--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management platform that Adio says is built for the next era of companies. A powerful data structure adapts to your business model, syncs in all your contacts in minutes, and enriches your business with actionable data. Adio says it also allows you to create those email sequences, those real-time reports, those powerful automations, which they claim can help you build what matters most, your company. You can go to adio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique, fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say. So we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe, expose corruption wherever we find it, and give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate, and more. Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Stay Explained. I'm Sean Ramasuram, and I love Halloween. But I've gone from being a Halloween reveler to more of a Halloween retiree. Instead of hitting Halloween parties or parades, I'm happy to just dress up and hand out candy to the kids and compliment their costumes. So that's what I was doing last night. But a thing I kept noticing is that kids wouldn't say trick or treat. They just walk up to me and, you know, hold up their plastic pumpkin or their plastic bag or open up their pillowcase and wait for me to hand them candy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And eventually I realized that's because I was actually doing it wrong. I was standing on my stoop eagerly awaiting trick or treaters. But where I needed to be was behind my door waiting for them to ring my doorbell. Doorbell, open door, moment of suspense, they say trick or treat, you hand out candy or get egged. The problem is, I don't even have a doorbell, which means I'm really doing it wrong.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At least according to the latest season of Nice Try. Nice Try's first season was all about utopias, and the new one is all about the lifestyle products that have been sold to us over and over, and the promises of domestic self-improvement they've made. The first episode of the new season is all about the doorbell, the essential technology that serves as an entry point into the American home and the new season of the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we thought we'd bring you that episode today as doorbells across the country and continent to recover from the return of Halloween. Nice try from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Hello, Avery. Hello. Just go through the door, go to the elevator, and come up to the third floor. Thank you so much, Ruth. From New York Magazine's Curbed and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Nice Try. I'm Avery Truffleman.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: I want to start this with the act of entering someone else's home. An act that is at times mundane or exciting or transgressive, especially if one is barging in with a microphone. You're already recording?
--:-- Ruth Cowan: I am. You know, it's like... Come on in.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: I usually don't like... Season one of Nice Try was about failed utopian experiments, about the yearning for more beautiful, more equitable, more pleasurable ways of living across centuries and around the world. And even though so many of these utopian efforts fell apart, that hunger remains. This feeling that there has to be a way to a better, different lifestyle.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: So this season is about where all those utopian yearnings got channeled, at least in the United States. When I was a young adult, when I was your age, I knew a fair number of people who were living in communes, but they didn't survive. There was communal living in Soviet Russia. It failed. There was communal living on the Kibbutzim in Israel. It failed.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: So I want to ask why, but can I first ask you to introduce yourself? Professionally, as an author, I'm Ruth Schwartz Cowan. Professor Cowan is a historian of science and technology, a big-deal Guggenheim Fellow sort of historian.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: And some of the communes Ruth Cowan saw firsthand in the 60s actually did chug along for a little bit. I mean, they survived more than one summer. But three years, it didn't work. It just didn't work.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: Why? Is it just our fundamental inability to get along?
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Well, I'm not a psychiatrist. I can only tell you, people have very, very strong feelings about their sexual relations. They have very, very strong feelings about their children. People care very deeply about what they eat and they fight over those things.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: But I mean, people come together in an industrial context and in an office, people do work together all the time in the name of capital. So why can't we work together in the domestic sphere?
