616: WiFi Egg

It's time for episode 616 of the Clockwise podcast from Relay, recorded Wednesday, July 30th, 2025. Clockwise, four people, for tech topics, 30 minutes. Welcome back to Clockwise, the tech podcast that's counting down the days until the end of this sweltering summer. Or maybe that's just me. Anyway, my name is Micah Sargent and I am joined across the internet by my good pal, my dear friend. It is the one and only Dan the Man Morin. How you doing, Dan?

I'm doing well, Micah. I can't let this episode go by without saying that this is the one episode that takes place in the main Marvel continuity because that takes place on Earth 616. Therefore, episode 616 takes place. Thank you. This is the one episode of Clockwise that appears in Marvel Comics somewhere, somewhere in there. I don't know. While we ponder the nerdery of it all, let me go ahead and welcome our first guest to my left.

partner at Lickability and host of Absolutely Crushed. It's MB Bischoff. Welcome back to the show, MB. I am so glad to be back, Micah. Thanks for having me. And to my left this week, it is senior culture writer at TechCrunch and host of Wow If True, Amanda Silberling. Welcome back, Amanda. Hello. It's fun to be here.

Good, good. While we have a little bit of fun, let's get going. You know how this works. We've got four topics, 30 minutes, and mine for you is this. I'm just curious, have you used any of the...

tap to exchange features that are part of modern smartphones. So I'm not talking about tap to pay at a payment terminal, but phone to phone payments, which is brand new, uh, or relatively new, uh, contact exchange, which we've seen before where you could say, yeah, Hey, this is me. And then you tap phones and phone numbers get exchanged phone to phone file transfer. Have you used any of these features with others? MB, we'll start with you.

Of course. I've used all of these features. I love holding my phone real close to someone else's phone and having it vibrate in this really weird way and having all these little particle effects fly across the air. It's amazing. I love being the person...

at the at the function who is like oh do you want to do you want to exchange contact info and then the person has never done it before and then i'm like wait wait just take out your phone they like try to they try to hand me their instagram or they try to like give me their number and i just show them how the Name drop is the name of the feature on the Apple side. Now how name drop works. I like, I like dropping names.

I am rarely in the circumstance where I need to exchange something with people. And I do think for better or for worse, the default is still like, oh, let me text this to you because I don't want to be the person who's like, oh, trust me, this will work. Let me hold my phone right next to you.

phone and then they stare at me awkwardly as nothing happens. It often doesn't work, sadly. That's the problem. And I will tell you, the place I quote unquote use this feature more than any place else is occasionally I will find I have my phone in my pocket and my watch.

gets really close to it and it wants to do some sort of thing and i'm like first of all you should know i'm not sending anything from my phone to my watch or vice versa uh and it's my own stuff uh so yeah i don't really use these i think they're cool that they exist uh but it does not it feels like there was a time where they really could capitalize on this but the fact that these things got added so recently after years of people developing other ways to exchange

information, it's hard. It's hard to change people's behavior. So yeah. Amanda, what about you? I think I've used this feature maybe like once when a friend was sending me a bunch of photos and then we were like, oh, wait, isn't there that thing where you can just like put your phones together? And... then I promptly forget that it exists. But maybe now that I've been reminded, I will, like MB, I will do some name dropping.

Yes. So the reason why I ask this is because recently I was hanging out with some folks and it was a new person and it came time for the little contact exchange. And I started to go through the typical process of handing my phone to them and having like a text message thing open and saying, you know, type in your phone number.

And then they, a person not in tech, said to me, wait, there's this thing that I'd like to do. And I was gooped and gagged at the idea that they... were like that they use this tap to exchange thing because i like dan don't want to be the person who goes to use it and it doesn't work and then i look like a fool especially because you're standing there staring like no no Yeah, no, no, hold on. I promise it's a real thing. It does. Wait one more second. And so, yeah, I...

avoid this feature and was shocked to see it in the wild. And so it made me go, maybe other people are using it and I just don't know. And it also then made me kind of wonder about. everybody has different tolerance levels for how many times something can not work or work. unexpectedly before they're ready to write things off. And I kind of thought maybe I need to recalibrate my tolerance because I'll just kind of go, okay, that's something I won't be using again.

but other people maybe have a little more patience. And I thought, that's interesting. So thank you all for your answers on that. Let's go to our next topic, which comes from MB.

