It's not all bad

0:00It's tax season, and at LifeLock, we know you're tired of numbers. But here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40 % your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast for the threats you can't control. Terms apply. 2025 is over and I gotta say it felt like a long year. 11 months deep into 2025. Here's a look back, recap, deep dive.

0:42January, Carrie versus audio crew. Quick TikTok ban, wildfires, bird flu. 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 all. The squirrels have begun eating meat. East wing group seven and the Nikki Cardi beef. Government shutdown, Halloween week, 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.

1:17Bryan 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. 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. I'm not even gonna lie.

1:55Bryan Walsh:I feel like I can confidently say for most of us, that 2025 was one of the worst goddamn years of our lives. For real, 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... 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? It's all about a matter of perspective, right?

2:28Bryan Walsh:It's all about 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 the way 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 get to their notice.

2:56Bryan Walsh:But that often overlooks not just, like, individual good news stories, but, like, a longer-term trend of things getting better. It's such that, like, I'm pretty confident if you put 2025 against most of the years of the humanities past, this one would come off pretty good.

3:17This is Unexplainable. I'm Joanna Solitaroff. 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?

3:45What for you are the good news highlights of 2025? five.

3:50Bryan 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 they need a liver transplant. And yet, you know, 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.

4:29Bryan Walsh: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. You know, like, here's a huge scientific advancement that now is actually paying off to save people's lives and make people better off. And it starts with this, you know, frankly, cute little six-month-old.

5:02Did this happen in the U.S.?

5:04Bryan Walsh:It 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. Wow. So people are still able to do great work and make these discoveries even in spite of all of these funding cuts. 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. And that is a long tail that, frankly, is vulnerable to being broken.

5:40Bryan Walsh:And I definitely worry about the future. I mean, I should say, off the bat, like, 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, you know, 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 hold 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. It's true.

6:14What are some other pieces of good news?

6:16Bryan 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, a social breakdown that occurred during the pandemic?

6:55Bryan Walsh:Now we're seeing in 2025, like, real shifts in that. There's an argument to be made that we could be, the U.S., on the track for one of the steepest one-year national homicide declines ever, pushing the murder rate down for 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.

7:21And yes, like that's, we're saying like there's still crime.

7:24Bryan Walsh: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. What's been attributed to that decline? 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 U.S. cities going into that period.

7:56Bryan Walsh:Then we had this long tail of decrease that went on for a couple of decades. There's enormous scholarly disagreement over exactly what causes both trends. You know, there were people who said it was about changing policing. There were people who said that was completely overstated. there's generational changes that happen like simply how many young people do you have given that you know 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 sort of cities like a new york improve economically at least from the depths of like the late 80s and and early 90s you had changes i think in drug sales drug consumptions i will say like the most recent one i think you know the simple fact is that like once you had the sort of shutdown and breakdown that occurred during the pandemic really made people act out, I think, for lack of a better term.

8:45Bryan Walsh:I think, you know, 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 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, you know, and this has made life in U.S. cities far safer than it was just a few years ago.

9:20Yeah. And does the same go for drug use?

9:24Bryan 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. You know, 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 2010s and early 2020s.

10:03Bryan Walsh:That was really horrible. But, you know, 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, you know, we're moving in the right direction. I do feel good about that. What are some of your other bullet points? 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. True. Yes. To me, I've 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.

10:42Bryan Walsh: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, you know, even those relatively small declines really do add up in improvement of health and survival, you know, in families that aren't destroyed by addiction. So that's also, I think, a nice Calvin narrative to like kids these days are so reckless and, you know, what's wrong with them? Actually, they're quite safe. You know, there's some downsides to that too.

11:16Bryan Walsh:But, you know, I don't think anyone would think this particular thing is a downside unless maybe you sell wine coolers, I guess. We do want to apologize to everyone in the wine cooler industry who might be. I'm sorry, Mr. Bartleby. I'm sorry, Mr. James. Who might be suffering these days. One last thing on the medical thing is obviously, you know, one of the worst plagues we face is dementia and Alzheimer's. Yes. 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 like markedly less likely to develop dementia than those who hadn't.

11:59Bryan Walsh:And there seems to be some connection possibly there. When I look to the future, I think 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. That's amazing. In terms of the environment, is there any good news? the environment's a tough one let me start with one that like again maybe this is more for people of my age like 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 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 ozone hole continue to shrink.

12:50Bryan Walsh: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. I mean, that, you know, 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 and wind leading the way. So that is a huge good news story. Like we're going much faster than I think even the most optimistic people thought 10, 15 years ago.

13:29I feel like now when I'm like laying in bed with anxiety, I'll just slowly imagine the hole in the ozone layer closing.

13:38Bryan Walsh:It's like the new counting sheet. Yes.

13:47There are certain times for me where I am just like so hooked into the news cycle. 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.

14:12Bryan Walsh:Yeah. You know, it's 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, you know, the ability to step back as well. I mean, that comes from like years of being a journalist where, you know, one thing is like 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.

14:43Yeah.

14:43Bryan Walsh: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, you know, 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, you know, is not the most convincing argument for other people. Like, if I go around, it could be worse.

15:19Bryan Walsh:That's especially true if you think about, like, global trends, things like extreme poverty, which has declined significantly over the last 30 years, or ditto with maternal mortality or childhood mortality. Like, 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, you know, all of us working together in some way in this world helped make that possible. I don't think that's something we report on a lot, but that is a true fact of the world.

15:59Hi, I'm Brene Brown.

16:00Bryan Walsh:And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. For the last 10 years, everything in American politics has basically revolved around one man. And as a political journalist who came of age during Donald Trump's rise in 2016, I've had a front row seat.

16:37I am officially running for president of the United States. It's going to be only America first. America first. Thousands of supporters of President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building.

16:54Bryan Walsh:But is it possible to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump? That's the question I'm going to ask in our new show from Vox. The idea of like a post-Trump or not exactly Trump-focused show can exist because he's not really driving any agenda items. It really does feel like so reactive. You know, I think this Iran thing is also going to cause a big split in the GOP. So far, it doesn't among like people who say they're MAGA voters are still with Trump. But like for the first time, you see on a major issue open opposition from the start of this war. I'm Estet Herndon and welcome to America Actually.

17:32If it weren't for the rotten things that happen in this world, we couldn't put on the news show. 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.

18:13Bryan 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 estate 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.