--:-- Ruth Cowan: Because work is different from life, from domestic life. But that's like a cultural... We call it the doctrine of separate spheres.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: The doctrine of separate spheres seems kind of obvious on its surface, but it's a bit of an insidious concept. It builds off this idea that life can be cleaved into. Into a public world and a private world. A clean separation.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: One that has been grafted onto another neat binary. Onto this idea that women tend the home and men go out into society. Like, that's just the way it was or supposed to be throughout much of the history of the West.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And then, in the Victorian era, this concept of separate spheres took on another layer of meaning. A moral, Christian one. The additional overlay that the home is the place that is pure, not sullied by the public world.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: This concept, or really this fiction, is that the currency of the home is love, not money. That home is a place for leisure, not labor. And that the home should aspire to be, both ethically and practically, a utopia.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: One that is deeply private and deeply personal. The American home became a haven, According to Yale professor emerita Dolores Hayden, Professor Hayden studies architecture and how the American home was designed, and it is around what she identifies as the Haven Strategy.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: The Haven Strategy was certainly typical of the United States from the 1920s on, and that's the way a lot of our housing was designed. The Haven Strategy, also called the Haven Model, is this idea that the home is a distinct, separate world where you can totally retreat from business, from your neighbors, from public life, into a dominion all your own.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And most obviously, this manifests as the suburban house with a white picket fence. Now, the haven was usually a haven for a male worker, but the haven was never a haven for a female who had to actually manage the husband, the children, the cooking, the cleaning, and every other thing connected to making this private world.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: This sort of 1950s archetype is ostensibly outdated, but America is still grappling with the construct of the separate spheres. Even though if you have conducted any business from home over the course of the last year or two, you have touched the gaps in the porous boundary between the public and private spheres.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And yet the Haven model still persists in popular imagination. Even if you don't have a house or a spouse, It's just this idea of a home that exists as a separate little dominion from the rest of the world.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: And like all utopian visions, the Haven model had its authors. I think you can go back to the early, middle 19th century. Someone like Catherine Beecher, who was an expert and wrote a book called The American Woman's Home, with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novelist.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. But let's focus on her older sister, Catherine Beecher, because Catherine is fascinating.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: And in the same way that her younger sister's book was intended to be abolitionist literature but ended up creating a racist caricature, Catherine Beecher had this early brand of feminism that, by modern standards, is a complete contradiction.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Catherine Beecher was incredibly influential. By the age of 35, she had founded and supervised two schools where Beecher wanted women to be able to study anything they wanted, to grow to their fullest selves.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: But the twist is that Catherine Beecher thought women didn't need to vote. Her 1841 book, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, was a huge booster for the doctrine of separate spheres because she was basically like, let's keep those spheres separate so that a woman can be lord of the private world.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Like, this was going to be the source of her power, deciding how her children and husband were to eat and present and sleep. She was basically the moral compass of the private world.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: And Beecher argued that this has more impact than a position in public life. Apparently, a lot of people agreed because Beecher's book was reprinted at least 15 times.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And I can't stress enough how different this was. It wasn't like, oh, a woman's place is in the home. Like, at the time, that was a given. This was uniquely American and Christian because Beecher was proposing that homemaking was a divine duty and that if a housewife did it well, it reflected upon her, the homemaker, as an individual servant of God.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: It was an expression of her soul. She was in that home taking care of her children, preferably without any servants, connected to the notion that the woman would be doing all of her own nurturing work and that she would be receiving her reward in heaven.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: It's quite a remarkable thing to go back and read her writing because in some ways it seems all too familiar to us.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: Okay, bear with me. This might not sound exactly familiar just yet, But Beecher's words were a huge source of hope for many women, especially young white wives setting up households in newly colonized areas of the United States because they were suddenly far away from friends or family or amenities to help them.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And this is when doing a load of laundry with lye took like all day. So overseeing your entire household was a massive, massive workload. It was for this reason that Katherine Beecher was all about life hacks. And she was someone who was designing labor devices for the kitchens and producing designs for ideal homes
--:-- Ruth Cowan: Even though in Beecher time the mechanical equipment in the home was pretty basic She had heating and cooling of a kind She had some indoor plumbing of a kind But all of that becomes much more developed and is sold much more aggressively.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: So, the American dream is this turn of phrase that gets thrown around a lot. And it means the private home. This idealized separate space. And as antiquated and cliche as it might feel, it really has impacted our dreams, or at least my dreams, around what we think a perfect place should be.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: And this dream is not a commune full of fellow believers or a big multi-generational family tilling the land together. It is a specific goal of an independent haven facilitated by a merry band of products.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: You might ask yourself what you're going to need to furnish your new apartment. My guess is quite a bit. Prosperity involves a lot of consumption. And home devices have become personal devices. Refrigerators and washing machines and kitchen aids are all sold as direct reflections of our personalities and our values.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: And this hammers home the idea that the daily tasks of feeding and cleaning and washing are moral, personal decisions. The very choices that make you who you are. That make your life yours.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: That is why Professor Ruth Shorts Cowan said, people can cooperate with each other on all kinds of things but some of them are very emotional and they fight over those things
--:-- Ruth Cowan: I guess you know the the thing that we're seeking or that I'm we're all seeking to answer in our lives and especially in this series is just are those things at odds the idea of a utopia and the idea of the private home can the private home be a sort of utopia
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Well, that's a $64,000 question. I would say that everybody I know, including my children, sets out to create a private home that will be a utopia and fails. And so come along with me on a journey into the private sphere, into the technology and products that have determined the ways we clean, cook, exercise, sleep, and shit as we attempt to sail to the unreachable shore of a better life in our little homes or apartments or rooms.