This week, there was a really big data breach of the women's safety app Tea. I'm having some tea right now. They claimed not to be storing uploaded images. You would upload a selfie, and then they said they would delete it right away. It turns out they weren't, and a bunch of the data leaked from Firebase and made its way to 4chan, and it was a mess.

This made me think about what parts of your own online communications have you set to be ephemeral? What are you setting up to automatically delete and how are you handling ephemerality in your stuff online? I am bad at this. I think for some stuff... Put it this way. I have two approaches. One is...

In so much as it's possible, not parting with anything that is critical information at any place beyond the necessities, right? I don't want to put my social security number anywhere. I don't want to put my driver's license anywhere. Unless it's, we're talking like a government agency in which it's like, okay, this is necessary, or a bank or something like that. It's very limited, right? The amount of places I'm willing to share certain types of information. Beyond that...

I feel like there's a lot of information that I'm like, this information is going to be compromised. And I don't. care. It's not that I don't care. It's just I've dealt with the reality of after having been online for 30 plus years, certain information is out there and it's never going away. And you just got to be...

cool with that because it's impossible to get rid of. As far as other data I'm sharing, I don't really use any of the disappearing message apps. Frankly, I save my iMessage history and all of that as like archived because I like being able to search. them. But I really am much more cautious when I'm signing up for new accounts these days in terms of how much information I'm going to put in, even like a profile, just because I don't... I kind of want to minimize...

the attack surfaces as it were. And, you know, not all that is in our power because so much information is collected about us without our knowledge or is collected through us indirectly through learning about us. But yeah, I do what I can. but I also don't want to stress about it and worry about it. So I don't necessarily spend a lot of time thinking too hard about it. Amanda, what about you? Are you better at this than I am? Not as good as I should be.

I use Signal for talking to sources if it's like something sensitive where they don't want the messages to be lingering around on my phone. I don't know. Nothing's ephemeral anymore. Like, I actually have been using Snapchat again recently, which is really stupid.

But some of my friends have been using it to like send pictures of their new cat. And I'm like, well, I need to know how the new cat is doing. So I'm exclusively on Snapchat to get pictures of my friends' animals. And I guess those are ephemeral. The best way I've been ephemeral when it comes to online communications, and for that I am taking it to mean outside of iMessage, is to... Just not post. Yeah, I really don't post very often. And when I do, it tends to be something that is...

absolutely 100% something that I'm okay existing on the internet. But having been a public facing... media personality you're famous you're extremely famous since so darn famous yeah yeah absolutely uh for a while like That came with its own host of lessons, object lessons that made me much more... careful about what I put online in the first place. So I think like the ephemerality of my behavior at this point is not disappearing content or anything like that, but it's content that is.

made to be shared and making sure that metadata isn't included in photos and that kind of thing, as opposed to sort of... going and deleting things after the fact. But I'm curious to hear, MB, if you have any special techniques that you use. Yeah, I'm generally sort of a digital pack rat. I have files going back to my first.

on my current computer. I've migrated many, many times. But of late, I've been spending more time in Signal. It has made its way into my dock. And in a lot of those conversations... The disappearing message time is set to one week. And it was a hard adjustment to make at first, not having that searchability, not being able to perfectly remember how a conversation went.

But I think it's teaching me something and I think I'm going to reevaluate some things that I'm keeping and figure out if I can get rid of some more stuff. Nice. I might have to give that a test as well. While we all go through and delete everything from our past, let's take a little break to head into halftime here. I want to remind you about our clockwise swag.

which we all know stands for stuff we all get. The clockwise swag you can get include a hat. It's a very good hat. It's very good. We've got a shirt. We've got a tote bag. Yes. We have stickers. I'm waiting for mine to arrive in the mail. I did order some stickers. A mug. The mug is also very good. And.

a phone case as well. So check that out at clockwise dot social by buying clockwise swag. You help support the work that we do here on the show. All right. We are back from halftime and that means it's time.

for Dan's topic. Yes. Well, let's talk about something we all love, tech frustrations. What's the most recent example of a time when you've been frustrated by technology or a case where technology has impeded you? perhaps from doing something that would make you more productive because you can't make the more productive part work. Amanda, let's start with you. Okay, I have a free startup idea for someone.

