The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Holiday Gift Guide 2020 Overview

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

As we approach the Holidays, The Chris Voss Show has now reviewed products over 11 years and nearly 8000 Articles and Videos. These are some of the products we reviewed this year that stand out to us AND MANY TIMES WE USE DAILY! Keep in mind these are the products we ONLY have reviewed and in many cases, they make the best products we love across their whole product lines. If you think a product should be on the list, sorry may have not reviewed it and kicked its tires around for worthiness. As we keep getting in review units, we'll keep updating this list up the Holidays so bookmark it and stay tuned. Be sure to subscribe to our 9 Podcasts at TheCVPN.com iFi Audio NEO iDSD desktop DAC/amp. This years most favorite product has MQA decoding, DAC/amp and rich with audio features. With Tidal music service having Masters MQA files, this is an amazing product to help you re-enjoy and re-discover your audio files. iFi Audio makes great audio products that will take your music to the next level check it out at: https://amzn.to/3oBMPF9 Vanatoo Transparent One Encore Powered Speakers & Vanatoo Transparent Zero Powered Speakers. This year our 7 year old desktop speakers from Vanatoo got an update and WE LOVE THEM! Check out our reviews and both sets of speakers from them. https://amzn.to/39VZ6An Master & Dynamic - M&D through its whole product line makes some of my most favorite products. The attention to detail is immaculate and a great designed spectrum of consumer sounding headphones is incredible. If Steve Jobs made headphones he would make these. This year, M&D launched more favorites: MH40 Wireless &MW65 ANC headphones. Then MW07 wireless earphones in a beautiful variety of models, MW07, Plus and Go. I joke every holiday "If you truly love someone get them something from Master & Dynamic." I personally love my MH40s the most (5 years old and still look new), but the new MW40 Wireless has me in love along with the great for travel MW65 ANC's. And you cant beat the cool personal looks of their new MW07 line. https://amzn.to/2QWN1kG The Astell & Kern KANN ALPHA Portable High Resolution Audio Player has been blowing our audio minds. Makes MQA files sound like magic and such an exceptional build. A must have if you can afford it. https://amzn.to/2W9k9qV OWC - Other World Computing send us some great stuff this year and as always they make a top of the line premium products. From the OWC SSD's that we use for Gaming and running our office computers, to their Thunderblade storage units, the Thunderbolt hubs docs, drive swapping backups, everything they build is super high quality and exceptional standards. The Chris Voss Show office is filled with their products that keep us running strong. Everything you can buy there is top shelf. We love em. https://amzn.to/34w8eWz Loved Ecovacs robots for years and use them daily in my home/office. Their new model that vacuums and mops at the same time is amazing. https://amzn.to/2VYldhq Kensington - We reviewed so many great things for home and office this year from Kensington. Buy anything, great stuff and search the reviews on the show. https://amzn.to/36YXrrO Peak Design - For all the years we've been reviewing Peak Design just everything is always top notch quality. Buy anything there. https://amzn.to/37SPd3y Litra - The Litra Studio and all their products kick butt. Great for photographers or just Zoom calls can make everything you do more professional. https://amzn.to/3h0FnRf Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own - The Book of the Year for me. Introducting me to James Baldwin by the exceptional Eddie S. Glaude Jr. was a life impactor. I wish I'd discovered his writings and appearances earlier. Must read!https://amzn.to/36XYHvb Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat - To me this is a MUST READ for what is going on right now ...

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hey guys, Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. We will probably have a fairly light schedule of book author guests over the holidays.

It looks like our schedule is firming up and most people don't want to be interviewed for their books and different things until after the first. We have a big July ahead of us, not only on the schedule for book authors, but CES, the CES show. We will have a ton of coverage for CES show, so watch for that as well. And, of course, I'll be on talking about different things. There's a few authors that we have in between now and then. But stay with us, hang with us, and watch what we'll be doing,

especially after the new year. It'll be pretty exciting. We had a great last half of the 2020 year, changing our format a bit and opening it up to a much more mainstream and broader people that were coming on as guests. Be sure to go back and watch a lot of the shows on 2020 if you're missing them. There's over, I think there's 700 or more shows now on the Chris Voss Show.