--:-- Ruth Cowan: Each, ideally, its own little fiefdom with its own culture and philosophy and rules. And each contingent, like any perfect utopia, on letting in only who they want to let in. And that decision, who to let in and who to exclude, is aided by a technology that I don't often think of as a technology. But it's the first thing that you touch when you enter someone else's home.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Once upon a time, I was throwing a party. And I remember I wrote in bold in the email invitation, please ring the bell to get in. Because I was hosting and I didn't want to have to keep checking my phone all night.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: But sure enough, everyone just texted when they arrived, and no one rang the bell. But I can't really throw stones because I, too, am one of these people who would rather text than use the doorbell. It's just like, I don't want to bother people. And I don't really have good associations with that buzz.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: At best, it's a delivery of some kind. But at worst, it's someone who's trying to sell you something, interrogate you, or bother you. It's obviously someone who doesn't have your number.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And I'm not alone in my aversion to the doorbell. I mean, just ask someone who rang doorbells every single day working for the last census.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: I could do 20 to 30 places in a day. I would say, like, maybe half of the doorbells, like, didn't even work or you couldn't figure out what unit they belonged to.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: In her experience as a census worker in the Sunset Park and Borough Park neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Selena Jo noticed an obvious demographic disparity in doorbells.
--:-- Selena Jo: We talked about this with my team. The demographics are really different. The blocks with the nicer houses definitely had working bells. And then on the other side of the coin, you have apartments that are above storefronts, and sometimes they don't have bills, or a lot of the time they had bills that didn't work at all.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: So Selena often had to just knock or give up, and she had to pay extra attention to the way she presented.
--:-- Selena Jo: Certain sections where we thought there might be more undocumented respondents, the idea was not to be too buttoned up and look like you're from the government trying to impose on them.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Because even before they talk to you, I think there's just a split second of, do I even open the door for this person?
--:-- Avery Truffleman: A doorbell says a lot about one's relationship to the world outside your door and how welcoming you're able to be and to what degree your haven is your own.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And so the confidence of a loud, resonant doorbell is powerful. I think ringing a doorbell is bridging the outside and the inside and uniting a guest with the residents, and they say welcome.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Robert Dobrin is obsessed with doorbells. Door chimes, doorbells, everything about them. And I am obsessed with people like Robert Dobrin.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: I seriously believe that it's an underappreciated aspect of Americana, and I'm doing my best to keep it alive. Robert has a collection of 500 doorbells from around the world.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Wooden boxes inlaid with copper, engraved silver bells, plastic press buttons from the 1960s that are simple like the flag of Japan. And you can see these all online.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: If I can, my website is electrachime.com. That's all one word, Electra Chime.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And can I make a request if there's anybody out there with a exhibit space that's interested in exhibiting door chimes, I would be amenable to that.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Although, be warned, if you are about to let Robert bring 500 doorbells into your exhibit space, know that a lot of it is going to sound really irritating.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: This particular bell that I'm going to ring is from the early 1900s. You know, it does the trick. It notifies you that there's somebody at the door.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: There's nothing poetic about it. Early wind-up bells were mechanical, just a piece of metal hitting another piece of metal, just trying to generate a sound that was louder than a knock.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And then battery-operated buzzers were soon to follow, which is kind of funny to think that you had to actively replace a battery to maintain something that might have sounded like this.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: In some ways, you can almost compare these to modern-day smoke detectors. Like, they were assessing a problem.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Certain doorbells and buzzers were meant to be deterrents and make alarming noises, especially in the era of door-to-door salesmen.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Salesman. It was the spam of the time. And you had to, you had unwelcome callers. Right.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And somebody had even invented a coin-operated doorbell button that you had to put a dime in. And if you were a friend, you got your dime back. But if you were a salesman, you didn't get your dime back.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Some doorbells were like pop-up blockers. And this is just to say there's always been a modicum of anxiety around the door.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And then around the 1930s, when electricity was more widespread in households and the real estate industry was ramping up and there was this interest in making lovely, aspirational home products, some doorbell manufacturers were like, hey, what if you could design a doorbell that didn't give you a heart attack?
