The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Google Buys Fitbit, Apple TV+ Launches, China Goes 5G & Other Tech News Nov 1, 2019

Episode Date: November 1, 2019

Google Buys Fitbit, Apple TV+ Launches, China Goes 5G & Other Tech News Nov 1, 2019

Hi folks! Welcome! Welcome, welcome, welcome all! Welcome! Welcome today. It's Friday. Friday, Chris. We made it! It's Friday, and guess what? It's November 1st, 2019. What's happening today? There's a lot of really cool stuff that happens today. We'll get into some of this stuff because that's why you tuned in. We certainly appreciate you being here today. Be sure to tell all your friends to go to thecvpn.com or you can type out Chris Voss Podcast Network. You can subscribe to all the cool podcasts that we have out there in the world. So hubba freaking hubba. Anyway, let's get into tech news, what's going on in the world and some of the things that

might interest you in what's going on, social media, tech, all that sort of good stuff. Top of the thing here, this is pretty interesting, a lot of you might be Fitbit fans. According to CNBC, Google is set to acquire Fitbit at $7.35 per share in cash. I guess they wouldn't take a check. Valuing the company at about $2.1 billion. I would have thought Fitbit would be worth more than that, but I don't know. They only sell those things really cheap, so I don't know. There you go.

The acquisition pits Alphabet against fellow tech giant Apple. There you go. I mean, Fitbit has been always doing really well in giving Apple plenty of competition, the Apple Watch per se. And this gives them the ability to, you know, Google can get all this wonderful data that it can chew up and spit out. Who wants to buy this data? So Fitbits are pretty, you know, there's a lot of

data on health, a lot of data on people's exercise, what they're doing, how they're feeling. There's a whole lot of data that I'm sure that you can sell. And if you're a Fitbit user, maybe you should be concerned about what they're going to be doing with your data. Uh, yeah, that might be a concern for you. That's all I'm saying. So anyway, that's what's going on with Google. Let me know what you think about that. Also on The Verge, Facebook and Google self-employed band can lead to problems with political ads in Washington state. There's a great story on there which led to an uneven enforcement and confusing rules. This is a cautionary tale for 2020 where I guess what was going on in Washington State, according to the article that we had on The Verge, was basically some people weren't following the rules.

So there was a self-imposed ban and people weren't following the rules. Now, given it's a self-imposed ban, so a self-imposed ban, everybody has to agree to follow the rules but if facebook or twitter at twitter of course in this case says they will not take political ads then there you go uh i don't know there might be people that uh go on twitter and try and cheat maybe maybe cheat and take and uh put up an ad that is they claim is political. I'm sure somebody's going to find a way around this one to try and get this going on. Of course, Facebook is still taking ads. They were the ones who contributed most to the Russian influence on the 2016 election. So we'll see how that goes with them and everything else.

I don't know, man. I mean, everyone's going to follow the rules. Everyone's going to have a certain level of, well, we need to be and operate with integrity. I certainly think the people that don't operate with integrity shouldn't be working for us. Remember that? They work for us. So there's that. Mark Zuckerberg, during the earnings call this week uh defended politicals um ads on the policy of facebook and um you know here's here's the thing about this revenue it represents

less than 0.5 percent of the company's revenue in 2020 so mark zuckerberg is fighting you know in this issue that he sat with the new news tab about how Breitbart's on there and a few other fake-ish news sites. This is a lot of revenue. Why bother fighting with this for 0.5 whatever? I mean, if you were Mark Zuckerberg, here's what you'd do. You'd go, look, man, my site is getting beat up. People are sick of me after the 2016 election throwing that whole wrench in the thing and now they're worried about me doing it in 2020 uh facebook's already taking a huge beating as a

monopoly there's a bunch of uh there's a bunch of attorney generals lining up against you hey man just kick the court on the political shit you'll make every people a lot more happy i'm seeing all my friends just raging on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. They're really unhappy that Facebook is going to allow people to post bullshit lies on their ads. And you know what? It's not worth it, man. I got to tell you, I've owned companies in the past where the liability just was not worth the income and the pain in the ass that it created. And it was always interesting once you cut off that pain in the ass part of it, the business, wow, it just, you can focus on the better parts of your business and your reputation,

your PR, everything else. I mean, Twitter got a huge PR win off this thing. I mean, huge. I mean, people are just going, yay, Twitter. And, you know, Twitter's been a clown car that crashed into success. Like, forget who coined that term. I think it was a book who wrote about the history of Twitter. I mean, they're just one muck up after another over there at Twitter. And so this is a huge PR boon for them. So Mark Zuckerberg hopefully wakes up.

