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Unexplainable
It's not all bad
00:25:23
Things in the news have been feeling kind of…bleak, so we called in some reinforcements.
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- [00:00]
Brian Walsh
AI had the time of my life a I never felt this way before.
- [00:10]
Joanna Solotaroff
From building timelines to assigning the right people, and even spotting risks across dozens of projects, Monday Sidekick knows your business, thinks ahead, and takes action. One click on the star and consider it done.
- [00:22]
Brian Walsh
And I owe it all to you.
- [00:25]
Joanna Solotaroff
Try Monday Sidekick AI you'll love to.
- [00:28]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Use on Monday.com Support for this show comes from Strawberry Me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job, or are you stuck in one you've outgrown or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from Strawberry Me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to Strawberry Me Unstuck to claim a special offer.
- [01:05]
Joanna Solotaroff
2025 is over. And I gotta say, it felt like a long year.
- [01:11]
Brian Walsh
11 months deep into 2025. Here's a look back recap deep dive January Carrie versus audio crew quick TikTok Ban Wildfires, Bird flu.
- [01:20]
Joanna Solotaroff
I mean, this TikTok came out in November and it just reminds me that so much happened last year I can't even keep track of it.
- [01:27]
Brian Walsh
All the squirrels have begun eating me. Wing Group 7 and the Nikki Cardi Beef Government shutdown Halloween week.
- [01:34]
Joanna Solotaroff
The security guard but my feeling overall is that 2025 was pretty rough. So I decided to take a break from my daily doom scrolling to call on my Vox colleague, Senior Editorial Director Brian Walsh, for a little perspective check.
- [01:51]
Brian Walsh
In early 2025, I launched a new newsletter that comes out every Saturday called Good News, which is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. It's an attempt to sort of look at what's happening through an optimistic lens in the world and kind of push back against the negativity bias that basically infects all of us, not just in the media, but really the human race.
- [02:12]
Joanna Solotaroff
Yeah, last year was like any other year where I feel like by December you start seeing all of these memes kind of declaring this was the worst year and 2025 was no different. And I had a TikTok that I wanted to share with you.
- [02:27]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Like, I'm not even going to lie. I feel like I can confidently say for most of us that 2025 was one of the worst goddamn years of our life. For really, can we talk about how awful this year was? I don't think I've ever heard a single person say, oh, 2026 is going to be my year. I think we're genuinely all scared. This Time because I'm not even exaggerating when I say this year almost.
- [02:46]
Joanna Solotaroff
So I have to say I don't disagree. I feel a lot like this young woman does. How do you feel about the last year, Brian? Do you also have a hard time kind of like parsing out the bad news from the good?
- [03:00]
Brian Walsh
It's all about a matter of perspective, right? It's all about what we, what we choose to look at and how we sort of see it in comparison to the past, you know. And I'm not surprised that tiktoks that say the year is the worst year ever are the ones that are going to get views and things because that is kind of the way our media works. It's where our media has always worked. That's not new with social media, but it's probably particularly intense with social media. And we are a people that tend to sort of focus on the negative. But certainly when it comes to being in the media, we all know this. Like if you tell people things are bad, that's something that's going to catch their notice. But that often overlooks not just like individual good news stories but like a longer term trend of things getting better such that like I'm pretty confident if you put 2025 against most of the years of humanity's past, this one would come off pretty good.
- [03:51]
Joanna Solotaroff
This is unexplainable. I'm Joanna Solotaroff and this is the second edition of our good news segment. Can Brian convince me that things may not be as totally terrible as they seem? What for you are the good News Highlights of 2025?
