Unexplainable - Good news for people who love bad news

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Good news can be hard to find, especially when our brains — and the media — are biased against it. Guest: Bryan Walsh, senior editorial director of Vox, and author of the Good News newsletter This episode was made in partnership with Vox’s Future Perfect team.For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠We read every email.Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, I'm Matt Bouchelle, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your FYP. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, don't swipe away. It's called, That Sounds Like a Lot. You know that feeling when you check your phone, read a few headlines and think, That sounds like a lot. I can't do this. Well, I can, and I'm going to get into it every Friday.

You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. I'm going to start by breaking down whatever insanity is happening in the world. And then I'll sit down with a comedian or actor or writer or, honestly, anyone who responds to my DMs. This is not the place to get the news, but it is a place to get the news. but it is a place to feel a little bit better about it. That sounds like a lot. Coming May 1st, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Brian Walsh.

That's me. So you are the editor of the Future Perfect team. You oversee the climate team. You oversee some podcasts like yours truly. So top editorial leader here, one of them at Fox. Yeah, you could say that. I think that's fair. Fair to say.

Yeah. Could you pull up the. the best performing Vox stories right now, and we'll play a little game of good news, bad news. Oh, boy, is it so embarrassing. Okay. Okay. Top Story.

Top Story. Pop Story. Fox.com. All right, top story. July 14th, Ian Milheiser. The Supreme Court just handed Trump his biggest victory of a second term. Well, I guess that's good news from someone's perspective. True.

Okay. July 18th, Concent Grady. There's a bigger story behind Colbert's cancellation. Yeah, I don't think. The bigger story is. Bad for the media, I'm pretty sure, and bad for media freedom. Right, right, right. Oh, this is a good one.

All right, July 23rd, Benji Jones, recent piece. The government stepped in to clean up a disaster in North Carolina. Then they created another one. I edited that story along with Paige Vega, our climate editor, and I definitely, that was not positive, unfortunately. Should I keep going? Yeah, yeah. Do you or three more.

Going down. Will we ever know why? Brian Cobbiger murdered the Idaho Four. Just going to keep on going on that one. Yep, yep. The real reason why everyone's so mad. over the Gen Z stare. I mean, everyone's so mad.

And they're like, oh, I love the way that Gen Zs look at me with dead eyes. Republicans now own America's broken health care system. Nope. America's fastest-growing suburbs are about to get very expensive. I think that's a good representative sample. Yeah, I'd say so. For July, 2025. You know, I'm not going to try to smoke screen you here and say that everything is,

great in the year 2025. In fact, it's probably quite a lot worse. It's been in most of the years I've been alive, I think. At the same time, like, I bet if we went back to, like, 2010 or something like that, I bet we would find a similar kind of tone emotionally. I mean, you're one of the people shaping media out there. What have you figured out? Like, what can you tell me about good news and bad news from that perspective. From that perspective, I can tell you one thing, which is that audience members, people will often tell you, like, why does the media report, why is so negative? Why is so negative?

You know, if you guys would report positive news, we would jump all, we'd read it. No, they're lying. They do not, they don't actually feel that way. I mean, this is the problem we face, right? Like, it's important for any editorial company or person, whatever. You know, think seriously about what they're putting out into the world, you know, not in a kind of like woo-woo energy way. But like, you know, real things about the human,

about who we are as people and where we could be going. And I think we need that now more than ever. Yeah, why do you think it's so easy to miss the good news or to miss covering the good news? I think, quite honestly, one part is there is, you know, the news often is like what is happening right now. And so usually the more positive stories, they change imperceptibly over a longer period of time.

And that probably more than anything else is why we miss them. It seems like the good news has a lot more context and explaining that has to go into it before getting to what that good news is or being able to appreciate the scale of it. Exactly, yeah. I think that that's another part where this is hard because we're dealing with the biggest, the best good news, honestly, tends to involve lots and lots of people. The real meaning of it is not that it's just happening to one person. The real meaning to it is happening to many, many millions of people over many, many years.