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And they actually advertised these new singing doorbells like they were solving a major problem.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Some of the creative marketing was like, prevent doorbell nerves or doorbell noise is noise enemy number one.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: The doorbell manufacturer Newtone used the catchphrase, a cheerful earful. I thought that was kind of cute.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: It was pretty cute. And they were definitely status symbols as well. And so the mellifluous door chime became a luxurious hallmark of a welcoming home.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And this is the part of doorbell history that really gets Robert going. My real love is the long bell door chimes with long tubes that are kind of the grandest of doorbells.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: They're supposed to be electrically operated, but I'm going to cheat and just strike them with a mallet. I think everyone would understand, though.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: I think it's pretty cool you're hitting them with a mallet. Can we say you're hitting them with a mallet, please? It's so cool.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: As long as you say that this is exactly how they would sound electrically. Okay, deal.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: So that is a long bell, eight note melody, Westminster Peel, played on a vintage long bell door chime.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: The long chime is, exactly as you would imagine, long. You can picture it as sort of a flat wind chime up against the wall.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: The bells are the real star of the show, the long tubes.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And now we come to the part of object history where we have to mention World War II. Everything comes from World War II.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Because in this time, doorbell companies, like a lot of American companies, pivoted to manufacturing military equipment.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And so the two biggest doorbell manufacturers, Newtone and Rittenhouse, had to learn more about electronics.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And then out of the war in the 50s, they realized that you could make reasonably pleasant electric sounds without actually using those long, cumbersome bells.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: You'll be very familiar with this one. Let me do that over again.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: The demise of the door chime was in the 1950s when things were meant to be heard but not seen, and houses were being built with as little ornamentation as possible to save costs.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And so the doorbell kind of went the way of the clock. Like how grandfather clocks used to be the centerpiece of a whole living room and then shrunk to wristwatches, and then as they got smaller and less grand eventually it was like okay this device only does one thing so what if we combined it with other features and stuff
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And they combined the door chime with an intercom and a radio and anything else they could think of to package it
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And it was the predecessor to the smart doorbell, which we're seeing now.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: After the break, how the doorbell turned into the home security system and made the private sphere more protected and the public sphere more public.
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--:-- Avery Truffleman: Hello, Avery. Hello. Just go through the door, go to the elevator, and come up to the third floor. Thank you so much, Ruth. From New York Magazine's Curbed and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Nice Try. I'm Avery Truffleman.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: I'm joined today by Shontavia Johnson, Associate Vice President for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Clemson University.
--:-- Shontavia Johnson: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: So, Shontavia, I'm a bit of a nerd, first of all. And my background, I have an engineering degree. I have a law degree. I've been a patent lawyer for about 15 years.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: So it started there, just learning about all kinds of Black inventors. And Marie Van Britton Brown is one of those.
--:-- Shontavia Johnson: So what is her story?
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Marie Van Britton Brown was a nurse. Her husband was really like an electrician or an electronics technician, and they saw a problem they wanted to solve.
--:-- Shontavia Johnson: They lived in Queens. They lived right across from JFK Airport. And in the 60s at the time, this was not a great neighborhood.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Marie Van Bittenbaum and her husband worked weird schedules and she felt concerned for her family because they were in a dangerous neighborhood.
--:-- Shontavia Johnson: And in a story that's very similar to today, Black people who live in predominantly Black neighborhoods that can be considered a little dangerous can't always rely on law enforcement to keep the community safe.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: So she took matters into her own hands and invented the first home security system.
--:-- Shontavia Johnson: There was a camera. There were television monitors, two-way microphones, and an alarm button. There was a radio-controlled wireless system.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: This was basically like closed caption television in your house for a security alarm in the 1960s.
--:-- Shontavia Johnson: They get the patent in 1969. Mrs. Brown is listed as the primary inventor.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: So they got some great press. They get a feature in the New York Times in 1969. There's a whole segment on their invention. There's a picture of them in the newspaper.
