What Bezos’ Big Day Means for Commercial Spaceflight
This week, Steven Levy fills us in on the Blue Origin launch, its implications, and why so many billionaires are obsessed…
SL: Lauren, I want to second that recommendation. It’s been a hell of a year for Jean Smart who is the lead in Hacks. She also was in Mare of Easttown. You know, Delco, outside of Philadelphia, and her performance is unbelievable.
LG: Yeah, she is chef’s kiss, very good. Mike, what’s your recommendation?
MC: I’m going to recommend a gadget and it’s not a new gadget, it’s kind of an old gadget it’s been around for, I guess, about four years. I’m holding it in my hand, it is called the Mighty Vibe. It’s an audio player, it’s about the size of an iPod Shuffle-
LG: It looks like an iPod.
MC: A square iPod Shuffle. It’s an iPod Shuffle for Spotify basically. You pair it with an app on your phone and you sync it to your Spotify account and then you download your Spotify playlists onto this thing and then you clip it to your shirt and then you either use Bluetooth headphones or old school plug-in headphones and you can listen your music wherever you go. So it’s like an iPod Shuffle but it basically syncs to Spotify. It’s something that I’ve wanted for a really long time and it came out and I never got one. There was one kicking around here at the office and now that we’re back in the office a couple of days a week, I found it and I was like, oh, I should try this out. It’s especially cool if you are a runner or if you do a lot of hikes and stuff and you like to do that to get away from the internet and go off grid because it’s an offline device.
It doesn’t connect to Spotify unless you’re in your home with your phone paired to the device and you’re on Wi-Fi and then it syncs all the music and then you can take it offline. So when I go on runs I clip this to my running shorts and then I have music and I don’t need to bring my phone with me when I go out. So it’s $110, which is a lot, and also I should warn you that it is buggy. So it takes a little bit of time to get it to work properly, it may not connect to both of your headphones, you may have to try a couple of different pairs of headphones to get it to work but once you get it working, it’s just set it and forget it and you can just clip it and press the button and go so that’s my recommendation, the Mighty Vibe.
LG: I’m looking at it right now. Can I see it? It’s super cute.
SL: If you end your Spotify subscription, does it still work?
MC: I think it does. I think if you just delete the app and then all of the music stays on the device and you never sync it again it’ll just continue to play all the files.
LG: You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of, I don’t know if you remember that Pebble, I think just shortly before it was acquired, developed something called the Core that I wrote about.
SL: Yeah, I know, I wrote about that.
LG: I went to their offices in New York City. And it was built for runners, it was a GPS accessory for runners. And it was I think a little bit larger maybe, but similar.
MC: Yeah. So yeah, the iPod Shuffle still around even though they’re just different now. All right. That is our show for this week, everybody should go read Steven’s dispatches from the Blue Origin launch in Van Horn, Texas. You can find those on WIRED.com. Steven, thank you for coming back on the show.
SL: Oh, I really loved it.
MC: And thank you all for listening. If you have feedback you can find all of us on Twitter, just check the show notes. This show is produced by Boone Ashworth. Goodbye, we’ll be back next week.
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