The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Censorship, Privacy, Misinformation, Weaponized Context & Other Tech News Aug 26, 2019

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

Censorship, Privacy, Misinformation, Weaponized Context & Other Tech News Aug 26, 2019

Hi folks, it's Foss here from thechrisfossshow.com, The Chris Foss Show. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly, guys, appreciate you tuning in. It is Monday, August 26, 2019. Oh my gosh, we're almost to September and you know what happens after that? The holidays. You got Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Oh my god.

You have to actually figure out which people you care about enough to want to go buy gifts and get into debt with your credit cards sorry i got everybody on the edge on that one everyone's like uh how do you tie a noose anyway guys don't do it it gets better uh you'll love it so welcome to a fun and happy monday other than my depressing lead off there be sure to give us a like subscribe to us on youtube with that bell notification youtube.com forward slash chris voss and um also subscribe to the show you know the rap uh let's see what's going on today kind of some interesting stuff in the news let's cover it uh let's start off with product hunt we like to fish through

product hunt every morning to kind of give you an idea of to i don't know stuff that might stand out uh you know and a lot of it after so much time is just kind of the same old same old at least it is in my opinion after seeing everything on the internet it seems uh but there is something for you iphone users those of you who love the apple iPhone, there's the Neural Cam Night Photo app. It's the first night mode camera for the iPhone. And so basically you can download this baby. It looks pretty good from what I'm seeing. I don't have an iPhone, so I can't test this. My apologies. But you can go to neural.cam. You can also find it in the iPhone, iPad, App Store at Apple. And it basically allows you to take brighter and clearer pictures with your iPhone in dark or low-light settings

using the latest technology based on AI and computational photography. I think it looks pretty good from what I'm seeing on their website. If it is what it is, it's getting some pretty good upvotes, etc., etc. It's got about 186 so far at 9 a.m. this morning on Mountain Time. So you can check that out and see what you think about it. Neural Cam Night Photo. Didn't see much else that kind of stuck out at me on ProductHunt.com. One thing that was an interesting offer, doesn't seem very popular, of course, but YouTube Decade.

It's basically a web app where you can go watch the most viewed videos posted exactly 10 years ago. I guess if you're feeling nostalgic, you want to go retro, you're that person who hates the future, who hates what's going on currently maybe you just want to go back to a better day where uh your president isn't tweeting crazy shit every fucking day you have to wake up to and go is is the world on fire today i'm just checking because i never know what day it's gonna be on so the amazon's on fire so we're close that's 20 of the world's oxygen according to scientists so um yeah oxygen's overrated man give it you know whatever man who needs oxygen really when it comes down to it so uh if you're feeling real nostalgic and you want to go back and watch videos of the days when maybe life was a little bit better for you and there was the innocent age of social media before

it became toxic evil and all sorts of crazy stuff was going on well you can go check that out and all that good stuff so uh youtube decade it's a web app uh so you can go take and do that you can go to youtube decade.net la fly let me see if i can redo that. Netlify.com. All right, way to make it complicated. No one will remember that. Smooth move. So that's what's on Product Hub. That's kind of some of the stuff that stuck out on me on Product Hub.

Top of the news this morning. This comes to us from Reuters.com. This is a lead off for australia is going to block internet domains that host extremist content during terrorist attacks what australia is trying to do uh and you know they've had some really horrifying uh terror attacks what they're trying to do is is limit the ability of these guys to uh become internet famous by famous by promoting their videos, live streaming on Facebook, their horrifying videos as they go. And this is what they want.

