Is Netflix Slowly Becoming a Podcatcher? - DTNS 5166

0:04This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, December 16th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context, and help each other understand. Today, Dr. Nicky is telling us about a treatment for Huntington's disease and more video podcasts coming to Netflix. What the heck? Is this a podcatcher now? I'm so confused. I'm Jason Howell. I'm Tom Merritt. Let's start with what you need to know with a big story.

0:33There's not an insane amount of detail here. I just honestly wanted to talk about it because I think it would be an interesting conversation. Netflix has signed a global exclusive deal to stream video versions of more than 15 iHeartMedia podcasts on its video platform. So we're talking The Breakfast Club, My Favorite Murder, Dear Chelsea, This Is Important, a whole bunch of them. That's just a few that are going to become Netflix first in the video version anyways with the new deal. The audio versions of those podcasts will stay on more traditional podcast platforms, let's say. So obviously, iHeartRadio's app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the audio versions are going to be out there where you've come to expect them.

1:17It's just these video versions are suddenly going to be exclusive to Netflix. New episodes are going to start appearing on Netflix starting in early 2026, at least here in the US. Yes, that's going to open up to more markets down the line. But also important to note, this isn't the first time. When I first popped this open, and this is a little closer to your normal every day because of court killers and everything, Tom. But when I first opened this, I had missed the earlier news that they had made the deal with Spotify. I think I heard about it, and I swiftly forgot about it. You probably heard about it on Daily Tech News Show.

1:54Probably at some point. It's possible we even talked about it, but it wasn't top of mind when I read this at first. I was like, whoa, wait a minute. Yeah, it's not something you're thinking about every single moment of your life, right? Yeah, and I certainly haven't seen any video podcasts in Netflix. So this was a nice reminder of, oh, wait a minute, Netflix, suddenly a podcatcher? Is that what this is? Or not really, because it's not everything podcasts. It's just exclusive deals of video podcasts. Yeah, this is, I think, a symptom of the fact that video podcasts have not been well supported.

2:31And when I say that, I think it's because they haven't been well received through RSS readers. A lot of the major podcast platforms out there that help podcasters produce either don't at all support video podcasting or they provide many fewer features for video podcasting or it's more expensive to do video podcasting because the files are bigger. And I think that led YouTube to try to grab the video podcasting real estate by saying we're cutting out Google Podcasts. And now all podcasts are on YouTube, whether they're audio or video, because we think we can get everyone to do their video podcasts on YouTube, which caused Spotify to say, hey, we actually are one of the few platforms that does support video podcasting and we do it really well.

3:21And we don't want YouTube stealing our thunder. So we're going to license to Netflix to get some money out of this. And Netflix realizing, hey, there is no video podcasting space out there in RSS land. And we are slowly becoming more than just TV shows and movies. We want to do video games and we want to do talk shows and we want to do live sports. So there's amazing content out there that will keep people on our platform. and doesn't cost us a lot of money relative to producing Stranger Things or Wednesday. So let's bring that content onto our platform. So yeah, I think when you come at it from our perspective, Jason, as people who've been doing this since 2005, it feels weird.

4:08Like, wait, is Netflix a podcatcher? But that's not how anybody making these deals sees it. They don't see it as podcatchers. They see it as eyeballs. People are watching things. Where are they watching them? and how can we take the best advantage of where they watch them to deliver it to them in a way that makes us all money. Yeah, I suppose we are old school. Tom, I remember the day when we were doing Buzz Out Loud, the days of Buzz Out Loud, when a video podcast was four separate Ustream video embeds on a single webpage. And the viewer had to log onto that page and mute three of them so they didn't get duplicated audio and all the players.

4:45Video podcasting has come a long way. made that page for us too right like yeah it has come a long way i mean just a just a symbol of how far this stuff has come and uh also you know slightly feeling a little old in this moment where i'm like shoot you know it's been 20 years and i've been working in this industry same as you um but it's but it's it's also one of those kind of crossover moments where i'm like all right go podcast i mean you know like you made it to netflix now granted this is not daily tech news show coming to a platform like netflix these these are podcasts let's say with with some air quotes but these are highly produced highly funded you know they're less of a podcast and they're more just show at this point kind of kind of what you were talking about right like it's just a produced show that can also be downloaded in an audio form through podcatchers if you want to I sometimes struggle with the idea of podcast as a genre, which is how we're using it right now when we're talking about it.

