Good news for people who love bad news

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0:37Hi, it's Kara Swisher. You know me as co-host of Pivot, but for August, I'm flying solo, and I've lined up some incredible guest hosts to join me. Mark Cuban, Chelsea Handler, Caitlin Collins, and a lot more you won't want to miss. Already out, my conversation with Hillary Clinton. Among many other things, we get into redistricting fights, reshaping state politics, and what Trump's golden makeover of the presidency. actually means, and it's not good. Trust me, you don't want to skip this one. Find Pivot on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

1:24All right, 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.

1:44Bryan Walsh:Yeah, you could say that. I think that's fair to say. Yeah. Could you pull up the best performing Vox stories right now? And we'll play a little game of good news, bad news. Oh boy, this is so embarrassing. Okay. Okay. Top story. Pop story. Box.com. All right. Top story. July 14th, Ian Millhiser. 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, Constance 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.

2:23Right, right, right.

2:23Bryan Walsh: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. All right, all right, going down. Will we ever know why Brian Koberger 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 then they're like, oh, I love the way that Gen Z's look at me with dead eyes.

3:00Bryan Walsh: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 smokescreen you here and say that everything is great in the year 2025. in fact is probably quite a lot worse than 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 from that perspective.

3:49Bryan Walsh: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? So why's it so negative? Why's it so negative? You know, if you just, if you guys would report positive news, we would jump all, we'd read it. No, they're lying that they do not, they don't actually feel that way. Um, 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.

4:25Bryan Walsh: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.

5:09The 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?

5:29Bryan Walsh: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 um 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 just you know 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?

6:05Because 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 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 um negativity bias just makes us more likely to pick up on things that are bad that are negative um 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, 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 is ultimately counterproductive.

7:07Is it also some, what 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 is bad. Yes, I think so. That's absolutely true. And I think Like, 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'll be the thing that'll stick in our head, not all the stuff that went just fine.

7:42Got it. So it's like the one-off holds just as much weight as, like, everything working well for 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 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.

8:19So we should like name this something super catchy. Right. Like, what should we call this?

8:24Bryan Walsh: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 Blue's Clues. Exactly. How about, uh, 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.

9:06Ooh.

9:13So I'm asking you, can you give me that? Can you give me that good news?

9:21Bryan Walsh:I feel like I'm ready to start like a morning radio show with that. Yeah, absolutely. So good. Awesome. So this is good news. You are 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 without fail, 530. Larry Kane comes on the TV show or whoever.

10:03Bryan Walsh:This murder happened here. This murder happened here. This murder happened here. Now, there were a lot of murders happening. Violent 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 sort of around the mid-90s and just mostly kept dropping, kept falling and kept falling into late 90s through the 2000s, into the 2010s.

10:36Bryan Walsh: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 that they believe crime is rising you know like 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 followed, you had a real meaningful, huge spike in violent crime in the United States.

11:14Bryan Walsh:This was happening across the country. And what's amazing is really just over the last 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 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?

11:52Hearing 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, why would this be good news that we might've missed? This just feels like, I mean, maybe I'm just 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. I mean, 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.

12:29That'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. Like that is, 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.

13:10But I think, you know, there are positive things happening, whether that's, you know, research that indicates that the worst levels of warming now seem less likely in the future or something else I've just looked at recently

13:23Bryan Walsh: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, I know. 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.

14:06That 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 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, just getting worse. Right. Can I just run to get some water? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, thanks.

14:24Sorry. Okay. Good news is thirsty business. Yeah.

14:39Concerns about dark money in U.S. politics date back years, at least to Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that removed barriers on corporate spending in elections. During midterm cycles and presidential races, there's always grumbling about dark money. And this year in Michigan, it sometimes seemed like the whole race. The pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC spent about$30 million boosting the campaign of Haley Stevens. Her opponent, Abdullah Syed, drew attention to this again and again, and she lost. AIPAC is in a difficult position. Its support can now be a liability, and some people are questioning the way the organization disperses money.

15:14I'm going to sound crazy when I say this, but Crush Magapack is affiliated with a different pack called Save Democracy. And Save Democracy has received$100 ,000 from United Democracy Project, which is APAC Super PAC. So sometimes the layers here are two or three or even four packs deep. On Today Explained, the backlash against APAC. Today Explained drops every weekday. Megan Rapinoe here. This week on Why Are You Like This, I got to sit down with legendary Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve in Chicago during All-Star Weekend. We get into her personal style of activism, how she supports her players as people, and why she proudly considers herself a dyke.

15:58Then we learn if she's more of a mommy, daddy, or baby. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.

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16:53Happy, happy, happy.

16:58Happy, happy, happy, happy, happy. All right, Brian. Brian with a 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,

17:17Bryan Walsh: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 Wobegon 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. A 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.

17:53In a 2 ,000-pound machine.

17:55Bryan Walsh:Yeah, exactly. 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? Um, I don't, but I hate being driven even more actually. So I drive a 2011 Toyota Prius right now. That is. Terminally, terminally dirty. Full of eight year old Cheerios. And very uncomfortable. The shocks at this point are just like, it's like, it's like riding a wagon from the 1800s. So, but, um, what 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.

18:40And that means no safety driver at the side, like just the car doing it. Sounds like a lot. Is that a lot?

18:46Bryan Walsh:That's a lot, yeah. I would say that's a lot. I mean, 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, 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.