This Thanksgiving, Filtered with TJ Walker steps back from the daily news cycle for a data-driven reality check on the state of the world.

TJ tackles the negativity bias, our tendency to focus on dramatic, recent bad news, and contrasts it with long-term global trends that rarely make headlines. Using data from major international sources, he walks through four massive improvements since 1962:

In the final segment, TJ reflects personally on how his own life has exceeded anything his teenage self in 1979 could have imagined: on-demand media, global information access, smartphones, ride-hailing, and the ability to broadcast and teach to millions from a laptop.

If you want less doomscrolling and more perspective, this episode explains why, by most historical measures, there has never been a better time to be alive, while still recognizing the work left to do.