Tech News Weekly 419 Transcript

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Jake Ward is here. We kick off the show by talking about Lego's CES announcement. It's the smart brick. And then Jacob and I talk about our experiences with CES, the trends we saw this year, and some of the complaints we have about those trends. Afterward, we have Stephen Robles coming live from the CES show, Florida to talk about what he saw while he was there. And we round things out with Ruth Reader of Politico, who stops by to tell us about how AI is being used to renew prescription medications in Utah. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:44]:
This is Tech News Weekly, episode 419 with Jake Ward and me, Mikah Sargent. Recorded Thursday, January 8, 2026. Utah trusts AI to renew prescriptions. Hello and welcome back or for your first time to Tech News Weekly in the year 2026. This is the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. And I am excited to kick things off. I am Mikah Sargent, joined this week by Jake Ward.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:22]:
Welcome, Jake. Hello.

Jacob Ward [00:01:23]:
Hi, Mikah. Happy holiday.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:25]:
I haven't had an opportunity. Oh, thank you, thank you. And I haven't had an opportunity to thank you for hosting the show while I was out. I appreciate that.

Jacob Ward [00:01:32]:
Big shoes. I don't. I've never seen your shoes in real life, but I. They were big shoes to fill. I really enjoyed that a lot. But it is a. It's no joke what you do. You do.

Jacob Ward [00:01:41]:
It taught me the grace with which my gastronomy pulls off his responsibilities.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:45]:
That's very kind of you to say. You know, Abrar is also fantastic. And so I was. I was very excited that the two of you got to be.

Jacob Ward [00:01:52]:
She made it very simple. That's right. No, a good pairing. Appreciate you.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:55]:
All right, so look, CES is going on right now. I'm very pleased to not be there, but we're going to talk a little bit about it. I. Before we get into my story of the week, which we'll kick things off with, and Jake will talk about yours without any other info. I'm just curious, have you been to CES in the past?

Jacob Ward [00:02:18]:
You're making my palm sweat. You're giving me ptsd. Yeah, no, I was, in a way. Really? My story of the week is just an excuse for me to kvetch about my, like, 12, 15, whatever it is, years that I've had to go to CES. This is the first time in years that I haven't had to be there. And so it is the. Oh, God. I'll just.

Jacob Ward [00:02:38]:
I'll just. I mean, I'll just tell you, like, so. So if you don't know, CES, right, the Consumer Electronics show was created. The lore in that organization is that it was created as a place for, like, television executives, not. Not production executives, but, like, the guys who make this. The boxes to get their families in Vegas after the holidays, because it happens, you know, at this time of year, and go on these horrible drunken sprees as a group. Like, whenever this was back in the. I don't even remember when it was founded, but, you know, back when it was first started, it was basically like a, you know, a horrific, boozy boondoggle for, like, the production industry.

Jacob Ward [00:03:22]:
Yeah. And that is the vibe of that place. And I spent years as a magazine writer going there back when I was a drinker, and. And, like, dragging myself hung over through these, you know, booth after booth after booth. And the joke among anybody who goes there is that the thing that falls apart first on your body is your calves, because you're. You walk and walk and walk, and you're walking in this deep corporate shag carpet. This army of people.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:53]:
Create sand.

Jacob Ward [00:03:55]:
Yeah. Create this incredible desert of. Of.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:59]:
Of.

Jacob Ward [00:03:59]:
Yeah. Deep shag carpet everywhere you go. And. And the number one attraction every year, no matter what anyone else tells you, is the one obscure little section of reclining massage chairs. There's like 50 or 60 of them in a group, and those guys know just what they're doing because everyone. There's, like, a line to go lie down in these things, because all you want in the world is to sit down at that. At that thing. So.

Jacob Ward [00:04:25]:
God, Mikah, I'm so glad I'm not there. Tell me about your experiences at CES.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:29]:
Yeah, I haven't had as many, but every time I went, I did not want to be there. I think, believe it or not, I was only. Well, I think there was one year that I went where. Because I had gone two years at the age of 19. At the age of 20.

Jacob Ward [00:04:51]:
When your calves were strong and creepy.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:53]:
My calves were strong, and I wasn't. I didn't. I couldn't drink.

Jacob Ward [00:04:56]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:57]:
So that helped. Yeah. But then 21, I went, and I. I've never been, like, a big drinker, and so I only had, you know, a couple of drinks. Of drinks. Yeah. And then I think 22 or something like that went. And at the time, I was working for a company with such a low.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:16]:
Not. Not much budget, and so, you know, I was basically eating crackers and water while I was there. So, yeah, all of my experiences as far as that has gone have been okay. But, but it is, it's a slog. It's. There's so much. You always, at least for me, I always felt like I wasn't doing enough, seeing enough.

Jacob Ward [00:05:36]:
The FOMO is so powerful. I mean, you know, I've gone there at the behest of like major national and international news outlets and I still felt like I didn't know what the hell was going on, you know, and I would, and I would. Whenever they say, like, the big theme of the show is this, I'm like, what are you. You know, I just, I want to. What are you talking about? Yeah, exactly. Like, do you know how many booths there are here? Like, it is not just that one building has many, many, many booths. You have to go all over Vegas to these, you know, airport sized buildings packed with stuff and, and there's whole sections of the show. There's like a whole automotive section.

Jacob Ward [00:06:14]:
One year I went, there was like an entire football field of drone companies. Like, you know, it just goes on and on. The one that I find most fascinating is the. They used to call it the International Expo. I don't know what they call it now, or sometimes they would call it like the Crossroads. And what it was was all of the based manufacturers with no name that you ever heard of offering up their capability to make anything you want. And so every year you'd show up, they have like the knockoff of every single thing. Like when the iPad first came out, you then go to the next building over and it's like 50,000 different versions of the iPad made by these incredible companies.