- [04:23]
Brian Walsh
One of my favorite stories involves a six month old baby who in February became the first person to receive a CRISPR therapy. That's the gene editing therapy that was custom built for a specific mutation in their lethal urea cycle disorder. And this is something that usually is essentially a death sentence for about half of affected infants or need a liver transplant. And yet now, almost a year later, the baby is thriving, the baby is cured. And this is just the beginning of the ability to use gene editing for things that can really target individual often rare disorders. And those are the kind of ones that science often skips over because they're only affecting a very small number of people. It's expensive to create treatments, there's not a lot of market for it. But gene editing, which is something we've been hearing about I think over the last decade now we're finally getting to the point where we can get ultra personalized therapies that will really change the lives and save the lives of kids and people and adults who otherwise really would have nothing for them. So I look at that and be like, that's amazing. Here's a huge scientific advancement that now is actually paying off to save people's lives, to make people better off. And it starts with this, frankly, cute little six month old.
- [05:35]
Joanna Solotaroff
Did this happen in the U.S. it.
- [05:38]
Brian Walsh
Did happen in the U.S. yeah. And it was a team at UC Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute that kind of led the way on that.
- [05:44]
Joanna Solotaroff
Wow. So people are still able to do great work and make these discoveries even in spite of all of these funding cuts.
- [05:52]
Brian Walsh
Right. I mean, in many ways, when we get to something of that level, it's been in the works for a long time. Gene editing itself. I think the earliest sort of discoveries that got us in the road to CRISPR go back to, you know, the 20th century. Then it took years after the actual discovery of it to begin to get to these kind of treatments. That is a long tail that frankly is vulnerable to being broken. And I definitely worry about the future. I mean, I should say off the bat, I can tell you a lot of great things that happened in 2025. That doesn't mean they're going to continue in the future. And that's kind of a little up for debate, really up for grabs, I think. But at the same time, it would be, I think, kind of mistaken or even blind really, to just put those away, to not look at those either. I think we can pull both ideas in our minds at the same time, hopefully without going completely insane and see that both things are possible. Both things are true.
- [06:42]
Joanna Solotaroff
It's true. What are some other pieces of good news?
- [06:50]
Brian Walsh
I think perhaps the biggest piece of good news I think from this year is the fact that we saw kind of across the board. What I say is like all the everything bad trends actually turning around and beginning to bend towards a more positive direction. So a lot of this comes out of the pandemic, right? In the pandemic we have huge spikes in violent crime. We have huge spikes in drug overdoses, we have huge spikes in deaths to spare, including suicides. You know, and there's real concern, like, was this just kind of a one off? Was it just a representation of this, frankly, the social breakdown that occurred during the pandemic. Now we're seeing in 2025, like real shifts in that there's argument to be made that we could be the US on the track for one of the steepest one year national homicide declines ever, pushing the murder Rate down to levels that haven't been seen since, like, the 1960s here in New York City. We actually set a record, I believe, for the most days without a murder. Wow, that's a huge improvement. And yes, like, that's. We're saying, like, there's still crime. We see it on the news. There's sadly, still mass shootings, mass killings. But what we're seeing is a lot of that has declined. And, you know, in the same way that I think we always see that's bad when those things are rising up. Like, we should also recognize that we can make change. We can have success against some of these trends, and we're actually seeing that.
- [08:15]
Joanna Solotaroff
What's been attributed to that decline?
- [08:18]
Brian Walsh
That is one of the big questions that's out there. It's amazing. Now we've had, going back to, I think, to the early 1990s, we had the tail end of the great increase in violent crime in US Cities going into that period. Then we had this long tale of decrease that went on for a couple of decades. There's enormous scholarly disagreement over exactly what causes both trends. There are people who said it was about changing policing. There are people who said that was completely overstated. There's generational changes that happen. Like simply, how many young people do you have? Given that a lot of violent crime is done by young people and young men, they often tend to be the victims of that as well. I think you had cities like New York improve economically, at least from the depths of the late 80s and early 90s. You had changes, I think, in drug sales, drug consumptions. I will say the most recent one. I think the simple fact is that once you had the sort of shutdown and breakdown that occurred during the pandemic, it really made people act out. I think, for lack of a better term, I think there was a lot less control. Kids were not able to go to school. As you get back to normality, you see that change. So I think some of this is working through just the terrible social breakdown that was the pandemic and getting back on the track that we used to be. I think some of it really is just a natural. It's a natural reaction to when you see these huge spikes that can't go on forever, eventually they do break, almost like a fever. And it's very important to continue to focus on. But the fact is that this is very real, and this has made life in US Cities far safer than it was just a few years ago.