And that's just, you know, I don't think that fits into a narrative or a story quite as easily as a lot of the more negative stuff. What's the mystery here? What's unexplainable about some of these biases? Why we lean negative, even though I don't think it makes us feel good. We know, it's funny. Like, we know that, like, optimistic people, you know, generally turn out better, better health, live longer. really annoying, you know, all those things. You'd think these are habits of mind that maybe would be selected or we'd want to develop more.

And you see it elsewhere. I think it might be here in the media that's less often. And then I wonder as well, like, is there anything that can be done to change this? Is this just who we are as human beings? Is it just how our media system will generally work? Because it doesn't feel like it's getting better. Like it feels like if anything, we're seeing like a darker tenor tend to win out over time. And look, maybe that's going to, that's reality to a certain extent. You know,

maybe I'm the one who's wrong. Yeah. How do you think this negativity bias shapes what we believe is true? You know, so much of this comes down to attention, right? Like, what are we paying attention to, what we'd notice, and what you notice then becomes your reality. So I think negative bias just makes us more likely to pick up on things that are bad, they're negative. And, if you think of your sense of reality or truth as a product of what you're noticing, then, yeah, that will be affected, you know. And the picture you see, it's like, you know, if you're drawing a picture on the paper and you only have black, gray and white, like, it's going to look differently than if you have

full colors in a way that I think is, I do. I think it's ultimately counterproductive. Is it also some more of like a confirmation bias here, too? Like once a narrative is rooted in our brains, it's like hard to shake or we're more skeptical of a like a good news take on something that we're convinced as bad. Yes, I think so. That's absolutely true. And I think, you know, we tend to pay attention to whatever we saw more recently, I think, of what's available in front of us, you know, even if there are things that are more unusual, things that aren't actually how things usually work on a day-to-day basis, like a terrible crime or an airplane accident, anything like that. That would be the thing that will stick in our head, not all the stuff that went just fine. Got it. So it's like the one-off holds just as much weight as like everything working well for middle. millions of people. Exactly.

Like we're not walking around with sort of being like, well, there's that one plane crash. But actually, you know, three million passengers every day. Land perfectly safe. No, that doesn't work that way. Yeah. I mean, we have, we have the power to do our little part. Maybe put some a little bit more good news out into the world. Let's bring some good news to the unexplainable listeners.

I love it. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. I mean, you said that, you know, it's like hard to get people's attention with good news. so we should like name this something super catchy, right? Like, what should we call this? I think we should call it good news.

Just simple, clean, to the point. Look, this is news. And it's good. It is good. Put those things together, you have good news. It's good news. Yeah. I mean, I was kind of thinking, like, along the lines of like,

what's the opposite of a sad trombone, you know? Like that? Kind of sounds like blues clues. Exactly. How about you may have missed the silver lining as you fell into a pit of despair? Poetic, but a bit long. Yeah, it's not as catchy. All right.

We'll stick with good news. You make a compelling case. Thank you. I did make a little theme song for you. Oh. I feel like I'm ready to start like a morning radio show with that. Yeah, absolutely. It's so good.

Awesome. So this is good news. You or Brian Walsh. Did you bring me some good news? I do have some good news. And it starts with bad news first. Of course. Did you ever watch like the nightly news, like the local news when you were growing up? Yeah. What did it usually start with? I think I remember. Yeah. Definitely. It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are? Yeah, exactly. And like I grew up outside Philadelphia, which in the 80s was definitely

Like every day, like every, without fail, 530, Larry Kane comes on the TV show or whoever. This murder happened here. This murder happened here. This murder happened here. Now, there were a lot of murders happening. Bond crime going through the 80s into the 90s was generally going up and up. That was sort of the peak. And I think there was a real sense of like, could this even be changed?