Jacob Ward [00:06:50]:
And like you could. It was a wonderful way of sort of keeping tabs on like how geopolitics was working and this, that and the other. But like, the idea that like a theme emerges, even though you and I of course are going to talk about the themes of it today, is so crazy easy considering how huge that place is.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:05]:
Absolutely. Well, I do want to mention one thing that caught my eye. While it was there, LEGO unveiled. What it. Wait, did I say while I was there? Because I was not there while it's going on. Yes, yeah, exactly. LEGO has just unveiled what it's calling its most significant innovation in nearly 50 years. Maybe it's what you expect, maybe it's not.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:25]:
If you thought it was a new color of Lego, no, they've already got a chartreuse Lego. But at CES 2026, the company announced Smart Play, which is a platform built around a tin sensor packed brick that brings lights, sound and interactivity to LEGO sets without relying on screens, or most importantly, without relying on AI. Both Wired's Jeremy White and the Verge's Sean Hollister were able to get hands on time with the new tech. And while Hollister admits he walked in skeptical, his kids LEGO Mario toys tend to collect dust after the novelty wears off. He walked out genuinely impressed. These smart bricks, he says, are for smarter and more. More imaginative play than he anticipated. So let's talk a little bit about what a smart brick is, because it's what sort of enables this whole smart play experience.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:14]:
It's a 2x4 Lego brick. It's got a little chip inside, custom designed. It's got LED lights, accelerometers, light sensors, a sound sensor, a miniature speaker. It uses the bricks. This is kind of cool. Internal air spaces to amplify its audio. And it communicates wirelessly with smart minifigures and smart tags. So these are little tiles that will trigger specific sounds or lights.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:37]:
They're little buttons, basically, or behaviors depending on where they're placed, how they're interacted with. Now, it's not just this experience of like, there have been some attempts at smartifying LEGO in the past and adding a little bit of interactivity, but before it was like barcode based. And so you'd scan a barcode and it would do a thing. This is actually sort of part of the play as opposed to sort of an external experience. And that is what makes it different. Now, LEGO says has been working on this for about six years and sort of trying to figure out what this would look like, how it works. And that chip that's in it, which is running lego's play engine, is of course at the heart of what it does. I kind of wanted to talk to you a little bit, Jake.

Mikah Sargent [00:09:32]:
I know for me, LEGO has been a part of my sort of play and, and experience and sort of the things that I enjoy for forever. I can remember my uncle, because we're close in age, I can remember growing up and the two of us actually taking apart different things. Like I think at one point, walkie talkie and building a LEGO thing around it and making what was like a LEGO walkie talkie. And so I'm learning electronics, I'm learning this, I'm loving to take things apart and of course having trouble putting them back together because they're not all lego. But that, like, that was at the heart of a lot of my curiosity. And so I'm kind of curious, either your experience with LEGO or you know, the experience of those around you, where does LEGO live in your experience?

Jacob Ward [00:10:28]:
Huge mythology, huge totemic presence. In my childhood, of course, the sound of rummaging through legos is this, of course the sound of my childhood as it is so many other people's childhood. I was always the kind of LEGO maker who was not smart enough, or at least not sort of brave enough to start playing around with whatever it was, the sort of the mechanized one that they had where you could, where there was like a little engine inside the brick and you could make it like a thing that went. And I had friends who played with those and I was never really, I think I was never really quite smart enough to, to put those together. I then later in life though was really interested by LEGO as a brand and a business because its patent expired in whatever it was in the 70s. Like they, you know, for a long time you weren't allowed in the United States to make a thing that, you know, there was no other, there were no knockoff legos. You could only have the original, right? And that was famously sort of the thing that, that kept a moat around them for a long time and then, and then their patent expired, but they, they somehow managed to just kind of keep going. Like, it speaks to the like power of a brand, you know, that they, that even though, I mean it's not, I mean a six sided, you know, whatever, the six dotted standard issue Lego, anybody can make that, right? And, and, and for a long time there was this, this idea that somehow LEGO would somehow fade away.

Jacob Ward [00:11:56]:
But the fact that it is hung on, even though it's so easy to replicate this product and it's no longer really patented in the same way is just sort of a crazy, it speaks to just how, I don't know how deep in our psyche those things have been. I have been stuck.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:12]:
You know, I got to interrupt there because I, I didn't know that sort of history of it. And that is fascinating to me, especially given the fact that if you want to buy, you know, these sort of adult LEGO sets, these, these more involved. I've got one back here. Banzai. Yeah. And they're not cheap. No, they're rather pricey. So the fact that not only has LEGO persisted past the expiration, its sort of patented design, but that it can continue to exist as a company that charges a boatload of dollars, that is pretty incredible.

Jacob Ward [00:12:52]:
And I think managed to hang on to people like me, right, who grew up with that, with the sound of rustling through a bucket of them.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:59]:
Yeah.

Jacob Ward [00:12:59]:
And then turn me into a crazy, you know, the kind of, sort of crazy collector. I mean, I have regularly gone to people's houses where there's a whole like display case, you know, and you realize, oh, we're not, not, we're not allowed to like take this apart and make it again. Right. I remember as a kid that thing be like, can I take this apart? Is that okay?

Jacob Ward [00:13:16]:
Can I take this part and make a new thing? You know, and, and the, and, and it was always the sort of, the weird kid who'd be like, no, no, don't take that apart. I need to keep that. You know, but nowadays that's like, that's the whole hobby, right? Is, is, you know. No, I made the Death Star and I read it's on display in my house. Yeah, they've, they've really like grabbed onto the brains of a whole generation, hung onto them for a long time. So I don't know, big respect to that. So in this case. But like now trying to make this new, a new thing that's going to have this other stuff.

Jacob Ward [00:13:45]:
It also reminds me of the pre iPhone world. There were companies, oh man, I hope somebody in the discord can remind me of who this was. But there was a, there was a startup that just a couple of years before the iPhone came out was trying to get off the ground a set of modular components that you could put together in your. As a personal device of your own. And the core of it was supposed to be a kind of phone, but you could then click in like, here's where you can click in like a camera and here's where you can click in a extra thing over here. And it was a very kind of Lego legoing your own device kind of thing before the iPhone and the app store kind of obviated all of that, but it was like, it was like a physical version of the app store kind of. And it just makes me think about this kind of thing here. Like if you've got accelerometers and so forth forth, like this is sort of the app store experience of Lego where you'll suddenly be able to like, you know, make a, you know, a motion detector.

Jacob Ward [00:14:47]:
I remember back in the old days there was a guy who in that, with that modular thing made himself a. It was an accelerometer based alarm clock that would tell him where it was. His stop on the train and go off the alarm, wake him up, right. That kind of thing. And I can Imagine, like smart kids now, like, playing with these Legos and it won't just be kids, right, Playing with these Legos and being like, oh, I'm going to make this, like, who knows, right, A booby trap for my mom or whatever the thing is they're going to try and make. So there's a kind of a, there's an inventive thing that I like to think could be made possible by this.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:19]:
Absolutely. There is more about this that we'll talk about and we'll get into. Also CES as a whole. I do need to take a quick break. Time just keeps marching on. I want to tell you about Delete Me bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. If you've ever wondered how much of your personal, personal data is out there on the Internet for anyone to see, well, I've got the answer for you. It's probably a lot more than you think.

