The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Blizzard Backlash Worsens, Uber Pet, Crypto Taxes & Other Tech News Oct 9, 2019

Episode Date: October 9, 2019

Blizzard Backlash Worsens, Uber Pet, Crypto Taxes & Other Tech News Oct 9, 2019

Hi folks, it's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming at you here with another great podcast. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys. Be sure to go to thecvpn.com, the Chris Voss Podcast Network, chrisvosspodcastnetwork.com and check out the six or seven. We're working on a seventh podcast. You can go over there and check out all the really cool, interesting podcasts

you can learn so much stuff from. Give us some support. Give us some great reviews and support us on the show if you would. We certainly appreciate it and all of our folks, etc, etc. Anyway, let's talk about news. We're going to cover this in two parts. Of course, we've started doing

one show where we cover news, talk about my slant on things and everything, what I think about and what's going on in your world today. Whether you realize it or not, I'm at work, Chris, in my cubicle. I can't see outside and they don't let me download the internet ever

since they caught me on Chattable. Chattable? No. One of those porn sites. They restricted my access. So this is for you. You can at least listen to this until your business overlords discover that you're listening to the podcast as well as the work. So there you go. I don't know that I condone it or not.

I'm kind of like, I don't know, I'm conflicted on the clear self-interest I have in this whole thing. Anyway, guys, let's get on to talk about that. What the hell is going on in the world, Chris? I don't know, but it's fucking crazy and it's just today's wednesday right yeah it's hump day i'll read you the news then you can be then you go hump like a desk drawer or something your cubicle uh again today this is the top of my news feed um this was a popular thing we talked about yesterday, at least popular in terms of its discussion. Blizzard

is facing intense backlash after banning a player over Hong Kong pro-democracy comments with some fans boycotting his games. This is according to BuzzFeed News. Evidently, the players are starting to boycott games like World of Warcraft, Overwatch,

Hearthstone. After a user was banned for supporting pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong during a tournament, they banned him for like a whole year, took away $10,000 of his earnings. If you're familiar with most of these gaming competitions and teams, these guys aren't millionaires, and they live this sort of thing. They're not getting paid buku bucks, so losing $10,000 might be a good portion of their annual earnings that they take and make. They have sponsors and different things like that, but still, it seems highly excessive and a willingness to serve China to make it happy. It's really sad. I think a lot of this does come down to politics.

Where China feels they can be more abusive. We're seeing this story play out with Apple. We're seeing it play out with the NBA and other industries. Google, of course, technology companies. This is a technology story. And we're seeing how geopolitics are affecting this sort of interest. Where China suddenly feels like they can really start putting the hammer down on everybody who wants to interact with them.

And they're starting to be jerks because, you know, honestly, their economy is finally reaching a point where it's becoming an interesting factor and a marketplace that people want to enter. According to The Guardian, also today, Chinese state media warns Apple over an app that tracks Hong Kong police. Apple's approval of the app made it an accomplice in the protests. And you notice the firm language there is meant to scare Apple into complicity. We talked yesterday about how Apple took down the Taiwanese flag in the emojis.

If you live in like China or Hong Kong or kind of outlying areas to just please China. So interesting things are going on in our world that are impacting our data, our technology, and everything else, and our free speech. And when you really think about it, you know, you can listen to these stories and go, Chris, this is just a political thing and blah, blah, blah. No, not really. This has to do with free speech. This is the thing that your grandfather and fathers went to the beach for. This is where they fought in Normandy and died and spilled their blood over freedom and free speech and being able to say what we wanted in the First Amendment. So that's what they fought for. So this isn't something that's

trivial in any way, shape, or form or just solely politics. This comes down to a context of free speech. If you've ever sat down, I would encourage a lot of people to sit down and read the top three news websites or newspapers, basically of China. And when you read them, it becomes really obvious very quickly. If you have half a brain that these are clearly chinese state-run pr media outlets and the spin on them sometimes is beyond extraordinary just like crazy fucking programming uh big brother 1984 type spin uh it's even interesting how they spin the stories from the u.s to uh you know make China look good. And it's very North Korean-ish, really, when you look at it. So anyway, that's what's going on in the news

there. Let's talk about 9 to 5 Mac story. The KU, K-U-O, iPhone SE 2 and brand new iPad Pro models are coming in quarter one of 2020. MacBooks with a new keyboard and Apple AR headset in partnership with third-party brands coming in quarter two 2020. This is a Chinese language Ming-Chi-Ku report. That's who the Ku is. And, yeah, they're rumoring that this release, now this release is something that they're reporting on. Apple, of course, is going to hold their secrets close to the vest and decide what they want to take and do. So take that with whatever sort of grain of salt you want to put towards it or fact. It's up to you.

