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

Foreign. Hi and welcome and happy Thanksgiving. If you are celebrating that here in the United States today, we're going to do something a little bit different here. It is Thanksgiving, and I'm going to focus this show on things I'm thankful for. Instead of chasing the top headlines, we're stepping back to look at one of the biggest communication problems we all face, negativity bias. And that relates to being thankful and not being thankful. So that's why I'm focusing on that. Let's face facts. The easiest way to sound smart and sophisticated is to complain that everything's getting worse and that today's leaders are uniquely corrupt. And I guess I'm as guilty of that as anyone. The quickest way to be dismissed by a lot of smart folks and to sound naive is to sound optimistic. That combination skews our thinking toward the most recent, the most dramatic story and erases decades of real, sometimes slow progress. So today's show is. Massive. Ways the world has actually gotten better since I was born way back in 1962. How extreme poverty collapsed from nearly half the planet to under 10%. How life expectancy jumped by almost two decades. How literacy and education, especially for girls, transformed billions of lives. And how your odds of dying violently from war or homicide have fallen to historic lows regardless of what you may see in headlines in certain regions of the world. And then I'll get personal and talk about how my own life as a middle class kid who loved media in the 1970s ended up looking like science fiction, but not the dystopian kind one with on demand movies, a global newsstand in my pocket, smartphone, communicators, ride hailing and comforts my teenage self would have thought required that I'd marry a Rockefeller. Well, I didn't. All that and more today on this special special edition of Filtered. Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker. Hi and welcome. Thanks so much for joining me today on Filtered. Before we dive into the Thanksgiving festivities, quick look at the market update. Yesterday The S&P 500 closed and at 6,812, that's up 0.69%. Nasdaq Composite closed at 23,216, up 0.82%. Please always keep in mind the long term S&P 500 over the last 25 years has gone up on average 8.32%. The NASDAQ 100 has gone up 9.09% for the last 25 years. So please, please keep in mind the long term. Okay, let's dive right in to our Top stories again, these aren't so much stories. From the headlines is trends I'm grateful for, I'm thankful for. And that's why we're focusing on it right here today on Thanksgiving. The first Big issue. Extreme poverty from normal to relatively rare. When I was born in 1962, extreme poverty was the default human experience. According to the World bank and our world in data, roughly half of humanity lived in extreme poverty around the time I was born. By 2019, that number had fallen below 10%. That's right, from half the world to single digits. Still too much. But that is tremendous progress. The World bank estimates that the number of people in extreme poverty fell from about 2.3 billion in 1990 to about 831 million in 2025, even as the world adds billions of people. And Hans Rosling's Gapminder research shows the share of humanity in extreme Poverty fell from 30% in 1997 to just over 9% in 2017. Again, huge, wonderful drop in the last 30 years. And yet you don't see headlines about it. Steven Pinkert, one of my favorite authors and thinkers, has called this one of humanity's greatest uncelebrated achievements. Because progress this steady and this quiet rarely gets attention. Covid and recent conflicts created temporary setbacks, it's true, but the long term trajectory is still extraordinary. The world I was born in to was majority poor. Today it is majority middle class or better. So what's the real message here? Everyone likes to claim gloom and doom. The world's never been worse and the middle class is being destroyed. Part of that's true. But the big picture is poverty worldwide has decreased year after year after year, slowly but surely. When I was born, half the world lived in extreme poverty. Today it's 10% or less. That is progress and something to be thankful for. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. Poverty's decline is history's most ignored success story. Forget when I was born. If you just go back 100 or so years, something like 90% of human beings lived in extreme poverty. Starvation for part of your life was normal. It was kind of weird for you to be well fed your whole life, for your family and friends to be well fed. That was something for kings and the leaders of society. Now capitalism takes a big hit, rightfully so, in many situations. And nothing makes you sound smarter than talk about, oh, the neoliberal order is horrible. We all realize that. But if you hate capitalism, you have to explain some other rationale for how the world has gone from, you know, 90% living in poverty before capitalism to today, less than 10%. And if you think the last 30 years was so awful because of so called the neoliberal order, you do have to explain why we've gone from 30% of the world living in extreme poverty to less than 10%. I would submit capitalism has done that. Is capitalism messy, unfair? Does it create more inequality? Yeah, but taking people out of extreme poverty is kind of a big deal if you're living in extreme poverty. I've never lived in extreme poverty, but I have to think that it's better the way we are now than in the past. I certainly don't want to go back to the days which was the norm for the vast majority of human history, which is 90% of people living in extreme