Time has flown by, and our little startup turned six months old this week.

To celebrate — and also because Father’s Day is a week from Sunday and Life Story Magic is a fantastic gift (and maybe an even better last-minute gift, hint, hint) — I have a quick update and a special offer code.

If you’re not familiar with Life Story Magic, the idea is simple: a professional interviewer does a remote video interview with a parent, grandparent, or other loved one (or with you—lots of people are using it to help record their own stories). You get the full recorded video and transcript, usually within 24 hours.

I’m grateful to some of our first customers who have given me testimonials and permission to share short samples from their interviews.

Like this one, in which a client I really enjoyed interviewing described what it was like for his family to leave the Midwest for California during the Great Depression.

(If you can’t see the video, you probably do not have images enabled!)

Most interviews run 90 to 120 minutes, so there's time to go deep.

This is just one example. You can find more interview excerpts on our new website, and I’ll be sharing a few more in the newsletter over the next several days.

Seriously: Do you have stories like that that kids, grandkids, or the world at large should know? If you’re fortunate enough to have older loved ones, do they have stories like this to tell?

To celebrate, I’m offering a Life Story Magic Anniversary/Father’s Day special for the first 25 customers who use code 6MONTHS at checkout.

You can purchase now and schedule the interview whenever it’s convenient.

Hope to help preserve your story—or a loved one's—soon.

On the other hand ...

When I was in sixth grade, I used to twist myself in knots with a hypothetical:

Would you rather live a shorter but happy, carefree life or a longer life that wasn’t quite so easy?

The instinct is to say the happy one. Who wants to be unhappy? Trading longevity for happiness seemed like a lopsided bargain.

Then again, I’d run around and take the other side of the argument:

What if unhappiness had its own value? What if worrying about things actually made you do things — useful things, meaningful things — that a carefree person wouldn’t bother with?

Didn’t that potentially be its own kind of happiness after all?

I was 11. Welcome to my world.

All these years later, a new study suggests it might not have been a pure hypothetical.

The evolution of worry

In a study published in the Science Bulletin, researchers were trying to solve a puzzle in personality psychology: neuroticism — the tendency toward worry, anxiety, and negative emotion — is consistently associated with worse health outcomes. More mental disorders, more chronic disease, higher mortality.

Yet, from an evolutionary standpoint, a species that didn’t worry would have died out long ago.

Worry is what keeps you from stepping in front of a bus.

So why does something that evolved to help us survive seem to kill us faster?

The answer, the researchers found, is that neuroticism isn’t really one thing. It’s two.

Two kinds of worry

Using a method that maps personality traits across a large population — drawing on health records, brain imaging, genome-wide data, and behavioral surveys covering many thousands of people from the UK Biobank — they identified two distinct dimensions running through neuroticism that work separately.

The first is what most people think of when they hear the word: general emotional distress. Mood instability, feelings of helplessness, and depression.

This dimension is associated with higher rates of mental illness and worse overall well-being.

No surprise there.

The second dimension is what the researchers call ERIS — Emotional Reactivity and Internal Stability.

At one end sit people prone to worry and anxiety. At the other end sit people prone to a kind of simmering fed-up-ness and mood swings.

High-ERIS individuals — the worriers — live significantly longer than people low in neuroticism overall because of what worry tends to make people do.

They go to the doctor more, avoid risky behaviors, and pay attention to diet.

This tracks with research I wrote about recently. Married people appear to have lower cancer rates, in part because spouses tend to notice when something is off and push their partners toward care they might otherwise skip.

So, anxiety works as a low-grade alert system that keeps people from ignoring things they probably shouldn’t ignore.

“Moderately worrying while maintaining emotional stability may indeed be nature’s gift for longevity,” the researchers wrote.

The ancient wisdom version

The study opens with an old Chinese proverb:

“Life springs from sorrow and calamity; death comes from ease and pleasure.”

Which is sort of what I was thinking in sixth grade.

A few caveats: this study is correlational, not a controlled experiment. Also, neuroticism at the clinical level — severe anxiety, chronic rumination — is still associated with worse outcomes.

Also, this research isn’t a license to catastrophize. The point is between productive, risk-aware anxiety and destabilizing emotional chaos. One appears to add years. The other doesn’t.

So, my childhood hypothetical turns out to be harder than it looked.

It’s not a simple trade of years for happiness, but two forces pulling in different directions, and you may not get to choose which one you’re wired for.

My sixth-grade self would have found that deeply unsettling.

But on the other hand …

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Other things worth knowing …

• AP: Trump threatened more strikes on Iran Wednesday as back-and-forth attacks continued to threaten the still-fragile truce. The U.S. military also fired on a tanker trying to transport oil out of Iran, the latest escalation since Tuesday’s retaliatory strikes over the downed helicopter. Iran’s armed forces warned that any repeat of “aggression against the Islamic Republic” would result in “more severe and widespread attacks.”