You can go back and review them all. The blueberry pot thing that we use to broadcast to iTunes and stuff, iTunes only will carry 300. But if you want the other 400, they are on the chrisfossshow.com. So you can go back and listen to those. You can search for maybe guests that you wanted to see or find old shows, etc., etc., some of the things we've been talking about the last few years. But just some great guests that we had on the show.

Today, we're going to talk about our holiday gift guide for 2020. We've been trying to put it together with all the stuff that we reviewed that we just loved over this year, and I think we got most of it in the can of what we wanted to cover. There might be a few stragglers we might add to this list. You can go to the Chris Voss Show and search Holiday Gift Guide 2020 and see the list of different products that we put up there. So we're going to walk through them today and give you guys the ideas of what we want. Now, keep in mind, the Chris Voss Show has been around for 11 years.

There's over 8,000 articles and videos that have been produced. I think we're going on 12, actually, next year. Wow, I feel old. And the list that we have for a holiday gift guide is not a paid list. They don't pay to get on it. A lot of times when you see like, you know, some big paper or whatever, the people pay to get on that list. We don't do the cheap stuff on the list. Like here's gifts you can buy under $15. I really don't give a shit about that stuff. That's just how I feel. And, yeah, there you go.

We're not, we don't do a lot of affiliate linking, although we do do affiliate linking to Amazon on the list. But, like I said, we're not looking like, here's everything under $15. Here's under $30. Here's everything, you know, all that noise. Look, we're just making a gift guide. A lot of the gift guide that we have or all of the gift guide we have has been reviewed by the chris vosh show so there's maybe a lot of

products out there you're like chris why didn't this product make the list probably because they didn't send it to us to review either company uh didn't get it to us or we didn't ask for it somehow or another it didn't make into our grubby little hands to review so um there's that the second part of it is is a lot of these stuffs that i recommend on the holiday gift guide every year are products that i use in my office on my desk every day they're products i am in love with and they make all the difference in my life. And most every product that you're going to find on this list, I use on a daily, daily basis. And this episode is brought to you by IFI Audio and their new Neo IDSD. The Neo is the new wave of digital sound listening for your desktop,

music, gaming, and bleeding edge Bluetooth, even MQA audio file decoding. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. So let's get to it. Top of the list has been the IFI Audio Neo IDSD Desktop DAC Amp. Now, they're one of the sponsors of the podcast.

You may be hearing them on the last bunch of podcasts, probably a few more as their ad run runs. I got to tell you, I asked these guys to sponsor the show because I was so in love with their products. We reviewed a number of them over the last year. But we've been getting more into this new format of MQA files. If you're not familiar with MQA audio file format, I encourage you to do so. We're preparing a show that we're going to do. We're going to talk about MQA, explain it to you, give you the details, show you how it

wraps out. But basically, these are super high qualityquality audio files, probably the closest thing you get to masters. They're even better than FLAC files and SACD files, etc., etc. So if you get a chance, Google MQA files, audio files, and kind of understand what they're about. There's actually a governance body that invented it and oversees it and everything else. If you don't have a Tidal account, you should go to the Tidal app. We've had one for a lot of years. They have master formats on there. In fact, Tidal should be on the holiday gift guide list.

And those will play MQA files. If you see master at Tidal, they're the only streaming service that I know of that has them in America. I believe there might be one overseas, but I can't get signed on to verify that because i don't live overseas so i'm just going to say that for that now what you need to really listen and appreciate mqa files is an mqa file decoder uh preferably a really good dac and other different services you can take and get uh one of the companies that makes great decoders, you can find a whole bunch of them on the MQA website, is IFI Audio.

And they have built this beautiful device that either sits landscape or horizontal on your desktop. You can plug your headphones into it. It takes multiple inputs and outputs and everything else. You can get into that on the full review that we did. But it gives you a beautiful MQA decoding, a DAC amp, rich audio features. I've been loving it. I just love the crap out of it.