5:48Because I think there is something unique about the medium that makes it a podcast the way that a radio show is unique versus an audio book. They're all audio, but there's something slightly different. I do think that podcasting and talk radio overlap, but there is something slightly different about it. But I think it is the audio version that makes it different. I think the video version either tends to be a spy cam of like, oh, I'm watching Howard Stern do his radio show kind of thing. Or it is just like you said, it's a show. And it might be delivered as a video podcast on a video podcast platform or it might not.

6:27These are no longer podcasts in that sense when they show up on Netflix, like you say. They're just shows. They're talk shows. The kinds of things you would see during the daytime or the off hours on networks, but available for you to watch whenever you want. Yeah, and very niched down, potentially. I remember back in the day when ABC started taking some of its news TV shows and turning that into a podcast. And the big question mark, like, well, that's not a podcast. That's a show for TV that you just turned into audio. But it's just the delivery mechanism. But it's just the delivery mechanism.

7:05Exactly. Yeah, it's a whole blurry definition. It is interesting to see Netflix go – we can trace this from Netflix's side too because remember Chelsea Handler had a talk show. The first talk show that Netflix did was with Chelsea Handler and everybody's like, how can Netflix do a talk show? It's not live. Is it really a talk show? And they ended up not doing it anymore after a while, but they've tried other talk shows with other hosts here and there. And here they are going like, maybe instead of creating talk shows, we'll just acquire video podcasts. And then we get Chelsea Handler in the bargain.

7:37So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not that expensive. Like you said, you know, when you're when you're comparing it against highly produced episodic content and everything podcasts, you know, it's kind of like reality TV on television. It's like there was so much and is so much reality TV because by and large, it's just a lot less expensive to produce that. Yeah. What have been video podcasts, I think, cover the talk show circuit. Also, the true crime. There's true crime video podcasts that are really just the kind of shows you'd see on the History Channel or DIY or something like that. They're that kind of Discovery Network style show.

8:17And that's what's been popular on the podcasting delivery mechanism and the podcasting genre platform. And they also fit into Netflix when you're just looking around for something to watch. Interesting. Well, we'll see. I have a Netflix sub, so I'm sure at some point I'll see it pop up and we'll see if it's enough to tantalize me to check out some of it. That is honestly one of my bigger questions is how many people watch this kind of content on Netflix? Because there hasn't historically been success with it. Will this make it more successful because they're getting Bill Simmons and Chelsea Handler and The Breakfast Club, super popular stuff?

8:54And exclusive. It's not just like another place that it's going, but it's exclusive video content. But if you listen to The Breakfast Club, you're not going to switch to Netflix because you're going to keep listening to it on your favorite podcast app. How many people were watching The Breakfast Club elsewhere and are now like, oh, I guess I'll watch it on Netflix? I'll be curious to see. I'm not saying there aren't. I'm just curious about that. Super good question. Well, DTNS is made possible by super good questions from listeners like you. Keep them coming. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com.

9:24And big thanks to everybody who supports us and has supported us for 12 years now. It was just last week that I got the note that our domain name was being renewed because that was the day that I actually created it back in 2013. So big thanks to Miranda Janelle, that Charlie dude, Justin Zellers. And Scott and Jason gave us a raise. I think it's a different Jason though, right? Yeah, definitely not me. and I doubt it's Scott Johnson. But Scott and Jason did give us a raise. So thank you, Scott and Jason, whichever Scott or Jason you are. And welcome back, Aaron, returning patron. Thank you very much, Aaron.

10:09There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. The Firefox browser general manager, Anthony Enzordameo, has been named by Mozilla to take over the position of CEO. Getting a big promotion. Interim CEO Laura Chambers will now return to the Mozilla board alongside company president Mark Sermon. That was planned. Laura Chambers was not going to remain as CEO. I guess it was not impossible. They could offer her the job, but apparently she didn't want it if they did. So the new CEO of Mozilla is Anthony Enzor DeMeo. He will lead Mozilla's effort to make AI features optional and prioritize customer choice over partnerships.

10:49That includes services like an opt-in assistant. So you'll get a generated assistant, an LLM-based assistant, but you choose which model powers it. You get to decide the privacy settings for it. There's also the Time Best Innovation of 2025, Shake to Summarize. I don't know if anybody out there has used this. It works on Firefox for iOS. You just shake it and it'll summarize whatever page you're looking at. Enzo DiMeo has an MBA, not an engineer. He's an MBA holder from MIT Sloan School of Management, was a product lead at mortgage company Better, product lead at the furniture store Wayfair, and was a CTO and chief product officer of home rental company Roofstock.