- [09:53]
Joanna Solotaroff
Yeah. And does the same go for drug use?
- [09:57]
Brian Walsh
Yeah. So the Number of people dying from drug overdoses is down about 24%. I mean, considering that the fact of the opioid epidemic was so terrible, I mean, you had deaths that were above 100,000 a year when things were at their worst. To see that fall is an enormous victory. I think you did see an improvement in response in the development and sort of distribution of stuff like Narcon, which can actually stop overdose deaths in progress and just greater awareness. We've seen this sort of curve happen before. I really hope we never see anything as bad as we were seeing in the late 2000 and tens and early 2000 and twenties. That was really horrible. But it is trending in a really much more positive direction than it used to be. There's still a lot of ground that has to be made up, but we're moving in the right direction, and I do feel good about that.
- [10:49]
Joanna Solotaroff
What are some of your other bullet points?
- [10:51]
Brian Walsh
Well, it's funny, I can stick on a bit of a similar subject, which is one of the biggest trends that's happening right now is a real, frankly, reduction in drinking alcohol.
- [11:00]
Joanna Solotaroff
True.
- [11:01]
Brian Walsh
Yeah. So you may have heard this. The young people, they do not like it. Not at all. Something like among 12th graders I saw in a study when I was writing about it a few months ago, reported alcohol use fell from like, 75% in 1997. Only 54% of Americans now say they actually drink alcohol, which is the lowest share since, like, 1939. Obviously, people enjoy alcohol in moderation, but it is linked to, I believe, something like 178,000 deaths a year in the U.S. so even those relatively small declines really do add up in improvement of health, in survival, in families that aren't destroyed by addiction. So that's also, I think, a nice counter narrative to, like, kids these days are so reckless, and what's wrong with them? Actually, they're quite safe. There are some downsides to that, too, but I don't think anyone with this particular thing is a downside. Unless maybe you sell wine coolers.
- [11:56]
Joanna Solotaroff
I guess we do want to apologize to everyone in the wine cooler industry who might be.
- [12:01]
Brian Walsh
I'm sorry, Mr. Bartleby. I'm sorry, Mr. James.
- [12:04]
Joanna Solotaroff
Who might be suffering these days?
- [12:06]
Brian Walsh
One last thing on the medical thing is obviously one of the worst plagues we face is dementia and Alzheimer's. And while that's still something that we have no cure for, we are seeing really promising research that's looking at the possibility that certain viruses might play a role. There's a really fascinating study that I wrote about where older adults who were given the shingles vaccine were markedly less likely to develop dementia than those who hadn't. And there seems to be some connection possibly there. When I think look to the Future, thinking about 2026 and beyond, that's one area of research that I feel really optimistic about. And anyone who has been touched by that knows how amazing that would be. So that's something that's huge as well.
- [12:48]
Joanna Solotaroff
That's amazing. In terms of the environment, is there any good news?
- [12:53]
Brian Walsh
The environment's a tough one. Let me start with one that again. Maybe this is more for people of my age who remember from their childhood about the ozone hole that was growing over Antarctica and was going to fry us all. That's one of the best long term environmental news stories I've ever seen. Really, because we've seen that ozone hole. Thanks to actual concerted international action going back to the 1989 Montreal Protocol to get CFCs out of the supply chain, we've seen the Ozenholt continue to shrink. Its peak area now is something like 30% smaller than it was in 2006, which was the record. It's closing weeks earlier than usual. Another area that's really great is renewable power. No matter what the Trump administration has tried to do, global renewable power capacity just keeps growing and growing and growing. Something like 4,600 gigawatts between 2025 and 2030. That's what we're expecting. And we've already had about that much installed so far in the world. Solar, wind leading the way. So that is a huge good news story. We're going much faster than I think even the most optimistic people thought 10, 15 years ago.
