How Should We Feel About Ring?

Amazon’s popular security camera brand now has some AI enhancements that make it easier to sort through footage. But we have to ask: Is more AI-powered surveillance a good thing, or a step too far?
A woman is lying on the couch looking at the footage from the Ring app. The display shows a shot of the surveillance.
Photograph: Tanja Esser/Alamy Stock Photo

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Ring cameras have come a long way. Since the security camera brand launched 11 years ago, its video doorbells and cams have become vigilant, constant surveyors of patios, porches, and vestibules everywhere. Amazon now owns the company, and has ushered it through controversies over privacy concerns, security breaches, incidents of vigilantism, and the company’s cozy relationship with law enforcement. The drama has not slowed growth; over 10 million Rings have been installed, and the cameras currently blanket our urban and suburban landscape, filming the movements of you, your family, and any strangers who wander near your door.

That makes for a lot of video to sift through if you're trying to find something important, like whether or not a delivery was made, or what time your kids left for soccer practice. That abundance of footage is why Ring cameras, along with many other consumer products right now, are getting some AI-powered capabilities. Ring’s software update helps users search for specific moments their cameras may have captured.

This week, WIRED senior writer Paresh Dave joins the show again to talk about the evolution of Ring—how the security cameras have become nearly ubiquitous security tech, and what the future holds now that they’re being infused with AI.

Show Notes

Read Paresh’s story about Ring’s AI updates. Read WIRED’s guides to the best indoor and outdoor security cameras. Read more about all the data Ring collects from its users and why we recently stopped recommending Ring cameras for a couple of years.

Recommendations

Paresh recommends getting a Sling TV subscription from Dish to watch live sports. Mike recommends searching for decoy security cameras you can install if your landlord requires you to put up a security camera. Lauren recommends the streaming shows Nobody Wants This and Killing Eve. Both are on Netflix.

Paresh Dave can be found on social media @peard33. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight@heads.social. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Lauren Goode: Mike.

Michael Calore: Lauren.

Lauren Goode: How many cameras do you have set up at home?

Michael Calore: What? You mean like on the show Call Her Daddy? Like pointed at my couch.

Lauren Goode: No, I meant cameras for security.

Michael Calore: Like what's my safe word?

Lauren Goode: No, the camera's on the front of your house.

Michael Calore: Oh, I see. Like security cameras.

Lauren Goode: Yeah.

Michael Calore: No. None. I have zero security cameras in the front of my house. What about you?

Lauren Goode: I do. Well, my landlord has one.

Michael Calore: Your famous landlord.

Lauren Goode: That is for another podcast. Yeah.

Michael Calore: Well, how do you feel about the fact that your landlord has installed a camera on your house?

Lauren Goode: Well I'm not going to lie, there've been some strange things captured on those cameras. But it's more like when I walk around our fine city now of San Francisco, I've become very aware of how much is being recorded. There are so many cameras in our neighborhood. It feels like science fiction once drafted this vision of the dystopian future of mass surveillance, but the mass surveillance was done by some big entity. And in fact, it's just a whole bunch of consumers who got together and bought networked cameras.

Michael Calore: And the big entity is Amazon.

Lauren Goode: The big entity is Amazon.

Michael Calore: Well, we should talk about this today. People's Ring cameras.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, it's a thing. We should definitely talk about it.

Michael Calore: Let's do it.

[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]

Lauren Goode: Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.

Michael Calore: And I'm Michael Calore, I'm WIRED's director of consumer tech and culture.

Lauren Goode: And we're joined this week by WIRED senior writer Paresh Dave. Paresh, welcome back to the show.

Paresh Dave: Hello. Back-to-back episodes, I think. Very exciting.

Lauren Goode: Was it?

Michael Calore: Yeah. Well, we took a week off.

Lauren Goode: We had a break week.

Michael Calore: Yes.

Lauren Goode: OK.

Michael Calore: Paresh was also with us during the break week.