11:34And he joined Mozilla in 2024. So with all that user choice, I mean, I hear a lot from people. That's Firefox's whole thing is like, we want you to be in charge, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I wonder how deep that in charge goes. Like could a user who's like fed up with this moment of AI where AI is in everything and now it's coming for our browsers. Could someone go into the settings and easily just turn off the AI? Oh, it's opt in. Did you not catch that? It's not on that. Like you don't have to do anything if you don't want it. Just don't ever turn it on. Yeah, that's that's fantastic. then that's that's uh some great choice right there because i think i think there's a there's definitely a growing resistance to oh my goodness now the ai is coming for the browser and it's integrated and i don't want it to be there and giving giving a user the direct control could be a real kind of convincing or selling point for firefox to um to gain some more market share yeah and i think firefox is smart in understanding that uh what a few people loudly write on the internet is not always representative of what the actual user wants to do in the privacy of their own home, including that same person who loudly wrote it on the internet sometimes.

12:47So they're saying, look, we want you to be in charge. We want you to decide how your browser works, but we're not going to deny you these new tools because they can be useful. We know a lot of you do want them, even if you're not complaining about it all the time. Yeah. And I like the approach of, we've just got a bunch of different models, so pick your poison. Yeah. Yeah. Because they are very different. I mean, I don't know what that does for Mozilla revenue, though. The reason you partner up with a model is that you can generate more revenue with a partnership like that because the model maker might pay you for it.

13:18But maybe they'll have multiple payments. That works for them with search where they make Google the default, but they allow you to choose whatever search engine you want. Yeah, interesting. Well, LG is going to show off its first micro RGB television at CES 2026. That's a consumer electronics show in Vegas next month. We're going to be there, of course. This set is called the LG Micro RGB Evo. And the technology, for those who don't know, uses a backlight system that can be set to any hue instead of just simply white. And so what that means is you get a wider color gamut. You get finer dimming when compared to standard LED backlit LCDs.

13:59And as far as where this sits in the TV technology marketplace, think of it kind of squarely between OLED and mini LED TVs. So it's smack dab in the middle. The new set features an AI upscaling engine, more than 1 ,000 local dimming zones. So you get very precise brightness control. And based on the article that I read from Engadget, 115-inch set is going to cost around$30 ,000. But if that's just a little too rich for your blood, just a little bit, have no fear. LG also plans smaller sets between the 75-inch to 100-inch sizes. Yeah. So that price is for Samsung's micro RGB. LG has not set a price.

14:50But yeah, no. But that gives us an idea of like, well, if Samsung's charging$30 ,000, I doubt LG's going to charge that much less. Right. Yeah. Somewhere, yeah. It's probably going to be really expensive. I mean, we see stories like this every year leading up to CES. And while we're at CES, it's always about what is the latest and greatest technology in TVs. And it's always ridiculously expensive. They always start big. And then, I don't know, over the course of two, three, four years, they come down to earth. Then we start seeing more people's living rooms because who's buying a$30 ,000 TV set?

15:22Really? I mean, who is it? I don't know that I've ever met them. It's weird. The micro RGB is striking a balance, like you said, between OLED and regular mini LEDs, but it's not striking a balance on price yet. Usually the thing is like, well, OLED's more expensive to make, so we'll do mini LED and bring the price down. And I guess the idea is eventually the economy of scale will get micro RGB to be a smaller price. But yeah, this is one of those. LG seems to always release their CES details early, and then they get covered again in the first week of January. It's brilliant. I'm not sure why more companies don't do it.

16:04It works. The Attorney General of Texas has filed several lawsuits against five major TV makers. So Sony, Samsung, LG, Hisense, and TCL. The suits all claim that the TV makers violate user privacy by using something called automated content recognition or ACR. ACR can track what is on your screen and then use that information to serve third-party ads. So they'll be able to tell like, oh, Jason really likes watching all these new Netflix video podcasts. We can serve him ads for Spotify video podcasts or something like that. The suits note that the screen captures are indiscriminate. So it's not just capturing what you're watching on the TV apps, but it could include your security footage, your doorbell camera images, your personal photos, anything being cast to the screen as well as data connected from connected consoles.