I am going on a trip with some friends in a few weeks, and we're going to a place that is remote and doesn't have good Wi-Fi, which... I am fine with, but there are some people who need to be working remotely while we're on vacation, so they need wifi. Do you know how hard it is to, like, go on the internet?

an attempt to buy like a little mini like Wi-Fi egg or like I'm going to use the total wrong terminology. But you know what I mean? I think that's that's correct. No, that's correct. It's just a little guy that you just. kind of rent and then it gives you wi-fi for a little bit and then you mail it back where oh the wi-fi egg yeah the wi-fi but like Did I move into a parallel universe, by the way? I think you did. Yes. I think we're all operating on a different frequency.

Every website that does this is extremely sketchy and does not seem like a real website. And then I asked my friend who was responsible for getting the Wi-Fi for a similar trip in the past, and the website that she used successfully no longer exists. And then one of the people going on the trip was like, what if I buy a Starlink? And I'm like, this can't be the answer.

I need to be able to give someone like $50 and then they mail me a little thingy that I can use to get Wi-Fi for a week and then I mail it back. But that doesn't seem to exist. So that's my tech frustration is it's weirdly hard to get Wi-Fi from a non-sketchy website and or Elon Musk while you're traveling. Sorry, there's an image in my head of Elon Musk being on the side of the road with like a trench coat. hey i got some wi-fi for you check out my wi-fi egg um so my frustration it's not about

tech in particular, but it definitely has impeded me to be more productive. I just recently swapped out. And in doing so, of course, you sort of tear down your setup and you put up a new setup. For me, the hardest part about that is committing to how things are going to be set up. Because I'm very... much the person who wants to have the cables managed and I'm using Velcro ties and this and that and the other, but...

I'm going, okay, but no, I don't like this here. I want this to go there. No, this doesn't look good here. No, this doesn't work here. And so it's been an exercise in absolute frustration over the past week or so. I am, you know, sort of finding what works and what doesn't. And there's a part of me that just wishes that I could have set it up and been OK with it and been done. And that has been frustrating. And certainly.

impeded my productivity as I rearrange everything over and over and over again. MB, what about you? Every time I interact with Siri, a voice five, the assistant, I feel frustrated. I feel I said I right before the show, like I said, I was making tea. I asked it to set a tea timer. I was standing there over my counter. I was waiting for the T-timer to go off. And it confirmed that it set the timer. And then I just said, hey, ahoy telephone.

How long is left on this timer? There are no timers on HomePod. There are no time. There are no timers on HomePod. So every time, every time, I mean, it's every day, everything, technology frustrates me every single day. There are four timers. Thank you, referencing us. Yeah, so I just like the idea. Siri is kind of gaslighting like that. What are you talking about? There's never been a timer. You've never set a timer. You've never set a timer in your life. I'm so into it.

Yeah. These are all great. I like it. I like all these. Yeah. Technology, the best and worst thing to have happened to all of us. Mine was a really concrete example I was working on this morning. I was trying to set up.

on the macOS Tahoe beta. I was like, oh, you know, I use the third-party clipboard manager. I've used that for years, but there's now clipboard history in here. I wonder if I can just remap the keyboard shortcut that I used to use for my third-party keyboard app to the keyboard history.

that should be easy, right? Well, there's no way to do that because it doesn't exist in the UI. So you can't tell it to use different keyboards. So I made a shortcut that then just uses like, you know, basically can be triggered by a keyboard command that would just use, you know.

issue keyboard commands to bring up the correct thing which worked for briefly and then it started telling me that like oh no no no no you can't have shortcuts like issue keystrokes that's just not allowed it's against the privacy and security permissions it's like well i'll turn let me turn those off it's like I can't tell you where those are.