You're the reader. You can decide what it means or what it doesn't. It's just interesting to see what the strategy is here coming out and how that lays out. There's been rumors that Apple would do more in the AR field and VR field in the future. So them coming out with a headset definitely sounds interesting. According to the New York Times, Facebook refuses the Joe Biden campaign request to take down misleading Trump campaign ads. Now, these ads were rejected by CNN. So it reignites a debate about Facebook and political speech. Now, I'm not being political here, but if you go back and you look at the

amount of money that Facebook is taking in, especially during the 2016 election, from money from Russia, and now they say Iran is getting into our stuff, all these money from all these outside sources that are buying ads, they make a lot of money. A lot of their bread gets made from selling campaign ads. So they have to walk this line, or more and more we have to demand that they walk this line between truth and reality and whether or not they're protecting our elections as an American company. I mean, certainly these are multinational companies, but when they go to other countries, they're asked to respect their country's stuff. They should do the same with ours.

And certainly, I don't know whether we need to legislate standards for political ads. Of course, no one would do that because they're the politicians who make their laws that yeah you see what the conflict of interest is there um and um yeah it's it's something we've got to decide what's right or wrong or whatever uh certainly you know these guys have to walk a line where they go hey do we turn away all this money we're making and so we can't make money by selling out the American people to Russia? Whatever. So kind of a conversation you probably want to have with yourself and your friends online and say, hey, man, where do we really find truth?

I think that's the biggest problem we're having right now. There's so much lies and bullshit and PR spin going on. People just more and more are just trying to figure out where is the truth. And to me, I've dealt with liars. I've known con artists like Trump. That's why I hate him. I've had a couple of friends that were pathological, psychotic, sociopath liars where everything was a lie. I mean, if they told you they're drinking milk in the morning out of their cup and it clearly had milk in the cup, you would check it for, to see if there was anything else in there, or if they just somehow colored their vodka white, um, so that it looked like milk.

I mean, you just, you just couldn't trust the fucking thing they said, no matter if you thought you saw them doing it, you're like, I'm not sure you did that because you're saying you did. And you lie about fucking everything. So anyway, it seems to be this whole demand that we have to have to fight for the truth. We've got to source our information better. I posted a post on Facebook today talking about how people need to quit sharing these stupid bullshit websites that post crazy stuff a new study shows dogs cure cancer, you know, and stuff like that. They're posts. I see people that are posting a lot of shit and sometimes they're just doing his feel good because they can't deal with the real news, but buckle up a buttercup taken strap a set on and deal with reality because posting a lot of other fake

bullshit, like, I don't know, like coffee helps you have a larger penis, you know, come on, man, seriously, come on, think about it, don't post that shit, I mean, if you're posting it to be funny in a parody sense, do it, but, you know, we, I think we all need to, you know, anytime now, if I post something, my friends will source it, if I haven't, and they'll call me out on my bullshit, and we all should be doing that to each other You know every now and then i've been known to wake up in the morning. I'll see an article uh, maybe share by one of your friends i'll share it again turns out the Um turns out the date is old. It's like a couple years old. It's not even current

And uh, well it is valid sometimes is an important point Uh, you know, I mean people people upset and go, dude, that's like old news. We already saw that. And you're making it seem like it's being resurrected again. So I think we all just have to go on this better journey for truth, truth, honesty, and everything else. And hopefully we go through this period of incredible amount of lies to find a better inner person that are going to be worse so imagine what that world is like an apocalyptic sense uh wired a growing number of astrophysicists are leaving academia to join data science teams at tech companies amid a surging demand for machine learning expertise space scientists are abandoning

the heavens to help you decide what to wear watch and listen to whether it's the stars or stitch fix it's all about machine learning this This is according to the Wired magazine. Yeah, I can imagine why they're leaving academia because academia and government isn't a great place for people in science right now. And I guess they're just going to go learn how to sell stuff and make money because now it's all about money instead of science, I guess, or how to use science against you to make money from you. We're going to go to use our science that we learned to figure out how to empty your wallet.

Great. Welcome to America, my friends. Rampant capitalism that might be a little too far out of control. Let's see. We read this story yesterday. I'm going to skip over that. Coindesk, this is important to you folks in the cryptocurrency market, those of you who have been delving for years and years and years long

before the IRS ever said, gave any sort of guidance on taxes and stuff. Of course, here's the bottom line. If you earn money, you should probably pay the IRS your taxes. That's always a good idea. Um, cause they, if you don't, they will find it and then you'll, you know, you'll be in trouble. You don't want to be in trouble. Um, you know, beyond the straight guys, just what I got done saying. So the IRS publishes its first guidance of five years for calculating taxes on, on cryptocurrency holdings, clearing up hard, how hard should be treated. So this is good. This is good. We're getting data from the IRS on how people should pay their taxes, how people should

pay their cryptocurrency. I think a lot of people in the early days of cryptocurrency thought that somehow because it wasn't like a sort of, what's the right way to say it uh like a common or or like a normal expected term of income uh that you know they didn't have to pay taxes on it and a lot of oil wasn't traceable to a certain degree but no man they they have their ways of finding your money so be honest pay your taxes and be a good person uh next up vice leaked in email from g email from GitHub CEO shows the company will renew its $2,000K contract with ICE despite state opposition to child separation policies. Hey, man, do what you want with that story. There it is.