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Mikah Sargent [00:18:16]:
We're talking about the LEGO Smart brick. I just have a couple more things that I want to mention with this. So at CES, LEGO announced the smart brick and as part of this experience, it's sort of a whole platform smart play. It's set to debut on March 1st and it's going to include three Star wars sets. Those are available for pre order starting tomorrow as we record the show on January 8th. So January 9th, the red 5x wing. And it will include these smart minifigs including Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. Very cool.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:52]:
And these smart tags. With these tags it will offer the ability to trigger laser shooting sounds, engine effects, refueling sounds. You'll also be able to purchase Darth Vader's TIE Fighter, Ion engine sound effects, and a a set called the Throne Room Duel. Very cool. It's got three smart minifigs including Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, Luke Skywalker, and players will be able to recreate or rewrite that final lightsaber battle from Return of the Jedi. Very cool. And I think ultimately for me, the thing that sticks out about this is what Sean Hollister of the Verge talked about in his hands on with it, which is that it opens up the door for people to get more play out of a set that they would not necessarily want to take apart. So it's also a little bit about what you're talking about.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:51]:
You know that yeah, growing up you just got like a big old box of Lego of multiple colors and you made whatever you wanted. And yeah, now it's especially I feel more than ever it's it's very much follow the instructions, build the set, and. Yeah, what is it?

Jacob Ward [00:20:07]:
It's the. It's the, like, coloring book versus actually drawing. Right. The, the...

Jacob Ward [00:20:12]:
You haven't done it right. Unless it looks like what's on the box, which I always found to be a really frustrating kind of LEGO experience, as opposed to just like, like, let me just make some weird, you know, thing that combines a few of my sister's pink ones, you know, so that there's like a sort of a. Like a garden on my spaceship. You know, like, all that kind of stuff was always the. The point of it is to be exploratory. And I always felt like the commodification where you're like, it's not cool unless it looks like Emperor Palpatine's, you know, Chambers. I'm always like, oh, that's. That's not quite what we had in mind, but.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:43]:
Okay.

Jacob Ward [00:20:43]:
All right. Okay.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:45]:
Yeah, No, I agree. As an adult. As an adult, I'm cool with my banzai just being a banzai, but I think, yeah, especially if I'm getting these for, you know, my niece or something like that. I do love the idea of the opportunity to, yeah. Take it apart and make it how you want to. As opposed to step one, step two, step three, which is a little bit, kind of. Kind of sad. But that is kind of quick look at what Lego is bringing forth again.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:18]:
It's not going to be available until March, but some of the pre orders available starting tomorrow. Let's move along now, Jake, to a conversation about CES.

Jacob Ward [00:21:32]:
Yes. So CES, right. As we have talked about, is a. To me, it's sort of like when the theme emerges and when you sort of settle as a correspondent, in my case, or as a. A reporter, you know, in that place, on a theme, very often it's because you're just freaking exhausted. Like, I don't know. I don't know. Let's just say it's this.

Jacob Ward [00:21:53]:
And so very often the, the sort of, the public relations strategy there is just like, can you, can you make it easy for an exhausted reporter to grab onto something? Which is why I think something like, you know, Lego is really a smart one. Like, you just, you'll. You'll see that stuff. There's always this little tug of war between, like, you're assigning people, people who aren't there who are asking. They're like, oh, I saw this is there. That sounds interesting. You know, and you realize, right, this is, this is how the news gets out. A lot of the time.

Jacob Ward [00:22:21]:
So in this case, what I feel like, I. So every time I've gone there over the years, there's always been like a theme that they're pushing and, and it's, you know, for many years it was 3D. 3D televisions are going to be the thing you, everywhere you went, they were making you strap on these, this weird pair of goggles and, and you. And that was sort of, you know, what was being pushed for a long time. For a long time before that it was 4K and we were all talking about 4K. And let's see, you know, more recently, I remember going to one that was supposed to be Internet of things IoT and every single, you know, household appliance was going to have a little sensor in it that could talk to the other sensors, was the, was the concept. And now, right, it's that again with AI. And what I've heard the most cynical people sort of say is that, that they've, they've been there and they're just like, can't I just have a cool coffee maker? Does it have to have AI in it? Really? Is that the thing? And that's sort of where we're at, is like, you know, as I, as I talk about in my work ad nauseam, there is not a lot of sort of democratic input right now around AI in our lives.

Jacob Ward [00:23:22]:
It's just, you know, that's what you get when you buy a thing. And CES definitely seems to be that way. There, there is, you know, it's literally, there's no category of it in which, you know, real or not, they're saying AI is being built into this thing. But the thing that, you know, the, the one that, that I kept coming back to is all of this autonomy stuff that, that was clearly everywhere at CES. So you had Jensen Huang at Nvidia announcing the Vera Rubin architecture, which we can certainly talk about. I think that was, that was interesting. We're sort of touching on later on. But, but they also had a big thing about how they're going to get into autonomous driving in a big way.

Jacob Ward [00:24:03]:
They've done that before. They are. You know, Nvidia made its name when it first made the jump from being just kind of like a video game chip maker to a real world chip maker. Autonomous driving was how they did that. But now, you know, building AI into that. Hyundai announced this big partnership with Google and Gemini being built into their, into the Atlas robots. And, and just like again and again and again and again, you had people showing off some Sort of humanoid looking or in some other way kind of cute and anthropomorphized looking AI powered robot that is going to somehow make its way into your life? And as someone just recently pointed out to me, and I'm curious to bounce this off you, Mikah is they're like well, but if nobody has a job, how are we going to afford the pancake flipping robot? Like who's that that going to be for if nobody gets work? And so I'm curious like what is your, what's your personal attitude about like humanoid robots and the, and the incredible amount of marketing that seems to be going into that right now?

