The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – More Pixel 4, Facebook Issues Swirling, Snapchat Is Still A Thing! & Other Tech News Oct 22, 2019

Episode Date: October 23, 2019

More Pixel 4, Facebook Issues Swirling, Snapchat Is Still A Thing! & Other Tech News Oct 22, 2019

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com. Welcome to the podcast today. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys. Be sure to go to the show and leave a review if you would. Give us some high marks if you like the show so that we can share it more and all that good stuff. Certainly appreciate you guys tuning in today.

What do we have on the agenda? Yesterday we got doing the first impressions sort of review of the new AT&T Google Pixel 4 XL. Google Pixel 4 XL. I always say it like I'm saying XL too many times because it's Pixel and then 4 XL, which is the larger version of the Pixel 4. So we got a chance to play with it some more today. If you get a chance, go back and listen to that review. Kind of my first impressions and rundown of the stats, what the phone is about, all the good stuff where you can get it at AT&T.com. Thanks to them for always keeping the Chris Foss Show in the groove over the last 10 years. And I got to tell you, I use the phone a lot today.

I used it into last night and started kind of using it as my main phone and kind of just really immersing myself in the phone. I got to tell you, I'm really impressed so far. I really like it. It's fast. It's speedy. The gesture control where you can unlock the phone just by looking at the phone. It even knows that you're going to probably want to unlock it or do something with it if you kind of shake it a little bit. Being able to squeeze the bottom of it for some gesture control is interesting uh we did some photographing uh last night we'll do some more of the night

version night shooting the night shooting is pretty bloody amazing holy crap you can shoot it and it literally lights up the world like it's almost daylight. It's crazy. And it looks good still. It's got really good sharp features. One thing I played with today that was kind of interesting on it is I played with the portrait camera. And what the portrait camera does, it creates a bokeh effect, if you would, in portrait mode. If you've ever seen really nice portrait photography they have you know a nice sharp image of someone really up close and they have a beautiful boat what they call a bokeh behind them which is kind of this creamy sort of background that gets basically like blown out you

just can't see what the background is you can kind of tell well you know like oh they're outside in some leaves or something you know whatever um but you can kind of tell, but it's blurred. So the focal point kind of brings to the point of whoever's in the portrait. So I got playing with that today. That looks really good. I played with that with my dog. I got some really good bokeh from it. I didn't kind of find it up to the quality of a DSLR.

Like, I've gotten really good bokeh with Canon lenses, the 135 millimeter, the 7200 millimeter. But, I mean, you're spending upwards of $5,000 to $6,000 for those cameras and lenses, if not more, depending upon what sort of camera you buy. But still, I mean, for a camera that is in a phone, yeah, it does a pretty good job. I was really impressed with it. The night shooting is really great. It's just really interesting because the phone's got, you know, these little cameras built into the back, which is kind of interesting. You're kind of like, whoa. So, so far, I really love the phone. I haven't found anything that I dislike about it so far, which is kind of weird. I love everything about it. I love

that it's a Google product. I'm a big Google person. I always like to have Google Now and all my stuff. And yeah, it's going to be interesting. And so go to att.com, check it out, the new Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL. I'm loving it so far. I think I'll keep loving it. If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you'll see some pictures we're posting there. I'm really impressed with it. The speed of it's really nice. The battery lasts a long time for me. I had some of my audience say that the battery was kind of smaller, which it's not if you review phones like I do. The battery is just fine and adequate for the size of the phone and what it's doing. I think we've kind of reached a point now where the phones are getting faster and faster in processing size.

They can still run on the same batteries. The batteries don't have to keep getting bigger, which was kind of what was happening there for a while. So anyway, let's get into some more tech news and talk about that. Be sure to check out the phones at AT&T. And of course, you can look at all the other phones like iPhone and everything else at AT&T as well let's talk about some of the news the tech news Chris let's get into the tech news so we got some interesting stories this is uh this kind of blew my mind I gotta tell you I gave up on Snapchat and everybody I know gave up on Snapchat and I always thought it was kind of a dying platform because Instagram is rocking it, and it seems like Facebook succeeded in stealing that mantle away from them of being this short-term whatever, whatever.

But they posted incredible earnings in their quarter three. They added 7 million users and revenue is up 50%. Maybe I need to go back and use Snapchat a little bit. What's going on over there? Um, and, uh, yeah, they pulled it off 7 million daily active users this quarter that it added, uh, they hit 210 million. There's 210 million people still using snapchat what wait what uh that's up over 13 percent year over year uh wow what do i know i guess i guess i abandoned that too soon i said the same thing about google plus i kind of left it for a while because i thought it was dead and then i I went back and thought, well, I should use it. Fuck, it's here. And then it died.