And then, you know, for reasons that criminologists still have, I'm sure, very detailed academic arguments in very polite language with each other on, it started to drop drastically, beginning. in the sort of around the mid-90s and just mostly kept dropping, kept falling and kept falling into late 90s through the 2000s and the 2010s, you know, maybe occasionally increases, but like in general, the story of crime was just going down, down, down. And that became the new reality. Now, what's interesting is that even during that time period, when you asked Americans, like, their feelings about violent crime, like, this is when we're in the middle of, like, a ski slope going downwards. Like, majority would still say, say that they believe crime is rising. That to me is one of the all-time best, like, negativity

news bias stories. But during the pandemic or in the years that immediately fell, you had a real, meaningful, huge spike in violent crime in the United States. This was happening across the country. And what's amazing is really just over the last, about year and a half or so, I think, or a little bit further than that, the early numbers of 2025 indicate that we may be on a pace for the lowest murder rate in U.S. history, at least in recorded U.S. history. That's pretty amazing. No one can quite explain why that is, but that feels like that should be a bigger story. I mean, certainly the media covered the increase in crime quite heavily for a good reason, because it was a big deal, but you don't see the same amount of attention being put on,

why is it coming down? Hearing you say that this could be the lowest murder rate in recorded U.S. history, Like, yeah, that seems like a catchy headline to me. It is. Why would this be good news that we might have missed? This just feels like, I mean, maybe I'm being too simplified here, but this just feels like a situation where we're less likely to report on and less likely to read a story about where a bad problem is getting less bad.

Maybe that's part of it, actually. Come to think of it. Like, because you can then look at this and be like, well, there's still, you know, 10,000, 12,000, 14,000 people who will be murdered. That's not a good news story. Right. And that's not a very satisfying story to tell, especially in the absence of the, you know, if it bleeds, it leads stuff that you get when you're seeing a crime spike. And look, you can reverse this too as well, I think.

Climate change is a story where often is, I think, reported as if it is just a continuous story of things getting worse. That is true in some ways. The temperature is continuing to rise, and it will rise for the foreseeable future. Right. There's an element where it is the ultimate bad news story because every year will be worse than the year before, which is something I'd like not to think about too often. But I think, you know, there are positive things happening, whether that's research that indicates that the worst levels of warming now seem less likely in the future or something

else that it sort of just looked at recently is that it appears as if the first six months of 2025 resulted in the fewest people globally on record dying from extreme weather. Oh, wow. Yeah, no. I mean, it's surprising. And that's definitely sort of the kind of thing that does not get reported a lot. That is really good news. And that's actually something that's been a long-term trend.

Like, we have seen really impressive reductions in deaths, at least, from extreme weather, even as the economic damage from these disasters has been getting worse. Right. But not dying is a really important thing. And we used to see massive casualties in big natural disaster events, like half a million people dying in Bangladesh during major cyclones. That does not happen to the degree it used to. And that, to me, is a good news story.

But I don't think you'll hear people and talk about that as much because, again, it does not fit into the picture of climate change as being something that is just, just, just getting worse. Right. Can I just, let me just run to get some water? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, thanks. Okay. Good news is thirsty business.

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Visit Ancestry.ca.C.A. today. Offer ends May 10th. Terms apply. Hi. Brian. Brian with the Y. We're back. Yes. What other good news is out there

that I should know about? I really like this one. And that is driverless cars. Okay. I think I know that everyone loves. But in fact, they really are good news because you know what, human beings are really not actually good at driving cars.

Like, we're really bad at it. Like, when you get down to it, I think. Some of us are better. I mean, all of us think we're good at it. Right. I'm obviously, I'm very good. Everybody thinks they're above average, right? Exactly.

It's the Lake Wobagon effect on cars. But close to 40,000 people are dying in car accidents every year. That's a result of us speeding, which we shouldn't be doing, result of us driving intoxicated, which we all shouldn't be doing. But just generally, like the human, you know, like we're moving 70 miles an hour. And a 2,000 pound machine. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

You know, it would be great if we didn't have to do this. I'm taking it that you do not like driving. Do you like to drive? I don't, but I hate being driven even more, actually. So I drive a 2011 to a Prius right now that is. Sexy. Terminally. Terminally dirty.