Mikah Sargent [00:25:06]:
Yeah, I mean I think that's fair right? That the, the concern, right, Is that cool there's all this stuff, but is anyone going to be able to afford it and is it going to be useful in a world where we are just trying to sort of get the bare minimum? That said, I think, I think I'm of, of, of mixed minds about it because there is that sort of, there's the realist approach which is that. But then there's also that little kid in me that is very, very much like I can remember having so many dreams, like literal dreams of having a little robot friend or Rosie or whomever and being able to, you know, walk around and ask hey would you mind grabbing this for me? Or whatever. That, that kind of thing is really cool. And I also think that there are so many opportunities for accessibility to be improved in this area specifically I think so. One of my good friends is a caregiver and she was talking about how Medicare, Medicare, I can't remember which one it is, but whichever is the one that is not like kid minded. Regardless, federal health programs for people who need is limited such that one of the clients that she works with is entirely blind and due to the rules around care necessary care I think she's only given, I think it's three days out of the week of covered care and a person who's fully blind having then four days of not being able to get around as well, you know, get like cook, whatever it happens to be is, is pretty upsetting. And so I think about then the federal programs that have given people who otherwise wouldn't be able to things like motorized wheelchairs or other mobility aids, right. A one time purchase of a, you know, well tested of course and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera robot that could serve in this capacity I think is a really cool idea and would perhaps make it more possible for people to get Care that they wouldn't otherwise get due to the limits on aid.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:06]:
So those are the places where I try to look when it comes to this. But I always, always, always keep in mind the negative aspects of so much of this and the concerns of this. I simply put, I think about just the fact that robo vacuums are growing limbs now and you've got the ones that have the arms. They can go around and pick up socks and other things. And the first thing I thought when I saw this robot with its little crane arm was how horrible is it if I come home and this robot has death gripped my dog around the neck thinking it's a sock? You know what I mean? Like that's.

Jacob Ward [00:28:47]:
Or your cat called socks.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:48]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's horrifying. So there's, there's a lot there that, you know, we've still got to figure out. So. Yeah, I guess that's what I mean. I'm with two minds.

Jacob Ward [00:28:58]:
I'm with that. I am also of those two minds.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:00]:
Yeah.

Jacob Ward [00:29:01]:
The young idealist in me. I was the editor in chief of Popular Science magazine. So all we thought about at that time was humanoid robots. I wrote this big cover story once upon a time about this one program at one university in the United States that was actually pursuing humanoid robots at that time because nobody else was really doing it. And I titled it the Loneliest Humanoid in America because it was. Because it was the only. They were literally the only people trying to build that. Everybody else was just building single purpose kind of pick and place robots.

Jacob Ward [00:29:32]:
But an all in one domestic kind of model was a crazy idea in the United States. It was a much more common thing elsewhere in the world. And the sort of engineering challenges of making that are really interesting because it's like, you know, at that time, like the actuators and everything that was involved in creating just the one limb was like made like one limb, like half a million dollars. Like the idea of putting them all together into an actual humanoid was ridiculous. So the idea that they've gotten to a place now where for the price of like, you know, still like a car, but, you know, for, for, you know, a hundred times less money, they could conceivably have something that very slowly folds your laundry or very slowly flips your pancakes.

Jacob Ward [00:30:16]:
Okay, you know, I mean, it's cool that we're on that. On the way toward that, my, you know, my modern mind can't then help but go to like the headlines about how Hyundai is going to like replace all its human auto workers with, with robots by 2028 at this one factory in Georgia, they've announced and blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, there's all of this social and political fallout that I think we're going to see from this stuff. But, you know, I went once upon a time to the DARPA Robotics Challenge in Florida and, and went to a different one in, in. I can't remember where the other one was, but anyway, it was like a, an Olympics of robots where they're trying to get upstairs and they're trying to like open a door and use a power drill. And, and they were such failures. God, they would just, just. I just watched these like multi million dollar creations, like tumble down a flight of stairs and drop a drill on its foot.

Jacob Ward [00:31:07]:
And you know, those, those, the fact that they've come to the point now where they could realistically claim you should buy this thing and let it wield fire in your house is, is a sign that we've come quite, quite a distance from there, you know, and, and, and you know, the, the big next thing that everyone's talking about, of course, is that, and I got to see a demo of this that Amazon put on a couple years ago where LLMs make it possible now for you to just say, go pick this thing up and bring it back to me. You know, go carefully pick up my dog and bring it back to me. Rather than you having to have any kind of technique, technical expertise, it, it really does create an interface where you can just in natural language say, you know, I need you to go pick up after my kid. And it can in theory translate that into real world stuff. So there's some cool stuff happening in that from a, from just the pure engineering perspective. And then the, you know, jobs and social and dystopian fallout we'll, we'll deal with on another show.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:02]:
Yes, absolutely. We'll have to deal with that at another time very much. You know, we'll be keeping an eye on what CES has announced. Well, what has been announced to CES this year. And as we continue to see AI getting integrated into every little thing. Yeah, I think those, as much as we talked about, it's hard to find the trends at CES, but we are seeing the big companies that are at the heart of this, the trends there. And the way, as you pointed out, sort of using LLMs from an a UI UX perspective and making it so that you don't have to speak a secret language to get this stuff to do what you're wanting it to do, that's one of the most helpful aspects, I think, of what we're seeing with large language models. In any case, Jake, always a pleasure to get to chat with you about this, that and the other.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:53]:
If people would like to keep up to date with the work you're doing, where is the place they should go to do that?

Jacob Ward [00:32:58]:
Well, Mikah, I really appreciate that. I run the rip current.com, we're a daily podcast and newsletter that covers all this stuff and more. And I am by Jacob Ward on all the big platforms. So yeah, thanks to Zebra for having me.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:09]:
I appreciate it, Mikah, thank you very much and we'll see you again soon. All right, folks, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with my next interview. Stephen Robles will be joining us to talk about what he saw at CES. This episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. You know we know the potential rewards, right, of AI. They're too great to ignore. You're not going to want to put them off, but unfortunately the risks are too great to ignore as well. Loss of sensitive data and attacks against enterprise managed AI are all there at the forefront.

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With Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across the business. Their Zero Trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss and against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more zscaler.com/security. That's zscaler.com/security thanks so much to Zscaler for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. And we are back from the break. Joining us from CES, it's Stephen Robles. Welcome to the show, Stephen.

Stephen Robles [00:35:36]:
Thanks for having me, Mikah. It's good to be here.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:38]:
Yeah. Good to see you. So you are there. You are experiencing it. You still sound good. That means the conference crud hasn't got you. That's good.

