Wellness Industry and Peptide Trends

It's time for Twit. This week in Tech Great Panel this week. We've got Victoria Song from The Verge, our dear friend Stacey Higginbotham from Consumer Reports, and car guy Sam Aboul Sam ad will talk about Tim Cook leaving Apple, a lot more leaving Meta involuntarily and why Australia's teen media ban just ain't working. That's coming up next on Twit . Podcasts you love from people you trust This is Twit ch This is TWIT, this week in tech epis,ode 1081, recorded Sunday, April 26th, 2026. That's my asthma . It's time for TWIT This Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Hello, everybody . Good to see you. And good to see our panel today. Stacey Higginbotham is back in the house. Hello, Stacy. Hi, everybody. Policy Fellow for Consumer Report s. Looks like a beautiful day in the Pacific Northwest. It is. It's it hurts my soul to be inside. I'm sorry. We'll get this over with real quick so you can get out for the sunset. How about that? Do you get really nice sunsets on your island? Uh because I came from Texas. No. Oh, you're spoiled. They're fine. Texas. We don't have enough pollution up here. Yeah, I was gonna say the thin layer of hydrocarbons in the air really give it a rosy glow. Yeah. I mean, there's still like you see the water and it's the mountain stuff. I mean, that's very nice. Yeah. I'm jealous. Also with us, Victoria 's song, senior reviewer for The Verge. Hello, Victoria. Hello. Sorry I was late. No, no, no, you weren't late. You were just on time, exactly. Like a wizard . Exactly when you meant to be. Wonderful see you. Everything going well in the song household? Yeah, pretty much. Just uh same old, same old cats being mischievous , uh husband stomping around somewhere. Nice , yeah. Turn yourself up just a little bit, because we want to hear all the goodness song. And by the way, we you and I are the cat owners here . Stacy has a brand new dog. And Sam Abool. Sam it is here with his pup. Hello, Sam from Wheel Varies Media. My car guy. Hey, good to be here again. And you drove something. What is the Toyota Woven City? What is that? Uh so Woven City is uh is this is it made of fabric? Uh no, it's not. It it's uh it's this test area that Toyota has built um near uh near Mount Fuji. Oh, this is why you were in Japan. This is why I was in Japan. I was visiting Woven City. Uh the story I've written uh has not been published yet. It'll probably be coming up in the next couple of days. This is all built just like a test tra for a test track? Nobody's it's not real? No, there no, it's real. There's people living there. Um it opened the first phase opened in October and there's about a hundred people living there now. Um they want to they're gonna they plan to grow that to about two thousand people. So the the facility is uh there's ba there's three main areas to it. There's what they call the inventors garage, which is part of Oh it was a it was an old Toyota factory. Yeah, and then there's the the the buildings, the residences, uh, and then there's the experimental f the experiment field , which is that's kind of the test track. And so they're they're working on all kinds of different mobility technologies. Uh some of which I'm less enamored with. Uh see a little scooter there. Yeah the scooters the scooters are pretty cool. They call the they call it the sw ake . Um does it have three wheels? Yes. It's three wheels. It leans, you know, so when you go on around turns it leans. Got a little back rest to give you a little more support, make it easier to stand on it. That's nice. Yeah, it's pretty slick. And then these Zook style uh driverless vehicles. Yeah, those those are called the ePallette. Uh they gotta work on the naming, but it probably makes more sense in Japan in Japanese. Yeah. So and it's it's an electric pallet. It's designed, you know, to be used for a variety of uses, like moving moving up to seventeen passengers, or they had a couple of them that were set up. One was set up as a mobile coffee shop. The other one another one was set up as like a little convenience store on wheels. Um and uh there was another one that was very clean. Mobile office. Yeah. Look how clean the streets are because there's only two hundred people there. What's that? That is a robot that uh they use for delivering packages and stuff. So that's that's like uh you know mailbox thing. Um so they're they're experimenting with various types of robotics and um and a bunch of different things. It looks like a trash can on a pedestal with a stool next to it and it rolls I guess around. Yeah. And stuff's in the can. Yep. So like twit. Oh there's another version of the robot. So this this is this is called the uh the guide moby. Um and again, this this little little the vehicle in the front uh is three wheels and it's autonomous. It's got radar, lidar, and camera and cameras. And uh you can use it for a bunch of different things. You can they can hook up a little trailer to it, so like utility worker This is all conceptual, right? This is Toyota's uh, no this I mean well it's it's experimental, I would put it that way. This stuff all exists. We saw yeah, we saw all this stuff. Wow. So if you go back to the previous image, what it's doing there is it's actually towing a car . So it's towing a Toyota B Z. Wow. Virtually. So it's wireless tow ing. So Oh so what what they have um is you know f so for this community. What they call Woven City. Um they have shared vehicles that they provide to the people living and working there. So they've got a fleet of these vehicles and there's a parking garage that has solar panels and it's set up as a virtual power plant. So all the charging uh all the charging happens in there is bi-directional charging so when uh when the um when the if the uh if they if there's extra power or if they need some power from the batteries in the vehicles, they can pull that out uh when somebody needs a vehicle to go somewhere , then uh they just pull up their Woven City app, say summon, and what happens is the the little guide mobile will come up by one of the vehicles, connect to it wirelessly, and then guide it to where the person is. What protocol does it use? What wireless protocol does it use to do? Is it basically Wi-Fi, uh, but it's it's customized. It's not low risk or somehow. Stacy's a big low rock fan. Sorry I'm a big wi wireless person. So they didn't get into too much detail about the specifics of the wireless protocol they're using yet. Okay. And then when you come back, uh because everybody's living in these apartment style buildings, there's nowhere to park your cars there. So when you come back, you just pull up by your your building, summon the guide Moby, and it will come and take your car away, take it back to the garage, it'll get plugged in charged and then it becomes part of the virtual power plant again so if the local utility is running under high load they need to uh they need some extra power they can pull it uh out of the batteries uh uh some of these cars uh as needed. So it becomes stationary storage when needed. Do you think this is a uh uh just a showcase or do you think that this is kind of a real something that will really happen. Um the shared mobility. Come true. Those those things those things I think will uh uh will absolutely happen. I mean there's there's a lot of experiments going on globally with ver with VPPs. Um you know shared mobility is is obviously a thing but what you know one of the other aspects of this whole community is they've Toyota, through their Arine division, which is their software division, has developed uh the Vision AI model , which is it's their own in house developed foundation model and a vision and a vision language model. So rather than uh processing text, it's processing uh visual inputs from the cameras. Um and it can be used for a variety of stuff. So when um when the um the when you walk around the the the city, there's cameras everywhere. Like I mean everywhere. And it's watching everything. Oh that that''ss so good. And and the idea is to you know see what people need when when they need it. Yeah. Um the Japanese don't mind that so much as not not not as much as Americans do. Yeah. But uh you know and one of the cool things they're doing with it is collaborative perception messaging. So as vehicles are moving around the city, you know, obviously the cameras on the vehicles or human driver's eyes are limited to line of sight. You know, and in an urban environment, you know, when you've got a lot of buildings close by, it's easy for stuff to be hidden. And so the cameras can detect, you know, if someone is approaching a street uh that might not be visible to veh aic vehicle coming down the street, and it can send a message to it and and provide you some extra situational awareness. Or if it's an autonomous vehicle, you know, to let it know uh hey there's there's somebody coming, you know, you should slow down. That's all well and good. I totally