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In 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that protected abortion rights in the United States. Since then, many states have rolled back abortion services or made them outright illegal. That includes some states restricting access to abortion pills like mifepristone. Now, at the start of an election year in the US and a year that will bring more legal challenges to abortion rights, a new study shows that women are stockpiling abortion pills in record numbers—even if they aren’t pregnant.
This week, we welcome WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs onto the show to talk about abortion medication, the trend of “advance provision” requests for mifepristone, and the coming legal fight over continued access to telehealth and in-person abortion services.
Show Notes
Read Kate’s story about how women in the US are stockpiling abortion pills. Read our primer on menstrual regulation medications. Learn more about the upcoming US Supreme Court case that could change some Americans’ access to the pills.
Recommendations
Kate recommends the film American Fiction. Mike recommends the movie Godland. Lauren recommends embracing the theory of Dunbar’s number and focusing on your closest relationships.
Kate Knibbs can be found on social media @Knibbs. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: Lauren.
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Lauren Goode: I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you personally have never sought out options for getting an abortion.
Michael Calore: Oh, we're really going to do this, huh?
Lauren Goode: Yes.
Michael Calore: Starting the year just with straight fire?
Lauren Goode: Yes.
Michael Calore: Well, yes, you're correct. As a gender-normative male, I've never had to think about getting an abortion.
Lauren Goode: But since you're also an extremely well-read and thoughtful guy, I know that you are also aware of some of the threats to women's health care that have become more urgent here in the United States.
Michael Calore: Sadly, yes, I am aware.
Lauren Goode: So this is how we are kicking off the show this year: not with ChatGPT, not with smartphones, but with mifepristone, a word that you should all be familiar with.
Michael Calore: All right, let's do it.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Lauren Goode: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: And I'm Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.
Lauren Goode: And we're joined this week by WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs, who is Zooming in from Chicago. Kate, our friend of the pod. It is always great to have you on the show.
Kate Knibbs: Thanks for having me on the show. I'm so happy to be kicking off the new year talking to you guys. Although I wish it was a slightly more uplifting topic of conversation.
Lauren Goode: Indeed, but it's an important one, so I'm glad we're covering it. So as many of you probably know, in 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That was the landmark 1973 ruling that protected abortion rights in the United States. And since then a lot of states have rolled back abortion services or made them outright illegal, and that includes abortion pills like mifepristone.
Kate, you just wrote a story for WIRED about how women are stockpiling abortion pills in record numbers even if they aren't currently pregnant. And in your reporting you also looked into the access gap where some people who may be the most in need of these kinds of services and medications aren't able to get them. So for the first half of the show, I wanted to talk about the abortion pill specifically. What is mifepristone?
Kate Knibbs: So mifepristone is one abortion pill. There are two, though. That's important to point out. When you talk about medication abortions or taking the abortion pill, it's a two-pill regime. Mifepristone is the first pill that you take. It blocks the development of progesterone, which is a hormone that is necessary for the development of an embryo. So once you take it, it halts a pregnancy, stops it from progressing any further. After you take that, then you're going to take misoprostol, which is a pill that it causes the uterus to contract, and that would basically spur a miscarriage. So taken together, these two pills are what we call medication abortion, and they are now the most common way that people get abortions in the US. In recent years, they've become much more popular. The fact that mifepristone is now under threat is going to be very important to the future of reproductive health care in the United States.
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Michael Calore: How long has medication abortion been around in this country?
Kate Knibbs: So mifepristone was FDA-approved in 2000. And so it's been around for decades. And because it's been around so long, there's been a lot of studies into its safety and efficacy, and it's been proven extremely safe, which is great. In recent years, the reason why it's become so much more commonplace in the last decade is because restrictions on how it's dispensed have changed, and it's become a lot easier for people to get. In the early 2000s, if you wanted to have a medication abortion, you still had to go see a doctor—several times, in fact—and you had to take the pills in front of the doctor. And you were still going into a clinic, and you were still being monitored in person. And so it was a little more time-intensive. Now, in recent years, there've been changes, and you can get the pills via telehealth. So instead of going into a clinic, you could see a doctor or a nurse over Zoom, and they could have the pills sent to your pharmacy, or you could just go pick them up real quick at the clinic and wouldn't have to go in and have a full appointment. So access has greatly improved in the two decades since it's been available in the US.