Full of eight-year-old Cheerios. And very uncomfortable. The shocks at this point are just like, It's like riding a wagon from the 1800s. But Waymo, which is a Google offshoot that has been doing driverless taxis for quite a while now in a bunch of cities, San Francisco, Phoenix, a few others. They've finally got together something like 56 million miles of fully autonomous driving. And that means no safety driver at the side, like just the car doing it. Sounds like a lot. Is that a lot?

That's a lot. Yeah. I would say it's a lot. I mean, like, it's enough that it becomes statistically meaningful. What they found was that just, you know, compared to what we expect, like, human drivers over about that amount of driving, about that many million miles, you had something like 81% fewer deployments of airbags because of accidents, 85% fewer serious injury crashes, 96% fewer intersection injuries versus human drivers.

Those are very good numbers, I'd say. 96. That's, you know. 96%. A solid A for Waymo. Yeah. So if you extend this data to be the equivalent of like the 3.3 trillion vehicle miles that are driven by humans in the U.S. in typical year. Okay.

So millions to trillions. We'd estimate that you save something like 34,000 lives a year. Okay. Now, you know, all right, a lot of caveats to go with that. Okay. It sounds caveat-y. Yeah, yeah. I, you know, this is the beginning of a story, not the end of a story.

And the way that these cars are being deployed, you know, they're deployed in warm weather, cities like Phoenix, like San Francisco. You know, these are cities that were picked, especially Phoenix, I think, that are easier to navigate to not running into some of the things that, you know, I might be running into here in the Northeast in a bad winter. Yeah, the cow paths made into roads versus like roads that were designed as roads. Right. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. You know, it's a company-run study. It was peer-reviewed, but you have to take that. I think it's just one self-driving car operator. There are others out there that may not have the same. focus on safety. But, you know, I still look at this. Like, bono vehicle deaths are a tragedy. They shouldn't happen. Like, we have improved. Like, we've gotten safer cars. It's really us who are the problem. Our distractedness are just general poor driving ability.

Right. I guess I still wrestle with not trusting a driverless car. Like, I wouldn't, I wouldn't go into a driverless car. Have you ever been in one? I've not yet, actually. Yeah. I would, though. You would. All right. But it would also feel weird. Even though I, like, almost certainly I'm going to be safer than I would with a human driver. Even me, if I was the human driver.

Yeah. What would it take for you to put your kid on a driverless school bus? Hmm. That's a really got me there. Okay. Woof. All right. Well, it's funny, though.

I mean, like, I actually had a thought. Okay, this is a little dark, but. Every day I do put my kid in a school bus. He gets sent to nature camp in Staten Island. What would it take? It's funny because then it becomes a matter of trust, right? Not just trust in the machine, but trust in whoever is regulating the machine. Even though, again, like, how much trust do I have and who might be regulating bus drivers?

I mean, I don't know. Yeah. I guess I would have to do it a few times myself. And then I would try to look at the numbers and try to, look at the numbers and try to, convince myself that, like, what do you believe? Like, your intuition based off what you're used to doing, what you're just accustomed to versus what the data shows you, and try to go with the data.

But when you put it that way, it's really actually quite hard. Me, I jump in it tomorrow. You know, I'd be fine. But, like, there is something different about sticking someone else's life on that way. Yeah. All right. Last good news story of the day. What do you got?

Okay. Yeah, cancer. Cancer, good news. Yeah, no, it's funny how often the good news of good news stories start with something really bad. I believe there's a reason for that, which is that that's where the progress has been made, I think, more than anything else. Also, that's more counterintuitive. That's a trick in journalism, you know, like you think one thing. I deliver something else.

The little switcher-roo. Yeah, exactly. So what's good about cancer? What's good about cancer is that we're getting much better at treating it, basically. One of the stories that recently looked at general data around cancer, and people today of a certain age have about a one-third lower risk of dying from cancer than someone of the same age in 1990. Cancer is an age-dependent. The older you get, generally speaking, the more at risk you are. Because it just like takes time for cancer to develop.