I just sat there staring at this two-line shortcut I'd written that didn't work because of privacy on my own computer that I couldn't even turn off. And I thought maybe computers are a mistake. So that's, yeah. We've all got our frustrations, and they range from keyboard shortcuts to Wi-Fi eggs and everything in between. Thank you all for that. I'm doing a lot with computers right now. Too much, really. And let's go to our first.

topic which comes from amanda speaking of apple and privacy or lack thereof this morning i was writing about sketchers and a new product that they have which is children's shoes except you can lift up the sole and then there's a perfectly carved little compartment where you can put an air tag in it and then your kids have an air tag in their shoes and

I don't think about this often because I don't have children or like interact with children that much where I'm like, on one hand, if you have a three year old who's like running away from the playground, maybe not the worst idea. On the other hand. Don't we already have so many issues with air tag surveillance? And like, I don't know. And then I was thinking like, well, then if kids are raised to know that they're being surveilled, at what end is it like?

When do your parents no longer have your location? And then I realized I'm sharing location with my parents and I'm an adult, but I do that voluntarily. But like, do we just know too much about each other? And are these shoes a bad idea? And are we OK? And are we OK? So, Amanda, I love this topic. I don't know if you all are familiar, but may very well be familiar with the concept of me.

World Syndrome. And it's this idea that when news, specifically cable news, started becoming more popular, or actually when it kicked off and we started hearing news... It resulted in people having more connection to more horrifying stories of murder and kidnapping and everything in between. resulting in us believing that the world was a lot more mean than it actually is in terms of how much violence and...

And those kinds of things happen around us. And so it resulted in a lot of paranoia that actually runs contrary to the data around crimes, which has shown that a lot of things like. kidnapping and other other stuff, I'm obviously not going to go through the whole list, have gone down over time. But we have more access to more stories about it happening. And therefore, we think that it's happening right next to us. I think that this is born of that in a big way.

places where something like this makes sense. And perhaps that is, you know, a little wild of me to say, but an example of this is my fiance's family went to Disneyland. And while they were at Disneyland in particular, you know, for the day, they did use, speaking of this, a pair of shoes. They just use a standard pair of shoes and just lifted up the.

soul and put it underneath. Um, so that if the small child somehow, you know, God forbid, wandered off, that they would be able to use this to find the child, but not as a regular... you are always being surveilled and tracked situation, just a very particular situation where I think that this made sense. If my dogs were bigger dogs, then I probably would have AirTags for them as well. So I think that there are situations where for me, I'm okay with it, but...

Not as a you're always tracked, you're always being watched sort of situation, elf on the shelf, living its best life all year round. MB, what are your thoughts? Yeah, well, this stuff gives me the heebies and the jeebies. I really don't like the idea of someone sticking an AirTag in my shoes, no matter what age I am, or sticking an AirTag in anyone's shoes.

um also i feel like air tags are not really they're not made for this they're not made to track people in fact they're like kind of anti-made for that and so i don't think it would even work that well um I think if you want to make an agreement with your kid, I'm not a parent, so I'm speaking out of turn, perhaps. But I think if you want to make an agreement with your kid at a certain age, you might be able to do something where you say, hey.

I'm going to we're going to get you an Apple watch. It's going to be for, you know, texting me when you're done soccer practice or theater camp or whatever. And. So by default, I'm going to share my location with you and you're going to share your location with me. And this is what that means. And if you need to turn it off for some reason, here's how to do that. That's probably what I would do. I think that... location sharing is great and I use it often, but I think it should be consensual.

um what about you dan hello i am the person with a three-year-old who runs away um incredible not runs away but uh is very active and runs around a lot uh i have a lot of feelings on this i saw this story actually before you even put it in the doc this morning amanda so i'm glad you put it in because i was thinking about it too um i know people who've done this kind of thing i agree with um several point one it's not really designed for it uh this is the apple explicitly says that

Don't use this for tracking people. And there are a bunch of features in there for this, because obviously you can use it for really bad ways to track people and stalk people and things like that. To Micah's point, the idea of having location stuff for a specific eventuality when you're in a sort of high-risk environment, I can see that as well.

You know, I think it makes more sense with a device that's actually designed for it again. But if you're just looking for something to do it because you're at a giant theme park and you're going to might get separated, you know, that that's. I think that's fine. I think it's fine for specific sort of tactical deployment.

You know, I am a big user of location sharing. I share my location with my parents, you know, again, voluntarily, as Amanda said, my mother loves to ask me questions about where I be. Oh, I saw you were at the doctor's office this morning. Is everything okay? But that's my mother and she's lovely.

and she's not doing it to be creepy she just likes to be aware of what's happening with people um and so um you know again reconciling all these things there's no one one size fits all approach i i think largely um The way that MB sort of pitched it for like, you know, at a certain age, giving kids the opportunity to be like, look, this is the deal. You know, you can have this device. But part of the deal is that you keep the location tracking on because that is the deal.