Lauren Goode: That's right. Paresh, we typically talk to you about Google. Today we're going to talk about Amazon, but specifically Ring cameras. Most of you are familiar with Ring home cameras, you might even have them around your house. And Paresh, you've just been reporting on what's new about Ring cameras, these search features that feel like the stuff of the future, however terrifying that may be. Later in the show we're also going to talk about Ring's business at large and how it has successfully infiltrated neighborhoods around the country despite in the past having had controversial relationships with law enforcement agencies. But first Paresh, tell us about these new search features that you've been trying out on a Ring camera at home.

Paresh Dave: So first, for those unfamiliar with Ring products, they have this video doorbell that they're known for, and then a bunch of other security cameras and other security gadgets. So before this new search feature, if you wanted to find a specific clip, say you know that at 9:30 last night a walked by and was barking a lot and you wanted to see what the fuss was all about. You'd have to go to this video timeline feature and then scroll, scroll, scroll back, and then kind of pinch around for the right exact moment somewhere in that 9:30-ish window to find the moment that the dog was going crazy and barking.

Now, Ring has trained an AI model to recognize people, animals, weather, situations, lightning, actions, running, dancing, jumping. So now you can go to the Ring app and think of it like searching YouTube except for your Ring footage, that's the library of videos that their search function is constrained to. And there's this pre snappy simple experience where you type in a query, you can filter by relevance or time and get videos that are mostly relevant to what you're looking for.

Michael Calore: So you say mostly relevant. What kinds of things is it good at and what kinds of things is the search feature not as good at?

Paresh Dave: Having just a few days to have tested this, I don't know if I can pass super broad judgments, but some of the things that I thought it worked well on included looking for people with backpacks. Dog, it's very good at finding dogs. When I typed in police, it pulled in a bunch of police cars passing by at different times, so that worked pretty well. But I wouldn't expect it to tell apart a Mazda from a Kia. Or one of the more funny ones is when I searched for blonde woman, it brought up a bunch of golden retrievers, walked by women who appeared to have darker hair.

Lauren Goode: I would take that as a compliment, look at my thick, luscious hair, like a golden retriever. Paresh, you also tried searching for some qualitative terms, as the Ring CEO put it, and in those instances you didn't get results, correct? Can you describe what those were?

Paresh Dave: Correct. So as part of reporting out the story, I spoke with Ring's CEO, Liz Hamren, and she mentioned that Ring has restricted or filtered basically some search terms. So you aren't able to search for things that are harmful or inappropriate or offensive. She wouldn't really give me examples of what that means. So I was left to guess on my own. But I imagine things like Black are terms that they don't really want people to search for or Indian or Hispanic. But I was surprised that you can search for man, woman, or you can search for something specific, like I said, blonde woman. I mean, along with the golden retrievers, that search did pull up some videos of blonde women.

Michael Calore: So Paresh, the company is stopping short of doing face recognition, correct?

Paresh Dave: Correct.

Michael Calore: It seems like one of those features that a lot of other cameras have. I know Google's Nest video doorbell camera can tell you Lauren is ringing your doorbell right now.

Lauren Goode: Can it really?

Michael Calore: Yeah, it can do face recognition. It can recognize what they term friends and family. Did you get any sense of why Ring isn't doing this?

Lauren Goode: Also, I would like to be categorized as your foe please in your home camera, yes.

Michael Calore: Friends, foes, and family.

Paresh Dave: I think Ring recognizes that there are probably users who would want this feature. I can't tell you for sure why they have not pursued it. But what Liz Hamren did tell me is that if there is user demand, I mean it is certainly something that they would explore. It's not on the list right now is the way that she put it. But yeah, you can definitely see situations where it's helpful to get notifications if there's someone you're really worried about and you want to know the second that they pop into view into one of your cameras. Or if you just want to know that your kids made it home safely, if they're walking home on their own and they're not good about texting you to get that sort of instant notification. We are in an instant gratification culture. So certainly you can see the value of that feature. But kind of unclear why they haven't pursued it.

