"We want to confer life and intelligence on everything. We want to see fairies under trees."

Wait a minute. If they don't get stained, does this mean that geeks are going to wear them for like four months straight without washing them?

This is what's terrifying. You know the fabrics with the embedded nano silver? A couple of athletic gear companies have these fabrics -- the embedded silver kills the bacteria that makes them smell.

So these shirts will never be washed.

Every new thing comes with a hidden curse. It was Heraclitus who told us that.

Another place where nano stuff comes in is new kinds of fabrics with wildly new finishes. Things that look like chatoyant rainbows. You know the kind of rock called tiger's-eye? How it kind of shimmers when you look at it? That is the quality of chatoyant. Having really interesting surfaces. Having fabrics that the artwork changes on them.

Robots, nano fabrics. Okay, what else we got?

Phones are fashion.

Is that going to produce a want?

The want has already happened and people just don't realize it. You no longer replace your old phone with your new phone because the old phone is broken. You replace it because you're bored with the finish.

What's so complicated about enamel?

It's not enamel. It's the highest of high tech. What we're going toward is phones that have chameleon finishes, that have active surfaces that change shape and color. You know, mood phones.

And we are going to want chameleon phones?