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Nicole went horseback riding on a horse named Moon and was the only rider in a helmet. VaShaun let his AI do the work this week, treated himself to African lobster tails at Capital Grille, and then got questioned by the panel about how lobster shows up every day from Africa at tariff prices. Eric has been in the workshop making canes out of bamboo, white oak and hickory. That is the first ten minutes.

From there it is canes, dogs and gadgets. Everybody names a favorite cane, and VaShaun tells the two times a stranger stepped on his, once while he stood holding a Starbucks at the NFB convention in New Orleans. Nicole explains why she owns two canes and carries neither. Eric, of the Epitome Show Band and president of LEOTO, talks about Excel, the black lab guide dog who came along right after two hard losses and had him walking with more confidence than any cane ever did. VaShaun is not sold on guide dogs, mostly because of the ones that smell, so Eric hands out the Bounce dryer sheet trick and a reminder that guide dog costs belong on your taxes. Then there are the two guide dogs at CSUN: one walked its handler into a pylon, the other into a glass wall.

On tech, Nicole picks the iPhone and ZoomText, VaShaun picks the AI that kept working while this episode was being recorded, and Eric tried on the Apple Vision Pro and felt like a Borg from Star Trek.

The last question is the one that names the episode: what is the one thing you cannot live without? Nicole says coffee and her daily walks. VaShaun says a good cigar and music. Eric answers in song. Nicole closes with her chiropractor story and a reminder about water: two cups, every morning.

Eric's internet is still broken, Nicole's love life will remain a mystery, and VaShaun wants prosthetic eyes in ocean blue with his signature written across them in silver. That is the first fifteen minutes.

From there the table question gets real: if you knew the sight was not coming back, would you get designer eyes? Eric, of the Epitome Show Band and president of LEOTO, would rather put the money in designer frames. Nicole would ask what the doctor is not telling you about the long term. VaShaun already has the color picked out.

October is Blindness Awareness Month, and the second half earns it. Eric talks about keeping it moving and the Helen Keller line he may or may not be quoting right. VaShaun tells the story of the Atlantic Station pole, and of being born three months premature, living half in and half out for decades, and finally loving being blind. Nicole, the show's moderator, goes the other way: she has not fully embraced it, she is still fighting the air, and she is doing it while taking sailing classes, braille courses and a trip where American Airlines called the night before to set up her assistance. Both things can be true at once, and that is the point.

Also in here: tequila testing versus tasting, jerk chicken pizza, egg water, chargrilled oysters, and what happens when a prosthetic eye ends up on a bar.

Next week: what happens to family and even friends when the sight goes.

Eric went to a high school homecoming game and came home with a topic, because somewhere in the stands five different colognes were competing for the same air. So this is the fragrance episode. It turns out VaShaun owns more than 500 of them and runs a YouTube channel called Sense of Smell, which explains the title and several other things.

Nicole wears Mugler, Angel and Alien, both refillable, and would like everyone to wash their winter coat once a week so they do not leave the house smelling like fried chicken. Eric wears his light, because certain things make his wife sneeze, and the sneeze messes up the squeeze. That became a song about four seconds later. Eric also went full granddaddy weekend in old school Obsession last year and got so many compliments, because nobody had smelled it in years, which led to a roll call of Drakkar Noir, Issey Miyake and whatever else is still sitting on VaShaun's dresser.

The turn is the question Nicole's sister keeps raising: are blind people's senses sharper because they cannot see? The panel's answer is no, they just get used more, the same as any muscle. From there it goes to AI, where VaShaun makes the case that for blind users it is only typing and listening, which we have done for decades, and Nicole makes the case her kids make against it.

Also: a Red Lobster gig with one outlet per room, Nicole's undisclosed birthday tour, BARD Mobile, and two separate on air requests for sponsorship from companies we had just finished insulting.

Watch Us Now. New episodes whenever we land somewhere with decent Wi-Fi.

Nicole was asleep. She says the culprit is the Sandman, and that if you set the call for ten she will be asleep at 9:50. By the time she gets here Eric has already turned into a robot once, which turns out to be foreshadowing, because there is a storm where Nicole is and her audio spends a good part of the episode breaking into pieces.

Underneath the technical difficulties, this one turned into the episode where everybody finally explains what they actually do for a living, and why.