poverty. And according to the World Bank, 2.3 billion people have dropped were in extreme poverty just a few decades ago. Now it's 831 million. The poverty. Excuse me, the population still grew around the world. East Asia made the biggest gains. India and China lifted entire populations or most of their populations from living under the poverty level to above the poverty level. Does that mean I endorse everything the Chinese government or the Indian government has done? No. But again, today is a day of thanksgiving, of being thankful. And I for one think it's too easy, it's too glib to just say the world is worse than ever and the neoliberal order has made things worse. Well, it's not worse for the billions of people who are not living in poverty anymore that used to do so. Okay, according to Gapminder, poverty was halved in 1997. From 1997 to 2017, most humans now live above bear survival. You can say, isn't it awful they're only barely surviving. You have to ask, compared to what a lot of people here in America like to say, well, back in the 1960s, we had a great middle class. Yeah, certain things were better for certain people in the United States. But if you care about human beings, if you care about humanity, you can't say, let's go back to a time when half of the people living on the planet were living in extreme poverty. So no, there was not some golden era when the world was really a lot better. The bet and I'm going to get flack for this, I'm going to get negative comments for this, but I will state this categorically, there's never been a better time to be born a human being than right now. Is it perfect? No. But compared to any other time in history. Your chances of growing up in extreme poverty is much lower than it's ever been. Most humans now are essentially a part of the non poor and I think you have to be pretty callous to dismiss that is somehow trivial. I'm TJ Walker. Happy Thanksgiving to you. I'm coming to you live on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn on TikTok. Talking to my friends on TikTok today. Glad you're with us as well, and we're not doing our typical show. I'm not taking stories ripped from the headlines and then filtering them through the lens of communication skills and personal development skills. Instead, I am looking at things I'm thankful for and I think really any human living on the planet should be thankful for. Stepping back from the big perspective, looking at things progress last 30, 40, 50 years. But getting out of poverty is only one thing to be thankful for. There's more to come. Stay tuned. Filtered is brought to you by the.

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Welcome back to Filtered. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. Again, this is our special live Thanksgiving version. I'm very thankful for a lot of things. I'll be talking about more of that at the end of the show, but I am thankful to be able to come to you right here today. Something that was a dream of mine as a kid, being able to do things like this. And now, not only can I do it, but anyone can do it if they have a smartphone or a laptop or a microphone. So indeed, there is a lot to be thankful for. Let's move on to issue two longer lives, fewer child funerals in 1962, again, the year I was born, global life expectancy was about 55 years. Thank goodness I didn't live back then because I'm over 55 now. Today, according to the World Health Organization and the World bank, it's roughly 73. That's nearly 18 years of extra life in a single generation. Child mortality is where the revolution is most dramatic. In 1950. About 23% of children worldwide died before age five. I mean, that's just mind boggling. Basically you had four kids, one of them was a goner. And that was the norm. That wasn't some rare bad luck. Today the rate is around 3 to 4%. UNICEF estimates that the under five deaths fell from $12.8 million, 8 million kids in 1990, not that viral, not that long ago, to under 5 million today. A drop of about 60% in just the last 35 years. But vaccines, yes, vaccines. Antibiotics, sanitation, clean water and safer childbirth all fuel this transformation. Steve Pinker and Hans Rosling both argued that if you want proof the world has gotten better, start with the number of children who now reach adulthood. Okay, what's the real message here? You cannot say the world is worse than ever before and look in the eyes of a parent and say, yeah, we should go back to the days where if you had four kids, one of them was dead. Because that was reality in 1950. Today it's relatively rare. Only 3 or 4% of small children, infants, die. That's progress. Let's go a little bit deeper here. I know for me personally, having a child was the best thing ever. I don't think I'm unique in that. People, people love having their children. They love their children most of the time. And the idea of ever going back to a time when you just had to, basically, you knew if you had an average sized family, if you had five kids, you basically knew you were going to outlive one or more of your children. It just seems horrific, it seems barbaric. That's something to be thankful for. And it's seems clever these days to say I don't, I don't agree with the mainstream medical establishment. You know what, fine. If you don't agree with the medical, mainstream medical establishment, go back to the 1800s and plan on dying at 30, because that's kind of what you got. 33. Most of human history, humans died around 30, 33 years of age. And it was, sorry, some of you don't want to hear this on Thanksgiving or any other day. It was because of mainstream western medicine, it was because of vaccines, it