Lauren Goode: So if you use the telehealth option, do you need to somehow prove that you're pregnant? Do you need to get an ultrasound or show a positive pregnancy test or anything like that?
Kate Knibbs: I think it depends on the providers. Generally speaking, you wouldn't have to go in and get a full ultrasound. You might just have positive at-home pregnancy tests. In some cases, maybe you went to your gynecologist and got a blood test or something, and then you thought about what you wanted to do and then you're having the conversation. But there's no rule that you have to go get an ultrasound or anything like that.
So the study that I just wrote about is actually about advanced provision, which is when people get the abortion pills even though they're not pregnant. And in that case, obviously there wouldn't be any ultrasound because you don't have a need for the pills at the moment. When it first came out, there was an advanced provision you had to be pregnant for them to dispense it, but now you are able to get it even if you're not pregnant at the moment. In the same way that you might buy Plan B, even though you're not going to take it that day just to have on hand. It's the same concept.
Michael Calore: So how many states is medication abortion currently legal in?
Kate Knibbs: It's hard to answer exactly definitively on how accessible this medication is because the laws have changed a lot in recent years. I believe it's legal in 21 states totally. And then it's legal in some form in 36 states and Washington DC. In states where abortion is banned, obviously it's illegal too. And some states since Roe v. Wade has been overturned, and specifically this year since there were some conflicting court rulings over the legality of telehealth mifepristone, some states have enacted what they're calling shield laws, which protect providers from getting in trouble if they end up seeing patients across state lines. And those shield laws are intended to help people maintain access to medication abortion even if certain states end up restricting access in the future. That's a very long-winded way of saying that basically, I think in every state where abortion is legal, still medication abortion is legal still. There's no states where you can only get a surgical abortion, if that makes sense.
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Lauren Goode: But in your story, you wrote about an aid group that is actually shipping them from overseas.
Kate Knibbs: Aid Access.
Lauren Goode: Yes. And so people in the US are able to get those cross-border or actually cross-ocean in this case?
Kate Knibbs: Yes. OK. So Aid Access is an incredible organization. It's run by this doctor named Rebecca Gomperts who is in Europe, and she's really been a pioneer helping people all over the world get access to abortions. You might've heard of her because the original iteration of this group was called Women on Waves, I believe, and they operated out of a boat and they would sail the boat around the world and people would go on the boat and get abortions. It's wild, and that's still operational. But they've expanded a lot and Aid Access is the wing of this organization and they will ship anyone in America, even if you're in Louisiana, Mississippi, the states where abortion is basically illegal across the board, they'll still ship you medication. It's not strictly legal. I don't know the ins and outs of federal mail regulations, but they're taking a risk in doing so. When they are shipping people pills, it's outside of the formal US health care system. So they are a very well-respected organization and a lot of third parties have verified that they're sending legitimate pills, but it's not the same as going to see an accredited doctor in the US. You are dealing with a foreign organization that is shipping you pills that a doctor in the US would not be able to legally prescribe you.
Lauren Goode: And we're going to talk more in a little bit about the research that Aid Access has done, which is what you wrote about in WIRED. But before we go to break, I just wanted to ask you, because I really do think a lot of people don't have an understanding of how this works. What are the physical, and by extension, emotional differences between obtaining an abortion in a clinic and an abortion by a pill that you take at home where you might be alone and you might not have a lot of support, the process is different. Talk a little bit about that.
Kate Knibbs: Yeah, the processes are definitely different, and it's not that one is better than the other. There are cases where having a surgical abortion just makes a lot more sense. Medication abortion is really only for very early pregnancies. You can't have one when you're too far along. You could have a surgical abortion further along. The huge benefit of having a medication abortion is it's just significantly less invasive of a procedure. You're not getting numbed, no one's touching your body, you're taking medications that essentially induce a miscarriage, which obviously isn't the most chill experience in the world for everyone. Some people might really benefit from having a plan where there's people around to support them.
