TBD Tries… Wearables

Summary

Podcast Summary: "TBD Tries... Wearables"

Podcast: What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future
Host: Lizzie O’Leary
Episode Date: March 1, 2026

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Overview

In this episode of "What Next: TBD," host Lizzie O’Leary explores the rise, promise, and pitfalls of wearable health technology—focusing on devices like the Oura Ring, Apple Watch, and Fitbits. Together with Slate culture writer Nadira Ghaf and guests including journalist Mario Aguilar and medical professionals Dr. Sunny Cashore and Dr. Jordi Cohen, the show investigates what it’s like to live with a wearable, the accuracy and meaning of the data these devices provide, and the broader implications for public health and privacy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Motivation and Experience with Wearables

• Nadira’s Story:
  • Nadira, after a difficult year marked by chronic illness and uncertainty, started using an Oura Ring for clarity about her body and health when traditional medical pathways were inconclusive.
  • She hoped the wearable would give her actionable data to improve her well-being, especially with sleep and symptom management.
  • Quote (Nadira Ghaf, 04:12):

    "I guess I just wanted some clarity about what was going on with my body at a moment where I felt like I had zero clarity."

2. What Wearables Track and Why People Care

• Popular Metrics:
  • Most wearables focus on tracking sleep quality, physical activity, heart rate, and readiness or recovery scores.
  • Industry origins trace back to simple step counters, but there’s growing ambition for deeper insights (e.g., stress and recovery metrics).
  • Quote (Mario Aguilar, 11:23):

    "The number one thing people want to track the most is, is their sleep... how well did I sleep?"

• Industry Growth:
  • The global wearables market approaches $93 billion in 2026, expected to double by 2033.

3. The Meaning and Usefulness of Wearable Data

• Readiness and Sleep Scores:
  • Nadira describes “readiness” scores as potentially arbitrary, likening them to temperature scales—relative, not absolute.
  • Quote (Nadira Ghaf, 14:29):

    "I kind of think of it like Fahrenheit versus Celsius... Sleep scores like that, 65 vs 64, 62 doesn't mean much to me. But 60 vs 70—those are differences I do feel in my body."

• Limits of Proprietary Metrics:
  • Many metrics aren't clinically recognized, combining several data streams into one (e.g., “readiness”), making them difficult for users and clinicians to interpret or act upon.

4. Wearables as Healthcare Tools: Potential and Pitfalls

• Medical Integration:
  • Apple has achieved some medical regulatory milestones (e.g., ECG features), but much of the wearable market is intentionally classified as “wellness” rather than “medical,” requiring little oversight.
  • The Oura ring—while popular—seeks a third regulatory classification for more flexible clinical claims without full FDA scrutiny.
• Doctor Perspectives:
  • Dr. Sunny Cashore continues to rely on traditional blood pressure cuffs for accuracy, seeing wearables more for trend monitoring than diagnosis (19:04).
  • Dr. Jordi Cohen cautions that the people who could benefit most from wearables (i.e., high-risk populations) are often the least likely to afford or access them (20:51).
  • Quote (Jordi Cohen, 21:01):

    "A lot of the people using these devices are the ones who are already engaged in their healthcare... My biggest concern is what's going to happen to the people left behind."

• Structural Concerns:
  • Wearables do not solve deeper issues like gaps in primary care or insurance coverage. They can sometimes be “consumer-focused bandaids” (21:19).

5. Data Privacy and Policy

• Data Black Boxes:
  • Wearables collect intimate health data, but companies’ privacy policies can be vague or legalistic.
  • Concerns arise over data sharing—with questions about how insurance companies or other third parties might use wearable-collected information.
  • Quote (Jordi Cohen, 22:35):

    "It's a black box with these companies right now."

  • Host Lizzie O’Leary, herself an autoimmune patient and cancer survivor, expresses concern over these ambiguities (23:09).

6. Real Impact on Health Outcomes

• Behavioral Benefits:
  • Some studies show that wearables can encourage positive behavior changes—more exercise, better sleep—which do lead to improved health outcomes.
  • Quote (Jordi Cohen, 23:35):

    "If whatever you're doing makes you exercise more, makes you sleep better and sleep more... these can very much and palpably improve people's health..."