This is why they're doing these mass killings. And what's really crazy is they just want to kill more and more people because they want to be that Ripley world's leader of killing the most people they ever can so they can, I don't know, be number one on the charts, which is a very sick thing to be at and want. But clearly these individuals are sick just by the nature of what they want to accomplish and do

and the way they're getting out their personal issues and sharing it with the rest of us getting out their personal issues and sharing it with the rest of us sadly uh so this is kind of interesting um you know it's it's one of those things that were talked about in the last i think australian or new zealand attack where the videos the live videos that they uh terrorists uh did of them uh killing people and preparing for their violence, Facebook Live did, and it was shared millions and millions and millions and millions of times. What's interesting, there's been a couple articles that have come up recently where I've been reading about and it's been talking about how one of our problems

with our society and our social media thing is people are just sharing utter crap. This whole thing where people just feel the need to share so they get the most popular posts, they're spreading a lot of disinformation out there. We'll talk about that here in a second. But basically with the Australian thing, it's kind of interesting. They're really pushing to force the youtube uh facebook twitter to self-regulate even better which is really hard to do considering the amount of information that they have on their platforms the amount of information on the internet the speed of what can happen i mean how do you when you've got 50 billion uploads happening any even second that are live how do you know which one is the terrorist intent on killing people?

Prevention may be the better thing here to try and prevent these people from getting, number one, assault weapons. Number two, maybe better investment in FBI, NSA. It's been kind of interesting since the El Paso shootings, a lot of local agencies seem to be getting really vigilant at going after people that are in the fringes, people that are threats. And they've actually shut down a lot of crazy shit. I think there's been like six mass shooting guys shut down recently. And so they're getting really vigilant of that, and I would encourage a lot of these police departments to do more of that. I mean, we've just got to be vigilant. The

problem is a gun problem. No one has these sort of problems anywhere in the world, yet they have video games, they have mental health issues, they have all sorts of stuff, but they have rules and regulations that make it so that responsible gun owners uh have to be trained have to be educated etc etc uh so uh this is kind of interesting thing because here we are once again we're on this bridge of free speech and open internet and being able to say what you want and be against censorship and we don't want to be 1984 but check it out uh you know australians wants to shutter these domains well this will give a lot of regimes like iran and other countries uh an excuse to be able to anytime there's an uprising

shut down the internet and squash um squash uh you know uprising hong kong's going through that right now. The Hong Kong thing is getting more crazier. I watched over the weekend that the Hong Kong students were cutting down the polls. They have these polls throughout the thing that do facial recognition, and they started cutting down the polls. I mean, we're starting to kind of enter the violent phase of this thing where you're wondering if the military for the Chinese are going to have to intervene. And then, of course, the world's not really excited about the whole prospect of everything that's going on there as well.

So, you know, it's kind of interesting this journey we're on. That's what always interests me about this and where it leads to, where it goes to, and the different concepts that come up as we do this. You know, basically basically Australian and New Zealand are trying to deny terrorists the opportunity to glorify their crimes according to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and I get that I get that these that's what these guys are doing it for they are doing it for the glory and I like what news agencies are doing they're shutting this thing down with

saying the names of the people popularize them but still these guys are glory and i like what news agencies are doing they're shutting this thing down with uh saying the names of the people popularize them but still these guys are revered as heroes in these uh sick communities and so i i think prevention is more the cure and i'm all for police departments getting more proactive and trying to shut these guys down i hey man, if you're coming up on their radar, they need to be taking a look at you. And for a state that I'm visiting right now to write a book, there's one town I have called American Fork that's still living on revenue tickets. And they were like 15 years ago when I moved. So if you're a town that's running a police department that's living on revenue tickets, maybe you should shut that shit down and go fucking stop some crimes. There's my advice.

Because the shit's getting weird out there, man. And maybe instead of sending your cops out to do traffic stops and shit, you should just, like, try and shut down mass shootings and killers and shit. Like, it's getting out of hand. So why don't you focus on the important shit? So there's that. Australia to block internet domain hosting extreme contest during terror attacks. Let me know what you think. You can go to at Chris Voss on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera.