I'm going to not delve into the politics of that. Other than, you know, it kind of shows a tech hypocrisy, if you will. I mean, if you're coming out and stating that you're opposed to child separation policies and taking money in the back door, well then, what kind of company or person are you? There you go. Next up, a survey of 4,272 U.S. adults, according to the Pew Research Center, shows patchy knowledge of tech issues. Many answered correctly on cookies and fishing, but few knew about 2FA, HTTPS, or private browsing.

It really is sad. I don't know why we're not teaching more of this in computer age in schools and stuff. Why aren't we teaching our children? That's probably something we need to equate ourselves with. That's also something we need to teach ourselves about. But more and more now, and we talked about this earlier in a prior couple stories, we need to know what the fuck is going on in our world and understanding safety and everything else. Gone are the days where you could just go, it's the internet, booga, booga, booga. I have to be careful. You've got to know what sort of world you're operating in and how you're doing it.

You've got to open your eyes and your brain, learn some new shit, learn a new game, teach that dog some new tricks. I know, because I have to constantly do that with this old dog, baby. House Financial Committee says Mark Zuckerberg will test on October 23rd as part of a hearing on Libra and more CNBC. This is kind of interesting. We talked, I think, last week about how PayPal has left the Libra Association movement. Looks like they're getting more pounding from the House Financial Services Committee and more politics. So I don't know. I think the big message that keeps coming out to Facebook is, hey, man, you need to clean up your act. I don't know.

Maybe some of this is extortion to get him to run more political ads that are fake and lies. I don't know, man. You connect the dots. I'm just going to throw you the information and see what you do with it from there. This is an interesting story from the Vox I found it thought-provoking if you will the biggest lie technologists tell themselves and others is there is nothing we can do to stop the natural and inevitable evolution of Technology they see facial recognition smart diapers and surveillance devices as inevitable evolutions. They're not according to Rose Evelyn, uh, Evelyn. Um, and, uh, interesting story, just, just kind of the yin and yang of it. It's good to kind of read this regardless of what you think. I think that was a great story. Um, and you know, there, there, there's a few other good books. I'm trying to think of one of them off the top

of my head that talks about how, um, how people who feel they're billionaires who want to step down and off the mountain of money and go, we're going to save humanity with our social efforts and our technology efforts. Um, there really is a narcissistic thing to it, a tinge that, uh, doesn't really, uh, help society in the end other than just to enrich themselves. So, you know, kind of look at it. I think it's a great article. You can go to the Vox and check it out. The biggest lie technologists tell themselves and others.

Give it a read. It's kind of an interesting counter sort of thing, depending upon which side you're on, et cetera, et cetera. According to the Financial Times, OECD countries and veil proposals to tax giant multinationals, especially tech giants after months of negotiation, cracking down on the use of tax havens. I think this is good. Cracking down on tax havens is super important. Uh, knowing that Apple at one time had like almost a trillion dollars parked over in a tax haven, wasn't paying taxes on it, is BS.

Recently, we saw that billionaires are paying less than the average American in taxes for the first time in millions of years. And so are these companies. I mean, I'm sorry, these companies need to be paying more in taxes. They just are, man. When the owner of Amazon is a multi-trillionaire and he's cutting back health benefits for, he's not a trillionaire, but you know what I mean, for Whole Foods and stuff, which he's getting flack for right now, this is bullshit. This is bullshit. These guys need to be taxed more. They need to pay more of a contribution. Their companies need to pay more of a contribution and it's bullshit that they're not paying more taxes when it comes down to it. Anyway, those are some,

oh, there's one other story that I did want to cover. This is kind of interesting. Uber is going to be launching Uber Pet, letting users bring pets on rides without risking cancellation for $3 to $5 surcharge in select cities starting October 16th. I'm actually kind of excited about that. I have two Huskies, and I've often worried that when I travel or when I go places, if we ever broke down, especially in the middle of nowhere, if I called an Uber, if they pulled up and went, we'll let you get in and out of the sun and off the side of the road, but not your two Huskies. And I'm often worried about that if I ever needed to use an Uber.

I don't use Uber a lot because I have my own car, but if I ever needed to or got in an emergency situation, I figured I'd fall back on an Uber. But usually when I travel, I have my two dogs with me. And so this would be a great way that I don't have to worry about that sort of thing or I don't have to say to somebody, it's okay if my two dogs ride with you. So I think this is great. And I'd be willing to pay an extra three to five, $10 for that surcharge. I don't care as long as me and my dogs aren't left on the side of the road with some Uber driver going,

yeah, we can't take you. You're just like, great. We'll just die out here in the middle of nowhere. Thanks. Thanks, buddy. Thanks. I've just got people blasting by me on the freeway 5 000 miles an hour so anyway uh we're gonna go to our next episode of the show which is a separate podcast we're talking about some of the really cool crap we saw not crap come on chris don't say that on productunt.com and some of the interesting tidbits the meat if you will not the fat the meat if you will for ProductHunt.com today we'll give you some of the things we think you should

download and we won't give you the things you should ignore because you don't need to see that kind of crap anyway guys thanks for tuning in we'll see you next time