Lauren Goode: I don't necessarily agree with you that we're in an instant gratification culture, but hold please. I'm waiting for my Turkish bagel delivery from DoorDash right back. So Paresh, search is really just the start here for Ring, this advanced search, what are the next steps that they plan to take?

Paresh Dave: So it's no surprise that once you have the ability to identify things in videos pretty easily, then you can start issuing alerts like we were just talking about with facial recognition. So I think Ring wants to be able to tell you like there's a huge storm and there's a crazy puddle forming in your backyard, maybe you should start to worry about flooding. Which could be especially helpful if you're away from the house for some reason. You could imagine alerts about fun things too, or scary, I don't know, depending how you look at it. There's a bear in your backyard. There's not supposed to be bears in your backyard.

So these sorts of alerts is something that Ring is actively working to develop and they're also working to develop summaries. So one of the fun examples that Liz and I talked about was would it be interesting know all the different types of dogs that passed by your home in the last six months, or how many times a particular colored car passed by? Like I said, right now it's not very good at telling a golden retriever apart from another breed of dog and it probably can't tell a red minivan apart from a red truck very well. But over time, as they build that, you could build out these summaries. Maybe they're presented in written form and video form, I don't know. But there's a lot of things that Ring can build off now that they have this AI search capability.

Michael Calore: AI loves a summary. Is this for every camera and for every user? Is it available only to people who subscribe to one of the paid plans for Ring or is it available to everybody?

Paresh Dave: Great question. Ring is saying that it works with every camera, so there's no limitations there. But you do have to be part of Ring's Home Pro subscription plan, which costs $20 a month or $200 a year. Ring right now has three tiers of membership and that is the most expensive subscription of the trio. So the reason for that in Ring's view is that to power this AI search requires a lot of computing power, a lot of cloud computing power. We know there's a lot of demand for cloud computing right now, and so Ring is offsetting that cost in part by requiring customers that want search capability to pay for it. But they are confident that this is something people are willing to pay for, especially people that have a lot of cameras to oversee.

Lauren Goode: All right, that was a great overview of Ring's new AI video search features. Stick around, because when we come back we're going to talk about Ring's business and those controversial relationships with law enforcement we mentioned earlier.

[Break]

Lauren Goode: All right. Paresh, we talked about some of the new gadgety features of Ring cameras. How is Ring actually doing as a business? How many are there around the country? And as we mentioned earlier, it's now a part of Amazon, so presumably it has all the backing it could need, but I'm wondering how Amazon treats the business of Ring within the corporation.

Paresh Dave: Yeah, so the story of Ring is super interesting. I've been following the company for about a decade. They were born in LA, and I used to cover LA startups, and the sort of arc of the company is what's really interesting. When it was first started, Jamie Siminoff, the inventor-entrepreneur who came up with the idea for a video doorbell, basically was trying to create another company, but then he was working out of his garage and couldn't ever hear the doorbell. Then he decided to invent a video doorbell, which is how this became a company back in 2011. And his whole thing was like, this is a way to fight crime. He would even pay the deductible for users who suffered theft if they had a Ring camera. He said he was able to ward off potential burglaries by always answering his Ring camera and shooing people off.

He even said he's never seen anything that has reduced crime more than the video doorbell, which is a big statement to make back in 2017. But a year after he said that, Amazon scooped up the company for a billion dollars. Ring was already using AWS, and so they had this relationship. And Amazon sort of nurtured Ring but didn't make a lot of changes. That changed early last year when Liz Hamren came in as CEO and Jamie Siminoff left the company. Liz had worked on Xbox and Oculus before coming here, and she's really moved away from that whole reducing-crime message that Ring used to push and made it into reducing anxiety. And I think there's probably some reasons for that.

Lauren Goode: Reducing anxiety. That's so interesting.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Who needs SSRIs—

Michael Calore: When you have a Ring camera.

Lauren Goode: … when you have a Ring camera?