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Some people it's not appropriate for because there might be some complicating factor where it would make more sense for them to go into a clinic. But if people are early on in their pregnancies and choose to end the pregnancy with a medication abortion, in some cases, they're able to do it with minimum disruption to their daily lives, which is great for people who are already parents, which is a large portion of people who get abortions already have kids. They might not be able to have several days of downtime taking these pills. It's just less disruptive to their daily lives, basically.
Lauren Goode: All right, Kate, thanks so much for all of this information. We're going to take a quick break and then be right back with more.
[Break]
Lauren Goode: Kate, your story on WIRED.com this week covers a research study that analyzed over 48,000 requests for abortion medications between the beginning of September 2021 and the end of April 2023. This was information from Aid Access, the organization you mentioned earlier. And there were some startling trends in that data specifically that the people who might need this advanced provision medication the most aren't always able to access it. Talk about some of these findings.
Kate Knibbs: So this study that came out of the University of Texas, but they used data provided by Aid Access, as you mentioned. When I saw the results, I wasn't shocked. They made sense. They fit the unfolding narrative about reproductive health care access in the US, but they're very good things to point to so people understand what's happening. The study compared demographics of people who were requesting these pills for advanced provision, which means people who weren't pregnant but were basically just preparing for the future, against people who were requesting them because they were pregnant at the moment and needed the pills now. And they found that the groups were notably distinct. The people who were just stockpiling the pills in case tended to be significantly older, significantly more wealthy or located in more wealthy areas. But the biggest difference was that they were overwhelmingly white, whereas it was much more demographically diverse in the group of people who needed the pills immediately.
And they couldn't make any definitive conclusions about this. But when I was talking to experts, they were all emphasizing that this points to an access gap that either people don't know about advanced provision, they just haven't come across it or they know about it, but it's out of reach financially. The pills tend to cost money even if you need them immediately. They're not free by default, but there's a lot of organizations including Aid Access who will offer sliding scale or offer financial help of some kind if people need the pills right away. If it's advanced provision though, you basically always have to pay a few hundred dollars.
Lauren Goode: It's a few hundred dollars for the mifepristone and then the follow-up pill as well.
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Kate Knibbs: Yeah, together. The pill's together.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Kate Knibbs: So it's a money thing, as a lot of reproductive health access comes down to class barriers. If someone has $500 left over for the month after paying rent, et cetera, and they find out they're pregnant and they need an abortion, then they can pay the $200 or whatever. But if they have that money left over and they're like, they're not necessarily going to be like, I should spend this little money that I have on this pill on the off chance that I need it. So that was a big takeaway from the study. Just that advanced provision would be a smart thing for everyone who might get pregnant to do just to prepare for the worst in case there's a future where abortion access is even more restricted than it is now, but the fact that it costs money makes it harder for people who might benefit from it the most to have access to it.
And then the other big takeaway from the study was that whenever there was an event that made it clear that there might not be easy abortion access anymore, requests went through the roof. After the Dobbs decision leaked, and then after it finally came out, in both instances there were huge spikes. And then last year when there was conflicting court rulings about mifepristone and it became clear that that might be restricted in the future, there was another huge jump. So the study basically just showed clearly that people are really concerned about this, they want access to this health care and they're willing to even spend a few hundred dollars on a just in case pill set.
Michael Calore: So we should talk about the fact that there may be another event coming up that could change the access that people have to abortion in general and abortion pills and clinical abortions specifically. Tell us what we can look forward to this summer.
Kate Knibbs: There is a big case. The next big battle in reproductive health care access is going to happen this year. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a court case that was brought that is specifically about me for mifepristone access. So there is a group of anti-choice doctors. It was a few different professional groups of anti-choice doctors that got together and filed a lawsuit in Texas. And it worked its way through the courts and now the Supreme Court is going to hear it. And it's very scary for people who care about health care because if these anti-choice activists get their way, access to mifepristone could be pretty severely restricted, potentially nationwide. It wouldn't be illegal. So the 2000 FDA approval would still be standing, but what this case might change is it might basically dissolve telehealth abortion access as we know it.
It might revert to the way things were when you had to go to a clinic and see a doctor to get these medications, which takes away a lot of the advantages of using these medications. And it's scary because it's not like that's going to be the hard stop and then the anti-choice activists are going to wipe their hands and say, "We're done here." If they win this, they're going to keep pushing. The next big court case I would think would be restricting it even further and maybe going after contraception. This is part of an ongoing and much larger campaign to restrict the bodily autonomy of our citizens. And so it's a big moment. It's a scary moment.