- [14:03]
Joanna Solotaroff
I feel like now when I'm laying in bed with anxiety, I'll just slowly imagine the hole in the ozone layer closing.
- [14:11]
Brian Walsh
It's like the new counting sheet.
- [14:13]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Yes.
- [14:21]
Joanna Solotaroff
There are certain times for me where I am just like so hooked into the news cycle. It you read one thing that upsets you and you keep reading and it kind of can turn into this like negativity loop for me. And I know for a lot of people I'm curious how you are able to manage the input of so much information. And if that's ever a challenge for you when it's your job to be immersed in these headlines all of the time.
- [14:45]
Brian Walsh
Yeah, this new job, this part of the new job, this good news thing actually helps with that because it actually forces me to go out and look for good things which otherwise would not be coming to me. So I think that's part of it, honestly. A big other part of it is the ability to step back as well. That comes from years of being a journalist where, you know, one thing is like you, you begin to get a longer sweep of time and you realize what seems like a huge story now will not necessarily be a huge story in a year's time, will not even be remembered in five years time. Yeah, weirdly, like the single biggest factor though, is understanding how bad things used to be. You know, like tens of thousands of people are still being murdered. Tens of thousands of people are still dying of drug overdoses. But it is better than it used to be. And then if you really look a long sweep of human history, you realize, I don't want to be born in 1800 anywhere. So in a weird sense, like, a lot of what I do is kind of anchor myself and be like, well, it's not in the midst of the Black Death, which is not the most convincing argument for other people. If I go around, I mean, it could be worse. That's especially true if you think about global trends, things like extreme poverty, which has declined significantly over the last 30 years, or did it with maternal mortality or childhood mortality. It's still awful that this happens to so many people around the world, but at the same time, it is meaningfully important and good that it happens to so fewer people than it once did. And we actually, all of us working together in some way in this world, help make that possible. I don't think that's something we report on a lot, but that is a true fact of the world.
- [16:32]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [17:54]
Brian Walsh
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- [18:16]
Joanna Solotaroff
Right?
- [18:17]
Brian Walsh
The Home Depot Dream Baths built here. New year same extra value meals at McDonald's. So now get two snack wraps plus fries and a medium soft drink for just $8 for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery.
- [18:42]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
If it weren't for the rotten things that happen in this world, we couldn't put on the news.
- [18:51]
Joanna Solotaroff
Okay, so it seems like people did manage to pull off a lot of great things in 2025, but what about 2026? I mean, kicking things off with military strikes and the capture of Maduro in Venezuela, all of the upheaval we're seeing here in the United States. We're only two weeks in and it has just been an onslaught of these big chaotic headlines. But if Brian is right, there's still some really good long term work happening in the background that maybe we can look forward to.
- [19:23]
Brian Walsh
Things are not perfect on this planet, but I do have some good news, which is that we are going back to the moon. NASA's Artemis II mission is scheduled to fly sometime in the early months of 2026. That's going to bring four astronauts on a round trip around the moon. That's expected to be the first in a series of missions in the years to come that will aim to establish a permanent outpost on the moon's southern pole. So if you don't like things on Earth, there might be some real state elsewhere in the future beyond that, like in 2026, we're expecting to see a few major clinical trials that will test how the psychedelic drug LSD can help treat anxiety and depression. I think that's incredibly important because mental health disorders and the rise in those are very real, a very great source of suffering, and we've had a really hard time coming up with new treatments for it. LSD and other psychedelics show a lot of promise. If these go well, we could see some version of LSD being approved as an alternative treatment as early as 2027.
- [20:23]
Joanna Solotaroff
What are some other pieces of good.
- [20:25]
Brian Walsh
News One thing is that we're seeing a huge global movement away from fur. Just recently, actually, Kenny Torella, who's a writer who really focuses on factory farming and animal welfare, wrote about how Poland, which had been the world's number two fur fur producer, has phased it out completely. And we're seeing more of that in the United States. We're seeing that around the world. Starting next September for the 2026 New York Fashion Week, there will be no fur at all. That's joining other major fashion weeks around the world. So I think we're entering a future where we just won't see that anymore. And when you think of how big an issue that used to be, I mean PETA and throwing fake blood on people with fur like that to me is a major victory. Beyond that, we're starting to continue to see improvement in things like cage free eggs, just slightly improving, the welfare of the hundreds of millions, billions of hens that lay eggs for all of us. We're still seeing improvement, I think in the technology of in vitro or lab cultivated meat which if that ever becomes really economical.