Stephen Robles [00:35:48]:
I've not gotten sick. Definitely dry. Las Vegas is my second time here and everything gets dried out and everything, but. But no, still here. Still enjoying it. It's fun.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:58]:
Awesome. So let's talk a little bit. I was just talking to Jake Ward about CES and how it's such a big thing and there's so many different booths and so many different products announced, and it can be hard to kind of of synthesize. Right. And I think that, you know, there are the trends that CES sort of puts out and the trends that other publications seem to try to synthesize and distill. But I'm just curious, I want to know some of the things that you saw that were interesting to you, that had you excited. It doesn't necessarily have to be any of the big stuff, unless that was some of it. But, like, what made you double take or what made you go, I'm going to have to post about this.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:40]:
What do you have, like video of, you know, what, what's what stuck out?

Stephen Robles [00:36:44]:
I mean, I feel like Lego stole the show on the first day with their smart bricks. And my podcast co host, Jason, he actually got to go hands on and did a briefing with them. You know, the fact that Lego is now getting into tech after like 60 plus years is pretty amazing. So that's fun. It's also going to be a real product you can buy on March 1, which is not something you can say about a lot of us. Other things, it's CES. You never know if it's actually going to come to market, if you'll be able to get it. But Legos told the show, obviously Smart home is a huge deal at CES and I love the smart home stuff.

Stephen Robles [00:37:15]:
And so the Aqara U400 lock, I got a briefing on that, got to play with it. And it's the first lock that works with Apple Ultra Wideband. So you don't have to tap your phone or your watch to unlock it. You can literally just approach and your phone in your pocket, it will unlock it automatically and it will even unlock faster if it detects you're approaching faster. So if you're being chased and you run towards your front door, it will unlock sooner rather than you having to get super close. So, really excited about that. That's actually available right now. You can get it on Amazon right now.

Stephen Robles [00:37:48]:
It went on for sale that day after that briefing. So all the smart home stuff is really cool. And then the biggest story is robots. You know, every. Everyone's got a humanoid robot, Switchbot, lg, I mean, Boston Dynamics was here showing off their robot. And so while some of that stuff is probably vaporware, it was interesting to see. And actually, right after we're done, I'm gonna go try to play ping pong with a robot. Apparently there's a ping pong robot that you can actually play live on the show floor.

Stephen Robles [00:38:14]:
And so I'm very excited to try that. I'm gonna try to get some video of that later.

Mikah Sargent [00:38:18]:
That is really cool. I. So when it comes to the robots, I'm kind of curious. Did any of them feel anywhere near something that you think you could see in a home this year? Or is it all still very much in a world one day? How did it feel to you?

Stephen Robles [00:38:42]:
So Boston Dynamics, you know, if you've ever seen the videos of their robots, like the Atlas robot online, it's always impressive how they can move their dexterity. And they have said it's not for the home. Right now. They wanted to work in the Hyundai Factory in Savannah, Georgia by 2028. That feels like the most legitimate thing that's probably going to happen with the humanoid type robot working in a factory, doing a single task all day as opposed to trying to fold your towels. So Boston Dynamics probably going to get it there. But the LG robot, which is the Cloyd, it couldn't even fold in towel. Like, let's be honest, LG literally has a booth and they're trying to demo it, folding a towel, and many times it fails.

Stephen Robles [00:39:24]:
And the other thing is it can't open the dryer to place the towel in. So if you want to use this humanoid robot, you have to have LG's proprietary dryer where the door automatically opens. This way the robot doesn't have to deal with that. So I think the Switchbot, the lg, a lot of the other humanoid robots, they're just for show. That's vaporware. Boston Dynamics, I think, has a shot. But again, that's not for the home. That's going to be for commercial use.

Stephen Robles [00:39:46]:
Use cases.

Mikah Sargent [00:39:48]:
Wow. Okay. So, yeah, I, I do, I am happy that you at least Were able to tell that, you know, the, the. Because what? I want a laundry robot. I'll be honest. I want a laundry robot. Yeah, like that's all I want in this world.

Stephen Robles [00:40:08]:
I will say all the robot vacuum companies are releasing some, some wild tech. So you have the robot vacuums that are like Roombas, but now they have arms which not only can pick up shoes and move them out of its own way, like little arms come out. But this one from Dreamy can actually get a brush from the dock and clean your baseboards. So it will run the brush along your baseboards. So not only vacuums and mops, but it cleans your baseboards. And Dreamy and Roborock, they're going all out like they're trying to be every appliance in your home. They're literally making washers and dryers and fridges, coffee machines, everything. And so, you know, I don't think we're far away from a humanoid robot, but you're going to be able to have whatever smart appliance you want you'll be able to get pretty soon.

Mikah Sargent [00:40:53]:
Nice. That's nice. Now you are known as, I think a big accessories guy. You like Apple accessories especially. What does charging tech and magnets and all that look like this year? Is it same same old, same old. Are we seeing any innovation, innovation in that space there?

Stephen Robles [00:41:17]:
So the usual brands are updating their lineup. So like Belkin announced on Sunday and I got to go hands on with their latest MagSafe battery packs where they say it's the Qi 225 watts faster charging doesn't get as hot. Those come out in like February and March so I'll be trying those. Basis has some new ones. Anchor has some new charging tech. It's iterative, basically improvements on all that kind of stuff. There is a couple brands like, like ecoflow which they bake power banks but also like proprietary docks for the power banks and like pogo pin style connectors. So you can just place the big old power bank on a dock and it charges but then it does a bunch of other stuff like you know, retractable cables and all this kind of stuff.

Stephen Robles [00:41:58]:
Some of them seem to go a little far. Like I don't know if I'm going to pay 300 for a power bank and a dock. You know you can get one for 50, 60 bucks. And so some of them are trying just to experiment, see if they can push the limits, but I don't think they've found actual use cases for that. So it's really Just the most useful stuff is just iterative changes. Slightly better magsafe batteries, slightly better power banks and I'm going to be checking those out later today because I didn't realize until I got here like yes, CES is huge. The convention center is impossible to see everything but a lot of the accessories is like this dark corner like in the Lion King. It's in like that dark area in the back.

Stephen Robles [00:42:33]:
So I got to try and find that later today.