--:-- Shontavia Johnson: But what doesn't happen is what you hope happens when you get good press. Lots of people reach out to you. Maybe you do get a licensing deal or something like that.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: None of that happens. So they never see a profit from what they created.
--:-- Shontavia Johnson: And you can guess why it's the 1960s. This is a Black woman and a Black man looking to enter an industry.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: But with patents, they typically last 20 years from the date you file an application.
--:-- Shontavia Johnson: So with Marie Van Britten Brown, for example, that means her patent expired in 1986.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And this is what I think is the real tragedy, is the home security system industry takes off. 1970s, 1980s, it explodes using the technology that Marie Van Britten Brown and her husband created.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Even today, we can see the legacy of Marie Van Britten Brown in technologies like Ring, which is a smart doorbell company owned by Amazon.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Ring has a patent application where they cite back to this exact patent from Marie Van Britten Brown and her husband.
--:-- Shontavia Johnson: And so the largest companies on the planet have based at least some of their technology on this exact invention.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: I don't even know how to open the gate. My friend Tammy invited me over to check out the Ring doorbell her landlord had recently installed.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And even though I was there specifically to check out Cammie's Ring doorbell, I couldn't figure out how to get past the gate, so I ended up having to do the, like, texting-that-I'm-here thing.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Gonna have to text.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: So first of all, the obvious question, how did you find out about Marie Van Britton Brown? There's like nothing out there.
--:-- Josh Roth: You know, so I'm a bit of a nerd, first of all. And my background, I have an engineering degree. I have a law degree.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: I have a law degree. I've been a patent lawyer for about 15 years.
--:-- Josh Roth: So it started there, just learning about all kinds of Black inventors. And Marie Van Britton Brown is one of those.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: So what is her story?
--:-- Josh Roth: Marie Van Britton Brown was a nurse. Her husband was really like an electrician or an electronics technician, and they saw a problem they wanted to solve.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: They lived in Queens. They lived right across from JFK Airport. And in the 60s at the time, this was not a great neighborhood.
--:-- Josh Roth: Marie Van Bittenbaum and her husband worked weird schedules and she felt concerned for her family because they were in a dangerous neighborhood.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And in a story that's very similar to today, Black people who live in predominantly Black neighborhoods that can be considered a little dangerous can't always rely on law enforcement to keep the community safe.
--:-- Josh Roth: So she took matters into her own hands and invented the first home security system.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: There was a camera. There were television monitors, two-way microphones, and an alarm button. There was a radio-controlled wireless system.
--:-- Josh Roth: This was basically like closed caption television in your house for a security alarm in the 1960s.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: They get the patent in 1969. Mrs. Brown is listed as the primary inventor.
--:-- Josh Roth: So they got some great press. They get a feature in the New York Times in 1969. There's a whole segment on their invention. There's a picture of them in the newspaper.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: But what doesn't happen is what you hope happens when you get good press. Lots of people reach out to you. Maybe you do get a licensing deal or something like that.
--:-- Josh Roth: None of that happens. So they never see a profit from what they created.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And you can guess why it's the 1960s. This is a Black woman and a Black man looking to enter an industry.
--:-- Josh Roth: But with patents, they typically last 20 years from the date you file an application.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: So with Marie Van Britten Brown, for example, that means her patent expired in 1986.
--:-- Josh Roth: And this is what I think is the real tragedy, is the home security system industry takes off. 1970s, 1980s, it explodes using the technology that Marie Van Britten Brown and her husband created.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Even today, we can see the legacy of Marie Van Britten Brown in technologies like Ring, which is a smart doorbell company owned by Amazon.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Ring has a patent application where they cite back to this exact patent from Marie Van Britten Brown and her husband.
--:-- Josh Roth: And so the largest companies on the planet have based at least some of their technology on this exact invention.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: I don't even know how to open the gate. My friend Tammy invited me over to check out the Ring doorbell her landlord had recently installed.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And even though I was there specifically to check out Cammie's Ring doorbell, I couldn't figure out how to get past the gate, so I ended up having to do the, like, texting-that-I'm-here thing.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Gonna have to text.