16:58So if you've got a NVIDIA Shield TV or an Xbox connected, it can see what you're using that for. And the suits allege that the TV makers do not adequately notify users of the use of ACR. And that is what violates the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Yeah, I mean, anytime there's a technology like this that does monitor, I mean, so, you know, I guess let me finish that thought. Anytime there's a technology like this that does monitor what's happening on a screen or what a user is doing or whatever, I firmly believe a user needs to know about that. So I absolutely support this. The ACR, the automated content recognition, that information, according to Texas and how this technology works, constantly being sent off to the cloud to some ad network to say this is an ongoing report of what this person watches.

17:51Therefore, this indicates what we should serve in ads. that sort of stuff. Yeah. Users need to know about that. Absolutely. Well, and I have not seen the lawsuit, nor have I read each of these television makers' privacy policies where they notify you. What I'm going to guess is they do notify you of ACR, that the attorney general is picking on the language that they use to talk about it, especially because they highlighted the security and doorbell camera images. I'm guessing there's something in the privacy practice that says we will, from time to time, uh capture what you watch on screen and use that to serve you ads and maybe texas is going to argue to a judge they should be putting all the consequences of that in there right the other side of this uh is that we we tend to think of this as like oh uh my entire screen is being streamed to a guy at high yeah there's someone there sitting there looks at my doorbell and the fact is acr is just looking for matches to be like ah he's watching wednesday oh he's watching pluribus uh and then keeping that track of that and then third-party data people aren't also getting your doorbell camera images they're getting like is that the image uh from jason's tv okay yeah could you send that over here please yeah i want to i want to see what packages you got uh they they are using that to say i would like to advertise to everybody who watches chelsea handler uh pluribus and the kansas city chiefs right and they don't care who those people are they And Samsung can say like, oh, yeah, we know who those people are.

19:23We can put that ad in front of all those people. So it doesn't work the way they like to imply you when they try to rile you up. But I'm with you that if the language isn't properly notifying you what they're capturing. And also, if there is data being captured from sources like your doorbell camera, how is it stored? Is it done on device or is it sent to a server? And is it stored for a long time? Could someone hack in and access that stuff? That's the kind of thing I'm worried about. That's all super important to know. Absolutely. CounterPoint Research published its data that shows global smartphone shipments for 2026, that is next year, expected to fall by 2.1%.

20:05Now, the firm had once at one point expected a few major brands to see year-over-year declines, but now is projecting that every brand in this space is going to see a hit to the bottom line. The report shares that lower end devices are going to be hit particularly hard by all of this. Counterpoint says this is due to the rising costs of materials. We've talked about on the show very recently, in fact, the rising cost of memory prices, chip prices skyrocketing all at a moment when there's a lot of demand in the AI industry, that AI demand continues to increase. The report says that this should impact the average selling prices of these smartphones with increases of around 6.9 % for hardware sold in 2026.

20:53Apple and Samsung says the report are in the best position to weather this storm because, I mean, they've got the resources to back it up, right? Smaller brands, far less wiggle room to work with. And so I think what they said is Apple and Samsung shipment declines around 2%, Honor more like 3+. Vivo and Oppo were a few of the hardware manufacturers that they expected to see growth and now are saying that's no longer the case. Everybody's going to be impacted by this. Yeah. I mean, Apple is run by the logistics guys. So one would expect that they have locked up their supplies to try to weather this storm really well.

21:34That doesn't surprise me. It's not just that they're big. It's that they're really good at logistics. And Samsung makes memory. So it would seem pretty stupid if Samsung weren't able to somehow make sure that they got a decent supply. So those two make sense to me. I look at this and I wonder, it's not like this will last forever, right? There is a demand for RAM, and there are people who make RAM. The problem is that the demand for RAM skyrocketed faster than you can build capacity. So what we're looking at is how long will it take for capacity to be built to meet that demand? Or how long will it take for the demand to decline, to kind of come back down?

22:24And it sounds like what CounterPoint says is at least a year. We are not expecting this supply-demand gap to be resolved in 2026, and that means you're going to have higher prices or less products to sell. I wonder, though, just a thought, if people can't afford to replace their phone and decide to keep their phone, does that teach them that they don't need to keep replacing their phone? Yeah. Well, I wonder about that, too. I mean, and, you know, the phones are a little more capable now. I feel like there's a lot of forces kind of converging right now on the fact that people, you know, update promises are better.