You know, so much of my music I've had for decades because, you know, there's certain things I still listen to. And I don't really pick up anything new. If you're like me, you just stick with your favorites. But a lot of it I've heard so many times, I kind of burn out on most of the music that I had in my library of collection. This has enabled me to go back to my music and really start enjoying it and really start hearing bits of my music that I never, ever heard before because of the extreme detail that comes with these MQA files.

So I definitely highly recommend you check this out, IFI Audio Neo IDSD Desktop DAC Amp. They sell a plethora of different other products and comparison things you can take and get. This is one of their newest products out. It will give you the highest resolutions out there with 32-bit and 76, 76 take and get. This is one of their newest products out. It will give you the highest resolutions out there with 32-bit and 76, 768 kilohertz. It will kick butt for you.

Go see the full review on it. It's worth every dime that you can spend. Beautifully built. The sound quality is exceptional. To me, it's one of the best things I've experienced this year and continue to experience. And it sure makes a difference when you're trying to get through the coronavirus quarantines. Just improve the quality of your life.

And please, don't listen to MP3 files and think they're the greatest audio files in the world. Or any of those low-quality things. You will thank me if you really understand this technology and can appreciate it with some good headphones. We'll talk about those in a second. Next up, Vana 2 Transparent 1 Encore powered speakers and the cheaper version they have of them, but still just as beautifully well made, the Vana 2 Transparent 0 powered speakers. Seven years ago, I was contacted by one of my friends who's a PR agent for the Vana2. It was a brand new company out. It was started by, if I recall correctly, two engineers. And these guys were extraordinary in their expertise. And they'd been building speakers for other companies.

And they wanted to make a new set of speakers and they wanted to do it right. And they wanted to, you know, make sure it had everything in there and they didn't want to cut corners for quality and everything else so they built this company vonitu i got one of the original sets of speakers called the uh the vonitu uh transparent ones uh and literally they have sat on my desk for seven years. Now what's funny about these speakers that will blow your mind is they literally were on 24-7 most all those seven years. I didn't put them on any sort of thing. I didn't turn them off when I went to bed at night. They literally sat on the whole time.

On top of that, usually something was powered in the back. These things had all sorts of stuff in the back of it, all sorts of different outputs and inputs and everything else, subwoofer, all that sort of good stuff. And one of the things they had was a power converter or power output there. So you literally had a plug there. So if you wanted to plug in your laptop or some sort of other feature on your desktop, you could, you could use that outlet. And I did use that outlet for seven years, seven years. Those babies were for me. They even fell over, got dropped a couple of times and moving. Uh, they were heavy as bricks and they still to this day, if you look at them and I kind of blow the dust off and clean them up a little bit, you will think they're almost brand new. Uh, they're just extraordinary. The sound on them was extraordinary kind of blow the dust off and clean them up a little bit, you will think they're almost brand new.

They're just extraordinary. The sound on them was extraordinary. And as the Chris Voss show, we get all these companies that send us all these products to review. So I've gotten a ton of desktop speakers. And we've had some really great companies send us desktop speakers. They just have not been able to beat the Vonatoos. And the Vonatoos have been here for seven years on my desk they're one of the products that when people see them or hear them they're like can I get those from you

and I'm like nope there's like it's one of those products where you're where I'm like over my dead body you'll have to take it from my pry it from my hands um it's one of those it's one of my choices valuable valuables of things we know when you get those things where people go if you were stuck on a dead desert island only could take like a few things like this would be one of them if i could take you know the other basics um the uh so check them out they have come up with an updated model, I believe last year, Vana 2 Transparent 1 Encore. And, boy, did they smack that baby out of the park. The extraordinary amount of stuff they put into it.