7. Does It Actually Help?

• Nadira’s Verdict:
  • Ultimately, Nadira found wearables can provide helpful reinforcement and insight, but only to the extent the user engages meaningfully with the data—they can just as easily become objects of obsession, or be ignored.
  • Quote (Nadira Ghaf, 24:59):

    "A large part of what you get out of it is what you give to it... there's a fine line between obsessing... and having a healthy distanced viewpoint."

  • The emotional push from data—like being told a night’s sleep barely qualified as such—proved motivating for her (25:40):

    "...when I had that moment where I had so little sleep that it logged it as a nap, I was like, well, like, you kind of ate with that... girl, you gotta be better, right?"

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• Nadira Ghaf (02:43):

  "I have had a really hard year...I also knew that my sleep schedule was really feeding into my flare ups or my symptoms..."

• Lizzie O'Leary (03:12):

  "These devices do a pretty good job of tracking simple stuff...But for addressing serious health problems, the jury's still out."

• Mario Aguilar (09:23):

  "If I could fit more devices on myself, I would probably wear them—but I have reached my carrying capacity for devices."

• Mario Aguilar (13:19):

  "These interpreted metrics...are not sort of directly measured, but are rather combined with proprietary formulas."

• Jordi Cohen (21:39):

  "Wearables can feel like a consumer-focused bandaid on a medical system with more fundamental and structural problems."

• Aura Spokesperson (24:15):

  "Oura Ring is not a medical device and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Our goal is to provide reliable, science backed insights that support preventative relationship-based care rather than substitute for it."

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Important Timestamps

• 01:07 — Introduction of Nadira and why she wears gold jewelry, leading into Oura ring discussion
• 02:43 — Nadira shares her health motivation for buying a wearable
• 03:12 — Policy/political framing (wearables as a government-supported initiative)
• 12:23 — Nadira on "readiness" scores and managing her daily life via the Oura ring
• 14:29 — Nadira unpacks what data is actually useful (and what isn't)
• 18:10 — Dr. Sunny Cashore on real-world medical use of wearables vs. traditional devices
• 20:51 — Dr. Jordi Cohen on access and equity concerns
• 22:35 — Data privacy questions with wearables
• 24:59 — Nadira reflects: did the wearable make a difference?
• 25:40 — The emotional/psychological effect of wearable data

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Conclusion

"TBD Tries... Wearables" offers an engaging, skeptical, and personal dive into the world of health wearables, raising vital questions about trust, utility, access, and privacy. The episode blends storytelling, user experience, clinical skepticism, and policy analysis—ultimately concluding that while wearables can help some individuals understand and maybe even improve their health, they are no substitute for structural healthcare reform, accurate medical oversight, or transparent data stewardship. As Lizzie O’Leary and guests remind listeners, the profound promise of wearables is matched by equally complex and sometimes unresolved risks.

Transcript

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[Lizzie O'Leary]

Lady Jennifer of Coolidge. Well, many thanks, good sir. Here is my Discover card.

[Nadira Ghaf]

They accept Discover at Renaissance Fairs?

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Yeah, they do here. Discover is accepted at the places I love to shop. Get it with the times.

[Nadira Ghaf]

With the times.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

You're playing the loot. Yeah, and it sounds pretty good, right?

[Commercial Narrator]

Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide, based on the February 2025 Nielsen report.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Do you want to introduce yourself for people who don't know you?

[Jordi Cohen]

Sure.

[Nadira Ghaf]

I'm Nadira Ghaf and I'm a culture writer at Slate.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Nadira Ghaf, who's my co worker here at Slate, is also very stylish. The other day you and I were in the office together and we were talking about how we were both going gold jewelry girls. Yeah, Like, I feel like, yeah. Why gold for you?