Michael Calore: Well, one of the things that I've report on a lot as well, Paresh, is the Neighbors App, which is the app that you would use to connect with the community of people who had Ring cameras. And there was a feature in the app called Request for Assistance that allowed a local police department to put a notice out to people who are on the app and say, hey, there was an incident on your block last week or a couple nights ago and we'd really love it if you could share your footage with us. And it made it super easy for cops to gather footage from people who had Ring cameras without using a warrant to get that footage, which is traditionally how law enforcement gets footage from cameras. First they just walk up to somebody and ask, can we have the footage from your camera? The person says, no, get a warrant. Then they go get a warrant.

So the Neighbors App wasn't necessarily skipping any legal steps, it was just reducing a lot of the friction that would be required for footage to end up in the hands of the cops. So obviously Ring got excoriated by all of the big privacy advocates.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, civil liberties groups.

Michael Calore: Yeah, Electronic Frontier Foundation, WIRED, a lot of organizations went after them for that.

Lauren Goode: When we would review the Ring cameras, we would append that information to it and basically say, just so you're aware, this is what's happening when you buy a Ring camera.

Michael Calore: And not to say that cooperating with law enforcement is bad, but it's just the cozy relationship between a consumer company and the surveillance state that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable.

Lauren Goode: And civil liberties groups were unhappy about this too because they felt that this opened the door for more potential misidentifications of people falsely associated with neighborhood crime.

Michael Calore: Yeah, especially if you're a stranger, an unknown person.

Paresh Dave: Exactly. So one of the things Liz Hamren did as she came in and CEO is this year, she pulled back on some of those partnerships that Ring had with police. They now do not sort of facilitate that exchange of video between police and users. But if police come to Ring with a warrant or an emergency request and ask for video, Ring may turn over that video, assuming Ring has access to that video. There is an option for users to turn on end-to-end encryption. But I'm doubting most users have, and people who want to use the new search feature wouldn't be able to if they have end-to-end encryption on.

But Ring has started to move away from that relationship and those connections to the police. And if you see their commercials now, there's a big emphasis on adorable cat videos and whimsical videos and a little bit of America's Funniest Home Videos style.

Michael Calore: Yeah, they have a show, right? Ring Nation. Wanda Sykes hosts it. It's like viral moments from people's security cameras.

Paresh Dave: Do they still have it? I don't know.

Lauren Goode: Do they really?

Paresh Dave: I know it was a thing. I don't know if they still have it.

Michael Calore: I think it's one of those things that they just made literally 150 episodes of it just so it could get into syndication and just play on television stations around the world in perpetuity.

Lauren Goode: We really do live in a dystopian future.

Michael Calore: We really do. But it's interesting too because that's part of the pitch that Ring is putting out there now. In addition to easing anxiety and being a friendlier company, they're also a company that can help you go viral. If you capture things with your camera that you can search for and find more easily and gives you tools to share those videos, then you can create viral moments with your security camera. I can't believe I'm saying these words.

Lauren Goode: There are some amazing Ring videos out there, OK. I may have a couple stored myself from years ago when my cat was a kitten and used to do goofy things. The night vision is really cool too because if you have a pet that skulks around in the middle of the night, it's a night vision video. Your little pet is this ghostly outline with beady eyes prouncing around your living room.

Paresh Dave: Well, coming back to search, that's how I felt about my experience searching for things the past few days. There's a certain serendipity to what you find, in part because the search doesn't always work that great that you're like, whoa, I didn't know this was happening. So for instance, I searched for bat thinking that I would get some video of me swinging a baseball bat in front of the camera. Instead, I got videos of a family of raccoons that roams by the camera seemingly every night. I had no idea this family of raccoons existed and they were passing by so much.

Lauren Goode: They're feisty.

Paresh Dave: I don't know that it changes my behavior anyway. I'm not worried about trash cans being rummaged through or something. I don't know if it reduces my anxiety in any way, maybe increases it to know that there's always these raccoons out and about. But I could imagine if I lived in some place more exciting and I had videos of the bear in the backyard, I could post that to TikTok and be famous maybe.