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Lauren Goode: So if you are a person who's considering buying or stockpiling these advanced provision medications, what's the right thing to do at this moment in time? I mean, obviously if you need it, you need it, and you should have access to it. But if you're someone who's thinking of stockpiling it, is there concern about supply and demand? Is that the ethical thing to do when it might be harder for other women to get? Should you be thinking about distributing it if you're not using it? What's the right approach?
Kate Knibbs: Well, I'm just saying this as a human being, right? I'm not a medical professional, so I don't want to give advice to people on how to deal with these medications, because I'm not qualified to do so. But I'll say I think everyone should be thinking about whether it would make sense for them to get these pills and just keep them on hand. When it gets into giving them to other people. I would certainly be consulting with a doctor since they are safe, but they're still prescription medications. I would not be super concerned about supply and demand. I mean, obviously don't stockpile 500 boxes of these pills, that's bad. But asking for one, that's not a big deal. There's not a shortage. I know there are a lot of pharmaceutical shortages right now, so that's a very valid question and something smart to think about and maybe it will change in the future, but it's my understanding that these pills are not in short supply. And if you wanted to buy a pack and keep it you, you're not harming anyone by doing that. You're just preparing yourself.
And I would say it depends where you live. I am not super concerned about it as someone who lives in Chicago because Illinois is very, very pro-choice state. And I don't think that my personal access is under threat at the moment now. A year from now. I might have a different answer for you on that. Yeah, so I would say it depends, but it's certainly something that everyone of reproductive age who wants control over their body should be considering.
Yeah. And I just want to add two things real quick. The first is that there are some organizations that operate outside of the US that are basically like pill mills and they don't necessarily have doctors behind them. They have access to generic forms of medication abortion pills and are willing to ship them into the US. And some of them are fine, but some of them, you're not totally sure what you're getting and there's not a doctor monitoring you. And I highly recommend that anyone who's thinking about ordering pills from abroad either choose Aid Access, which is highly respected, completely vetted, it's a great organization, or just do due diligence. And there's a website called Plan C that offers a lot of guidance about the provenance of these pills and stuff. Just do some research before ordering these pills off the internet from an international supplier willy-nilly. They are safe, but they're prescription medications. I never want to encourage people to just be taking prescription medications that they buy offline. That would be bad.
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And the other thing I wanted to quickly say is that I've been reporting on telehealth medication abortions for a few years now, and one thing that quite a few of the providers in the US have told me is that if mifepristone access is curtailed and if they can't supply it anymore, if that happens, they would be willing to offer a misoprostol only medication abortion, so it wouldn't necessarily be completely off the table. But misoprostol doesn't work quite as well as mifepristone plus misoprostol, and so they don't want to do that because it's below the standard of care that they're currently offering. It would be a last resort situation, but I don't want to make it sound like if mifepristone is restricted that all of a sudden no one will have access to medication abortion. It will just be worse access basically.
Lauren Goode: Thank you so much for that, Kate. Let's take another quick break and then we will come back with our recommendations.
[Break]
Lauren Goode: Kate, as our guest of honor, our friend of the pod, what is your recommendation this week?
Kate Knibbs: I have a recommendation for a movie. It's called American Fiction, and it's in theaters right now. I was able to see it over the holiday break, and I was so excited to see it in a crowded theater. People were loving it. It's about a Black academic writer who's nerdy, and he tends to write books that are a little esoteric and sell horribly, and he gets really frustrated and he sees another writer having great success selling books that he thinks are really cringe, basically. And he decides to imitate her and her genre and make a book that's basically just like an amalgamation of offensive racial tropes. And then it sells really well, and he ends up becoming a pseudonymous literary celebrity. And then so all that's happening, and it's a really, really funny and sharp parody of the publishing world and political correctness and DEI culture’s excesses.
And then it's also just a really thoughtful and heartwarming family drama, too. It's two films welded together, and somehow it all works. And it's very near and dear to my heart because it's my former colleague who directed it and wrote it. He was a blogger with me years ago, and now he is a Hollywood pioneer. His name's Cord Jefferson, and so I'm just thrilled that the movie's as good as it is. I had such high hopes. I wanted it to succeed, and I had so much fun watching it, and I highly recommend it.