Yeah, exactly. I think, I mean, and it's important to know that, like, because the population in the United States as a whole has gotten older from 1990, you can see raw increases because there's more people who are falling into the age group where cancer might happen. But then if you just look age by age, and then give an age group, then, yeah, you have about a one-third lower risk of dying from cancer as someone of the same age back in 1990. And that to me is like, that's a pretty meaningful improvement. So just to, like, break that down a little bit, like going back to the, to, like, what? what this good news actually is. So even though there are more people dying of cancer today than there were 30 years ago, me personally as a 34-year-old, I have less of a chance of dying from cancer this year

than if I had been 35 in the 90s. That is correct. Yeah. It's not like rocket science exactly of why this has happened. the fact that we don't smoke in anywhere near the degree we did in the 1960s is a big, big, big, big cause here. So part of, like, what was driving trends in the 90s was how much people were smoking in the 60s? Well, yeah, I think so. I think plus even in the 1990, people were still smoking more than they do now.

Like, it's been a general decrease. But, you know, beyond that, like, there's been really amazing improvements in certain therapies and things like immunotherapy, like targeted small molecule drugs. you know, things like colonoscopies have become more common. I've had the lovely experience of going through that. Welcome to your 40. Yes, exactly. I've been hearing recently, though, about, like, more younger people getting cancer, like getting, like, cancer in surprising ways.

How does this square with that? That is happening as well. But I guess at the same time, like, one element does not cancel out the whole story, you know? And I guess I would not suggest that, okay, ignore the fact that there are rising rates of gastrointestinal cancers among people who are like younger people and people in my age. Now, we'll see what happens with this. Like, if this becomes a really bigger public health issue, then that really does be to complicate the story. But I think otherwise, I think you see a situation where it is improving. That's part of it.

Bad things can happen even within that. But that shouldn't obviate the whole story. Yeah. All right. Well, I'm feeling a little better. That's good. How are you feeling? I'm feeling like by the end I was like acting as the press secretary for the concept of good news.

It's like really spinning very hard on that one. Yeah, yeah. It's funny. But, you know, it needs help. Yeah. It sounds like it needs somebody in its corner. You've taken that on. There you go.

Yeah. How has, you know, looking for a good news story every week for your newsletter changed your approach to looking for stories. The thing about a weekly newsletter is you do it every week, and that adds up. So, you know, how many times go to go to twice a week? Oh, God, yeah. Blocked right into that. Okay.

I think things that, like, what are the stories we tell ourselves, and what are the conditions that allow people to be more resilient? You know, because I think things will be tough and hard, and giving up doom scrolling is not an option. And so trying to be more hopeful, and with that hope, is a reinforcing element to, I think, resilience. And so I used to be someone who was very like, I don't know, like the idea of like, oh, positive attitude can make you better, healthier, so forth. It didn't really make sense to me. But now I think to a degree it does.

And I think I'm not sure I have science backed up exactly, but I think it's almost like an armor you can put on as you go off into the. Not very easy world, frankly, in the not very easy and a little scary future. If you want more good news from Brian every week, you can sign up for his newsletter on box.com. We will also include a link in our show notes. This episode was produced by me, Meredith Haddonaut. I also run the show. It was edited by Jorge Just, Noam Hassanfeld makes our music, Christianiola did the mixing and sound design, and Melissa Hirsch checked the facts.

Bird Pinkerton backed away from the platypus. us as Aaron Bird step forward. His wings flared and smirked. What a touching story. But let's not forget why we're here. It's dual time, Pinkerton. Thanks to Brian with an eye, Resnick, for co-creating the show. If you, Brian, and all the other non-Briens out there

want to share your thoughts with us right in. Send us a voice memo. Tell us what you're thinking. We're at Unexplanable at box.com. We really love hearing from you. If you want to support the show, help us keep making it. Please join our membership program. That's at Vox.com slash members.

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