--:-- Josh Roth: So, yeah, Ring basically bridges the divide between ringing and texting.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: It's essentially a doorbell that alerts your phone, and it shows a video of whoever's outside, and you don't need to be home to answer it and to talk and engage with whoever's outside.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And by the way, I'm sorry if I'm mansplaining how Ring works if you have one, because you very well might have one.
--:-- Josh Roth: Ring has sold more than 1.4 million video doorbells in 2020.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: So this is it. This is it. Is that the sound it makes?
--:-- Josh Roth: That was, that's the sound that... There's motion?
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Oh, it caught me fucking with the gate. No, it caught you, like, just now passing the camera.
--:-- Josh Roth: And then can you see a video of me?
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Sure can. Sure can.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Is that the sound it makes? It caught me fucking with the gate. No, it caught you, like, just now passing the camera.
--:-- Josh Roth: This doorbell caught me from pretty far away. Like, Tammy's gate is probably a solid seven feet away from her door.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And Tammy's entryway is obscured by the stairs to the first floor. I just say this because from the street, I could not see the camera.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: I didn't know I was being recorded. And by the way, I did not look cute in this footage.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: It is just funny that like everything looks sketchy with the fisheye lens. Yeah, it looks like you're trying to commit a crime.
--:-- Josh Roth: If everybody had a ring, we'd have, you know, a phenomenal neighborhood watch in every single neighborhood.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And hopefully it would deter crime.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Before I get too into this, can I ask you to introduce yourself?
--:-- Josh Roth: Sure. I'm Josh Roth. I'm the chief technology officer here at Ring.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: I've been here for about seven years.
--:-- Josh Roth: If you see a Ring doorbell, you'll know it. Ring cameras say Ring on them, and there's a visible lens that is obviously a camera.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: We didn't want to be out of sight, out of mind. We wanted to be products, not just the doorbell, but the cameras that didn't hide, right?
--:-- Josh Roth: We weren't trying to be a spy camera. We were trying to help people protect themselves.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: But what is not obvious to the casual caller is that Ring owners have the option of saving the footage captured by their doorbell.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And they also have the option of uploading it to a Ring app called Neighbors.
--:-- Josh Roth: I downloaded the Neighbors app just to see what's up. And so now I get push alerts about stabbings and carjackings and fires that scare the hell out of me.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And I also get occasional public safety updates about extreme weather and COVID stuff.
--:-- Josh Roth: But most of my fellow users, known only by numeric pseudonyms like Neighbor43 or Neighbor26, they mostly post videos of packages getting stolen with captions like this.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Thief dummy. He came around 920 thanks to Amazon not informing us there was a package. Also hope it was worth stealing $10 charger SMH.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: These are real captions. We put them through a robot so you could hear them.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: This guy took our package in broad daylight, opened it in plain view of the camera, saw it was a water bottle for a child, and took it anyway.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Stealing package in the middle of the day. Hope the extra small petite black dress fits him.
--:-- Josh Roth: The bigger ones, beyond package theft, which we've been, you know, really instrumental in is we've helped solve kidnappings.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: We've been used by, you know, law enforcement when customers share their videos with them for a variety of things.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: That law enforcement piece is very important, and we're going to come back to it.
--:-- Josh Roth: But I think a subtle yet key distinction in this development of the doorbell is this. Ring doesn't just capture video it also captures sound and it captures sound pretty well.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Sure can sure can which actually caught me off guard i mean i went to tammy's apartment in order to look at her ring camera and i was still a little weirded out when after we spoke she sent me all the footage that her ring had captured like this moment when i left at the end of our time together and her doorbell filmed me leaving, even out past her gate.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Hi. Hi.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And practically speaking, just think for a moment about the nature of the conversations that happen in the doorway, in the coming and in the departing.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: The last words. The goodnight kisses. Like Tammy's doorbell picked up a parting pep talk from our mutual friend, Capiche.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: Just do life, you know? If you want to do something, go for it. Now's the month.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: And, of course, I had to ask Capiche for his permission to play that clip of him for you.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: I constantly have to ask permission to record interviews at all because there are states with one-party consent and states with two-party consent where both people have to agree to be recorded.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: There are legal limits on what you can audio record and disseminate.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: But I didn't actually think about this in a doorbell context until ACLU policy analyst Jay Stanley pointed this out to me.
--:-- Avery Truffleman: If I leave my voice memo function on my phone, I leave it running, recording, and I leave