was because of antibiotics, it was because of pharmaceutical companies making antibiotics and vaccines. Let's look at some more of the stats here. Again, under five deaths in just the last few decades. It's gone from 12.8 million to less than 5 million. Part of it is simply clean water. Sadly, a lot of the world still doesn't have clean water. But more and more do antibiotics. It seems so humdrum, so boring. But that has dramatically enhanced people's ability to live longer. And not just for infants. Anyone. I mean, George Washington, the first President of the United States, got what today would have been considered a minor infection when he was in his late 60s, and because there were no antibiotics, died. He was otherwise a quite robust individual. But those are the times you live in. Any, any kind of cut, any kind of infection could essentially end your life. So if you believe in life, if you consider yourself pro life at a larger societal level, you have to celebrate this. Humans are living longer than ever before. Are there problems with a lot of humans in certain societies like the United States, just hanging on because we do everything we can to destroy our health by, by stuffing our faces? And I will be doing that later today. But people who are doing it 365 days a year, not exercising. Yeah, but still, if I had a choice between dying at 30 or 33 or 55, which was the average lifespan when I was born, to living to 80, 90, and maybe not being in the best of health the last few years, I definitely prefer living today. Plus today you do have the option of having healthy habits, of having a healthy diet, having healthy exercise habits, and potentially living to 80, 90 or beyond. So that is the second really big thing I'm very thankful for on this 2025 Thanksgiving. And what I think the whole world has a reason to be thankful for. Again, the purpose of the show today is to put a spotlight on things to be thankful for and to get away from the negativity bias. The news has a strong negativity bias. If a plane crashes, it's big news, it's visual, it's tv. If a thousand planes land successfully today around the world, there's not going to be any story about that. If the number of people who die in plane crashes goes down every year, there's not going to be any story about that. That's because the news has a negativity bias. That's because you and I have a negativity bias. But if you want an accurate sense of what's really going on in the world, which I would assume you do, you want to live in reality. You want to know what's really going on so you can make the smartest judgments for yourself, for your business, for your family. That's why it's essential to try to be aware of your own biases. And that's a part of what I try to do every day on this show. But we're especially trying to do that today on this day of Thanksgiving. Stay tuned. There are even more things to be thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day.

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Welcome back. It is a day of Thanksgiving and I want to say I'm thankful to you. This show is a little more than three months old and it's been a lot of fun. I'm very thankful for so many of you who are regulars here, regular audience members. I appreciate you a great deal and this is I'll talk about the end of the show. This is something I'm very thankful for because there were times in my life when I failed miserably at hosting shows because I couldn't even get on the ear. Now we all can get on the air, so to speak. If you do get any value out of today, do it my friend on LinkedIn or excuse me, on Tick Tock just said Jason said share. He's asking me to ask you to share this show. So I would very much appreciate it if you could share the show. Like it, Leave a comment, subscribe or follow Whether you're listening on a podcast platform or watching on YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn or any other social media platform, let's dive into the next big big thing. I think I'm thankful for and I really think any any human being who cares about someone beyond themselves, who cares about the planet, has to be thankful for. And that is a literate, educated world. Especially for girls. In 1960, only 42% of adults worldwide were literate. That's right, most people couldn't read. According to UNESCO and Our World in data today, literacy is around 87%, so more than double as more than 100% increase. Primary school enrollment is close to 90% worldwide. Only about 8 to 11% of primary age children are out of school. That's a radical improvement from a Time when most kids didn't complete basic schooling. Gender education or gender equality in education is one of the biggest breakthroughs. Women once made up about 2/3 of all illiterate adults. The gap has narrowed dramatically as girls school expanded across much of the world. Rosling repeatedly shows that when girls get more education, family sizes fall and incomes rise and then health improves. So this is great news. What's the real message here? As recently as 1960, only 42% of people in the world could read. Today, 87%. That's a huge improvement. Most of all, we've taken young girls and women who were two thirds of the illiterate of the world and given them a shot at reading and education too. This is huge improvement for all of humanity. Let's dig a little bit deeper here and look at some more facts. As I mentioned, 42%, only 42% literate in 1960. And a lot of nations, not the U.S. but in a lot of nations, you have close to a hundred percent literacy. And those who aren't often, it's not because of opportunities, it's, it's because of other learning disabilities. So that's