Give me your comments, share your ideas, what you think, good, bad, or ugly, and all that good stuff uh you know it's is it censorship i don't know it's not censorship because these are uh well it is a government shutting down a private uh entity so it is kind of a form of censorship in a way but it's like censorship of good stuff so but then you know that people that are evil will use this as like well we thought you know those that was an uprising uh because we're a horrible government so those people are terrorists no they're not terrorists they're just people that are you know using the uh will of the people to speak out against their government in a free uh society or free press and and meanwhile

they're like no they're terrorists so we're gonna have to kill them and shut down the internet so these it's a double-edged sword anyway you cut it and that's one of the issues that we have to think about and describe so basically in the news binance has launched a crypto lending business allowing holders of its bnb token eth Ethereum classic, and USDT stable coin to lend their assets and earn interest. This is a pretty cool thing that's going on in the cryptocurrency markets. And I don't know, kind of weird. I guess it's kind of like Airbnb or let's see, Turo for cars. Basically, if you've got Bitcoin laying around, you've got nothing better to do it.

You can utilize these folks' service. And there's a couple of them now, and I guess it's really getting popular. But basically, in the crypto lending space, Binance is offering interest-earning opportunities for BNB, ETC, and Ether. So if you're sitting on a bunch of your stuff, you can earn interest on it, annualized interest rates of 15%, 10%, or 7% to loan that money out. It's kind of interesting because it claims

that if you do the subscription, you have guaranteed interest, which makes me skeevy. Anytime somebody says I have guaranteed returns, that's never a good sign. But I don't know. I guess whatever. Users can subscribe to any lending product and earn interest, and they claim it's simple. The interest rate for each product is guaranteed, so your crypto balance will always grow regardless of how the market moves.

The new offering will constantly be evaluated at new coins and tokens based on demand and value, the exchange says. Now, what's interesting is the crypto lending sector is booming. Early in this month, crypto credit assessment startup Greychain published a report saying the sector is currently valued around $5 billion. I wonder if they took a check. However, lenders have earned back $86 million or 1.83 interest in interest. Two lending players, Celsius and Genesis, have the highest volume with 65% of loan originations per the report.

This is according to TheBlockCry block crypto.com this uh article that of course i'm uh narrating to you uh so pretty interesting um you know the one thing about banks is banks of course would make all their money you'd put your money in the bank and they'd loan it to you or they give you like you know well it used to be back when i was a kid six percent passbook savings account they certainly don't give you anywhere near that now. And then they would take your money and loan it out at 10, 20, 18, 30% to commercial development. And, of course, they'd make an assload of money and then pay you pennies on the dollar for using your money. What a concept.

You've got to love banks. So it looks like banking largely more and more is moving into the sphere of cryptocurrency. So you can earn money. I mean, geez, if you're sitting around a bunch of cryptocurrency just waiting for that, you know, to hit, you know, 5 million mark and everything to go crazy in the cryptocurrency markets, you can earn some interest on your thing. I am concerned about guaranteed returns. So caveat emptor, as they say in Latin, and in legal terms, let the buyer beware.

So there's my advice to you. Now, I would never, you know, we're not an investment thing, but I would never invest anything more than I would have to easily lose when it comes to doing risky or sort of speculative investments on stuff like this like I say I've been in the business for a long time I own a mortgage company for almost 20 years we are a mortgage banker I think in Vegas and you got to be careful when you hear the words guaranteed return, guaranteed interest, et cetera, et cetera. So you might want to try it, like it, see what you think, see how it goes, everything else.

I don't know, man. I don't know. It's crazy to the world, but this is a good step in the right direction to make cryptocurrency replace banking, which I am all for because i hate banking uh but we do need some more security in that market as well uh some of the things i touched on earlier in the prior story about the australian shutting down the market and you've heard me been talking about this it's almost kind of becoming a theme on the uh chris voss show we talked about how uh you've heard me mention before about how 10 years ago, 2008, I think

when I started with, in fact, you know what? The Chris Voss show is 10 years old today. The filing of the chrisfoss.com is 10 years old, I believe, sometime this month. I think on the 20th, maybe. So we missed the date, but yeah, welcome to 10 years old. And then I think the Chris Voss show podcast started a couple months later,

so I'll have to check on that. Anyway, when we started there, there was this beautiful utopia of world peace and kumbaya on us, and we're all going to be one, and social media is going to solve all the world's problems. We're all going to come together, and we're going to be one planet, and everyone's going to hold hands through social media and and we're going to overthrow governments and and evil and and uh you know as this promises wonderful new age and now it just seems to be become rotten so uh there's an interesting article you'll definitely want to read i think if you're an