It's just not a desktop speaker. It is an extraordinary buffet of features, remote control. They added Bluetooth. They added an auto feature where you will uh you can you know pair it with multiple products like your laptop or multiple computers you have on your desk and it will switch between the ones that are geared into it just extraordinary and the sound is exceptional the speaker quality built into is exceptional i love looking at them without the grills on they're just so beautiful everyone who sees them are like what the hell is that um and so they're awesome so check out vana 2 transparent one on course power

speakers they do sell a cheaper version these are quite expensive and they're worth every penny you'll pay if not more i mean geez i think mine were 500 bucks the original ones back seven years ago what's 700 bucks divided by seven or 500 bucks divided by seven i mean literally the value is there people uh you i gotta tell you there's times in my life where i've spent a lot of money for really good products and you go wow that's a lot of money spent for that right now but the products that are built with high quality they go the distance and they'll make all that difference for you high quality they go the distance and they'll make all that difference for you um next up on the recommended product list for holiday gift guide 2020 is another product that's very similar master and dynamic google master and dynamic

you can see this on the website as well for us and everything else. This is another company that years and years, I think five or six years now ago, gave me one of their original starting headphones, and I was just blown away at the amazing love, care, engineering, design. For years I told people that if Steve Jobs had made headphones, the master dynamic would have been headphones in fact if steve john made desktop speakers they would have been the vonitus um so uh for five years i wore the same headphones and beat the crap out of them uh and loved loved every bit of them uh And they survived and performed well and everything else.

And we reviewed a number of their other products. They made earbuds, and they made other great headphones like Bluetooth and ANC headphones for noise canceling and everything else, all different variations. In fact, they make a lot of different kind of skins, if you will, like the Rolling Stones and Leica cameras and stuff. So really cool product product very well designed the sound spectrum on it is exceptional and at the 300 range i've just found they're one of the best sounding headphones i've i've ever experienced 250 i think is now you can now get them for but three 250 300 range uh you really don't get good headphones and as far as i'm concerned unless you pay uh 250 to 300 there's a few exceptions but i don't know about the quality or long term

of the build uh but i have heard some pretty good sound spectrums um and the 100 to 150s but it's really rare and i don't i don't know if they'll go the distance for years and years and years and sometimes you lose you get the sound spectrum but you lose the beauty and these things are real beautifully made and the engineering that goes into just the finite detail so master and dynamic headphones any of their headphones are beautiful my favorites are the mh40s wired um i use the mh40s uh wireless for when i want to move around wireless uh or i want to do phone calls I use that for a lot of phone calls the MW65s are really freaking awesome with their ANC I used to use that when I traveled on planes and different things I don't travel so much anymore but if you want to get rid

of the noise in your background and you want to hear some great sound spectrums master dynamics so there you go one of the new things that we just got done reviewing that made the list at the last minute was the estelle and kern con alpha this thing is incredible and it's followed us down the road where i talked about earlier we're talking about mqa files where we're talking about high-quality sound, 32-bit, and all that sort of good stuff. The Estelle and Kern ConAlpha made our list this year. Now, it is $1,099 for this portable audio player, and that seems quite an extensive high price

unless you study high-quality, high-resolution MQAs, sort of decoding files, et cetera, et cetera. This thing is amazing. It will work with all your streaming services. It will act as an audio player. It's got a built-in battery to it. The design of it, just from the look of it, is impeccable. The UI that's in it for the software is excellent.

You can download your files to it. You can download files off of the services of course like title and Spotify I don't know why you do Spotify but there you go you put an MS a micro SD card in the bottom of it it shows you different colors and the dial the volume as to what quality of file you're playing or what type just Just an extraordinary thing. It's got a touchscreen on it that you can take and use. But the sound quality that it's going to put out,

it actually has two DACs built into it and an extraordinary list of other measurements. Go see the review on the Chris Foss Show. The Estelle and Kern Con Alpha, portable high-resolution audio player. I got to tell you, this thing is an exceptional piece of equipment. Highly, highly recommend it. Sell a kid, sell a kidney, get one.

You'll, I don't know, you may die because you only have one kidney, but you'll at least hear some great music before you die or as you're dying. So there you go. Maybe don't sell the kidney. Maybe sell like a kid or something. I don't know. Something like that. Something you won't miss or something you at least tune out the audio with.