a huge, huge improvement. These days, it's relatively rare to see kids in factories, working in soccer, you know, making soccer balls. Does it still happen? Yes, but according to United nations research, 90%, almost all young kids today are in some kind of schooling. Now, 200 years ago, 90% of humanity was illiterate. So again, you look at 200,000 years of humanity, basically everyone was illiterate until several hundred years ago. And as recently as 200 years ago, 90% were illiterate. Today it's less than 15%. Women once were 2/3 of all illiterate adults. People thought, well, she's just got to cook and clean. What does she need to learn how to read for? Thankfully, we've gotten past that attitude. And these days, girls are actually surpassing boys and young men in the education department. Now, when there is more education, people learn about the birds and the bees, the science and biology, so they no longer have 12 kids. This creates a dramatic improvement in the quality of life for people. It also means, thanks to the issue we spoke about earlier, since you don't have to worry about one out of four kids dying, you don't have to have eight children to end up with a handful that live. So with more education means smaller family size. It also empowers economies. There's a direct correlation between education levels in a society and the size of its economy, the wealth of the economy and the wealth of individuals. These are all fantastic things. And yes, are there excesses in education here in America? Has a lot of higher education turned itself into basically hedge funds and Hermes bags and just trying to manipulate you to get the most amount of money out of you? Yeah, there's all sorts of problems with education, but look at the big picture. The fact that the entire world is now mostly literate and that in society after society, it's not just elementary school education, it's secondary education, it's college education. This is making the world a richer place and a better place for all of it. And it's something that I think any, any human being has to celebrate. Yes, there are the Peter Thiels of the world literally paying people not to go to college. But if you look at all the, the tech entrepreneurs these days telling oh, don't go to college, it's a waste of time. It typically is coming from people with, with advanced degrees from Stanford. So it worked out well for them. I'm not here to say everybody has to go to college, but I do think everybody needs to learn how to read. And we as a, as a planet, as a species are much better off because of these extreme advancements that happened like that. When you look at the, the, the history for the last 200, 000 years of human beings, it's been amazingly quick. It's, it's just not quick enough to get in today's headlines. It's not enough to get on CNN or the BBC or Fox News. In part, it's a little too gradual for that. And it's not negative news. And unfortunately, as we talked about, that's what drives most news, is negativity. And that's not what we're about right here today. Filtered. Today's special vision of the show. It's a special edition of Filtered for Thanksgiving where I'm talking about the things I'm thankful for and I'm thankful for you sticking around for this next topic. Stay tuned.

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Welcome back to Filford. It is Thanksgiving. I am here on the road today visiting family in Charlotte, North Carolina and really looking forward to my my times here. Having a great time and I'm about to have a big traditional Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, all sorts of trimming. So very much looking forward to that and very thankful to my sister and brother in law for hosting me and the whole family here in Charlotte. My wife Joanne and Rossa with me as well and other family members. So if you are celebrating this Thanksgiving, I hope it's a wonderful one for you. Okay, let's dive into yet another topic to be really thankful for. Less violent death than our brains assume. It feels like the world is getting more violent. I understand it feels that way. But long term data from PRIO, UNODC and WHO tell a different story. Worldwide battle deaths fell from 24 per 100,000 people in 1950 to around 2 per 100,000 in 2015. That's a drop of roughly 90 to 95%. Yes, I know we have situations in the Middle east, we have situations in Ukraine, but still it's dramatically lower no matter how you slice and dice the data. Global homicide rates also declined. UNODC reports a drop from 7.2 homicides. You know, your neighbor kills your neighbor, or wife kills husband, husband kills wife. 7.2 people per 100,000 in 1992. It fell to 6.1 by 2017, with many wealthy countries experiencing their lowest levels in decades. In this case, the United States being one of them. Now, the world is far from peaceful and current conflicts are horrific. But compared with the 1960s and especially compared with earlier centuries, your odds of dying violently have fallen dramatically. I know it doesn't seem like that, but those are the stats. Okay, what's the real message here? Yes, you can see headlines about war in Ukraine and destruction in the Middle East. Death, death, death. The reality is you as a normal human being have never been safer from violent death than right now in 2025. Violent deaths from combat, from murder are lower than they have ever been. That's something to be thankful for. Let's look at the data in a little more detail. This is an issue I do talk about a lot because fear sells. You don't have to look any further than New York City. Crime is lower than it's been in 30. It's dramatically lower than it's been in 