Mikah Sargent [00:42:37]:
Oh, that's hilarious. Everything the light touches is not accessories. Anything else that has either stood out to you or maybe you've seen everybody kind of flocking to where it's like, oh, I think we probably need to hop on that. Are like, are cars big this year? It seems like some years people are really into the car tech. There's a solid state battery people are excited about. It's always, yeah, kind of like trying to figure out what people seem to be drawn toward and then from that what actually matters.

Stephen Robles [00:43:18]:
Yeah, I haven't seen a ton of car tech. Sony has their Avila brand car which they've said is coming out for the last six years. Get my podcast goes he actually got hands on with it. But all the car tech seems like vaporware. I think the TV tech is always interesting. I went to the LG booth Hisense they have all incredible looking TVs but they're also all trying to make TVs that look like art. You know the Samsung Frame TV is one of the best selling TVs on the market because it doesn't look like a TV when it's off. And I always thought who really wants that? Apparently everybody.

Stephen Robles [00:43:51]:
Because not only is Samsung's TV one of the best sellings, but LG has their wallpaper tv, extremely thin bezels, shows artwork when you're not looking at it or when it's not on. Amazon also released an art line series which is a TV to made to look like art when it's off. And so apparently art TVs are a thing those are going to be available. And I did go to the Amazon, they have like an entire room set up all their stuff. Yeah, they have, they had a commercial size ring camera which is like what you would see in a parking lot of a Walmart if there was like, I don't know, police activity, like a huge light type post basically. But there's a ring camera on top and they're selling it for Neighborhood watch and so that was pretty interesting. But Fire TV got redesigned. They're showing that off.

Stephen Robles [00:44:34]:
But I Got to play with A plus, which is their AI features. And plus, on Fire TV actually got me kind of excited for maybe Apple doing something like this soon. You can literally ask. Plus, show me the scene in Lord of the Rings where Gandalf says, show me you shall not pass. And the Fire TV will literally open the movie and jump to that place in the movie in seconds. I thought it was really cool. And they said, show me the rainbow road scene from the Mario Brothers movie. Jumps right to that scene.

Stephen Robles [00:45:03]:
And it's like, okay, I want that. And so I'm hopeful, you know, all the rumors is that Google Gemini is going to power Apple's assistant, maybe even come this March with 26.4. So I'm hopeful that we'll get more of those kinds of LLM style features. That's not a difficult problem. Like you could right now in an AI browser. Ask it give me a timestamp for a Steve Jobs keynote where he said this and AI can do that. Like Comet can do that. ChatGPT's Atlas can do that.

Stephen Robles [00:45:30]:
I want Apple stuff to be able to do that. This way. I could do it on my Apple tv, I could do it on my Mac. And so that was cool to see. And the legitimate use case of AI, I feel like, is that actually artificial intelligence? Probably not. It's just a computer doing computer things, finding a timestamp. But it was cool to see nonetheless.

Mikah Sargent [00:45:45]:
Yeah, that is really interesting. I just the other day was looking for a scene from the Office and I had to do so many different Google searches to find someone who finally was like, this is one of my favorite scenes. So I saw that I found a transcript and then I had to go, now what episode? And it was so much work. So the idea of just being able to say, you know, pull it. That's so cool. And that's what I would love to see as well, from, from. From Smart Televisions. Well, we've got enough time to kind of round things out here.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:15]:
With your remaining time there, what's left for you when it comes to kind of what you're hoping to see?

Stephen Robles [00:46:26]:
I've never gotten a chance to try augmented reality glasses before this conference. And so I tried even Realities. I went to the GME booth. They usually do projectors, but they're launching a line of, of augmented reality glasses where they look like normal glasses, but there's a little screen in the lens that is not really visible to other people. But you can have a teleprompter for a speech. You can have live translation on the screen in the glasses. And I actually thought that was pretty cool. And so I'm excited to try those.

Stephen Robles [00:46:52]:
There's more coming out in the next few months. It was cool to see a bunch of creators as well, just YouTube creators. And I also saw Renee Richie, the Creator Liaison for YouTube. He spoke. Yeah. Here. And he actually. I don't know if it was an announcement, I didn't see it elsewhere, but he said that YouTube is going to bring dynamic ad insertion for channels soon.

Stephen Robles [00:47:11]:
Meaning as a YouTube creator, I can put a timestamp in a video, and then I can insert a branded video or branded sponsorship that I made into that video in the future and even change it out later. And later this year, you'll be able to do it to your back catalog of YouTube videos. So you could literally, you know, tell a sponsor, you can buy out my channel or whatever for a month, and I will insert our branded content where I record the ad into all my videos for the last 10 years. And so creators will be able to monetize older videos where they maybe didn't have an ad then just by being able to put it in a timestamp and insert an ad. So, like, podcasts have dynamic ad insertion. YouTube is actually going to have that very soon, too.

Mikah Sargent [00:47:53]:
Wow. Okay. That's interesting. Well, thank you for dropping that as well, Stephen. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us literally from the show floor and still sounding amazing and looking great. Really appreciate that. If people would like to stay up to date with all the work you're doing, where are the best places they can go to do that?

Stephen Robles [00:48:11]:
Go to Beard fm, and all the links to my stuff is there. It's easy to remember.

Mikah Sargent [00:48:16]:
It is very easy to remember. Thank you. We appreciate it.

Stephen Robles [00:48:19]:
Pleasure to be here, Mikah. Thanks for having me.

Mikah Sargent [00:48:21]:
All righty, folks. We have an interview coming up in just a moment with Ruth Reader of Politico, so stay tuned for that. Whoa, look at the time. Time is flying. And there's only a little bit of time left to take our annual survey. Sorry, it's freezing here. Your feedback helps to guide the future of Twit. Your feedback matters.

Mikah Sargent [00:48:44]:
It makes us make our shows better. So if you head to Twitter TV survey 26 before January 31st, that is the time to tell us what you think. And by the way, every time one of you fills out the survey, it gets a couple of degrees warmer here, so I could really use it. It'll only take you a couple of minutes, I promise. Thanks so much. We Appreciate it. And oh, wow, I appreciate the few of you who've filled out the survey because it's already getting warmer here anyway. TWiT TV survey 26.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:15]:
Artificial intelligence is already helping doctors analyze medical images and assisting pharmacists with fulfillment. But what happens when AI starts making prescription decisions on its own with no human involved? A new pilot program is testing out this prescription option and it's raising big questions about how far we're willing to let algorithms go in healthcare. Joining us today to talk about it is Politico's Ruth Reeder. Welcome to the show, Ruth.