educated person you want to take and read this article. It's from scientificamerica.com, and it's entitled, Misinformation Has Created a New World Disorder. Our Willingness to Share Content Without Thinking is Exploited to Spread Disinformation. You know, and it's very true. A lot of people, I'm even guilty of this too. To this day, i see some piece of information i go oh man i have something that maybe it's just fresh off the press if you will fresh off the twitter press uh and i bet no one's seen it so i should post this first so i can get

the most likes on it and i should get the most comments and people see me as someone who's really smart innovative thinker uh you know, hey, whatever. I guess it works. That's part of being an influencer if that's your thing. But, you know, also I like to educate the world, make the world smarter. So one of the reasons I share this sort of stuff is because I want everyone to be smarter so we can start having better governments, better people. We can all start being better human beings to each other. That's not a bad idea, but I do do it sometimes for the juice

or try and be there at the edge of being like a leader. But, you know, I want to lead the world to a better place, so I'm not just doing it so I'm hoping to make more, I don't know, people send me free cookies or something. Although I do like that as well because that's what the Chris Voss Show does. So you've got to read this article. It's very interesting. It talks about how we've gone from a society where we were sharing all this wonderful kumbaya stuff and then controversy. the craziness, the misinformation like we saw with the Russian campaign in 2016,

the anti-vaxxers, all this sort of stuff where we went from like, hey, we can share knowledge and we'll all be smarter and healthier and kumbaya, we'll all be better friends and crap, to holy crap, this stuff is being used by evil people against us. So there you go, man. So it's an interesting article. I highly, uh, advise that you take and read it. I found it incredibly interesting when it talks about what's going on in the world and how the world works and, uh, uh, how this information now has turned evil and we've got to start getting better at what we share. I think all of us, at least my friend groups, we've had to get more careful what we share.

There's been times where we shared stuff and then you'll look at the date and go, that was like two years ago or three years ago. I shared something the other day that was from The Onion and I knew it was old, but it was still funny. It was a recycling of a joke that was still great today. Something happened in the news cycle that brought it back, if you will, and, you know, the irony of it. So I shared a news onion thing, and people were, like, really jumping on me going, that was from four years ago. And I'm like, yeah, but it's still relevant today because the news cycle brought up the same topic and yeah those who don't learn from their history are doomed to repeat it so here we are but uh and then more and more I've I've turned to Snopes in the last year

uh to check stuff even like quotes I've had to be really careful with quotes to check quotes on Snopes and be like did they really say Um, the misinformation is out there and, uh, it seems like everyone is trying to get their angle, their spin. Uh, it used to be that, uh, there were three channels you watched on TV. Now there's 50 million people putting out 50 million platforms of information that are coming at you with all sorts of different levels of spin. And you don't know what their interests are, what sort of subtle or underhanded things that they're trying to do, propagandists, et cetera, et cetera.

It's pretty interesting. There's three categories, according to the article on scientificamerica.com, of information disorder. There's falseness, intent to harm areas with misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, which is deliberate publication of private information for personal and corporate rather than public interest,

such as revenge, porn, deliberate change of context, date or time of genuine content, uh, disinformation fabricated, uh, deliberated,

deliberately manipulated content, intentionally created conspiracy theories or rumors. Now, we're going to see more of this in the future with the disinformation of fabricated or manipulated content with AI things and people being able to make videos where it looks like you're speaking in a video and saying stuff. And they've put in whatever sort of audio they want. And your lips look like you're saying the things they want to say, which is really scary because I can make a video, post it. Someone could take and edit it and, you know, I put some racially charged stuff in there, misogynist charged stuff in there. And it's fairly good enough to the point where the average person wouldn't notice it someone could destroy people's career their lives their political uh aspirations uh with some of these stuff and it spreads so quickly through the internet uh yeah