I hope that more social networks go, Hey man, this isn't worth the effort. You know, they're, they're constantly getting bashed by the left and then they're getting bashed by the right. And you favor the right. I mean, if you even left, Hey, just fucking knock off the ads, just be what everyone likes you to be, you know, post family pictures. Everyone argues over stuff. And then, I don't know, you sell our data and our soul. So you may have heard Ad Jack on Twitter announced this week that he'd be stopping to accept all political and issue ads on his platform starting on November 22nd, which is kind of weird. What were they waiting for? I don't know.

So it'll be good. It'll be good. Let's kill all those political ads. You know what used to drive me crazy? I'll tell a story that used to piss me off. Back in the day, this is going way, way back when you had caller ID just barely coming onto the market. I had a big mortgage company and a huge telemarketing arm that did the telemarketing for the mortgages. And they enacted the Do Not Call call DNC, I believe it was

called the DNC database, the FTC did, I think it was. And, you know, they basically, Congress created this law saying, you know, if someone, if you call someone and they say, take me off your list, you have to take them off the list. If you keep calling them, it can be like, you know, thousand, 10,000 bucks in penalties, etc., etc. And there were certain rules, and people could register their number if they didn't want to be called. I don't know where the hell that thing went, because if you're like me, your phone's getting blown up 10 times a day by robodials. But what really pissed me off is they put this rule in place,

and the dirty politicians exempted themselves from it. So basically the politicians could make robocalls so they could get reelected, but anybody else trying to make a buck, you know, had to follow the rules. I really hate that. So I love this whole idea of just dumping political ads. Good. Uh, nine to five is reporting that Apple TV Plus launches with nine original titles in 100 countries for $4.99 a month or $50 a year. It's actually, I don't know, with one year free on the purchase of a new Apple device. Wow, so if you purchase a new Apple device, it's like basically getting $50 off? The Apple's new streaming service apple note plus uh i'm gonna have to check that out and see what i think uh i don't know if it's

just nine original titles or if i don't know what you get for 4.99 i gotta find out why don't you find out chris and then tell us how it is i don't know man i'm not a real big Apple fan. But what do I know? What do I know? The Apple TV app. Can I use this on my Samsung phone? So basically, they're giving you Apple TV Plus. It costs $4.99. Seven-day free trial.

And what else does it have on it? Annual plan, 12 months. Switch to end of plan. It says that affecting your free trial. Single TV subscription. Av available, 100 countries. I don't care. Like I'm not traveling to 100 countries this week. Uh, and what does it tell you? It launches with eight shows in one movie today.

So wait, I'm just buying eight shows in one movie. That's four. That's $5 a month. What? Apple's released all 10 episodes for the period drama Dickinson. And I guess they're just launching a few shows. I thought it would be like Apple TV would be like Apple TV. I don't know whatever

you can check it out if you're an apple fan you're probably gonna like this stuff i mean what don't you like about apple at this point really uh according to vice a scam spanning eight u.s cities nearly 100 listings shows how easy it is to exploit air and bees poorly written rules through phony listings and fake reviews. Wow. Wow. So people are grifting people with Airbnb through phony listings and fake reviews. I guess that's the new bait and switch. That's the new eBay scam where you buy something or you go on Craigslist, you buy something. I remember the story of the iPads back in the day.

People would buy them and then they'd open them up and they're like, oh crap, there's a brick in here. I should have checked it. So there's that. This is interesting. Washington Post. China's three state-backed wireless carriers launch 5G in some cities ahead of original 2020 date.