There are ages at which kids are not empowered or capable of making those decisions in an informed way. That depends. very much kid to kid. And obviously, it very much depends on parents, depends on your living situation, depends on where you are and what the risks are.

To Micah's point about the mean world idea, many of us did live sort of unfettered lives roaming around the neighborhoods without any major ill effects, you know, in our youth. And while times have changed, I don't want to discount that. think people tend to believe that

that the world is much worse than it is. So there are a lot of different things to take into account here. However, none of this takes into account the real problem, which is, look, I don't know if you know how fast kids go through shoes, but it's real fast. That's the real. We're not investing in this.

So that's my feeling on it. I don't think this is the right approach. I think there may come a time in my kid's life where we say, here's an Apple Watch for communications purposes. And part of the deal is that there's location tracking on.

But again, I think that's at a point where they're able to have a conversation about that and understand everything that it entails, which is a while from three years old. Right now, I'm just going with a time-honored, I can see you. And if I can't see you, you should come back where I can't see you.

Old school. Amanda, you want to wrap us up here? Yeah, I think even for those of us who don't have children, I think that these same questions around surveillance... are very prevalent in our lives where like... Some people think it's weird that I don't have my boyfriend's location, which I'm just like, he doesn't want to share it and I trust him, so it's fine. But then other people would be like, that would be really weird if you did have it. But then I'm like...

I have the location of random friends of mine, and I'm like, oh boy, looks like Caro's working in the office today. And I don't need to know that Caro's working in the office today. But I also don't really care that they know where I am and I know where they are. And like, it's just kind of like a weird social thing that's happening now where there's more of an expectation of sharing locations. And sometimes it's innocent and fun and doesn't matter. But like.

what if you're sharing in a relationship and then it becomes an abusive relationship like right there's a lot that can be happening here

Absolutely. All right. We have just enough time for a bonus topic. My question is, when you were a kid, did you have an idea of what career you wanted to have when you grew up? And if so, what was it? And MB, we'll start with you. Thanks for this question, Micah. It made me go back and think through what the progression was for me, like as far back as I can remember what the career goal progression was. And I think it went like this. I think it went, I wanted to be a magician.

professionally. And then I wanted to be a visual effects artist and then software designer, which I do now. And then software engineer, which I have done and I do a little bit of still. I think that was it. I think that was the full progression. What was yours Dan?

I mean, I wanted to be a detective and a spy and all sorts of good stuff like that before I really understood what any of that meant. But starting in about first grade, I basically, when I learned to be able to write things, I decided I wanted to be a writer. Which is what I do. Wow. What about you, Amanda?

I think the first job I consciously can remember wanting to have was in kindergarten. I wanted to be a teacher, and I think that's probably just because I wanted to be in charge, and that was the in-charge example that I saw. And then I read books and was like, it would be so cool if I could make those. And then that basically just stayed the same of wanting to be a writer of some things.

And now I am a writer of, oh my god, is it okay if kids have AirTags in their shoes? I don't know. Many such cases. The first job that I wanted to have was I wanted to be a Looney Tune. Amazing. And then I wanted to be a rocket scientist and then pediatric surgeon. And so then it was like creative director, graphic designer. And then I went to school for that and ended up getting into journalism instead.

Folks out there, if you'd like to get ad-free episodes with an extra unwound episode every week where Dan and I chat about a topic, you can become a member of Clockwise. Go to relay.fm slash Clockwise to sign up. It's $7 a month, $70 a year. And in doing so, you'll help support.

the show. And with that, we have reached the end of this episode of Clockwise. All this left is to thank our wonderful guests. MB Bischoff, always a pleasure to have you here with us. This was a blast. Thank you so much. And Amanda Silberling, thank you so much for

joining us too and making us talk about air text and shoes yeah always whenever you have me on you can guarantee that i will uh have an existential crisis about technology all right well that is all from us for this week mike will be back next week but until then We remind everyone listening out there, watch what you say. And keep watching the clock. Bye, everybody.