Michael Calore: Awesome.
Lauren Goode: I'm totally invested in this story just based on your telling of it. Sounds great.
Kate Knibbs: Yes, it is. It is so good. And if you wanted to, it's based on a book called Erasure by Percival Everett, which is also fantastic, and I think it was written in the ’90s if you wanted to read that first. I always love to read the book that the movie is based on and think about them in tandem. I recommend that too. He's a great writer. He's really prolific. He has a book coming out in 2024 that's like a new twist on Huckleberry Finn called James from the perspective of Jim the slave. I have a galley, and I can't wait to read it. But yeah, the book's great. The movie's great. It's all definitely worth checking out.
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Lauren Goode: Awesome. Thank you for that recommendation. Mike, what's yours?
Michael Calore: I'm also going to recommend a movie, and it's also a movie that I watched over the holiday break. It's a fantastic movie from Iceland. It's called Godland. One word, Godland. It is directed by a person. So I don't know the writer and director of this movie, so I'm probably going to butcher their name, but it's Hlynur Pálmason directed this movie. It's shot in a really interesting way, because it takes place in the late 19th century, and the main character is a priest from Denmark who has to go to Iceland. So he's going to 1800s Iceland and experiencing a lot of things outside of his comfort zone, let's say. He is also a photographer, so he carries this camera on his back everywhere he goes, and this is like an 1800s camera, so it's two pieces. It's like the camera and then all the equipment to develop the photograph, because you had to develop the photograph outside of the camera right away. So he's carrying all this gear with him on this journey and he stops and takes pictures.
So the film is very picturesque, I guess to use a lazy word, but it is done in a way that is just gorgeous. It's shot on beautiful film stock. It's done in a way that is both very old and of the time of the story, but also very modern and very 2023, 2024. It's also just a beautiful narrative and has a lot of subtext. It's in both Danish and Icelandic. Part of the tension of the movie is that this guy only speaks Danish and he can't really communicate in this new place that he's in, but he's a priest and he has to preach and he has to build a church and he has to get all this stuff done, and it's this giant challenge for him. He's also, of course, challenged spiritually and physically because of the environment. Fantastic movie.
It's slow. I'm going to warn you. If you like a lot of action, you won't find it here. It's also, it's two and a half hours. It's in Danish and Icelandic, but it is an absolute treat. I've been recommending this movie to everybody who I know who I think would enjoy it, and they've all been watching it and I've gotten good reports. It's going to probably be nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film, so I'm sure you'll have opportunities to see it plenty in the coming months, but it's like five or six bucks on the big rental services, and I think it's streaming for free if you're on Criterion Collection.
Lauren Goode: That sounds amazing.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: Adding it to the list.
Michael Calore: Excellent. I think you will enjoy it.
Lauren Goode: I was going to say, is it going to devastate me like Worst Person in the World?
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Michael Calore: No.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Michael Calore: No, it's not as devastating. I mean, it's a drama, so it's not necessarily uplifting, but it does have a lot of moments of humor and levity in it. There's no mushroom trip in it like there was in Worst Person in the World.
Lauren Goode: Best scene.
Michael Calore: What is your recommendation, Lauren?
Lauren Goode: I watched so many movies over break, and I'm not going to recommend any of them, only because I can't distinguish. They were also good. I watched Saltburn, which David, our colleague David, recommended a few weeks ago. I watched Maestro, I watched Leave the World Behind. I watched an oldie, an old Oscar-nominated film, Banshees of Inisherin. Oldie, it's like a few years ago. Anyway, that was great. That's what everyone should do over break if they have the opportunity to do it.
I'm going to pull a little bit of a Gilad here. Gilad is our pal who used to be on the show who once recommended Slice Lemons, but he lives in infamy for that, right? People talk about this. I'm going to recommend the Dunbar theory.
Michael Calore: What is the Dunbar theory?
Lauren Goode: What's that you ask? The Dunbar theory is a theory that was first proposed I think a few decades ago by a British anthropologist that compared the size of primate brains with the average number of other beings that the primate would socialize with or spend time with. And the idea is that we as humans really only have the capacity to establish connections with around 150 people, and beyond that we get overwhelmed or the ties become looser or it's just not a meaningful connection. And there have even been social networks, by the way, built on top of this theory.