Nicole owns and operates vending machines across the state through the Business Enterprise Program. A friend planted the idea when she was 17 and did not own two nickels; she started at 32. Eric is a mediator, sitting between people who have filed against each other and seeing whether they can settle it before a judge does it for them. He also ran 39 vending machines in the 90s, wrapping a thousand dollars in quarters a week. VaShaun's introduction to vending was being homeless and getting five dollars a machine from a woman named Shirley Barksdale.

The turn is what everybody wanted to be instead. Nicole wanted to be a pediatrician. Eric wanted to teach. Both were told, in those words, that they could not, because they could not see. Eric eventually found a rehab counselor who did not say no. She said "tell me how would that work," and he was in school the next semester.

Also: how Fedora Outlier got its name, a ten year overnight success, and the best sign off this show has produced so far.

Watch Us Now. New episodes whenever we land somewhere with decent Wi-Fi.

Eric brought VaShaun a microphone. Drove it to the state convention, handed it over in a box, everything where it should be. Everything except the battery, which he had tested the thing with and then quietly taken back out. That is the whole episode in one box, and it is also the title.

Before that trial starts, Eric explains OneCourt, a tactile device out of Seattle that lets him feel where the ball and the players are during a pro game. VaShaun mentions losing his sight playing baseball, and that the friend who was there had called him that same day, first time in four or five years.

Then it turns. If you remember the seasons and the colors, and then your sight goes later in life, how do you actually handle it? Eric still wishes he could see his wife smile, and his granddaughter's face, and she does not know yet that he cannot see her. Nicole answers with her father, who had limited to no vision and still ran the electricity, the plumbing and the garden, cooked every meal, drove until he was 25, and taught her to tie her shoes. She says that is why she never thought of blindness as incapable. Then she says the harder part: she had all that vision for years and was still, in her words, crippled by her mind.

Her braille measuring spoons also went down the garbage disposal today, exactly one week after these three spent an episode arguing about whether braille is obsolete. Nobody planned that.

The back half is Saturday morning cartoons, a birthday box of Cap'n Crunch, a $200 cable bill getting cancelled, an air fryer that talks without being asked, and an old school jam lightning round that runs decade by decade until it hits the year everybody stops knowing the songs.

VaShaun Jones is the Visionary of Fedora Outlier LLC. Eric Smith is with the Epitome Show Band and is president of LEOTO, Living Everyday On Their Own. Nicole Myrick moderates, when she is not sprinting home from the trail to make the top of the hour.

Watch Us Now. And don't forget to drink your water.

Eric has been listening back to the show and reached a verdict: we come in hot. No hello, no here is who we are, just three people already mid-argument. So this episode is about whether Watch Us Now needs a proper welcome, and it answers that question the only way this show knows how, by not getting to it for a while.

First there is a saxophone solo to account for. VaShaun played the opening ceremony at the NFB state conference, and Nicole is still talking about it. Then the trail deer that keep ambushing her, the neighborhood that somehow has deer and sailboats and a Harvard class, and the beans and cornbread disagreement that should have ended a friendship. Eric, it turns out, has never eaten cornbread with his beans. He has, however, eaten a skewer of worms in a Houston Chinatown restaurant, and would recommend it.

Then it turns, the way it always does. Nicole brings the high-pitched ring some of us hear, her EMF theory, a wall of frequency on the interstate near Bowling Green, and a football team that blames its injuries on a cell tower. Underneath the jokes is a real thread about low-vision people hearing what everyone else misses.

We close on a tease we are making you wait for: an autonomous tricycle Eric rode at convention, footage coming and your comments wanted, and the first interview guest lined up for next week, Dan Parker, blind engineer and the fastest blind man on record.

Watch Us Now, with VaShaun Jones, Eric Smith of LEOTO and the Epitome Show Band, and Nicole Myrick. Find the show wherever you listen, and find VaShaun at Fedora Outlier.

Someone told one of VaShaun's braille students that braille is on its way out. That is the whole argument, and the three of us do not land in the same place on it.

VaShaun opens as the skeptic. He uses braille for elevators and finding his hotel room and not much else, because the phone does the rest. Eric takes the other side and argues it as an art worth keeping rather than a skill you strictly need, with a refreshable display and an SD card as his answer to what happens when the power goes out. That leads to a long stretch about whether a braille display is just a brick once the battery dies, and what you would do with the brick.

Nicole was on VaShaun's side for years. She told Eric not to bother with the class. Then she took it: "braille stretched my brain more than going to college."

