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We were only supposed to be checking microphones. VaShaun was recording the whole time, and that is how our first behind the scenes episode, or BTS, got made.

Eric has a new mic. Nicole has moved to her basement to get away from the router, and her iPad types loud enough to pass for a Windows laptop. VaShaun confesses he started changing settings on his preamp ten minutes before showtime and lost all sound right as Eric joined. The coffee Nicole promised to take to Eric's mom is still missing, because the coffee lady got sick. Probably.

From there it goes where it wants. Eric invites Nicole to Atlanta for a live season finale at their November 22 show, and Nicole agrees to check ticket prices, which is how you know she means it. VaShaun asks who eats chitlins, which leads straight back to the cornbread and beans feud. Eric draws a hard line on turkey bacon and will not be moved.

The turn: Nicole's horse ride, which lasted longer than her last visit to Atlanta, came with a helmet. VaShaun admits he wore one on a horse too, and Eric rules that a fedora does not count as a helmet. That gives us Nicole flying first class with a helmet, except she actually sits in 30D by the restroom, and she makes a surprisingly strong case that the back row is the best seat on the plane for a blind traveler. Also covered: connecting flights, the Greyhound, 40 people on a Megabus to Orlando for about 47 dollars, and the Amtrak sleeper car VaShaun wants for date night.

Drink two cups of water, stay away from processed meats, and watch us now.

A blind man walks into a crab restaurant on Tybee Island and orders a beer. A few sips later it is gone. So is the second one, and the third. Nobody at the table is playing a joke. In the middle of every table is a hole for crab shells, and he has been knocking his beer straight down it. He held on to the fourth.

That is VaShaun's opening story, and this week's topic: blind mistakes. Nicole goes for a handshake in a dark room while sitting down, and her hand does not find a hand. Eric reaches into his berry planter, forgets the stake is there, and takes it right at the eye, which is why he preaches bending at the knees. That turns out to be rule one in a book a friend of VaShaun's is writing, and news to Nicole, whose family would like her in a helmet. Eric also puts cinnamon in his scrambled eggs instead of pepper and eats them anyway, because eggs are four dollars a dozen.

Before any of that, Eric hosts a backyard movie night with a projector, a fire pit and Happy Feet, and the DVD gives out an hour and fifteen minutes in. VaShaun has notes on the menu.

Then the turn: Eric's first jobs, busing tables at the Spaghetti Warehouse by day and cooking the overnight shift after, until he went to bed one Wednesday and woke up the next night. At 19 he moved out with four months of rent saved. To close, VaShaun brings in a Stevie Wonder story from another podcast, a house and a 20 year rent free arrangement, and the panel decides who should have been saving.

Watch Us Now is VaShaun Jones, Visionary of Fedora Outlier LLC, co-host Eric Smith of the Epitome Show Band and LEOTO, and moderator Nicole Myrick.

Eric needed a background singer, so he called VaShaun and asked for her number. VaShaun gave it to him. She has sung with Eric ever since, and VaShaun has thoughts about that. When he tries the same move on Eric for Nicole's number, the answer is a flat no.

Once that case is settled, Eric brings the real topic: how the three of them handle life around the house. Nicole tried cutting her own grass years ago, hacked it, and has paid someone ever since, though she has her eye on her neighbor's robot lawnmower. VaShaun names the two chores he swore off for life, courtesy of a mother who had a visually impaired kid washing baseboards every Saturday. Eric put hardwood floors through the whole house to get out of vacuuming and keeps paper plates around to get out of dishes. Nicole lit her kitchen until it glows, and cuts with her fingers tucked back so the knife finds a knuckle first. Toledo, it turns out, has services Georgia does not, and Georgia hears about it.

Then the conversation turns. The three of them talk about the people who drift away when you lose your sight, the friends who stop calling and the partners who leave, and what each of them did about it. Eric goes to the jazz spot by himself when nobody else will. Nicole talks about her father, and why she once swore she would never get married.

Also in here: VaShaun's new play, Respectfully Disrespected: Misconceptions of the Blind; a Voltron explainer nobody asked for; and Eric's Fall Extravaganza on November 22, where low vision guests should buy early, because late tickets mean the balcony and the building has no elevator.

Watch Us Now is VaShaun Jones, Visionary of Fedora Outlier LLC, co-host Eric Smith of the Epitome Show Band and LEOTO, and moderator Nicole Myrick.

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.