• CNBC: Inflation hit a three-year high in May, with the Consumer Price Index rising 4.2% year over year — the third consecutive monthly increase — driven almost entirely by the Iran war’s impact on energy prices. Gasoline is up 40.5% from a year ago. Real average hourly earnings fell 0.7% from a year earlier, the biggest drop in more than three years. Markets now expect no Federal Reserve rate cuts at all in 2026.

• CBS News: The Social Security Trustees’ annual report released Tuesday confirms the program’s main retirement fund is on track to run dry by the end of 2032 — at which point benefits would be automatically cut by 22%, reducing the average retiree’s monthly check by roughly $500. The report moved the insolvency date up three months from last year’s projection, partly because the Big Beautiful Bill reduced tax revenues flowing into the program.

• MSNBC: House Speaker Mike Johnson told a Louisiana radio station Monday that Republicans have a plan to "adjust and fix" Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — but won't unveil it until 2027, after the midterms.

• Fox Sports: The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off tomorrow, June 11, with Mexico vs. South Africa at the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City — a repeat of the opening match of the 2010 tournament. The U.S. plays its opener against Paraguay on Friday night in Los Angeles. The 48-team, 104-game tournament runs through the final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19.

• AP: The two crew members of the Army Apache helicopter downed near the Strait of Hormuz were rescued by a Navy sea drone — the first time in U.S. military history an unmanned surface vessel has rescued personnel.

• ScienceDaily: Researchers have confirmed that Stonehenge's six-ton Altar Stone was deliberately transported by Neolithic humans from northeast Scotland — roughly 700 kilometers away — making it the longest known stone transport of any prehistoric monument.

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Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.

I once came across a 73-year-old first person account in The Atlantic.

I got completely sucked in.

It was written by Edward Kennedy (1905-1963), who was an Associated Press correspondent in Europe during World War II, and who was the first reporter to break the story of the German surrender — beating the competition by a full day.

Only, Kennedy wasn’t praised for his big scoop; he was pilloried.

Here’s what happened. The German military surrendered to the Allies on May 7, 1945 at 2:41 a.m., in a schoolhouse in Reims, France, which was part of Eisenhower’s headquarters.

Kennedy was there, along with a dozen other reporters. They’d been allowed to witness the event on one condition: they had to hold the story for a few hours, so the Allies could make their own official announcement first.

As Kennedy told the tale, the U.S. war censors later changed the rules, ordering reporters to withhold the news for 36 more hours, so the Allies could stage a second surrender ceremony in Berlin on May 8.

The point was to ignore the first ceremony at the school house, and make the Soviets’ role more prominent.

The reporters chafed at this. But then, the Allies ordered German radio to announce the end of the war to the German people. Kennedy told military censors that he now considered his obligation to hold the news fulfilled.

“Do as you please,” the chief censor told him. Kennedy managed to call London, and he dictated a short story to his AP coworkers.

By the next morning, May 8, Kennedy’s article was on the front page of every newspaper in America. The free world celebrated, but the weight of the U.S. government came crashing down on him.

He was banned from Europe and fired by the AP. Later, the military investigated and vindicated him, but it was too late for his career.

This article in The Atlantic was his attempt a few years later to give his side of the story.

I had never heard of any of this until I read that 1948 article. I was a bit surprised, because I’ve always been interested in both World War II history, and the history of the media. Heck, I was a reporter for Stars & Stripes for a while.

But no matter what side of this 81-year-old debate you might come down on, what really pulled me in was just the fact that Kennedy got the chance to tell his story.

I believe almost everyone has at least one really interesting story to tell. But, most people never get the chance to tell it.

It’s quite sad, if I let myself think about it. Either time passes before they get the chance, or they don’t have the confidence in their storytelling or writing ability, or they just don’t think anyone would be interested.

But later, their loved ones, at least, really do wish they’d shared.

I’m a member of a parenting Facebook group, for example, and a mom was asking if people thought she should come clean to her college-aged children about her wilder days before she’d had them.

One woman replied with an enthusiastic: Yes! Tell them everything!

She explained that her mother is deceased, and she finds herself craving every piece of information about her, good or bad, momentous or mundane. She would have wanted to know.

Anyway, this is sort of what happened with Kennedy. He wrote the article for The Atlantic, then moved to California and ran some smaller newspapers. He died in 1963, at age 58, when he was hit by a car.

But later, it was his daughter, who was then just 16 when he died, who took up his cause.

She followed in her late father’s footsteps and become a reporter; even worked for the AP for several years. As I gather, she then went to business school and did some other things—but she also got an academic press to publish her father’s memoir in 2012.

