Filtered: Why the World Is Better Than Ever (Thanksgiving Reality Check)

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:

1. The collapse of extreme poverty worldwide
2. A huge jump in life expectancy and a plunge in child mortality
3. A global surge in literacy and education, especially for girls
4. A long-term decline in violent deaths from war and homicide

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.