Good news for people who love bad news

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! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 0:37Speaker 01

  Real innovation is powered by real people. This is Amex Corporate. Trusted experts, smarter technology, 24/7 dedicated support from day one to answer questions, help set up policies and approvals, and consult on spend capacity as your business needs evolve. Plus, on-demand resources help level up operations at every stage. That's the trusted service you've come to expect. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is Amex Corporate.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  All right. Brian Walsh.

• 1:25Speaker 03

  That's me.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  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 Vox.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, you could say that. I think that's fair to say.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. Could you pull up the best performing Vox stories right now? And we'll play a little game of good news, bad news.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  Oh, boys, it's so embarrassing. Okay. Okay.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Top story.

• 1:58Speaker 03

  Pop story.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Vox.com.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  True.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Okay. July 18th, Constantrati, there's a bigger story behind Colbert's cancellation. Yeah, I don't think the bigger story is that bad for the media is that pretty sure and bad for media freedom.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  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?

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  All right, all right, going down. Will we ever know why Brian Koberger murdered the Idaho four? Just gonna keep on going on that one.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yep, yep.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  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 the Gen Z's look at me with dead eyes. Republicans now own America's broken healthcare system? Nope. America's fastest growing suburbs are about to get very expensive.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  I think that's a good representative sample.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd say so.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  For July 2025.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  You know, I'm not going to try to smokescreen you here and say that everything is great in the year 2025. In fact, it's 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.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  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?

• 3:46Speaker 03

  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 so negative? Why 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. I mean, this is the problem we face, right? Like, it's important for any editorial company or person, whatever, you know, to 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.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Why, why do you think it's so easy to miss the good news or to miss covering the good news?

• 4:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  What's the, what's the mystery here? What's, what's unexplainable about some of these biases?

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Why, why we lean negative even though I don't think it makes us feel good? We, 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. 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? Because it doesn't feel like it's getting better. Like, it feels like if anything, we're seeing like a darker tenor tend

• 6:09Speaker 03

  to win out over time. And look, maybe that's gonna, that's, that's reality to a certain extent. You know, maybe I'm the one who's wrong.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. How do you think this negativity bias shapes what we believe is true?

• 6:22Speaker 03

  You know, so much of this comes down to attention, right? Like, what are we paying attention to? What we notice? And what you notice then becomes your reality. So I think negativity bias just makes us more likely to pick up on things that are bad, that are 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, if you're drawing a picture on the paper and you only have Black, gray and white, like it's gonna look differently than if you have full colors in a way that I think is, I do, I think is ultimately counterproductive.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Is it also somewhat 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?

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Yes, I think so. That's absolutely true. And I think, um, 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 are actually what 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.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Got it. So it's like, the one-off holds just as much weight as like everything working well for millions of people.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Exactly. Like, we're not walking around with sort of being like, well, that was that one plane crash, but actually, you know, three million passengers every day land perfectly safely. Uh, no, that doesn't work that way.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Let's bring some good news to the unexplainable listeners.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  I love it. Let's do it.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  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 it?

• 8:21Speaker 03

  I think we should call it good news.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Just simple, clean, to the point?

• 8:28Speaker 03

  Look, this is news.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  That's good.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  It is good. Put those things together, you have good news.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  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?

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Like that?

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Kind of sounds like Blue's Clues.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  How about, uh, you may have missed the silver lining as you fell into a pit of despair?

• 8:53Speaker 03

  Poetic, but a bit long.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not, it's not as catchy. All right. We'll stick with good news. You make a compelling case.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  I did make a little theme song for you.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  So.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  I feel like I'm ready to start like a morning radio show with that.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  So good.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Awesome. So this is good news. You are Brian Walsh. Did you bring me some good news?

• 9:33Speaker 03

  I do have some good news and it starts with bad news first.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  Did you ever watch like the nightly news, like the local news when you were growing up?

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  What did it usually start with?

• 9:45Speaker 02

  I think I remember. Yeah, definitely. It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And like, I grew up outside Philadelphia, which in the 80s was definitely like every day, like every, without fail, 5:30, 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. Von 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.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Into late 90s through the 2000s, in 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 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. This was happening across the country.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  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 for 2025 indicate that we may be on a pace for the lowest murder rate in US history, at least in recorded US history. That's pretty amazing.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  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?

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Hearing you say that this could be the lowest murder rate in recorded US history, like, yeah, that seems like a catchy headline to me.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  It is.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Why, why would this be good news that we might have missed?

• 12:04Speaker 03

  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 could 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.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  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.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  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 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 I've 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.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Can I just run and get some water?

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  All right, thanks.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Good news is thirsty business.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:35Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Sonos. Hey, Sonos, give me some music.

• 14:42Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 14:58Noam Hassenfeld?

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  I get in here to the kitchen, and I got a brand new Sonos Play right here on the counter. I can open the fridge, grab a seltzer.

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• 16:08Noam Hassenfeld?

  Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

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• 18:11Speaker 02

  All right, Brian, Brian with a Y, we're back.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  What other good news is out there that I should know about?

• 18:20Speaker 03

  I really like this one, and that is driverless cars.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  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.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  I'm obviously, I'm very good.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Everybody thinks they're above average, right?

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's the Lake Weblegon effect on cars. But close to 40,000 people are dying in car accidents every year. That's a result of the 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, if we're moving 70 miles an hour...