That led the then-current head of the Associated Press to write an introduction, apologizing for how his organization had treated Edward Kennedy all those years before.

Maybe I’m sentimental, but I’m sitting here on the couch in my living room in New Jersey, putting the final touches on this newsletter.

And I keep thinking that a man who died years before I was born basically reached up from the grave, and led me to read and share his forgotten account once again.

Nobody’s going to live forever. But, it seems to me that people who share their stories like this at least have a fighting chance to be remembered.

I’ve now done dozens of these interviews myself. And I’ll tell you — the families who receive them are always grateful. Not just for the stories they knew, but for the ones they never would have heard otherwise.

Next week I’ll be sharing something special ahead of Mother’s Day. Stay tuned.

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Other things worth knowing …

• BBC: An 86-year-old French woman whose American husband died in January before her green card application was completed is being detained by ICE in Louisiana. The woman had moved to the U.S. last year after rekindling a 1960s romance; she and her husband had first met during the 1960s, when he was a soldier stationed in Europe, and she a secretary. They had each married, had children, and been widowed before beginning a relationship in 2022. “They handcuffed her hands and feet like she was a dangerous criminal,” her son told a French news outlet.

• KFF Health News: As immigration authorities carry out what President Trump has promised will be the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history, several states are passing laws to keep children out of foster care when their detained parents have no family or friends available to take temporary custody of them. The record 73,000 people in detention in January represents an 84% increase compared with one year before; parents of 11,000 children who are U.S. citizens were detained from the beginning of Trump’s term through August.

• USA Today: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has secured a parliamentary majority for his Liberal government, a win he has said will help him deal more effectively with the trade war started by President Trump. It also probably means Carney, who took office with no political experience and has earned global praise for his efforts to band middle-power nations together, won’t have to worry about an election for years.

• CNBC: United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby reportedly floated the idea of a potential tie-up with rival American Airlines to the Trump administration earlier this year, a suggestion that if acted upon, would create the world’s largest airline. “This would be the biggest of all time. I can’t even see the slightest chance that a court would allow it,” said George Hay, a law professor at Cornell University.

• NPR: More than a quarter of private colleges are at risk of closing: 442 of the nation’s 1,700 private, nonprofit four-year colleges and universities, with a combined 670,000 students, are at risk of closing or having to merge within the next 10 years.

• Financial Times: Consumer AI chatbots falter when used to make medical diagnoses, particularly when faced with incomplete information, according to new research highlighting the risks of relying on them as digital doctors. A study found that failure rates exceeded 80% for all models when they needed to perform so-called differential diagnosis — when full patient information was lacking.

• The Guardian: Faced with high demand for GLP-1 drugs, some cities and states that previously covered the cost of weight-loss medication for low-income residents and public employees have now started to restrict or eliminate coverage. Some legislators and healthcare providers argue that dropping coverage might provide short-term relief for governments but will ultimately harm Medicaid recipients’ health, while cities and states will then have to pay for more health problems related to obesity.

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I said I’d probably close the Founding Customer offer after 10 or so people took me up on it—but we absolutely blew past that in the first couple of hours.

Here’s what’s next:

• I’ll honor a few more Founding/Launch Customer offers ($149), but you need to enter code LAUNCH25 at checkout. The discount will show up on the next screen, after you apply it.

• However, I’m going to have to shut the offer off pretty soon—definitely later today this weekend—so that I don’t completely overextend myself. If the code doesn’t work as expected, that will be why.

• Please don’t share the code; I really want this to be for loyal Understandably readers only!

Important: From here on out, all interviews happen after the holidays.

You can purchase now and give as a gift (let me know in the form after checkout so I can send a digital gift card). But, the actual interview will be scheduled after January 1st, when things calm down.

I won’t keep emailing you about this—but I’ll include an update in Monday’s newsletter.

Again, a giant thank you! This is really validating!

—Bill

Check out Life Story Magic

Questions? Just reply to this email. I’ll answer personally!

Let’s start with two sisters

Long ago, two sisters in Rhode Island had a big falling out. They didn’t talk for years. Eventually they reconciled.

Later, one of the sisters had friends visiting from Montreal, who brought their teenage daughters.

“Cute girls,” she thought. “Same age as my nephew.”

So, she took them to her sister’s house—and, that’s how my parents met.

Imagine if those sisters (my future grandmother and my future great-aunt) hadn’t reconciled, and hadn’t literally brought my Canadian future mom to my American future dad’s doorstep.

I might not exist! You wouldn’t be reading this right now!

Got any good stories?

I learned most of this story last year, when I started doing a series of interviews with my dad about his life—his childhood, what he knows about his family and ancestors, his career, his faith, my mom, my siblings, and more.