China Mobile aims to bring 5G to 50 cities by year's end. Holy crap, people. The Chinese are ahead of us. In fact, there's some European countries that also have 5G as well. So, wow, man, we got to catch up, eh? We got some catching up to do back in these things. Now, we get phones from AT&T to review. We just got into reviewing the wonderful Pixel for Excel it's a good phone I used

it for a little while and I flipped back to my notes the battery life is just so much better they need to come out with something to fix the battery life on the on the pixel force and so I end up going back to it the other big downer for me was it lacked fingerprint I really like fingerprint the facial recognition is really good but if you like wake up in the middle of night check your phone like I do for emails and everything else you have international clients you you know it doesn't recognize your phone in the dark very well and so and then there's other apps that I like to open

like you know my banking apps, my Starbucks apps, opens with the fingerprint. So not having fingerprint really is a big downer. But the battery burn on it is a real problem. I'm not sure what the deal is. I turned off Bluetooth and was turning off a lot of different things. I don't know. Hopefully they'll come up with a thing for it.

And the reviews are killing it over that and how small the battery is it just doesn't really be competitive when it comes down to it but if you like pixels you can try it out and see what you think I thought the camera on the phone is wonderful the personal shooting

or the portrait shooting is amazing with the bokeh it creates and it creates just a really sharp picture that seems to be unedited, like a real natural picture. And then the night mode is really cool, too. It takes a really great night picture. So you can see that review on the Chris Voss Show if you want. What else do we have up on the news?

Los Angeles Times is reporting that GitHub is doubling down its ICE contract. That's the immigrant group there that runs the government-run immigrant group that rounds people up and deports them and handles people that are coming to the country, legally or illegally. Anyway, they're defending their contract. It came out they had an ICE contract, and they were renewing it, and they got a whole lot of social media bashing for it.

They're saying that the cancellation could hurt the immigrants, that we all want to help an internal memo amid rising employee anger. I guess their employees are not happy about the whole thing. So that's kind of interesting. What else do we have on its thing Google Maps help Google has started rolling out incognito mode for Google Maps on Android which users activity will not be saved to their Google account so when you turn on incognito mode your activity and maps like places you search or get directions to won't be saved your google

account this will be great for every guy or gal wife or husband who's got that mistress or pool boy on the side you don't want your wife trying to hang over in a barbara's again hey shut it quit saying barbara oh geez there he is right on the map um especially when she hacks in your account because she knows your password and she puts your finger on your fingerprint button while you're asleep. There you go. So that's kind of interesting. This is also, this blew my mind. The BBC is reporting an investigation that finds domestic workers in Kuwait

are bought and sold online through Instagram. They're promoted via hashtags and other apps, Play Store and App Store. So I guess these women are sold behind closed doors. They're deprived of their basic rights. And it's like an underground network of course it's not really underground i guess if it's being used on instagram so uh buying and selling of domestic workers wow okay and they just have all these people and you can go through and it's basically an online slave market it's really weird to me that in 2019,

we haven't figured out how to stop all this crap. Are you slaves and stuff? Oh, wow, this is interesting. Nine out of 10 Kuwaiti homes have a domestic worker. They come from some of the poorest parts of the world, the Gulf, aiming to make enough money to support their family at home. So I guess their human rights are being violated.

And basically they buy and sell these domestic workers and they put him through hell so they treat him like horrible crap and the people are trying to get their money back to their family no sleep no food nothing I guess they I guess what they do is they exploit them they come here hoping to make a buck to send home their family and then were trapped in a slave sort of situation they don't get paid and uh they probably their visa's taken away that's a big thing in dubai uh they take away their visas the employers do there and then the people can't leave they can't go home they can't prove who they are they don't have any identity it's really messed up

some evil stuff in this world uh and all that good stuff so um what else do we have that stuck out in us as well um some of the different news and whatever we're seeing i don't nothing's really sticking out to me stuff that i want to take and talk about or stuff that we have already covered we'll be coming up with a a new an extra feature of course of the show in a separate episode uh with product hunt we'll be reviewing some of the things we thought stuck out with us on Product Hunt today and maybe through the rest of the week or last week and just kind of give you an idea of maybe some good little different toys and things you can take and get of. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in.

Be sure to give us a like. Subscribe to us on YouTube.com. For us, that's Chris Voss. And hit that bell notification so you can see all the wonderful reviews from AT&T pixel and all that sort of good stuff that we are up to. We're getting ready to go to a really cool show. Probably SEMA in Las Vegas. It's huge automotive show.

And then CS is coming up. Oh my gosh. The consumer electronics show 2020. I can't wait. My feet hurt already. No, but it's really a lot of fun and it's crazy huge. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.