[Nadira Ghaf]

I just think that my skin undertones, they're warmer. Or at least I'd like to believe so. That's what I've gathered from Internet research and comparing it to myself. And I think gold jewelry makes my skin pop in a way that silver jewelry doesn't.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

I'm asking this because I noticed that you were wearing, among your other jewelry, a gold aura ring. If you're not familiar, OURA rings are one of a huge number of wearables available to consumers right now. Much like smartwatches or Fitbits, an OURA ring can track various fitness goals, sleep, or even your menstrual cycle. And OURA rings are popular. At the end of 2025, the company's CEO said he expected to reach a billion dollars in revenue for the year. That's twice the amount from the year before. The ring is marketed as a way to know more about yourself and your body. Oura's website says it gives you unlimited access to accurate data and information about your body so that you can make more informed decisions and lead a better, healthier life. Nadira got hers after a really frustrating year.

[Nadira Ghaf]

I have had a really hard year. Last year in terms of health. I basically discovered that I had some sort of chronic illness or at least or, or multiple, um, and the doctors and I were having a hard time trying to figure out what they were, if they were autoimmune, if they were something else. And I also knew that my sleep schedule was also really feeding into my flare ups or my symptoms and the stress and the exhaustion.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

These devices do a pretty good job of tracking simple stuff, your heart rate, for example, or the number of hours you slept. But for addressing serious health problems, the jury's still out. Nonetheless, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has thrown his and the administration's support behind them. We think that wearables are a key to the MAHA agenda, making America healthy again. And we are going to my my

[Mario Aguilar]

vision is that every American is wearing

[Lizzie O'Leary]

a wearable within four years. Aura even has a contract with the Defense Department. And according to Politico, the company, which is Finnish, spent more than a million dollars on lobbying last year. That's more than double what they spent in 2024 to push for a lighter regulatory hand in Washington. But most people, like Naadirah, are not thinking about the policy goals of a company making their smart device. They're just thinking about their health.

[Nadira Ghaf]

I don't know, I guess I just wanted some clarity about what was going on with my body and a moment where I felt like I had zero clarity about what was going on in my body. And I kind of felt like I wanted someone or something to yell at me and maybe give me hard numbers so that I could improve from counting

[Lizzie O'Leary]

steps to tracking sleep. Millions of Americans are turning to wearable devices for more information about their health, and the Trump administration is relaxing the rules that govern these products. But what's it like to wear a wearable? And when you've got complicated health issues like Nadira does, is something so simple a real solution? This made wearables a perfect testing ground for our new occasional series. TBD tries hands on reporting about the tech making your life better or worse. Today's episode is especially hands on. Now, I don't own an aura ring and Slate would not let me expense one. So we asked Nadira to record some audio diaries for us about her ring.

[Nadira Ghaf]

I will say that the app was very, very kind to me when I had gone out dancing until the wee hours of the morning and even though I had only gotten a little bit of sleep, I had gotten more sleep, twice the amount of sleep than I had gotten the day previously, even though I had gone to bed at 3:30 in the morning or something like that, and I had danced all night and I had far beyond succeeded or exceeded my activity goals. And it gave me a little crown. There's a little crown marker when you hit your goals or when something's optimal. And so it gives you a little crown because you know you're, you're, you did it. You've triumphed. You're a queen, you're a king. You own, you own that space of your health, I guess. And so that feels good to know that I hit it that one time.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Wearables are all the rage. Are we creating a future where people can gather data about their own bodies or just shifting responsibility away from a broader public health system? I'm Lizzie o' Leary and you're listening to TBD Tribes, an occasional series from what next tbd. Today on the show, TBD tries wearables. This episode is brought to you by Duck AI, a new product from DuckDuckGo. It's 2026 and the news is full of AI. It can be a little overwhelming, especially because it's easy to wonder if what you are asking a chatbot is actually secure. That's why DuckDuckGo built Duck AI. Duck AI is designed to let you chat privately with the same AIs you might already be using. Plus, it's completely free. No signups, no subscriptions. Duck AI promises to protect your info from hackers, scammers and data hungry companies. And it's from DuckDuckGo, the company that's been protecting your privacy, not collecting your Data for nearly two decades. If you want to use AI but you're concerned about privacy, visit Duck AI TBD today. That's Duck AI DBD from DuckDuckGo, where AI is always optional and designed to be private.

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[Mario Aguilar]

I am very into new gadgets and what they can do, and if I could fit more devices on myself, I would probably wear them. But I have reached my carrying capacity for devices.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Mario Aguilar writes about wearables for Stat News. He also wears two health trackers at a time, one on each wrist.