30 years. By some metrics, violent crime is lower than it's been in 60 years. But that's not what the news report. Especially if you look at conservative outlets like the New York Post or, or Fox News Channel. Any one death is given so much media coverage to scare people because it helps political and agendas. It helps certain political factions, say other political factions that control the cities are bad, evil, out of control, will destroy the world, therefore vote them out of office. And yet no one looks at the facts. You will never see a giant, giant, giant headline in the New York Post saying violent crime down for 10 straight years on average, or violent crime dramatically lower than it was in 30 years ago in New York City. You won't see that headline. It's not going to sell because it doesn't create fear. Let's look more at the stats again. In 1950, there were 24 people dying in wars for every hundred thousand people on the planet. By 2015, it had gone to two people. From 24 people to two people for every hundred thousand. That's huge progress. In general, there's been a 90 to 95% decline in people dying in wars. That's great news. Armed conflict is rare versus disease. Homicide now gone from 7.2% down to 6.1%. Be nice if that were better, but it's still headed in the right direction. Most countries are safer than in the 1970s. Violence is concentrated in more specific regions than it used to be. It used to be kind of everywhere. Now it's more concentrated. You therefore hear about it more because the TV cameras can go to that one spot. So when I hear people say, well, I'm thinking about having kids, but you know, you know, the world today, that's insanity. If you don't want to have children, don't have children. I'm not here to tell you. Elon Musk is telling. Everyone's got to have five children. No, if you don't want to have children, don't have children. But to use the rationale that somehow the world is worse than when you were a kid, you're lying to yourself. You're letting so many biases penetrates your brain and it's completely irrational. Now everybody's irrational. Otherwise we wouldn't get married or take care of children or be nice to other people. Sometimes we don't know. It's nothing wrong with being irrational, but you need to recognize when you're being irrational. So, no, if you tell yourself you'd like to have kids, but the world's too dangerous or crazy or out of control, you're not Being honest with yourself. Maybe you just don't want to have kids and that's okay. All right. Those are the, what I see as the four biggest things that we as a world need to be thankful for. You're a human being and you have any sense of empathy for the world. You can't simply ignore these positive trends because they have been wildly and profoundly positive to the world and it's backed up by data. And I'm constantly amazed by how many people who consider themselves rational, data driven people and yet are convinced the world is getting worse and worse and worse. Does everything always incrementally get better at the same amount? No. I happen to be one who thinks the current US political situation is substantially worse than it was even a year ago. But in general, when you look at these trends, how long people live, whether people are even learning how to read, the kind of health care they are getting, the number of people not living in extreme poverty, when you look at these issues, these trends, it gives me hope that humanity is doing something right. We are not only making progress, it's not linear always, but we're making progress faster than humans have ever done it in the history of the world. Because for most of human history there really was no progress. People were subsistence farmers and before that they were just nomads. And this happened for thousands of years. Forget net worth. All you were worried about, did you have something over your head, a cave, something and enough food to eat today? That was the extent of what you were focused on. We no longer live in those days. Okay, let's switch now to the final topic of the day. Issue 5. My Own Life outran my teenage fantasy. Now, if you described my everyday life to the 17 year old me way back in 1979, I would have assumed that you know what my life is like today. I would have assumed way back in 1979 that I, I won a billion dollar lottery or I married a Rockefeller or something bizarre. Because back then luxury meant being able to watch three TV networks, getting ready, being able to read my local newspaper every day, maybe a decent stereo system. If I missed a movie in theaters, it was just gone. My house didn't have cable tv, there was no Internet back then, wasn't even a rumor really. It was just kind of a fantasy. Today, with single streaming subscriptions, I can access. With multiple streaming subscriptions, I can access pretty much every movie ever made, thousands and thousands of TV series. Google offers more than 40 million books instant instantly available. I have at my fingertips more books than Alexander the Great and you know, the richest kings in the history of the world. I can have them all on my phone right here. Instantly. The Star Trek communicator, that was something I loved in the early 70s. I would watch Star Trek every day. Wow. This communicator you hold in your hand. You can talk to people anywhere. This was the 23rd century. And while I was optimistic as a teenager in the 1970s, I didn't think I'd live to be in the 23rd century. Well, that's a smartphone. Nearly 5.8 billion people use smartphones today. About 70% of humanity. Now you can argue maybe some of us use it too much or are addicted to it. But I wouldn't really want to go back to those days where I had to go into the kitchen, pull a phone off the wall, have that big long curly wire and dial the 1 or the 0 and have it come all the way. I wouldn't want to go back to that. There's been tremendous, tremendous progress in the US roughly 95% of households have a computer. 