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.