[Mario Aguilar]

So, yes, I'm interested in them, but I also maintain a healthy level of skepticism about how useful they actually are and the metrics that they output and what they're good for.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Mario spoke with one of our producers, Patrick Ford.

[Patrick Ford]

I think it's important also to define what a wearable is.

[Mario Aguilar]

Right.

[Patrick Ford]

Like, it's not just your Apple watch. Right. There's just a whole. There's a million different things that that means, right?

[Mario Aguilar]

Yes. You know, I think wearables like the Apple watch are probably the biggest part of the market by far. It's Apple watches, Fitbits. You also have OURA rings. You have what we called in my consumer tech days, wristables, or as a joke, of course, but like the whoop, which isn't a watch, strictly speaking, because it doesn't have a screen. You also have devices like continuous glucose monitors, which are little devices that you stick onto your skin and are also not watches.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Some estimates put the size of the global wearable technology market today at almost $93 billion, and it's projected to grow to more than 200 billion by 2033. All the different devices, rings, watches, things that look like watches but aren't, are busy collecting information

[Patrick Ford]

with this spectrum of the wearables industry. Like, what sort of data are people collecting about themselves? Like, just sort of like, what things? If you wanted to get a wearable, what sort of of things might you want to be tracking?

[Mario Aguilar]

I feel like the number one thing people want to track the most is, is their sleep. Like, how well did I sleep? And I think that's probably across the industry, at least the consumer industry, the most widely offered metric. People also look to track their fitness, so how hard they're working out, how much they move from day to day, their steps. This industry got its start, you know, basically with glorified step counters that interpreted your motion and tried to give you a sense for whether or not you were hitting 10,000 steps a day or whatever else, whatever other goal you had set for yourself. People are looking to these companies offering these devices for more sophisticated measures that give them a sense for their recovery, how prepared they are for the day.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

In the world of the OURA ring, that's called Readiness. Here's Nadira again.

[Nadira Ghaf]

My readiness score was only a 51. The thing that's a little bit worrying about the scores is I have another full day ahead of me, full day of work, I've got some deadlines and I also have a birthday party this evening. And so I don't know if or when I'm going to be able to catch up on any of that sleep. The one thing that I think is interesting is what I'm sort of understanding about the way that I personally react to, respond to and approach these sort

[Sunny Cashore]

of wearable

[Nadira Ghaf]

data points is I have this sort of pressing sense that this app cannot make me feel worse than I actually feel. I appreciate that it has faith in me, but it might be misplaced.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

But readiness isn't some standard measure.

[Mario Aguilar]

Increasingly, people are looking to these companies offering these devices for more sophisticated measures that give them a sense for their recovery, how prepared they are for the day, sort of these interpreted metrics, these, these scores or readouts of how prepared they are for the day, their readiness, their stress, the quality of their sleep, which are not sort of directly measured, but are rather combined with sort of proprietary formulas to determine how ready you are.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

I wanted to understand how Nadira felt about this tension. A device measuring some things that are clear and quantifiable and others that don't really mean anything in a clinical setting. How did you feel about the two big boxes of data that these devices can produce? Heart rate, very generic, real agreed upon thing, and sleep score, which is a little bit made up. Do those numbers have value to you?

[Nadira Ghaf]

That's a great question. I kind of think of it like Fahrenheit versus Celsius. Celsius, because there's less numbers in between, right? 30 degrees Celsius is very different from 31 degrees Celsius, whereas in Fahrenheit, what's the difference between 75 degrees and 76 degrees? I think of sleep scores like that, 65 versus 64, 62 doesn't mean much to me. But 60, 60 versus 65 versus 70, those are actually differences that I do feel in my body. And so I think in some ways it is helpful. In other ways it's not. The thing that I have trouble wrapping my head around though, is the breakdown of the sleep stages. I don't know what to do with that information. I don't know how to change that information. I don't know how to get more deep sleep or REM sleep as opposed to just more sleep overall. And so that can be a little bit frustrating. If it's like, okay, well, you got seven hours, but you weren't in your REM sleep stage long enough. Okay, well, what am I supposed to do about that?

