TNW 398: How 'Wellness' Became Tech's Regulatory Escape - The Blurry Line Between Wellness and Medical Tech
Tech News Weekly (Audio)
Leo Laporte
4.0 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2025
⏱️ 78 minutes
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Summary
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy joins Mikah Sargent this week on Tech News Weekly! Jennifer shares her first impressions of Alexa Plus. The growing overlap between consumer wellness gadgets and regulated medical technology. And Google's rolling out a machine-learning age verification model to detect account users who are under or over the age of 18.
- Jennifer Pattison Tuohy has spent some time with Amazon's new, AI-powered Alexa, Alexa Plus. She shares her excitement and criticisms for the new voice assistant.
- Victoria Song of The Verge joins Mikah to talk about wearable tech companies using the idea of "wellness" technology to skirt FDA regulation on medical technology.
- And Mikah talks about Google's rollout of a machine-learning age verification model to verify account users' age in the U.S.
Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Guest: Victoria Song
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Jennifer Patterson, Tooey of The Verge stops by to talk about her time with Amazon's virtual assistant now that it's gotten more agentic. |
| 0:11.0 | Then Victoria's song also from The Verge stops by to tell us about how wearable tech companies are using wellness to escape FDA regulation. |
| 0:23.1 | Finally, I round things out with a story of the week about Google's age verification tech now that it's rolling out in the U.S. |
| 0:31.5 | Stay tuned for this episode of Tech News Weekly. |
| 0:36.4 | Podcasts you love. |
| 0:38.1 | From people you trust. |
| 0:40.6 | This is Twitter. |
| 0:44.0 | This is Tech News Weekly, episode 398 with Jennifer Patterson-Tooey and me, Micah Sargent, |
| 0:51.3 | recorded Thursday, July 31st, 2025. |
| 0:55.1 | How Wellness became Tech's regulatory escape. |
| 0:59.8 | Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. |
| 1:07.4 | I am your host, Micah Sargent, and I am joined this week by Jennifer Patterson, Tui of the Verge. |
| 1:16.5 | Welcome back, JPT. |
| 1:18.2 | Hi, I know it's been a long time. |
| 1:20.3 | Very happy to be back, though. |
| 1:22.1 | So happy to have you here. |
| 1:24.4 | For people who are tuning in for the first time, we typically kick off the show by |
| 1:28.6 | sharing some of our stories of the week. These are stories that we think are interesting. |
| 1:33.7 | I want to share with you. And in some cases, stories, we've written ourselves. What? As is the |
| 1:38.8 | case this week. I think this is going to be an interesting one for our dear, dear John Ashley, our producer and |
| 1:47.7 | technical director and editor, who is going to have to work around the use of the A word. |
| 1:57.8 | We can just go with the A word. |
... |
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