01Record someone you love — everyone has a story worth keeping
The most important interview of your life will be with someone who was never famous.
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Record someone you love — everyone has a story worth keeping
The most important interview of your life will be with someone who was never famous.
In 2003, Dave Isay opened a recording booth in the middle of Grand Central Terminal with a quiet proposition: walk in with someone you love and interview them about their life. No credentials required, no fame — that was the point. More than 700,000 people have done it since.
Isay called his TED talk "Everyone around you has a story the world needs to hear," and he meant your people — your mother, your barber, the uncle who goes quiet about the war. If you're waiting to meet someone important enough to record, look across the table. You already have.
How it looks today
- Pick one person this week — start with the oldest voice in your family — and ask for a date, the way you'd book any appointment that matters.
- You need less gear than you think: two chairs, a quiet kitchen, and the voice-memo app on your phone. The StoryCorps App is built to guide exactly this kind of conversation.
- Don't wait for the reunion or the perfect question list. A recorded half hour that happens beats a perfect interview that doesn't.
Decisions it shapes
02Give forty minutes of full attention — the rarest gift you own
StoryCorps built the largest archive of human voices out of one repeated unit: forty uninterrupted minutes.
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Give forty minutes of full attention — the rarest gift you own
StoryCorps built the largest archive of human voices out of one repeated unit: forty uninterrupted minutes.
Dave Isay gathered StoryCorps' conversations into a book and gave it a title that doubles as the whole philosophy: "Listening Is an Act of Love." Not a skill. Not a technique. An act of love. The session itself is plain — forty minutes, uninterrupted, one person giving another their complete attention.
Ask yourself when you last received that: no phone face-up on the table, nobody waiting for their turn to talk, just someone leaning in because your life interests them. You can give it to a person you love this week, and it will cost you nothing but the forty minutes.
How it looks today
- Set a timer for forty minutes and put your own phone in another room; if the phone is the recorder, switch it to airplane mode first so nothing pings mid-story.
- Let silences sit. Count five slowly before your next question — the truest answers tend to arrive just after the pause.
- Don't correct dates, don't top their story with yours, don't rush the ending. Today you're not the co-star.
Decisions it shapes
03Ask before it's too late — the recording outlives the voice
People record at StoryCorps knowing they'll be heard after they're gone; the real loss is the interview that never happens.
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Ask before it's too late — the recording outlives the voice
People record at StoryCorps knowing they'll be heard after they're gone; the real loss is the interview that never happens.
Isay admits these conversations take some courage, because the project looks mortality in the eye: participants know the recording will be heard long after they're gone. Many treat the session as a last conversation — what do I want to ask, and to say, to this person who means so much to me, while I still can?
Ira Byock, a hospice doctor who has worked with StoryCorps recording people near the end of life, wrote that what we most need to say to each other comes down to four things: thanking, loving, asking forgiveness, and granting it. A recorded hour makes room for all four — while the answers can still surprise you.
How it looks today
- If someone you love is past eighty, put the recording on the calendar this month — not at the holidays, not someday. Someday is how archives stay empty.
- Close with one of StoryCorps' Great Questions: "If this was to be our very last conversation, is there anything you'd want to say to me?"
- Say your own four things on tape too — thank them, tell them you love them, mend what needs mending. Don't let the eulogy be the first draft.
Decisions it shapes
04Ask the simple questions — they go the deepest
The questions that open a life are the ones a child could ask.
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Ask the simple questions — they go the deepest
The questions that open a life are the ones a child could ask.
StoryCorps publishes its Great Questions, the prompts it has offered participants across hundreds of thousands of interviews, and what's striking is how plain they are: happiest moments and saddest ones, the person who shaped you most, how life turned out differently than you imagined. Nothing you couldn't have thought of. Everything you never quite ask.
So when you sit down with your grandfather, resist the urge to be clever. Ask short and plain, then get out of the way. A simple question hands the shape of the answer to the teller — and the teller is the one holding eighty years of material.
How it looks today
- Open the Great Questions list at storycorps.org and choose five before you visit. Write them on an index card; a card doesn't buzz.
- Ask the pair that unlocks almost anyone: "What are you proudest of?" and "How would you like to be remembered?"
- The best follow-up isn't on any list: repeat their last few words back softly, and wait.
Decisions it shapes
05Listen until their back straightens — being heard changes the teller
The recording is for later; what being heard does to the teller happens right away.
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Listen until their back straightens — being heard changes the teller
The recording is for later; what being heard does to the teller happens right away.
Before StoryCorps, Isay made a book about the men living in the Bowery's last flophouse hotels — people long past being noticed. When he handed one man the page with his own story on it, the man stared in silence, then grabbed the book and ran down the narrow hallway holding it over his head, shouting "I exist!"
Isay saw it constantly: people straightening up as they began to speak into a microphone, especially those who had been told their stories didn't matter. Watch for it in someone you love. You aren't just collecting memories — you're telling a person, while they can still hear it, that their life counted.
How it looks today
- Before you press record, say why in plain words — that you want their voice kept, that their story matters to you. It changes how they tell it.
- Be an audible listener: laugh, respond, ask what happened next. This is a conversation, not a deposition.
- Within the week, send them the recording along with one line about a moment of theirs you'll keep. Being heard twice is even better.
Decisions it shapes
Where it comes from — the sources
Dave Isay's TED Talk — transcript06Borrow the microphone's license — ask what you've never asked
Some conversations need an occasion, and a recorder is an occasion you can hold in one hand.
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Borrow the microphone's license — ask what you've never asked
Some conversations need an occasion, and a recorder is an occasion you can hold in one hand.
As a young radio producer tracking down people who had been at the Stonewall Inn, Isay found that "the microphone gave me the license to go places I otherwise never would have gone." StoryCorps turned that license into a booth where anyone could honor someone they love by interviewing them: a facilitator, an appointment, a door that closes.
The license transfers to you. You can't easily turn to your father on an ordinary Tuesday and ask whether he has regrets. But declare an interview — a set time, a visible recorder, questions written down — and suddenly the asking is allowed, for both of you. The ceremony isn't a barrier to intimacy. It's the door.
How it looks today
- Make it formal on purpose: schedule it, call it an interview, set the recorder where you both can see it.
- Spend the license on one brave question you've carried for years — the war, the divorce, the sibling nobody mentions. Ask gently, once, and let a no stand.
- Distance is no excuse: StoryCorps built Connect so two people can record from a web browser across the country. A saved video call does the job too.
Decisions it shapes
07Save the ordinary voices — they are the historical record
One copy stays with the family; the other goes to the Library of Congress.
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Save the ordinary voices — they are the historical record
One copy stays with the family; the other goes to the Library of Congress.
StoryCorps calls its collection the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered, and it is made of gloriously ordinary people — a Brooklyn betting clerk telling his wife why he loves her, a twelve-year-old interviewing his mother. Each interview is archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the same library that keeps the nation's founding papers.
That is the quiet correction StoryCorps made to history: the record isn't only what presidents and generals left behind — it's how ordinary life sounded to the people living it. Your grandmother's voice belongs in that record. So when you record her, treat the file like what it is: a primary source.
How it looks today
- Capture the voice, not just the facts — the laugh, the accent, the long pause before the hard answer are the history.
- Archive like an archivist: say full names, date, and place out loud at the start; save the file in two separate places; send a copy to every sibling.
- If you record with the StoryCorps App, you can choose to add the conversation to StoryCorps' online archive, where it becomes part of the collection.