[Lizzie O'Leary]

After the break, we get a second and third opinion.

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[Lizzie O'Leary]

on one second, I just need to. What if you had a room where no one interrupts, no notifications, no expectations, just space to talk with Better help Therapy happens in a space that's yours. Visit betterhelp.com randompodcast for 10% off your first month of online therapy. Many of the consumer wearables companies have been working to increase both the reliability and credibility of their products. Apple has FDA approved hypertension detection and electrocardiogram features in its Apple watches, though some doctors are still concerned about the accuracy of the blood pressure measurements. Then there is the question of what exactly a wearable is. In January, the Trump administration eased regulation of consumer wearables, saying many can be classified as general wellness products, which require almost no oversight. Higher tech, more intrusive wearables are still classified as medical devices which require FDA approval. Aura is pushing for a third option. Remember when we told you that Aura had beefed up its lobbying spending? A third regulatory classification would allow companies like Aura to flag health issues to users, but without the lengthy FDA approval process. Now, even without the medical device label, many doctors see a way to utilize wearables in their practices.

[Sunny Cashore]

I'm Sunny Cashore, an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco. I work on hypertension control both at the University of California system as well at ucsf. I'm also a general medicine doc. I see patients in primary care where trying to deal with blood pressure is a near daily, if not more than

[Lizzie O'Leary]

that, need to treat patients with high blood pressure. Sunny often starts with a three to six month plan that includes talking about exercise, weight loss, reducing alcohol consumption, and it also includes monitoring your blood pressure at home. Here's our producer Patrick, again.

[Patrick Ford]

And that's with either just like a blood pressure designed, specific purpose thing or a wearable. Like, if it is a wearable, like, what are you giving them? Like, what sort of device is that?

[Sunny Cashore]

So I would say my practice is still to stick with the blood pressure cuff, if I can. I have seen some of these devices like the Apple Watch, et cetera, which doesn't give you an actual number, it just gives you a bit of a trend. So I think the basic answer for me is I still stick with a tried and true blood pressure cuff in my practice right now.

[Patrick Ford]

And it sounds like the way you were describing that data, how you view it or value it maybe, is that it is not something definitive, not something you would base necessarily a treatment decision on. It's just more like, hey, we see overall that you are at home taking these readings and the trend is either still up or it's flat or something. It's just kind of like another piece of the puzzle for you.

[Sunny Cashore]

I think that's right. I mean, there's one case. I'll give you an example. We know that people actually, like, 50% of the time, when you ask people to do the blood pressure measurements at home, there's still a lot of attrition. So it's like up to 50% of the time where people just drop off. And then the data shows that there's also low patient engagement even after a year. So it's like 30%. And so this is the sort of argument in some ways for something that's passive monitoring or a wearable, because people, even though it's not a blood test, in some ways, it's very different than having to get your blood drawn. The idea of still putting a cuff on and measuring it, that, like, is still a barrier.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Then there's the question of a different kind of barrier. Wearables can be expensive, and yeah, some are covered by insurance if you have it. But even the least expensive Apple watch costs almost $250.

[Jordi Cohen]

The highest risk. People are often not the ones using these devices.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Jordi Cohen is an associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania.

[Jordi Cohen]

I feel like a lot of the people using these devices are the ones who are already engaged in their healthcare, already engaged in doing, like, physical activity, doing things that they would be doing anyway. And so my biggest concern is what's gonna happen to the people that are sort of left behind and not using that stuff when it really starts to take off.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Monitoring your heart rate might be helpful, but it doesn't Solve the problem of finding an affordable, accessible primary care doctor or having health insurance that pays for you to see them. Wearables can feel like a consumer focused bandaid on a medical system with more fundamental and structural problems.

[Jordi Cohen]

I think it's great to have information if it gets you to the right place in the right location at the right time. When it's sort of a random number generator of is it accurate, is it not? I'm not sure. I don't know if our society quite knows what to do with that. I think people are leaning on that not high quality a lot because a lot of people say, well, your doctor's worse or like, you know, it's better than nothing. I don't know if I'm that much of a nihilist yet. I think in the future this data could be super valuable. I think in maybe the next five, 10 years we will have really accurate blood pressure algorithms from these watches and it will be actionable and it will change the face of what we get from like a watch. And I appreciate attempts to push that forward. I think that just making everyone have one before it's ready for primetime worries me right now.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Wearables collect a tremendous amount of intimate data from their users and each company has slightly different policies for how they handle that.