23:06There's a lot of reasons for people to hold on to their phones longer. But we've seen this happen, and then it gets undone, you know, and it goes in the opposite direction, too. So, yeah, I'll be curious. Also, phone makers may learn from this, like, oh, we don't need to continually update the RAM. Like maybe in our flagship phones we do, but most people don't really care. They still buy the phone if it's got 12 instead of 16, right? So they may learn something out of this as well. True. All right. Finally, some quick headlines. These are the kinds of things that are good to know if you just want to understand the news in the future.

23:41Like, wait, I heard about that. You heard about it here. Yeah. Remember that. OnePlus revealed plans to launch a new Turbo smartphone lineup. Turbo! in 2026. Apparently, it's going to target top-tier performance, as you would imagine from the name, gaming capabilities, improved gaming capabilities, and even larger batteries. I'm super curious to see what this means because already their batteries are ginormous. It's more battery than phone most of the time. Google is adding something to its homepage, which they don't do lightly, a plus menu to the left of the search bar that will let you upload an image or a file to be used directly in AI mode.

24:29I mean, put the AI everywhere, right? If we put it in our most viewed product, people will use it and get used to our AI. Also, if you want to search by image, which it can do, this is a lot easier to do it now. You don't have to click in to something. It's right there on the homepage. Totally. The Apple TV app for Android now supports Google Cast. The iOS version of the app, by the way, does not. Yeah. Use AirPlay, people. Yeah. Seriously. Meta's new SAM audio model can isolate sounds from noisy real-world recordings into their own tracks using single prompts. It's available right now through Meta's Segment Anything Playground.

25:14Yeah, I want to play around with that and see what the quality is. It's an imperfect science, but it's getting better with every kind of approach. So I'm curious. Adobe Firefly now lets users make prompt-based edits inside a new video editor. So this is going to also tap into third-party models like Flux 2 and Topaz Astra for improved quality and things like image generation and especially 4K upscaling. Instagram is launching an app for TV, IG for TV, a Reels-focused app. So focused on the short videos, it's starting by launching on Amazon Fire TV. And finally, iOS 26.3 introduced an EU-only notification forwarding toggle.

26:00It's going to channel full iPhone notifications over to third-party wearables. This is, of course, in response to DMA pressure to open up watch notifications. I don't know. My Pebble watch gets notifications pretty reliably. So this will just make it easier, I guess. Maybe more context-filled. Yeah, yeah. More actions. I can't do a lot of actions. Those are the essentials for today. Shall we dive a little deeper, Jason? Yeah, let's do that. This October, an international research team tested a gene therapy that is the first treatment proven to slow Huntington's disease. And Dr. Nikki is here, spoke with you, Tom, all about it.

26:41Dr. Nikki, welcome back. Happy to be here and to talk about a fun and positive and exciting topic today. Not a cure, but a treatment that can slow a disease sounds very good to me. First, let's start for people who don't know, what is Huntington's disease? So this is a genetically inherited neurodegenerative disorder, meaning it causes the brain to degenerate. It is relatively rare, but rare means different things for different people. It affects about 30 ,000 people in the US. But once it starts, so around when you're about 30 or 40, it can onset and can be lethal within 10 to 30 years after its onsets.

27:25and the degeneration that happens results in memory loss, psychological changes, and eventually motor function loss. So pretty devastating disease. What causes it? It's a genetic factor. Oh, well, actually, I'll give you a bit more detail on what I thought that was just a... I'll give you some more detail, Tom, on exactly what causes it. It is a genetic mutation in the HTT gene. This gene produces a protein called Huntington, which when healthy, it doesn't cause a problem. But when the gene is mutated, causes the protein to misfold, which can kill neurons. So if you've heard of prion disease before, that's also misfolded proteins.

28:08Misfolded proteins in general are a problem in a bunch of different brain disorders. Probably most people have heard of the mad cow disease. Yeah, mad cow disease, for example. And Alzheimer's in certain aspects as well. Okay. So what did they do here to create this treatment? So they're trying to reduce this toxic protein that gets produced by this gene mutation. And they did it with something really cool that we haven't talked about, I think, on DTNS before, which is gene editing and gene therapy. um so this works by taking a safe virus adenovirus and um modifying a specific dna sequence putting it inside the virus and then injecting the virus into the brain locally uh one downside of this is you have to go inside the brain and that is a 12 to 18 hour surgery where you pick a very specialized area to inject this.