It’s been a great experience. It also reminded me, for about the 12 billionth time, that most of us are walking around with amazing stories to share—but no time to tell them.

Or else, sometimes we do tell them, but rarely in a format or a way that makes them easy for others to remember later.

I wonder whether there are similar stories in your family.

Life Story Magic!

I’m sharing this today because I’m launching something I’ve wanted to build for years: a simple way to capture our life stories before they’re lost.

It’s called Life Story Magic. Here’s how it works:

1. I will personally interview someone whose story matters to you—your mom, your dad, your grandmother, a loved one, whoever—even you, yourself—via remote video for 60 minutes at a time (or a bit more if the stories are flowing).

2. I’ll ask the questions that get the stories flowing. (I’ve spent a professional lifetime figuring out how to ask the right questions). We’ll have a fun conversation.

3. Within 5 business days afterward, you’ll get a recording, a short summary, and a full transcript to keep forever.

I’ve done extensive family history projects for families in the past, but frankly at a price point well above what most people can afford. Now, technology has caught up, and I think this should be available to every family.

‘This is that’

Here are the fine details:

• You’re probably wondering about cost. The regular price will eventually be $499 for one interview, with discounts for multi-interview packages. But, I really wanted to start with a bang, and to include a great special offer for my newsletter readers who want to give it a try.

• So, I’m offering a founding customer / newsletter-reader discount: $149 per interview. I’ll probably have to cap this at around the first 10 customers or so, as I expect them to go fast.

• Also, I’ll eventually bring in other interviewers. But for now, I promise to do all of the interviews myself.

If you’ve ever thought that you should sit down and record your parent’s stories, or your grandparent’s, or your own—this is that. Just simpler than you probably imagined.

Wouldn’t this make a great gift?

Wow, I never thought of that! :) Yes, it would make a great gift! Especially if there might be any holidays coming up …

Grab the founding customer rate now, let me know it’s a gift, and I’ll send you a nice gift card so that your loved one can schedule the interview whenever works for them.

What kinds of stories?

Whatever matters to you. Some examples:

• How did your parents (or grandparents) meet?

• What stories did they hear growing up that you’ve never heard?

• Who had the biggest influence on their life—and why?

• What challenges did they overcome that shaped who they are?

• What do they want their grandchildren to know about them?

• What’s the recipe for that amazing thing they make that everyone loves?

• What’s the story they’ve told before, but they really want to make sure is recorded well for posterity?

A one hour interview captures meaningful stories, with a transcript that usually runs roughly the length of a magazine article. Some families may want to book multiple interviews—to go deeper with one person, or to interview several family members.

The stories won’t wait

I’m capping this founding customer offer at about 10 people. I’m telling you first because many of you have been here supporting me for years, and I wanted to thank you and make sure you didn’t miss out.

The stories won’t wait. The people who lived them won’t be here forever—none of us will. Most of us keep thinking “someday I should record this …”

Today is Friday. But, it’s also someday.

Check out Life Story Magic

Get the $149 Deal

Questions? Just reply to this email. I’ll answer personally!

7 other things worth knowing

• Amazon is planning to end its partnership with the U.S. Postal Service by the end of 2026 and expand its own nationwide delivery network according to a report by the Washington Post. The e-commerce giant has been the Postal Service’s largest customer, generating more than $6 billion in annual revenue in 2025, which represents approximately 7.5% of the agency’s yearly revenue. (Yahoo Finance)

• Brian Cole Jr., 30, of Woodbridge, Va., was arrested Thursday morning and charged with planting pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican National Committees on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot started building the deadly devices in 2019, federal investigators say. The FBI didn’t provide many details or suggest a motive; a neighbor described him as “very antisocial. Very.” (The New York Post)

• Say Goodbye to the Billable Hour, Thanks to AI: With AI taking over their grunt work, lawyers and other professionals may have to charge for outcomes rather than time spent. (WSJ)

• The AI boom is heralding a new gold rush in the American west. Once home to gold and prospectors, the Nevada desert is now the site of a new kind of expansion: tech datacenters. (The Guardian)

• Why One Man Is Fighting for Our Right to Control Our Garage Door Openers: If companies can modify internet-connected products and charge subscriptions after people have already purchased them, what does it mean to own anything anymore? (NYT)

• Walmart says it sold out of its entire inventory of giant-sized Kraft Mac & Cheese in a 65-inch box the size of a flatscreen TV in in minutes on Black Friday—advertising them at 12:01 a.m. and running out within an hour. Walmart apparently wouldn’t say just how many they sold, but they’d given samples to social media influencers beforehand. (USA Today)

• Travelers wore pajamas to airports in protest of a federal government request for them to dress more nicely when they fly. (The Washington Post)

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Thanks for reading. See you in the comments—or maybe at Life Story Magic?