I'm being awful, aren't I? Next up on the list, OWC, Otherworld Computing. Otherworld Computing sent us a ton of products. Go to the Chris Voss show up in the right-hand corner. There's a search mechanism. You can see all the hubs that we reviewed. You can see all the products that we reviewed you can see all the all the products that we review just a ton of stuff from motobc we get a ton of stuff from them every year uh these

are this is a company that puts a lot of impeccable quality and concern into their products their customer service is exceptional um these guys really care in In fact, we reviewed the CEO and I believe the vice president over the past few years on the show. And just really great people. The vision that they put into it. Exceptional company. They build high quality stuff. If you have Mac computers,

they have a whole different thing of Mac products you can check into. But they've started to make more PC friendly stuff like hubs and USBb micro usbs uh different uh one thing we reviewed this year that i think was uh fairly new to them was like raid devices and stuff like that for backups and and stuff so check out all the reviews there's a ton of them ton of products anything from odbc we recommend i mean they're just that good of a company uh next up is ecovacs ecovacs robots um we just got done reviewing one of the latest robots this thing

is crazy it actually vacuums and mops at the same time vacuums and mops at the same time who knew i didn't even know that was a thing i when they first sent it to me i'm like oh i guess i gotta do the mop i gotta do the vacuum part first because it has two different cartridges that comes with it and then i guess i'll mop after that and uh i did that like an idiot you know testing it that's how we do things kick the tires but in doing that uh i was like oh my gosh, it vacuumed too. And it put it in a separate bin. Like it didn't make some nasty wet vacuum bin.

I was like, holy crap, that's brilliant. So there you go. These have been very popular with the COVID coronavirus quarantines. People have been at home more. The home's getting more traffic and more dirty, I'm sure. The kids are tracking more stuff and dogs if you're like me. So you need one of these to help maintain and probably help whoever is doing the home cleaning at home from losing their mind, whoever that is. Because God knows if you're quarantined at home with people, you don't want people losing their mind and going all the shining on you.

Ecovacs, we've had their products for a lot of years. We've viewed a lot of other great robot vacuums. We didn't get any this year from anybody, which was kind of a bummer, even though we reached out to them. But on top of that, I gave my mother one of these Ecovacs, and she loves it. I mean, she loves it. In fact, there's been a couple times where I'm like, hey, do you want me to see if we can, are you using that? Or can we get rid of it? She's like, you can't take my Ecovac.

My mom doesn't talk like that, but she says that. Which means she loves it. She loves her little robot, which is really funny. She's 78 and it took her a little while to get used to that. She's like, now what does it do uh but but she loves her eco vac and i think that's it's a good endorsement uh which means we've had them for years we've used them for years and they've been a great product there's been a few other good robot vacs we've had but i gotta tell you eco vac just keeps coming through for us and the new mop thing which is this is mind-blowing we're like

what the mops and vacuums at the same time? Check out Ecovacs. The other great thing about Ecovacs is they make really good robot vacs, and they're really inexpensive, and they seem to hold up to abuse. Next up on the list, Kensington. Kensington is a company, they send us tons of stuff. If you go search for them on the Chris Foss Show, you'll find a ton of hubs that we reviewed.

They've really gotten, they're really killing it on hubs. In fact, they're killing it on a lot of office products, and now you call them home office products. Just a plethora of stuff that we've reviewed from Kensington. They make really good quality stuff. We love their products. They're always pretty rock solid on their stuff. In fact, I can't think of any that haven't been. but we've always loved their products they do a really good job go check them out search for kensington uh whether it's hubs or home office equipment or anything else

you might need we even had something come today this year that was a a stand that to for your monitor and underneath it is an air filter so it cleans your air so you can breathe well and stuff breathing is important especially if you i don't know smog and all that kind of crap that's in our next up on our list peak design peak designs made the list uh several times over the years they make incredible bags uh early on a lot of them were kind of angled towards photographers they had the velcro insides where you can make and shape different shells and compartments. These guys still, to this day, six or seven years later, I think when we first reviewed them when they started out, it's kind of interesting.