90% have broadband. Now I've had computers for, for almost 40 years now. I mean, I got my first laptop, I believe, in 1987. I've had bad broadband since it, whenever it came out, which gives me access to everything. I remember as a kid seeing movies about rich people with their limo drivers. Wow, wouldn't that be cool to not have to drive? Well, these days everybody's got a limo driver. If you've got a couple of bucks, you can get an uber. It's in 70 countries. I've used it myself and probably at least 35 countries. It's in 15,000 cities again. Is Uber perfect? All of its drivers? No. But it does create a world of luxury compared to the world I grew up in. So yeah, I'm personally grateful for my home, my work, my sig, my financial security. But what amazes me the most is the mass luxury has become a norm. Now, I'm not going to try to be Louis ck. He did a bit on this about how many years ago about how all of us are annoyed all the time and we're so ungrateful. These modern devices that make life so instantly convenient and accessible. But what looked like billionaire level science fiction to my teenage self is now everyday life for billions of people. So you don't have to be that successful to be able to access every movie ever made, every book ever made, every great song ever made, and to be able to have access to, to your own television production company if you've got A cell phone, Your own music recording production facility if you have a cell phone. These are things I'm grateful for. But you sound like a rube. You sound like a naive fool if you talked about it because it seems so ordinary. Duh. Everybody's got a cell phone. It happened. It didn't happen in one day, but it happened. And it's something I'm grateful for. Now I should point out. I'm also grateful for my daughter, for my wife, for my family, my sisters, my brothers in law, my nieces, my nephews, all of my friends. I'm happy for that. I'm happy for the great life I have and I'm happy to be able to spend time with you now. For me personally, even as a kid back in the 70s, I was fascinated by news commentators. I loved watching William F. Buckley and On Firing Line, and I loved watching Louis Rukeyser, who was the host of Wall Street Week. This was before there were CNBC's of the World and financial news 24 hours a day. You wanted financial news. It was a half an hour on PBS once a week on Friday night. So I was fascinated by that. To me, that seemed like a fantasy life to people, to be seen on video by people around the world, opining, giving insights into the news. How would I ever do that as just kind of an average kid growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina? Well, here I am and it has happened. I'm maybe not quite as famous or successful as William F. Buckley was, but I'm having a very good life, able to be in the world of media and ideas and communication and working with clients all over the world. I'm very thankful that I have 12 million student enrollments in my online courses from every country in the world other than North Korea. And if I get somebody from North Korea next year, I'll mention that in next year's Thanksgiving show. So a little reminder of some of the facts here again. 1979, only three TV networks, no Internet. Maybe you had a PBS station. Today, every book imaginable is available at your fingertips. Millions of them for free. I had to go to my public library, which was nice, but only had maybe 20,000 books. So we got from 20,000 books to every move movie ever made, access to every news story written today, access to every major media outlet. Cars on demand with a push of a button. And pretty soon we're going to have cars on demand without a driver. So it is luxury. And what it does does is give a lot of middle class people luxuries that the wealthiest of the wealthy couldn't have even imagined for most of human history. And I'm not even talking about indoor plumbing now, let's face it, you could be the richest king in most countries. Hundreds of years ago, you still had to go to the outhouse. You still had no electricity. We have all of these things. So that is one of the things where I believe that economists are not doing as good a job as they should of factoring in true productivity. Because if all of a sudden everyone has a cell phone and it does the things that you used to have to spend half a million dollars on, video cameras, Internet cables, audio production, places to watch movies, There's a case to be made that a cell phone is essentially worth half a million dollars in terms of the services it provided. What you would have had to pay 40 years ago. Now you get all that, but instead of paying, half a million dollars. Has gone down. Does that mean our work is over and everything is great and there's no income inequality and everyone's rich? No, there's still tremendous need in the world. There's still plenty of opportunity for improvement. But there's been tremendous progress. And on a day like this, a day of Thanksgiving, I think it is important to be thankful for the progress we've made. I want to thank you for spending time with me today and every day, hoping if you are celebrating Thanksgiving, it's a great one for you and your family. I'm TJ Walker. I'll see you back tomorrow with our regular programming of dissecting and filtering the top news stories of the day. See you then.