So in a way Ring is just another distraction. Don't get me wrong, I think video doorbell, that part of it pretty useful, pretty interesting idea just as it was when Jamie Siminoff first came up with it. But in some ways, Ring is just like TikTok.

Lauren Goode: Paresh, can you do me a favor next time you're using this AI search feature? Can you search specifically for raccoon hands, little raccoon hands and see what comes up? Can you do the CSI thing where you just kind of zoom in on the photo like 100X and then you just enhance and enhance these little hands?

Paresh Dave: If only it was that clear.

Lauren Goode: But to get back to Ring's business, so Amazon has this habit of buying up smaller hardware startups and then unless they're shuttered completely, basically leaving them to exist as is. Eero is another example of this. Ring still has its Ring branding. From what I understand, Ring is still based in LA, is that correct? So how does Ring actually operate and how is it doing as a business?

Paresh Dave: Yes. So when I was covering them back in 2017, they were unprofitable. They didn't even have budgets because the CEO at the time didn't believe in departmental budgets. His mantra was just don't waste money. And he'd even ask people to clean the office themselves, do their own vacuuming. But these days Ring is profitable, and Liz Hamren told me that's without any sort of asterisks. That's on a normal accounting basis. And I think that says something about people's willingness to pay for security, feeling connected, whatever it is that they're getting out of their cameras and their security systems that Ring sells.

And yeah, it's sort of been left alone. But Liz has a portfolio that also includes some other related Amazon businesses, including Blink cameras. So like Amazon not only sells Ring cameras, they also sell Blink cameras. Confusing. There's two different brands, but they're sticking with it for now. She also runs this Amazon Sidewalk business that allows Wi-Fi connectivity in a potentially creepy way and a couple of other businesses as well that they've sort of all grouped together.

Michael Calore: Yeah, Sidewalk is nuts.

Lauren Goode: You wrote about Sidewalk last year, Mike, and we did an entire episode on it.

Michael Calore: Yeah. Basically it is a low power long range Wi-Fi network that devices that are registered as Sidewalk devices can use to get bandwidth outside of what would be normal Wi-Fi range. And every Ring doorbell that's installed is broadcasting a slice of your home Wi-Fi network out into the world for these devices to use. Delivery vehicles use them, firefighters can use them, any kind of public service vehicle that needs to figure out where it is in the world can use these signals that are coming out of your doorbell. You have to disable it. It is enabled by default when you install it. And when you tell people that, like, oh, you have a Ring doorbell, do you know that you're broadcasting 1/80th of your home Wi-Fi connection out into the world for absolutely anybody to use and a secure. They're like, excuse me. People just don't know that it's out there. So it's like a big sleeping giant in the cities of the US.

Lauren Goode: Amazon taking over cities.

Michael Calore: It's really crazy. And there's other protocols that do this too. I think Zigbee kind of works in the similar way. But just the fact that the company was able to just blanket urban America with free Wi-Fi signals for its own devices to use without really telling anybody, without anybody even really noticing is kind of amazing.

Lauren Goode: So it sounds like Ring is not going anywhere. It has the backing of Amazon. It is profitable. And that's something that also I think drives consumers too, because when they think about what they're going to buy to install in their home and they don't want to have to upgrade those cameras every year or two, they want it to be a multi-year purchase, they're going to go with an entity that feels stable. And that is Ring. It feels like Ring has kind of won this game.

Paresh Dave: That's certainly what they're projecting. And you talked about at the beginning of this section that Ring is like conquered neighborhoods. Well, they've conquered the home part of neighborhoods. And I think what's interesting is one of the things that Liz Hamren revealed in my conversation with her is that Ring is next going after small businesses or small and medium-sized businesses. So early next year Ring plans to launch some sort of business-focused subscription plan because there's small businesses that tend to use Ring cameras to monitor what's going on. And they plan to introduce features that make it easier for small businesses to oversee multiple locations or give certain access privileges to their employees. And I imagine there will probably be other unique features to the business set. And I think that's also a big deal. In the same way that they've become part of millions of households and hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods, whatever it is, their reach is about to expand significantly potentially.