A lot of these great products that I found, they almost make the list every year or do make the list every year. And I've been reviewing them since their inception. They're just the people who made them I've met and gotten to know, and they really care about making high-quality products, and they don't make garbage. So Peak Design has always done that, reviewed I think two or three of their bags this year. Extraordinarily well-built, everything you could think of.

In fact, I still had my old bags and i wouldn't part i didn't really want to part with them but i got the new ones and went yeah i guess i'll move to the new ones yeah yeah um uh they're they're a highly loved bag just incredible bag this is another product where people call me up and they're like hey can i buy your peak design i'm like no screw you there's not i don't know Go get your own. So love the designs. Love the quality of the build. Love the distance it will take and go for you. If you're looking for messenger bags, backpacks, and other products along those lines that they have on their thing,

they even have some tripods and different stuff they've been expanding into. Check out their products. These guys really think their stuff through. Coming down last on the list, there's three more items. Let's go through them. One of the other products we want to talk about is a company called Skyroam. We reviewed their Skyroam Solus X Wi-Fi Smart Spot. For years, we've worked with AT&T.

AT&T has been giving us bandwidth for a lot of years. But recently this year, they kind of dialed some of that back. And in fact, you know what? AT&T didn't make the list this year. Oops. And we love AT&T. We love their service. We love their phones and everything else.

The Chris Foster needs bandwidth on the road. So we sat down and said, how can we travel once the COVID virus is over and do all the things we used to do with our bandwidth, et cetera, et cetera. And then we discovered this company called Skyroam. And you can use their service in 135 plus countries around the world, which is going to be great for when we have to travel to CES and NAB and different shows in the future. It's going to be great when we need to go to other countries and everything else.

We've been looking for something like this. And one thing that's impressive, there's a lot of different services to do this. What's impressive about these guys is they have everything built in this unit. They actually have a built-in camera. It's got a built-in file system. It's more than just taking a hub with you and actually you can put your files on it you can use it as a networking hub uh you can use it as a as multiple people to dial into it and it's really easy to take with you just

throw it in your pocket or whatever um and works really well the customer service is excellent as well um and since since I mean it just reached a point where we use Google Voice all the time so most all of our calls are internet calls from from our companies and our messaging systems and stuff everything is Google Voice and so really using these guys when we go out has been just wonderful it's fairly cheap you don't pay a fortune in you know all the taxes and the services and all that crap when you sign up with the you know any one of the big carriers you just pay you buy the unit i think you pay like i mean an

activation fee uh you'll have to look it up on the website you just pay like for what you use like for example i think it's like nine dollars for a gig or something like that and uh if you don't use a lot or if you're not watching videos or you're driving down the road or you know whatever you may have um it will kick butt for you and it'll do a great job and it pulls into 4g um you know if you're looking to save money on what you're paying for mobile phone bills this probably is a good rendition. Um, I haven't had a mobile phone bill for at least 10 or 11 years. And I've been loving this thing because I don't have to really deal with it. It tells me how much is in the gigabytes are in this storage and how much I have to use. And once it's used,

throw another nine bucks, 50 bucks in it or whatever and get the storage you don't have to worry about it ending every month and taking away your stuff i mean i love it it's pretty awesome so check it out sky roam solus x they even have a cheaper one that does a little bit has a lot more limited stuff to it next up guys on our product list for uh 2020 holiday uh a company we've been reviewing for quite some number of years we actually use their lights all around the studio uh company is called litra at litra.com you can go check them out and they make an assorted number of uh really cool products uh ones that have magnets on the back that you can stick to things almost anywhere that's

metal so you can get really cool lighting angles they just came out with a new product recently uh called the lycra studio and it's really really awesome you'll see the reviews for that coming up on the chris voss show and they have the little uh lycra small units that are really fun we like to play with those the lycra torch 2.0s and and a lighter pros these things are pretty darn amazing they even have something new called the light mod Zeus mini LED these are great little lights you can use for like your zoom calls if you want to light yourself up you'd be surprised how much better you look on zoom those zoom calls if you put some light on your face they've got some

different packages you can take and get our bundles if you will different accessories on how to port the light, direct the light, use different color shaders, et cetera, et cetera. Go to the website, lycrapro.com. Check out their products there. We highly recommend them. We've been really impressed with the Lycra Studio. This thing is really amazing.