Stephen Robles [00:49:42]:
Hi.

Ruth Reader [00:49:43]:
Thanks so much for having me.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:44]:
Yeah, absolutely. So you put together, along with another journalist, a fantastic piece that I was just eating up, learning about this and excited to get to talk to you about it. This is Doctronic, who's working on a pilot program in Utah. What is this program and why is this considered a first for the U.S. sure.

Ruth Reader [00:50:07]:
So it's kind of simple. It's allowing AI to renew patient prescriptions for chronic illness. So this is not for just anything. These are patients who have diabetes and so they're going to be long term on a medication and they can expect to be on a medication for the long term. And they only do 190 drugs. But basically you go to the Doctronic website, you can see it now, it has a little banner at the top that says, are you in Utah? We'll renew your meds. And you go through and you can sort of renew your meds really easily. And why is this a first? This is a first because we.

Ruth Reader [00:50:48]:
Well, traditionally clinicians prescribe drugs. Right. And they do all of the work involved with renewing those drugs as well.

Mikah Sargent [00:50:58]:
Makes sense. I'm curious to hear kind of how does this AI powered prescription renewal process actually work from the patient's perspective? You know, what steps do they go through in comparison? You know, if I need a new prescription, I typically just go to my sort of patient portal and I can either send a message to my doctor or click a few buttons asking for a prescription renewal. Is it similar to that?

Ruth Reader [00:51:24]:
It's basically the same thing. Yeah, yeah, you go through. And I think the, one of the differences is just that, you know, you get your identity checked with clear and that's the way they sort of pull up your patient records.

Mikah Sargent [00:51:37]:
Understood. So yeah, it sounds very similar on, on the patient side of things, of course, a little different that perhaps the doctor is not always there on the other end. Now, given that that's the case. Right. Like what safeguards has Doctronic said it's built into the system to address those safety concerns. And then of course, they needed to run tests versus human clinicians. What, what do we know about how those tests panned out?

Ruth Reader [00:52:07]:
So I'm going to explain sort of this in two parts.

Stephen Robles [00:52:09]:
So the first is.

Ruth Reader [00:52:09]:
Let's just talk about Doctronic itself. So Doctronic says, you know, that it has a. It's machines make or like matches clinician decisions at 99% rate. They also have a malpractice insurance policy. They want to make sure that their AI is being held to the same standards as doctors. But they also are doing a sort of phased rollout of this program. So I believe the first 250 prescription renewals are going to be reviewed by a doctor just like off the bat to ensure that when they are doing these renewals, it is in fact doing the right thing that it needs to be doing. Then after that, I believe a portion of renewals will be sort of like randomly checked to ensure that it's maintaining that quality in general.

Ruth Reader [00:53:01]:
Doctronic has a human in the loop sort of philosophy about the way they do things, and I think we'll talk about that a little bit later. But like they're. Yeah, so they, you know, they have physicians within their company. The other thing I wanted to raise on this, on the safety front is that, you know, Utah is doing a really. The reason that Utah is even doing this and can do this is because they have this regulatory sandbox. And what the regulatory sandbox does is it eventually it essentially suspends. I shouldn't say suspends, but it relaxes rules. So if the rule traditionally is that, you know, only clinicians can prescribe drugs, they're saying, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna sort of pause and.

Ruth Reader [00:53:44]:
Or sort of not enforce that rule in order to see what this AI can do in exchange for oversight. Right. So like Utah is very involved and this is sort of almost like a co launch between the two in this program. So it's not like Daktronic is just like out here kind of oversight, Wild.

Mikah Sargent [00:54:08]:
West sort of situation.

Ruth Reader [00:54:09]:
Exactly.

Mikah Sargent [00:54:10]:
Okay, that's. Okay, that's really fascinating when you say that. Is Utah sort of AI and is it a regulatory relaxing when it comes to AI or is it a regulatory relaxing just with this company?

Ruth Reader [00:54:29]:
No, it's a regulatory relaxing for AI. So they have an AI sandbox. And they're not the only state that's doing this. So I think they are sort of the furthest along in doing this. But I believe other states that have explored this are Arizona, Texas, Wyoming, Delaware and there are more states that are interested in this. There are a number of states that have sort of launched groups, task forces to sort of explore these kinds of ideas to see how they can sort of incorporate AI more into their state.

Mikah Sargent [00:55:05]:
That makes sense. Now let's talk about then when the humans outside of the company and outside of these, these groups come forth. The what are the concerns that like doctors groups and pharmacy regulators have when it comes to delegating some level of prescription decision to artificial intelligence?

Ruth Reader [00:55:27]:
So it's super interesting. Well, I would say so. We, so first of all we spoke with American Medical Association CEO John White and what was so interesting in talking to him was that, you know, he emphasized that even small, like small things, I mean like this is just a, this is just a renewal for like a diabetes medication. Right. That we're talking about. So that seems like pretty straightforward. You know, you were explaining how you just go on to your patient portal, you click some buttons and ta da, you have your renewal. But he was saying that like, like even, even that simple thing, you know, there's potential for things to go awry.

Ruth Reader [00:56:06]:
Right? Like dose matters a lot. You know, if you get the wrong dose, maybe you get the wrong med, maybe you don't get the med. There are just like small things like this that actually can be quite big things. And I think that's really, at least from the physician perspective, a big piece of this. They really want to make sure that, you know, AI isn't unnecessarily complicating patients lives. And then another thing to bear in mind is sort of the either over prescription or potential for patients to even be taken advantage of. So for example, during the pandemic we saw certain telemedicine platforms use a lesser form of technology but auto renewals to renew prescriptions for ADHD medications like Adderall, when patients didn't even want those medications. So I think that's another piece of this.

Ruth Reader [00:57:03]:
Right. And then finally, different states have different perspectives. So ultimately at the end of the day, states regulate the practice of medicine. And so some states aren't as sure as Utah about allowing AI to perform, you know, prescription renewals or even just like, you know, more broadly, you know, getting involved in the prescription of medicine. So I think that's sort of something that we are wading through now.

Mikah Sargent [00:57:35]:
That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, and again, when it comes to all of this, immediately I think anyone's going to go, what are the regulations here? You know, so you talk about the regulatory sandbox. That. Does that mean then it's. It's protection at the federal level as well. The FDA is probably going, hello.

Ruth Reader [00:58:00]:
So it's really interesting.