The strongest case against VaShaun turns out to be his own. Recording a voice clone for his AI courses, the last verification step put three sentences on the screen and asked him to read them out. Inaccessible. His braille display was in the next room, going to get it felt like too much trouble, and he waited two days for a workaround instead.

Then it wanders, which is where this show usually earns its keep: QR code menus in restaurants too loud to hear your own phone, why there is braille on the bank drive-through, and how each of them handles cash without getting shortchanged. It closes on Nicole's nutrition regimen and VaShaun committing, on the record, to seven days of the Mediterranean diet.

Watch Us Now. New episodes whenever we land somewhere with decent Wi-Fi.

The topic VaShaun brought in was the one that had been bothering him all week: the haves and the have nots. Not sighted people versus blind people. Blind people with some sight versus blind people with none, and which of the two thinks it is better than the other.

Nicole went first and made the case from the middle. Retinitis pigmentosa gives her a clear morning and a blurry hour later, confidence carries her further than her vision does, and she owns two canes she does not use. Eric answered a slightly different question before VaShaun pulled him back to the one that was asked: "You have people who do have 20/20 vision, but sometimes they lack 20/20 common sense." (7:05)

Then Nicole brought her own topic and the second half turned practical: getting from an airplane seat to an Uber. Unlit parking garages, waist-high gray barricades nobody thought to paint, airport staff whose directions amount to "go around the corner, spin around five times." Eric walked her through curbside assistance and Sky Cap. VaShaun made the case for carrying the cane even on the days you can manage without it. "It's a pride thing, and I know it, and it's an ego thing, and I know it, but you got to pull it out and show it." (22:57) Nicole had already said the quiet part a minute earlier: "It's an ego thing for me. I got to let it go." (21:50)

There is also a bus driver who would not look up, and a reply Eric had clearly been saving for him. (24:41)

First episode with all three of us on the same recording. It only took until 1.3.

Eric Smith has been the co-host of this show since episode one, and until now nobody had actually introduced him. We fixed that — badly, at first. The recording opens with VaShaun working out that the introduction he thought he had done had never happened, and Nicole not being there to point it out.

What follows is Eric in about five minutes: musician, owner and music director of the Epitome Show Band, twenty years of originals and covers around Atlanta, corporate rooms through to backyard parties. He tried stand-up once and calls it the hardest job he has ever had.

Then it turns. Eric has retinitis pigmentosa, and so do more than twenty people in his family, which means he has seen the whole range of it — relatives with no sight at all, relatives with only peripheral vision, relatives with only central vision. He lost his guide dog in 2020. He learned braille at the start of the pandemic and now teaches it, which he describes as "helping people to be able to learn how to live with blindness, instead of let blindness control them."

He also talks fast. Fast enough that his co-host says so on air, and Eric's defence is that this is a podcast and you can just play it again.

Find Eric at leoto.org — Living Everyday On Their Own — and at epitomeshowband.com.

I messed up again. Not as bad as last time.

Last episode I couldn't get anybody into the recording. This time I got one and a half of the people who were supposed to be here, which I'm choosing to count as progress. Eric was there — he's just not in this one. We're re-recording him next week, and I promise I've got it together now.

So this episode is Nicole. Nicole with no H, Myrick. I asked her to introduce herself in her own words, because she's smarter than me and I didn't want to open with a stupid question. She's going to sneak in a thing about Harvard. Listen for it.

Here's what she told us: she grew up in a small town in Ohio, and inherited retinitis pigmentosa from her father, who inherited it from his mother. Diagnosed around twelve. She'd watched her dad live with it, so she thought she knew what was coming — but as she puts it, you don't really know what someone's shoes are like until you begin to walk in them. Losing the chance at a driver's license took a lot with it, and for a while she was bitter about that.

Then she got a degree, had a family, started a business under the Business Enterprise Program, took classes through Harvard, and went back to school again. She has a sailor's license. She runs 5Ks. She jogs with a run group on Saturdays, travels alone, hosts a networking group of business owners in her town, and describes herself as a part-time comedian in her own mind.

Her advice, for anybody out there with any type of limitation: don't wait. The things you think aren't possible are very much so possible for you.

Eric next week. For real this time.

Watch Us Now is about technology, braille and culture — recorded wherever we land, and always circling back to Georgia. Hosted by VaShaun Jones of Fedora Outlier, with co-host Eric Smith and moderator Nicole Myrick.