And, of course, you can use an app to control a lot of these devices, which is really neat as well uh so check them out we highly recommend them and think they should be a part of your collection for this holiday season or gifts that you want to give to maybe your favorite photographer or you want to use them for your zoom calls i mean look you'd be surprised how much better you'll look if you get good light on your face and of course i'm sure the people on the other end will be appreciative of it and it'll be wow, that person's really got their zoom calls together. Uh, the last two items on the list, we might add one or two items that we'd seen that we were asking people to send to us that we think would make the list, but we haven't seen yet. The last two items that

made the list are books. We had, we had some extraordinary book authors on, and I loved every single one of them. And I felt bad about putting these two book authors and books on the list because there's probably, oh, God, just all of them. We didn't have anybody on that was just really that I didn't like or didn't appreciate having on or I didn't learn so much from. But I had to pick something that changed my life this year and I think would change yours. That's kind of the criteria of what it came down to. There's so much good data out there, so much. And we bragged on all of it. So if you're an author out there that didn't make these two lists, we bragged on you.

We talked about you. In fact, this book, the first book i'll talk about we talked about almost every podcast that had to do with racism or politics or different things on that line it had an incredible influence on us the first book in the list was begin again by eddie eskalaw jr eddie is probably the um baldwin james baldwin of our time i had never heard of james baldwin up until now i skipped college and went uh right into business at had never heard of James Baldwin up until now. I skipped college and went right into business at 18. Never heard of him. Hadn't been exposed to him.

When I first saw Eddie's book, when he was promoting on Morning Joe, which I watch every morning, I looked and said, who's that weird man sitting there? I didn't really get it. And I'm like, well, when Eddie's books come out, I'll buy it and find out more of who this James Baldwin character is. Through serendipity of the coronavirus epidemic and us changing the format of the show, we had Eddie on. And right before that, we had the Fire is Upon Us author.

I forget his name. I want to say Thomas Bercouli. But anyway, he had an extraordinary book on where he talked about James Baldwin's famous debate in, I believe it was in England or is it Yale or Princeton? Anyway, it was a famous debate between him and the conservative who I it was, he started the nation, Buchwald. And so anyway, they had this huge debate, and it was famous, and you should go watch it if you haven't. But there's something in James Baldwin's writing that really moves me.

There's not only a logic to it, but there's also an emotion and a love to it there's a passion to it that's extraordinary in the way he communicates and it really touches and moves me irregardless of what he's talking about he just there was something he had that was very it just was really poignant in in in the being human being from an intellectual sense and also an emotional sense of being able to communicate that well um not only that you know what he talks about with racism and some of the things we've dealt with racism this year but how to resolve racism what the problems are what the uh how we should understand it um if you're if you struggle with

the empathy of of of you know why is racism a big deal or whatever the case is, get James Baldwin's work and study it. Even then, his novels are well written and people love him for that. But to me, this was the book of the year. This is the book of the year that really changed my life, had an effect on everything that was going on. Begin Again by Eddie Esclav Jr. If you're not familiar with Eddie's work, Eddie is a brilliant, he's probably the James Baldwin of our time.

He has a way of putting things so logically, brilliantly, and passionately, sometimes just on improv, that you just sit there and go, wow, that was moving and brilliant. So thanks, Eddie, for coming on our show check out his book begin a game begin again begin again James Baldwin's American it's urgent lessons for our own the extraordinary thing about the book is James Baldwin told us stuff what 70 years ago or something

Jesus 70 60 years ago that we have not lived up to. And that his same words echo that we should be trying to get to today. And that's what makes it really important. And that's what Eddie teaches us in the book from James Paul when saying is what James taught us and what we should try and get back to. So check out the book. Give it away as a gift. Highly recommend it. To me, it's the number one book changer of my life this year.