Stephen Robles [00:58:02]:
The.

Ruth Reader [00:58:03]:
So states, as I said, states regulate the practice of medicine. So that's firmly within their scope. On the other hand, the FDA regulates medical devices, and they regulate software as a medical device, and they regulate AI as a medical device. So, but what they've said. So based on past guidance, what they've said is that they only want to be regulating AI that is involved in the diagnosis and treatment, which you could say that this AI is involved not necessarily in the diagnosis, but certainly in the treatment of a patient. So that said, it's sort of up for debate. And when we reached out to the fda, they were like, this isn't really. We don't see this as within our purview.

Ruth Reader [00:58:58]:
So, you know, we're not going to comment, which I thought was interesting. And certainly this administration is very bullish on AI and they want to see AI used in medicine. I think for AI renewals like this specific pilot, they're obviously not taking action, or at least not yet, and they may not be inclined to do that. I think that where this conversation gets a little more tense is once AI starts doing more than just these prescription renewals, once AI starts to actually do some level of prescribing, I think then it might be harder or it just. It definitely becomes less clear who's in charge at that point.

Mikah Sargent [00:59:46]:
I guess that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. Now, yeah, this. It's operating in this gray area. Right. And that's. That's how these companies are. It's almost like, like optimizing for the gray area, which is really interesting.

Mikah Sargent [01:00:01]:
We got to talk now about the business model of it all. You know, this is always the question that I think it's our job as anyone dealing with tech companies specifically to go, now how are we making money? You know, does this cost patients directly, indirectly? What are Doctronics plans for? For making money? And then also has it talked about its plans for expanding beyond Utah?

Ruth Reader [01:00:28]:
Yes. So just to talk about the pilot itself for a minute, I believe the cost for the renewals is $4. And then obviously you have to pay for the cost of medication in general, though. The funny thing about Doctronic is, though it does have AI and it's using AI, its main business model is doctor visits with real doctors. And so it charges $39 per visit. And I believe that AI, you have the. The AI is sort of freemium. You can talk to an AI doctor and have it answer your questions, and then I think it uses that largely to connect you ultimately to a physician.

Ruth Reader [01:01:13]:
And I believe I have to double check this, actually. But I believe that's launched. I think they're launched everywhere, so you can already use that platform. And the other way that I believe it makes money is through contracting with payers and health systems. So it's also doing a little bit B2B as well. And then in terms of scaling, I mean, my understanding from the piece that I worked on is that they definitely want to expand. They want to go beyond doing sort of more rote prescription renewal to maybe doing some real prescription. I mean, I think that, you know, there's, there's a lot.

Ruth Reader [01:01:54]:
But there's like a, you know, there's, there's a lot of questions that need to get answered in that time. Right. I think that. But I think that also, you know, within that, that's a conversation that's really actively happening right now, not just with Doctronic and not just with Utah, but there's another piece I wrote this week which is about how, you know, if. If 2025 was all about doctors adopting ambient scribes, then this year we're really looking at how can AI do a lot of the. Really take care of some of those issues that patients find most frustrating. In some cases, you're really lucky. Your patient portal sounds so great.

Ruth Reader [01:02:38]:
You just go on and renew it.

Mikah Sargent [01:02:40]:
I know is nice. Yeah.

Ruth Reader [01:02:41]:
Not everybody has that experience. And so, you know, where are the places that AI can make the patient experience better? I would love it. You know, I can't right now, me personally as a patient, I can't even text my doctor. I can't email them. They don't even take. Can't email them, cannot email them, and they barely answer their phone.

Mikah Sargent [01:03:02]:
So.

Ruth Reader [01:03:05]:
So this is a place that, that some, some people in the healthcare industry, some healthcare institutions are saying, hey, could we put AI here? Would this be an efficient way? Because I think part of the problem right now is, you know, the reason that doctors, that some doctors, I will say, don't take emails or texts is because that's their time and time is money and they're not necessarily getting paid to do those interactions. So could you put AI in there? Could AI answer some of those questions? And I think is like a very, like, immediate question that, that people are asking.

Mikah Sargent [01:03:40]:
That makes sense. Any last kind of notes on, on where things stand, what we can expect going forward. If, you know, Doctronic is one of the main companies doing this, or if we'll probably see others kind of try to take this on. Yeah. What's. What does the future look like, as far as we can tell?

Ruth Reader [01:04:01]:
Didn't chat. Well, chatgpt yesterday, or I should say OpenAI made a big announcement about their foray into healthcare. So, like, I mean, it definitely. Doctronic is not the only one that's going to be exploring this field. Will chatgpt be making prescriptions? I think that's probably not in their immediate future. Maybe. I mean, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that that is probably not, not, not for them in 2026, you know, but it could be on their roadmap, for all we know. Right.

Ruth Reader [01:04:35]:
I think that this is like, I think that this is really the year that we really start to explore and I think we'll see a lot of explorations like this. Like where exactly does AI fit into patient care?

Mikah Sargent [01:04:48]:
That makes sense. Yeah. It's. Yeah, it's interesting to see the different approaches right. Of, of where they're popping it in. And I think arguably some has more concern associated with it and less concern the idea of having AI be involved in the renewal of prescriptions, not in the new prescriptions and that. Yeah, sort of. I think there's good sense to it in my mind when it comes to, again, some of these medications, especially as you pointed out, there's only so many that are allowed to exist in this spot.

Mikah Sargent [01:05:28]:
So, yeah, if it means that people are able to get the things that they need and not have to wait for the fifth call to finally answer from the doctor's office. And I think this is an interesting place for it to exist. Ruth, you've been wonderful. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today on the show. If people would like to keep up with the work that you're doing, where is a good place to go to do that?

Ruth Reader [01:05:52]:
Politico.com that is where I live.

Mikah Sargent [01:05:56]:
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate it.

Ruth Reader [01:05:59]:
Thank you. Have a good one.

Mikah Sargent [01:06:00]:
You too. Alrighty, folks, that brings us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. Of course, you know, you can head to twit.tv/tnw to subscribe to the show. Audio and video formats. Of course, if you would like to get all of our shows ad free, well, join our club twit.tv/clubtwit. $10 a month, $120 a year gets you access to every single one of our shows ad free. It's just the content. You also gain access to our special feeds including our behind the Scenes, before the show, after the Show Special Moments.

Mikah Sargent [01:06:34]:
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