- [21:27]
Joanna Solotaroff
Have you ever tried it?
- [21:28]
Brian Walsh
Oh, I have tried it. I've tried lab grown salmon, it's pretty good. I've tried lab grown chicken which tastes like chicken. It's definitely there. The technology exists. It's just of course it's pretty expensive right now, but that was true of other technologies. And if we can do that, if that could ever actually happen, I mean that would be just a sea change. I think we're going to look back in like 100 years as factory farming being one of the worst things humanity is doing right now. And that's a technological solution that it's got a long way to go. But I do feel hope that it continue to improve, continue to become a little more economical and actually start to make a difference in the real world. And it shows the difference that people, really dedicated activists could make that you really had to change people's minds. What happened there was convincing people over time that this was just wrong to do. One of the things we're interested in at future perfect is how do we make successful change. Looking back, how did we stop awful things around the world like how do we improve things like working conditions? It's never easy. It takes time. Sometimes you get technological improvements that can kind of sidestep that maybe that will be lab grown meat. But a lot of the time it's the hard work, the hard slow boring of changing people's minds. And one of the things I always feel most optimistic about is that there never seems to be a shortage of people who want to do that as hard as it is.
- [22:50]
Joanna Solotaroff
Can you tell us about Future Perfect too?
- [22:53]
Brian Walsh
Oh, sure, yeah. Future Perfect is a section at Vox that is dedicated to writing about things that are important but also neglected and then have what we call tractable solutions. So in practice, what that means is these big problems that are out there in the world that people just kind.
- [23:09]
Joanna Solotaroff
Of accept what is your most outrageous prediction for this year?
- [23:15]
Brian Walsh
I think my most outrageous prediction is that I think there is a I believe I put 60% chance that an AI generated song will top the Billboard Hot 100. This has already happened. I believe in country music. In the streaming charts there there was an entirely artificial cowboy act that scored a number one hit. I mean the reality, by the way, I'm not saying this is a good thing, to be clear in favor of this. I want to put that out there right away, okay? Not in favor of algorithmic non real human bands. That said, like, the technology is improving really rapidly. I think songs, the nature of them makes them copyable and maybe there's something about the way pop works today that makes that even more likely. But I do think there's a good chance of that happening over the course of 2026. And that's not a good news prediction, but it's crazy to think of.
- [24:20]
Joanna Solotaroff
It is outrageous.
- [24:21]
Brian Walsh
It is outrageous at the very least.
- [24:29]
Joanna Solotaroff
Thank you to Brian Walsh for helping me feel a little more optimistic about the state of the world. If you, like me, are in need of some good news, you can subscribe to his Good news newsletter@fox.com and we will be linking it in the show. This episode was produced by me, Joanna Solotaroff. It was edited by Meredith Hoddinott and Sally Helm, Mixing and sound design from Erika Wong, fact checking from Melissa Hirsch. Amy Pedula is pure poetry and Noam Hassenfeld is a top 10 AI country song. Jorge Just and Julia Longoria are our editorial directors. Bird Pinkerton immediately asked Platy, who who made your guitar? It was made by a bird. A bird? Not just any bird, platy replied. A yardbird. Eric Flapton thanks to Brian Resnik for co creating the show along with Bird and Noem. If you have thoughts about the show or some good news that's brightened your spirits, please send us an email or leave it as a comment. You can email us@ unexplainableox.com youm can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. It is always, always appreciated and if you're into supporting the show and all of Vox in general, join our membership program. You can go to vox.commembers to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and we will see you next time.
- [26:04]
Brian Walsh
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- [26:24]
Joanna Solotaroff
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