29:06They also do it with very cool tech, which is a live MRI that's guiding the surgeon with a microcatheter to the specific regions in the kind of lower parts of the brain and the brainstem. So very delicate. I would not want to be doing that. And this is just for the research. This is the clinical trial. Yeah. So not for everyone, but still it got this far into people. So that's pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So once they get into this brain region, the virus activates and delivers the DNA into the local neurons in this region. And then they cause the neurons to produce something called a micro RNA.

29:48Just think of it as like a messenger. It intercepts what we call messenger RNA, which in the mutated diseased cells are telling the cells to produce this toxic protein. So it stops it from telling them to produce this toxic protein and just reduces the amounts that it produces. And because neurons, they're a little bit different than like skin cells, they don't die. So once you've kind of fixed them, they stay like that, which is great in this case. In this case, do shoot the messenger RNA. Yeah, shoot the messenger. How did it work? Obviously, we don't have a cure, but it seems like it's doing something.

30:30What did it do? Yeah, so this was really interesting. I'm not deep in the Huntington's field, but before this came out, nobody really had hope for a cure anytime soon. And this kind of – they didn't really expect this to work as well as it did. So it's really, really exciting news. This is a phase one-two study. It involved 29 patients, seven of which are up the road at Birmingham here, which was fun to find out. And so this drug, which they called Unicure, showed an average reduction of 75 % in disease progression. So the disease progresses way slower, meaning that a decline, maybe say like neuronal death that you would see in one year, and this case would take four years.

31:14So it's a pretty drastic life expectancy improvement for these patients. the way that they measured this is also a really cool technology and one that i use as well they measure um spinal fluid and they look at the level of a certain marker in the spinal fluid that's indicative of cell death um and they realized that the the amount was way lower than what they expected it to be um over time so really really exciting result okay so we're not shooting the messenger we're delaying them for up to four years that's good yeah we're slowing down i think we're like reducing the amount of cells that are producing the messenger so we shoot some of the messengers and not all of them the messengers but we can't quite get them all yet we're still working on that some of them are really fast uh then uh the there's always downsides when you're shooting at messengers what are the downsides to it uh some other researchers have claimed that This is a relatively small study at an end of 29.

32:15It hasn't yet been peer reviewed because it's been performed by this drug company, but still people, I mean, it's really promising. So you heard me mention the 18-hour brain surgery. That is, in fact, invasive and difficult. But for now, this gene therapy needs to be delivered directly to the brain. in 2021 they had tried to do something very similar by injecting it into the spinal fluid and it failed and they think it's because enzymes in the spinal fluid cleaved the the virus or the dna that they were trying to um inject so this seems to be the way to get it done for now i'm sure it'll improve um the other thing is that i don't know if you've heard but gene therapy is really expensive um gene therapies that are being applied in people right now for other techniques cost like$2 million.

33:02So this is not super accessible for everybody. That being said, the step forward that this represents outweighs all of the downsides. Yeah. I think that's the thing to remember is we tend to want to be like, well, what good is it if it's that expensive and that difficult? And the fact is we had no treatments basically that that were nearly near to this effective. We had symptomatic treatments before now, right? And so having something that is effective, now we can work on trying to make it a little less invasive. Now we can work on making it more effective. Before we were working on coming up with something.

33:39So that's an important advance. Yeah. And one of the next steps that they're talking about is they did this in people who had advanced Huntington's and they're talking about doing a trial on people who have the gene, but it hasn't manifested itself yet. The gene always does. So they want to see if they do the intervention in someone where it hasn't activated yet, if they can stop it completely, which would be also incredible. And I do think it needs a bigger study. Obviously, it absolutely needs to be peer reviewed. So, you know, let's let's let's not get too far ahead of ourselves on that stuff.

34:11But it's incredibly promising for for something that hasn't had a lot of promise. Right. And very little side effects, which I also found really interesting. Yeah. Other than the side effects of brain surgery. Yeah, yeah. Which is, you know, not something trivial. That's something I'm going to volunteer for. I'm not volunteering. Yeah, yeah. Before we wrap up, I know you mentioned the live MRI part of this. Were there any other technological aspects of this that you found interesting? Yeah, I just think sometimes, I mean, we like to talk about how everything is tech since we invented FHIR. But there's just so much tech that goes into this that maybe you don't think about.