[Jordi Cohen]

It's a black box with these companies right now.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Jordi has been looking at one kind of wearable cuffless blood pressure devices.

[Jordi Cohen]

Before any of these cuffless blood pressure devices should really be coming to market even is that there should be a lot of transparency about what are you doing with my data, who has access to it and how. And I think there is a sum and usually like for instance, Apple has that page of like, here's your privacy information. But when I read it, I don't even understand what it's saying. Like it. I think a lot of these are written in legalese and like it's not entirely clear to all of us who has access to our data and what they're doing with it.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

If that data was shared with insurance companies, what would that mean for people with pre existing conditions? In my own life, I have an autoimmune disease and I'm a cancer survivor. That's the kind of thing that gives me pause, which is not to say that wearables aren't valuable, just that they may need policy guardrails.

[Patrick Ford]

Are these like a thing that can help, like improve health care outcomes overall?

[Jordi Cohen]

So there are some studies, for instance, that have shown that like using a Fitbit can maybe like in combination with other things can convince you to exercise more. If you get. If whatever you're doing makes you exercise more, makes you sleep better and sleep more. These are all things that have been linked like very strongly to better outcomes. And so like that to me is the hopeful part of this is like, if it can get people having better health behaviors, if it can help you track your diet and realize I'm taking in like way too much salt and those are all things that can improve outcomes. So I think that there are ways in which these can very much and palpably improve people's health and then there are ways it can't and those get conflated a lot.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

When we reached out to Aura, a company spokesperson told us, quote, aura was created to help people better understand their bodies so they can have more informed conversations with their clinicians, not to replace them. They added Oura Ring is not a medical device and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Our goal is to provide reliable, science backed insights that support preventative relationship based care rather than substitute for it. Which brings us back to where we started with Nadira. She got her Oura ring because she wanted more information about her health. So I asked her, did it help?

[Nadira Ghaf]

In some ways, yes. In other ways, no. I think with these wearables and it's not just, you know, Oura ring specific. A large part of what you get out of it is what you give to it. Right. And so there's a really fine line between obsessing over the things that it's telling you you're getting right or getting wrong and having a healthy sort of distanced viewpoint. But also you can tip into, I have this thing, I'm wearing this, but I'm not caring too much about what it's telling me at all. And therefore it's ineffective.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

Did paying such close attention to this during this experiment change the way you think about your health data at all?

[Nadira Ghaf]

That's a really good question. Mostly because I don't know what's going on in my brain half the time. I think there's a whole bunch of things just swimming around up there lately, honestly. But I do think there are some things that changed, maybe didn't change, but just fortified what I think about my own health or how I think about it. You know, I'm someone who let's just take sleep because that tends to be the biggest thing I feel that I'm using this, this wearable for. Right. I'm someone who knows that I want to improve my sleep and so when I had that moment where I had so little sleep that it logged it as a nap, I was like, well, like, you kind of ate with that. Like, yeah. And I should be shamed a little bit for that because it wasn't a full sleep. That was indeed a nap. And so I think a little bit of, like, sassy fortification of these things is actually helpful to me. I don't know that it changed how I feel about my health data, but I do think it in some ways made my health data ring a little bit more true or have a little bit more of a lasting effect. Right? Because I can sit there and say I didn't get enough sleep. But the moment something tells me you got so little sleep, that actually, to us, that's a nap. It's kind of like, okay, girl, you gotta be better, right? You gotta think about this a little bit differently.

[Lizzie O'Leary]

That is it for our show today. What Next TBD and TBD Tries are produced by by Patrick Fort and Evan Campbell. Our show is edited by Paige Osborne, who is also senior supervising producer for what Next and what Next tbd. Mia Lobel is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate, and TBD is part of the larger what Next family. Special thanks to our colleague Nadira Goff. I'm Lizzie o'. Leary. Thanks for listening.

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