you're just like wow okay my life's over because of misinformation. And of course, what's even sadder is there's people that do horrible, evil things they say, and they get caught doing it, and they claim that it's misinformation. So the fake news, if you will, quote unquote, gets blended up into stuff. And of course, you have falseness. You have misinformation of unintentional mistakes, such as inaccurate captions, dates, statistics, translations, or when satire is taken seriously. We've seen that. And one of the interesting things is, and I mentioned with dates,

and, of course, people cherry-pick their stats. And we've seen, I think there was one time where The Onion published some articles a few years ago, and there were some countries that took it as real news and got really angry about it. And you're like, wow, the joke's really on you. So we have to realize that there are sources out there in the thing. We have to educate our public. We have to educate our public. We have to educate our kids. I mean, school classes should now have classes that say how to, you know, determine what information is correct,

when information is highly propagandized. Um, it basically is now a system where people are weaponizing context, uh, and putting up against, uh, you guys. Uh, what's kind of interesting I don't want to get political here but I have to use this as an example is it just came out I believe let me check the source in this article but there's a source in this article which is pretty interesting and scary as to what's going on this is from the New York Times Trump allies target journalists over coverage deemed hostile to the white house. Now, this is what's actually going on guys. Kind of crazy, but let's keep this in the mind of not just politics, but what's going on. There's a network of conservative operatives that are alive with the white house. That's pursuing an aggressive operation to discredit news

organizations deemed hostile to the president by publicizing damaging information about journalists so what they're doing is they're going after journalists uh they're speaking ill about the president and of course operating within the realm of what we call the free press this is very fascist and what they're doing you know very 1984ish what they're doing is they're going after old tweets, old publications, old blogs of journalists, like going on the way back, way back and seeing if there's any sort of like tropes that they've taken done that might be racist, misogynist, things that could hurt their career.

And they're basically using that. They're weaponizing Me Too. They're weaponizing racism. They're weaponizing all that sort of stuff. And if they find like in 1995 at the beginning of the internet, you put up a tweet that, uh, you know, maybe use the N word or something like that. They're going to send that to your news organization, trying to get you fired and shut down. And it's basically a fear and terror tactic. And, uh, yeah, it's, it's basically, uh, more dissemination of information.

Hey, our guy lies. Well, we found a tweet of yours that your employee who does this, so you should fire him and wow, we win. And evidently they're doing targeting. So whoever the loudest voices are, the most powerful voices in the news environment for free press are being targeted for this. This is very scary, folks, when it comes down to it.

But I don't want to delve into politics, but realize there is this level of organized misinformation that's out there, information attack dogs that are going after stuff. And evidently, they are spinning stuff. So if you say something in the most subtlest way, they're going to try and spin it. And then what they're trying to do is put media from their end behind it to say, well, he was saying this. And this was the weaponized context, which you're going to find talked about in this article from Scientific American. So give it a read. Go to scientificamerica.com and check out misinformation has created a new world

disorder we have literally gone from this beautiful utopia of this kumbaya to now we are whatever and there's actually a deplorable interviewees talked about how they mean Donald Trump into the White House I'm not getting political again, but they claim we directed culture. So it's interesting. I mean We saw what happened in the two set 2016 Russian campaign where they use memes and a different Facebook tropes to take and go after People's prejudices and thereby elect a president that they wanted against the popular vote even, which is an even more interesting way to win.

We basically have set up the game to work against us. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes in the future, but give this a read and be careful what you share in the future. Be careful not to share, oh, this looks like a hot new item. Oh, this looks like a really controversial thing. Let me post it. And without checking the background, without checking snopes, we all have to get really smarter about what we're sharing.

I've done that and been more selective. So I advise you do that too as well to make the world a better place because it's definitely getting weird up in this place. It's getting weird up in this bitch. So let's see. What else do we have up on the news? It's kind of interesting. Google and Dell team up to unveil Latitude Enterprise-grade Chromebooks.