• 19:03Speaker 02

  In a 2,000-pound machine?

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. You know, it would be great if we didn't have to do this.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  I'm taking it that you do not like driving. Do you like to drive?

• 19:12Speaker 03

  I don't, but I hate being driven even more, actually. So, I drive a 2011 Toyota Prius right now. That is...

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Sexy.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Terminally, terminally dirty.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Full of eight-year-old Cheerios.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  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 fifty six million miles of fully autonomous driving. And that means no safety driver at the side, like just the car doing it.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Sounds like a lot. Is that a lot?

• 19:56Speaker 03

  That's a lot. Yeah, I would say that's a lot. I mean, like, it's, you know, I mean, it's, 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 eighty one percent fewer deployments of airbags because of accidents, eighty five percent fewer serious injury crashes, ninety six percent fewer intersection injuries versus human drivers. Those are very good numbers, I'd say.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Ninety six, that's, you know.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Ninety six.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Solid A for Waymo.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. So if you extend this data to be the equivalent of like the three point three trillion vehicle miles that are driven by humans in the US in typical year.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Okay, so millions to trillions.

• 20:38Speaker 03

  We'd estimate that you save something like three, four thousand lives a year.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  Now, you know, all right, a lot of caveats to go with that.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Okay, it sounds caveat-y.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  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, so not running into some of the things that, you know, I might be running into here in the Northeast in a bad winter.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, the cow paths made into roads versus like roads that were designed as roads.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  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 motor 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, our just general poor driving ability.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Right. I guess I still wrestle with.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  I'm not trusting a driverless car like I wouldn't I wouldn't go into a driverless car. Have you ever been in one?

• 21:54Speaker 03

  I've not yet, actually.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  I would, though.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  You would? All right.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  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 a human driver.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. What would it take for you to put your kid on a driverless school bus?

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  That's, that's, you really got me there.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Blow, blow.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  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.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  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 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'd jump in it tomorrow. You know, I'd be fine. But like, there is something different about taking someone else's life on that one.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right. Last good news story of the day. What do you got?

• 23:30Speaker 03

  Cancer.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Cancer. Good news.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's funny how often the good news of good news stories start with something really bad. And I believe there's a reason for that, which is that.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  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.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Little switcheroo.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  So what's good about cancer?

• 23:56Speaker 03

  What's good about cancer is that we're getting much better at treating it, basically. One of the stories is 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. Cancers are aged better, you know, the older you get, generally speaking, the more at risk you are.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Because it just like takes time for cancer to develop.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  I think, I mean, and it's important to know that like, because the population of 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 in given 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.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  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.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  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, big cause here.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  So part of like, what was driving trends in the 90s was how much people were smoking in the 60s?

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I think so. I think plus even the 1990 people were still smoking more than they do now. Like it's been a, 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. That's, I've had the lovely experience of going through that.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  Welcome to your 40s.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, yes, exactly.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  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?

• 26:12Speaker 03

  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 my age. Now we'll see what happens with this. Like if this becomes a really bigger public health issue, then that really does begin to complicate the story. But I think otherwise, I think you 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.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right. Well, I'm feeling a little better.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  How are you feeling?

• 26:54Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  It's funny, but you know, it needs help.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sounds like it needs somebody in its corner. You've taken that on.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. How has, you know, looking for a good news story every week for your newsletter changed your approach to looking for stories?

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Thing about a weekly newsletter is you do it every week and that adds up. So, you know, like

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Just wait until you go to twice a week.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  Oh, God, yeah. I walked right into that. Okay. I think things that like, what are the stories we've told 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, didn't really, I didn't 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

• 28:13Speaker 03

  it's almost like an armor you can put on as you go off into the not very easy world, frankly, and the not very easy and a little scary future.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  If you want more good news from Brian every week, you can sign up for his newsletter on vox.com. We will also include a link in our show notes. This episode was produced by me, Meredith Hodnot. I also run the show. It was edited by Jorge Just. Noam Hassenfeld makes our music. Krista Yala did the mixing and sound design, and Melissa Hirsch checked the facts.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Bird Pinkerton backed away from the platypus as Aaron Bird stepped forward. His wings flared and smirked. What a touching story. But let's not forget why we're here. It's dual time, Pinkerton.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Thanks to Brian, with an I, Resnick, for co-creating the show. If you, Brian, and all the other non-Brians out there want to share your thoughts with us, write in. Send us a voice memo. Tell us what you're thinking. We're at [email protected]. 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/members. You will get ad-free podcasts and unlimited access to Vox journalism. And if you sign up because you love Unexplainable and the things we make, please tell our bosses. It makes a big difference. You can also support us by leaving a nice rating or review

• 29:51Speaker 02

  wherever you listen to your podcasts or just tell the folks in your life the good news of Unexplainable. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back in your feed on Wednesday.

• 30:14Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Sonos. No matter how much you know about frequency response or harmonic distortion, the thing that's going to make you fall in love with a speaker is how it makes you feel. And Sonos has that it factor, you know? It's this seamless system that makes things sound good in every room. That obviously takes some serious engineering, but it also takes a big-picture understanding of how and why we actually listen to things. The birthday playlist, the new TV show, the exciting new game you just got. And for the nerds out there, Sonos does have amazing frequency response and extremely low harmonic distortion.

• 30:54Noam Hassenfeld?

  Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

• 31:04Speaker 05

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are, with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich, together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.