34:46So yeah, live MRI, for one, is already pretty amazing. I talked about this biomarker analysis. We do this in the lab, so I know what it takes. You have to get your sample, centrifuge it, and then put it into a specific machine that uses antibodies to read the marker that has an optical density plate reader. That's already a list of tech. Virus-assisted gene therapy. I mean, there's 50 million types of tech that go into that, but it's just such a cool concept that you get this kind of non-damaging virus that you can put a piece of genetic information into, which includes gene editing, and then put that into the person.

35:24There's going to be microscopy at some point in this. That's technology. Probably the very precise surgical techniques that they're using. I don't even know what that comprises. I even thought like the physics behind creating the very specific microcapillary tube that they need to inject the virus. I don't know if you can think of any other things, but I was just like, there's a lot of tech steps that go into getting this far. Just being able to do the precision of the brain surgery and the guiding and all of that is incredible. Nikki, thank you so much for helping us understand this. If folks want to find more of your kind of science, where should they go?

36:01Happy to be here. All of my stuff is over at NicoleAckerman's.com and my handle is the same thing on Blue Sky. So find all my research over there. Fantastic. Fantastic. Fantastic. Thank you. Science. That was some nice fantactics you had there. Thank you. Yeah. There's fan strategy and fantactics. You know, they're two different things. I saw your face when we were talking about the live MRI brain thing. Yeah. It's pretty crazy, this stuff. Big thanks to Nikki for bringing that to us. If you would like to get in person with me and talk fan tactics or fan strategy, I'm headed to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

36:48So we should meet up. I'm going to be there. Rob Dunwood's going to be there. Amos is going to be there. KT Data is going to be there. We're going to meet up with a bunch of other folks in the DTNS world on Wednesday, January 7th at 6.30 p.m. at the Resorts World Food Court. We'll have some stickers to give away. We'll have some great conversations about tech that'll just happen because we're all standing around there. So whether you're at CES or just in Las Vegas, for whatever reason, come meet us Wednesday, January 7th, 6.30 p.m. at the Resorts World Food Court. I'll see you there.

37:22We end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Reid sent a note to help us understand VPNs a little better. Yeah, this was a great link. Thank you, Reed, for sending this. It's to a company's website called IP Info. They help provide geolocation information. So they're trying to show that there are better ways to do geolocation than just VPN. But I think we learn a little something in the process. They tested 20 different VPN providers and all the regular names you know are on there. And they wanted to see if their exit traffic actually matched the country it claimed to be from.

38:0117 of the 20 VPN providers had at least one claimed country that was not the same as its exit. And I'll explain how that happens. 38 countries claimed by VPN providers were what's called a virtual. A virtual location is one where the VPN provider declares an IP addresses in a country. You can do that. If you own all the IP addresses, you can say this range is in Somalia, but there's no law that says you have to have that IP address exiting in Somalia. So you can exit that wherever you want. Since geolocation uses IP addresses, you will appear to be in the Bahamas, let's say, if that's where the declared IP address is from, but they might actually be exiting your traffic in Florida.

38:5138 countries were found to be virtual only in at least one VPN provider, including Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Lebanon, China, and more. That doesn't mean all VPN providers were virtual, but those are countries that were virtual on some of these providers. The Bahamas and Somalia were never real if they were listed. They weren't always listed, but if they were listed, they were virtual. And only three VPN providers had no virtual locations. That's IVPN, Mulved, and Windscribe. Oh, that's fascinating. That's a really interesting insight into how the VPNs work. Never knew about this. It's important to know because if you're just trying to fool a TV provider into letting you watch a different catalog, it's not that big of a deal.

39:36But if you're trying to make sure that your data is protected from being subpoenaed or something, it might make a difference if they could show, like, actually, that data was exiting in Florida, not in the Bahamas. Therefore, it's subject to U.S. law. Fascinating. Well, folks, what are you thinking about? you got an inside story like Reed did share it with us feedback at daily tech news show.com. Yes. Big thank you to Reed for contributing to today's show. Thanks to Dr. Nikki as well. And thank you for being along for daily tech news show. You can keep us in business, become a patron at patrion.com slash DTNS.

40:14We'll see you tomorrow.

40:23The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.