Lauren Goode: All right, thanks again, Paresh, for the rundown on Ring. This is really interesting, but stick around because we're going to come back and do our recommendations.

[Break]

Lauren Goode: All right, Paresh, what is your recommendation this week?

Paresh Dave: My recommendation is a bit US-centric today. I had to get a pay-TV subscription this month to watch baseball playoffs and apparently already paying for Hulu, Netflix, Max, and 20 other things wasn't enough. So I decided to subscribe to Sling TV from Dish. And wow, I was surprised by how good and simple it actually is to use. I haven't encountered any sort of bug that I can recall over the past week. I haven't tried to cancel it, but I can say that there's no commitment. You just subscribe a month at a time. There's not all this weird fuss around free trials in seven days, but then you're still charged for a year.

It was easy to switch plans, because one plan had one channel and the other plan had the other channel. And conveniently, I didn't need the other channel anymore. The app was just fast. The recommendations were tailored in a way that was helpful. I can't say the same about how buggy the ads are on Hulu or how slow the Max app is on my TV, but Sling has worked fine on my phone, on my TV. Yeah, I was just overall amazed having not given Sling TV a try before.

But I think the caveat that I want to put in here is that DirecTV just announced a deal to buy Dish. And if any antitrust regulators are listening or reading to this podcast, I don't want to provide any sort of opinion on how they should rule on this deal, but I do think it would be prudent to look at how decently impressive Sling is and for them to make sure that a service that's proving this useful isn't harmed in some way that leaves consumers worse off.

Michael Calore: Amicus brief. Amicus brief. Paresh Dave writes to the FTC and says, hey, please make sure that my baseball still comes through.

Paresh Dave: Maybe I'll get subpoenaed.

Michael Calore: What's your team?

Paresh Dave: The Padres.

Michael Calore: The Padres, OK. The dads.

Lauren Goode: Paresh, you forgot to mention too that the former CEO of Sling TV from Dish happens to be our CEO now.

Michael Calore: At Condé Nast.

Lauren Goode: Roger Lynch.

Paresh Dave: I only knew him from, what, his Pandora days or something.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, he was also at Sling, and I'm pretty sure that when he made the pitch to Condé Nast said, he said the same thing, no bugs, free trials, easy to switch plans. We don't want people to switch plans from WIRED. Recommendations perfectly tailored to me. And look out regulators don't ruin our business. I'm just kidding. As far as I know, did not make that pitch at all. But yes, we do share some CEO DNA there.

Michael Calore: Nice.

Lauren Goode: Thank you, Paresh, for that. Mike, what's your recommendation?

Michael Calore: So my recommendation is kind of a pragmatic one. I have heard instances of people who have moved into an apartment building and their landlord has required that they get a Ring doorbell installed or their landlord installs a Ring doorbell and compels them to sign up for the service. Or people who buy a home in a new neighborhood or in a condo and the homeowners association requires that they have a Ring doorbell. So if you are for some reason being strong-armed into installing a Ring doorbell or a video doorbell of some sort as security surveillance for your home where you live and you don't want that, I have a search for you. It's called decoy video doorbell. If you go to Amazon, the company that owns Ring and Blink.

Lauren Goode: This is all too circular.

Michael Calore: And you search for decoy video doorbell, you can find fake video doorbells. You can also go onto any of the 3D printing platforms where people share designs, and you can find several different designs for 3D-printed video doorbells that look like real video doorbells that are not real. So if you are being strong-armed by your homeowners association or your landlord or somebody in your building to install a security device and you don't feel like installing a security device, just buy a fake one and put it on your front door. And then, if there's ever an incident where they say, “We need the footage from your doorbell,” you can tell them, “My video doorbell was not powered on at the time,” which is not lying. You're actually telling the truth. But then also you don't have to share any surveillance footage with anybody.

Lauren Goode: Is that an obstruction of justice?

