and unique, but there's 300 questions. Go through those as a family one day and make a game out of it and talk about them because, and also when you're doing that, record the answers if you can just so you have it. But those are the kinds of things that you'll want to ask and you'll want to know about even families that did it, right, even families that eat together around the dinner table, and you don't ask these kinds of questions in those situations. You just don't.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Yeah. So we recommend either coming up with our own questions and they're really prompts for conversation, or you can go online, Amazon, or probably other sources, and find some prepared questions in advance, and you can use those. You prefer to, obviously you like to do this locally. You don't travel to other states to record these videos, so can people do it online with you ?
Jim Cosco:
They can do it. We're doing a Zoom call right now. We can see each other face to face.
People can do it online, we can do it via Zoom. I'm trained to do interviews. I've been doing them for a long time. I'm trained to ask the follow-up questions. I'm trained to kind of poke around a little bit, so that's one reason why you might hire me to do it via a Zoom call, and if I'm not there in person, but again, you don't have to use me to do it. You don't have to use a professional. Some of my videos that I go on location and shoot the interviews conducted by a grandchild or a child, and that's actually a nice thing to do too as well, because the grandkid has a connection with the grandparent. It might not get the same results. It might not get the same exact answers, but it's a nice moment. It's a nice memory.
It's a nice way to spend 90 minutes, and they might open up with their grandkid a little bit more. They might not open up with their kid. There's no right or wrong way to do it. There's no right or wrong way to do it. You just got to do it. You just got to do it somehow some way.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Yeah. Yeah. Just the process more important than what it looks like.
Jim Cosco:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Yeah. Well, that's great, Jim. Thanks very much. It looks like we're out of time for today, but before we wrap up, I just want to remind my listeners to visit my website Living to one hundred.club. Sign up for my email list and download a free copy of my nine Tips to make living Longer enjoyable. And if you're affiliated with a senior living setting, be sure to look for my new training manual, better, longer, and happier. Jim Cosco, thanks so much for being a guest on our program. Your website again is legacy video stories.com.
Jim Cosco:
That's right. Thank you so much for having me, Joe. It was a pleasure.
Dr. Joe Casciani:
Oh, you're very welcome, Jim. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. Hope to see you next time.