So that's kind of interesting if you're in the enterprise business. There's Megvi, a Chinese-based facial recognition-focused startup that files for a Hong Kong IPO. They raised $750 million, reported a $4 billion valuation earlier this year. If you haven't figured out what that means, you are going to have facial recognition used against you in the future. German court temporarily suspends a February decision from competition watch the order Facebook to restrict its data collection practice in the country is interesting fight going on in the EU and Europe according to Reuters you can check that out I mean I

don't know what to do with all that on one hand there's competition and the EU is trying to regulate it and they're trying to regulate our companies and people are trying to find what the perfect pill is for dealing with privacy and everything else definitely in discussion we need to have a discussion when you think about data collection all that good stuff Google had come out with something recently that was fairly controversial where they said they want to change cookies and they want to change some of the rules surrounding them one of the problems with it is it's basically walling off the garden where they want to restrict everyone else's tracking cookies but their own that's basically the uh knife in the velvet glove if you will uh so um

uh you know it's interesting what's going on with this world and how people are fighting over our data, over our data collection, over what we see, what we do. And we're just these, uh, poor little mice that are running through the rat cages, labyrinth, trying to get some cheese. And, uh, these guys are making billions and billions and trillions of dollars off of us. So, um, I think this is something we all need to think about, we need to discuss, we need to talk about what's important to us, and maybe keep an eye on what's going on. This is kind of interesting.

JPMorgan Chase, according to CNBC, says it will shut down its digital wallet app, Chase Pay, in early 2020, but it will continue pushing the Chase Pay button and apps on the web. I guess it didn't go over well. JPMorgan Chase has got a huge image problem, at least when it comes to normal people. They may want to work on it, although I don't think they'll be able to fix it.

Everyone sees them as the evil glorified banker, and I don't think that will change. What are you going to do uh fire eye china linked hacking groups are increasingly targeting health care systems attain medical research data and intellectual property for medical devices uh this is according to wired uk and uh they're using cyber espionage groups linked to china that are targeting medical research data and the intellectual property for medical devices. Another part, what we talked about earlier with Facebook, this is kind of scary. People are using the data against us.

Your data is becoming weaponized, and most likely it will be used against you in the future. If you look at, here's a thought that just came to me. You look at what's going on with the social Status that you can have in China where to bend upon what you shop what you buy things you watch things you do All influence your social status in China, and if you speak out It becomes hard for you to do anything social you can't write trains. You can't write fly airplanes They restrict you to your geography. They make it harder for your message to spread if you're speaking out against the

government. What if in the future they start looking at your health care? So if they look at you and decide that you're not worthy of kidney transplant, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe that affects your social status, your ability to move. If you have disease, maybe China says, oh, you have AIDS? Yeah, we're not going to let you get on trains, planes, boats, and we're going to restrict your geographic thing as well. So some scary stuff there is what's going on. And certainly one of the last vestiges of privacy you do have is your medical information, for the most part part that hasn't been hacked um so there you go uh it's it's kind of

interesting privacy you kind of notice that there's themes around this that we keep talking about the chris voss show and all these news things deal with privacy hacking disinformation weaponizing information etc etc the fight over your privacy and meanwhile where you're eating popcorn watching Netflix this is what's going on with your stuff and you might want to be a little bit more concerned about it than maybe you already are and your children's future because this is the world they're gonna grow up in and be exposed to and you know it's a kind of a form of digital slavery when you think about it we're all being sold into in the future of our

children are being sold into digital slavery I think I just coined a term anyway what else do we have here on the news thing that's kind of interesting Pew study smart from users in emerging markets have more diverse social networks than those without smartphones. Certainly, smartphones seem to be democratizing the world. But once again, here is our conversation about weaponizing information, disinformation, and making sure people have plenty of information to make the choices and decisions they want to take and do. So we have that as well.

There you have it. That's kind of some of the stuff that stuck out to me today in the news. Later on today, we're going to have a really interesting conversation with an interviewee. He's going to be on the show. I think you're going to love what's going on with him. So be sure to tune in for that as well, and you're going to learn some really cool and interesting stuff about life, business, how to be a great CEO, how to be successful, and all that good stuff. You might want to tune in for that and check it out. Be sure to go to thechrisfossshow.com.

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