Michael Calore: I don't know and I'm not a lawyer. But all I'm saying is that I think it's ridiculous that if you're renting an apartment and your landlord says you have to get a video doorbell as part of your lease, or even if it's typically not part of your lease, they just tell you, they send you something in the mail that says you need to get a video doorbell. I don't think that people should be compelling people to install security cameras on their front doors.

Lauren Goode: I love that your way of sticking it to the man is to go to Amazon and buy the thing.

Michael Calore: Or go to one of those wonderful 3D printing communities and figure out how you can get access to a 3D printer in a hacker space in your neighborhood and print it out if you don't want to go to Amazon.

Lauren Goode: Yes, this is WIRED-level podcast shit we're talking about here.

Michael Calore: I think there's some delicious irony in going to Amazon to buy a fake Ring.

Lauren Goode: Fair enough. Thank you for the recommendation.

Michael Calore: They're like 10 bucks. Anyway, that's my recommendation. Don't let them tell you that you have to spy on each other people. Unless you want to, which is fine. You can do that.

Lauren Goode: Here, here.

Michael Calore: Everybody else does it, as we've established in this 40 minutes of programming that you've just listened to. Lauren, what is your recommendation?

Lauren Goode: Mine is so much more basic. Has everybody seen Nobody Wants This on Netflix?

Michael Calore: No.

Lauren Goode: Paresh, have you seen it?

Paresh Dave: No, but it's on the to-do list.

Lauren Goode: Mike, you've been camping, you've been in a tent without service for several days, so you've missed all of the conversation about Nobody Wants This. Paresh, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. That's not my recommendation though, because everyone's already talking about it. I will say the main character on the show has a podcast, and her podcast with her sister is very much like Call Her Daddy. They make a reference to Call Her Daddy and the $60 million Spotify deal in the program. It's got those vibes. It's a sex podcast. But no, so what happened was I finished that, actually ended up watching it twice, because I watched it by myself and then I watched it with family.

Michael Calore: Wow.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. Real family affair, watching a love story between a rabbi and a non-Jew and whether or not they can make it work. Delightful rom-com. But I started after that, one of my recommendations was Killing Eve, which I think you've recommended before, Mike?

Michael Calore: I don't think so.

Lauren Goode: No, I could have sworn that was your jam.

Michael Calore: No, I don't think I've ever seen it.

Lauren Goode: Oh, OK.

Michael Calore: This one was Sandra Oh.

Lauren Goode: Sandra Oh. Written, executive produced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and it's great. It's about two years old, so once again, I'm behind the curve, but I love anything having to do with spies, really. And Sandra Oh plays an administrator for MI6 who ends up accidentally getting promoted, if you'll call it that, because she's kind of got the beat on this one Russian assassin. And she gets formally assigned to track her down, and it's a cat and mouse show and darkly funny. Gross. There's lots of killing in it. It's literally called Killing Eve. But I like it. I'm enjoying it.

Michael Calore: Very cool.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, so if you haven't seen that before and you're a Sandra Oh fan, as I am, I love the way Phoebe Waller-Bridge also writes women characters. So yeah, I'm a fan.

Michael Calore: Nice. Good recommendation.

Lauren Goode: So also watch Nobody Wants This. Mike, you have to watch it.

Michael Calore: OK. I promise you that. I will.

Lauren Goode: OK.

Michael Calore: As soon as baseball playoffs are over.

Lauren Goode: As soon as, yeah, the sports things. OK. This was a really fun show. Paresh, thank you so much for joining us once again. Well, maybe next week too. Who knows?

Paresh Dave: Had a great time.

Lauren Goode: And everyone should go read Paresh's story on WIRED.com. Mike, thanks as always for being a fantastic cohost.

Michael Calore: Thank you.

Lauren Goode: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on the Ring video footage we'll be posting on social after the show. Just kidding. Just check the show notes. We'll put our various handles in there. Our producer is the excellent neighborhood vigilante Boone Ashworth. We'll be back next week and goodbye for now.

[Gadget Lab outro theme music plays]