The second book is a really important book, and it came in at the last second. Strongmen, Mussolini to the President. It's by Ruth Bengate. If I'm hopefully pronouncing her name correctly, if I'm from memory, she wrote an extraordinary book. And it was a book that I had wanted written. There's been another book that I was written that was written this year was about Stephen Miller and what the Trump administration did, where this monster came from. And she wrote the whole thing of that.

I believe that was Jean her last name slipping me but this strongman book really took me I had wanted to sit down and and compare Trump's fascist authoritarian attempts and behaviors to other strongmen like Pinochet, like Duterte, like she even went so far, the Libya strongman. She went through pretty much a lot of the right-wing strongmen of the 20th century and outlined a personality profile, a behavior profile, how they operate in office, how they bend everyone to their will, how they kill their own people, and a lot of the basis for it. Male toxicity, sexism, repressing rights of women, minorities, LGBTQ,

and how usually their response to the rise of those people's rights. And so it's a male blowback, if you will. When you read it, you totally understand what brought Trump to power, how he stayed in power, and how he almost destroyed capitalism and brought this country down to its knees to fascism and everything else. It's a really good book to read also because she talks about how to prevent this in the future, how to see these guys coming. There is a profile, just like an FBI profile, of these monsters and what they do and how they kill their own people and how they get away with it.

So I highly recommend everyone read that book. There will be another Donald Trump. He will be smarter. He will have learned from Donald Trump, and he won't make the mistakes that he will be smarter. He will have learned from Donald Trump and he won't make the mistakes that he will this time. And, uh, it will be another weak moment in our history, like a pandemic, just like we saw Hungary fall with the pandemic, uh, in the democracy this year. Um, it can, and may very well happen eventually on a long enough timeline. Uh, so it's really important for people to read this book,

get familiar with what's going on, and everything else. That's my list so far of top products that we love this year that we reviewed. And I've got to tell you, that's pretty much it. The Kick Butt Holiday Gift Guide. We may update the gift guide here in the next few days. If something comes in, we've, we're a lot of really cool stuff.

We just got to see it appear here. Um, but check that out. You can go to the Chris Voss show, search for holiday gift guide 2020. And you can see a list of all the great products we have there. Everything I've told you here, we use pretty much every single day.

We love it. We love it. We love it. Uh, so I encourage you to, to go check out all these products and everything else. And, of course, you know, give them away to your loved ones. If not, ask for these gifts. Like call up your loved ones and say,

Chris Voss said you need to buy me these new Masternemic headphones. If you really love me. There's been kind of a joke I've had for a few years with those headphones where I'm like, if you really love someone for the holidays and you want to give them a gift that says, I love me, there's been kind of a joke I've had for a few years with those headphones where I'm like, if you really love someone for the holidays and you want to give them a gift that says, I love you, buy the Master and Dynamic headphones. If you don't love them, buy them a competitor. Which means on the other side of that, if you don't get Master and Dynamic headphones and you get a competitor for Christmas,

you may want to question if that person really loves you. I'm so horrible. And hey guys, we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to the show. Tell your friends, neighbors, relatives,

subscribe to the show. If you, if you want to say great things about us, please email us. Let us know how we're doing. There were tell us how much you love the show. We really appreciate that. There's times where people reach out to me where sometimes I get a despondent

or I just feel like things aren't going well or, you know, there's a lot of people listening, but, you know, you don't hear from people. So let us know, man. It really freaking helps. I got to tell you, you know, reach out to me. So when I meet people and they're like, we love the show, we we love this show and that oh that show is good as people do that to me lately it really helps out so uh share the love if you will we certainly appreciate you guys wear your mask happy holidays you're gonna hear from us several times up until christmas but uh

do me a favor uh love and and uh support everyone around you that are good people. And tell them you love them as much as you can. The world is a crazy place, especially right now. And everything is more fragile, mortal, and stuff can happen in a moment. So deeply love the people you love and the people you care about. And make sure that they know it because, you know, someday, sometimes in a nanosecond, it's all gone. And hopefully we learn to appreciate each other more over this holiday

than ever before. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.