Michael Calore: I remember this.
Lauren Goode: You remember this. Years ago, a former Facebooker created an app called Path that was based on this idea. It was like taking the vastness of Facebook and shrinking it down and saying, actually, these are the only connections that matter. And towards the end of last year, I'd made one of those little lists in my Apple Notes in and out, these were very popular and social media during the break, people were sharing their ideas of what was in and what was out for 2023 and what was in for 2024. And I determined in my little personal list that I did not share with the world that parasocial relationships are out and the Dunbar theory is in.
So it's a prediction, but it's a recommendation, which is maybe this is the year to focus more on meaningful connections with the people closest to you than to feel like you have this one-to-many relationship with a whole network of people who you don't actually know super well and maybe cause you anxiety in some way, or just you're never really going to know, right? Focus on the people closest to you. That's my recommendation.
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Michael Calore: That's pretty good.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Michael Calore: So what about—
Kate Knibbs: It sounds very psychologically healthy.
Michael Calore: It does. What about influencers? What are they supposed to do?
Lauren Goode: I don't know. I mean, influencers are just going to keep hashtag influencing, but I even think that says something about the state of social media and how that has shifted. Because if you look at something like TikTok, TikTok really isn't a traditional social network in the sense that you're using it to connect with people or DM with people. It's very much like it's entertainment. It's one to many. You're blasting yourself out to the world. And so maybe the way to think about that is actually that it's entertainment, it's not friendships. What you're doing when you're influencing is you're looking to attract as many people as possible, but you shouldn't do that maybe under the guise of, I'm going to have meaningful connections with all these people. You're doing it to entertain them and fill their feeds and it's different. We can categorize that differently, I think.
Michael Calore: OK. All right, listeners. So now if you're DMing Lauren and she's not responding, you ain't in her top 150.
Lauren Goode: Right, but it doesn't mean I don't appreciate you and also we love your reviews.
Kate Knibbs: Yeah, you're all in our 150. I was just going to say, what does this parasocial relationship thing mean for podcasting? But I think Gadget Lab's the exception.
Lauren Goode: Gadget Lab. We are your friends here.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Lauren Goode: We're all friends here, and we are your friends. We're your tech friends. Kate, you're in my 150, so thank you so much for joining us.
Kate Knibbs: You're in my 150 too and thanks for having me,
Lauren Goode: Mike, you're in my five, so thank you as always-
Kate Knibbs: Oh, so flattered.
Lauren Goode: For being such a great cohost,
Michael Calore: Of course, are you going to be here next week?
Lauren Goode: No, next week. Well, I'm going to be here next week. The question is, are you going to be here next week?
Michael Calore: I'm going to CES in Las Vegas.
Lauren Goode: Yes, you are. And so on next week's podcast, what can we expect?
Michael Calore: We will have a live report from Las Vegas that we record in a hotel room and then ship off to Boone so he can edit it and bring it to everybody. We're going to be talking about all the big trends and everything that's happening at CES. We're going very far away from gadgets this week, next week we are going hardcore straight into gadgets
Lauren Goode: And what are the top trends?
Michael Calore: Well, the big thing that everybody is expecting is that there's going to be AI in absolutely everything. So you buy the thing now, it just comes with ChatGPT on it. It's the future we all want. I mean, really.
Lauren Goode: It's what Alexa was five years ago at CES.
Michael Calore: Sure, but chattier.
Lauren Goode: Chattier, but chattier, smarter.
Michael Calore: Slower.
Lauren Goode: More human-like. I look forward to CES five years from now where they're like, "Ships with AGI."
Michael Calore: First talking toasters, sentient toasters.
Lauren Goode: A toaster that feels the burn.
Michael Calore: Oh God.
Lauren Goode: All right, if you've listened this far, thanks to all of you for listening. And I mean, if you have feedback, leave us a review. I love reading the reviews. You can also find all of us on all the socials. Just check the show notes. We'll link to our accounts. Our producer is the excellent Boone Ashworth. Goodbye for now and we'll be back next week from CES.
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