Wait, if I do that, will Snap die? Here, I'm going to start using it again. Fuck it. I hate their owner, the CEO. He's so obnoxious. Now, I'm probably not going to be able to log into the site. Why can't I log into the site, Chris? You said shit on the podcast about the owner. He just seems like a dick. That's all I'm saying in the nicest sort of way possible of saying someone is a total dick. Like you ever had that jock, that person that you have in school that was just the dick and they look like a dick and they always look like some Hitler youth and you just look at them and they just had that face like a hitler youth that you want to punch all the time and they're just a dick i'm sure he's

a nice guy and certainly i would never condone violence against anyone but i'm just saying you know you know that person that you in your mind you'd be like that person's a dick and then you hang out with him be like well he looks like the part and he acts the part uh so there you go it's kind of like a hollywood actor there only in real life anyway that's uh i guess they're notching what 446 million dollars they're up a whopping 50 year over year at a loss of 0.4 earnings per share okay and it flew past the estimates seriously there's that many people I'm like really fucking blown away have these people never heard of Instagram hello snapchat users is there some of you that that that missed the whole Instagram did you know there's one look it up there's there's actually

a competitor that's been eating their lunch and it looked like for a while they were gonna go out of business but hey uh snap has continued to continue cutting losses and it edges towards profitability their net loss improved to 227 million that's okay and can you imagine going to your wife hey honey how short are we in the bank? She's like, we're short 227 million. You're like, okay, great. See you next quarter. With the loss decreasing to 98 million versus Q3 2018.

Evan Spiegel, the guy just disparaged. I'm sure he's a nice person. Maybe. I don't know. He he's a nice person. Maybe. I don't know. He just looks like a dick. Maybe. Whatever, man. I don't care.

He made his case and has prepared marks for why Snapchat's share price could be higher. We're a high-growth business with strong operating leverage and a clear path to profitability. How many years have you guys been public? For fuck's s profitability. How many years have you guys been public? For fuck's sakes. How many years have you guys been around? Like, since, seems like back when MySpace was around, you guys were around. Anyway, I don't know. But according to TechCrunch, some of this news that I'm giving you here,

reading off to you, yeah, they're daily active users, or what people call the... Wait, hold on. Is that global? Oh, I see what it is. Yeah, okay. The growth was mostly international. It wasn't Europe.

Well, it was kind of a little bit of Europe, but it was like the rest of the world. It wasn't North America. It wasn't Europe. It was the rest of the world. So I know what's going on now. It's all the Philippine scammers and porn stars and everything that flooded Google Plus that are now using it. Well, maybe I should go back.

There you go. $2.3 billion. Yeah, that guy just looks like a dick. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Evan. I'm sorry. You look like a dick. And any time I've seen'm sorry, you just, you look like a dick, and anytime I've seen you speak, you're, it just seems like you're a dick, and there's nothing wrong with that, I mean, I,

I probably shouldn't judge people, no, that's not true, anyway, let's move on to the next thing, enough about Snapchat, Chris, why you to always be a dick about dicks? That's for the Grindr podcast. We'll save that for later. By the way, there is no Grindr podcast for those of you who are just tuning in for the first time. That's a joke. Anyway, let's move on to something else that's kind of interesting, controversial. I had no idea this was going on.

Thank God I work for myself. Jesus Christ. I never want to ever have to go look for a job. controversial i had no idea this was going on thank god i work for myself jesus christ i never want to ever have to go look for a job for please god no don't stop anyway this is a company called higher view and they've gotten written up today and i have the news go around off the Washington Post, or for those of you who are short of breath, WAPO. The Washington Post is doing a story, and it's, HireVue, what they are is they're an AI-driven face and voice scanning employability assessment tool used by 100-plus employers, including Hilton and Goldman Sachs.

Of course, Goldman Sachs, another company that looks like a bunch of dicks. Too big to fail. Whatever happened to Lehman Brothers? Anyway, yeah, that's an old 2008 joke. Anyway, they have developed this face scanning algorithm that increasingly decides whether you deserve to get hired by them. And it claims their artificial intelligence decides who's best for the job. Outside experts call it profoundly disturbing.

Now, I got to tell you, okay, let's get into the story, according to WAPO, a little bit, and then I'll get to my story, okay? We're going to walk this down the right pathway here, I suppose. We won't get ahead of ourselves. If not, Chris, don't get ahead of yourself this time. All right, so anyway, I guess some of these employers have been using this AI data, which is really interesting. And what they do is it uses the candidate's computer

or cell phone cameras to analyze their facial movements, word choice, or speaking voice before ranking them against other applicants on automated generated employability score. Wow. So basically how you look and communicate is going to determine whether you get the job, not whether you're qualified or anything. God knows we shouldn't do that. You know, I got to tell you, this is crazy. It's become so pervasive in industries, including hospitality and finance, that universities make special efforts to train students on how to look and speak for the best results.

More than 100 employees now use the system. Hilton, Unilever, Goldman Sachs, and more than a million job seekers have been analyzed. Wow. But some AI researchers, according to WAPO, argue the system is a digital snake oil with an unfounded blend of superficial measurements and arbitrary number crunching that is not rooted in scientific fact. Analyzing being like this,

they argue it could end up penalizing non-native speakers, visibly nervous interviewees and anybody else who doesn't fit the model for look or speech i've had thousands of employees across all my years and between managing companies and between having my own companies i gotta tell you uh the one experience i have and you can i don't know you can call it whatever bias you want but the one thing i found is pretty people make horrible employees they get promoted they get ahead they seem to get everything handed to them a lot of people give them a pass because they're pretty and they're good looking and you know just people want to fuck them that's basically what it is let's just get

right down to the basis of the monkey of our society. Um, and they're usually horrible workers because they know that they look good and they don't have to put out. So there you go. Uh, usually they're even bad in bed because they don't have to work that hard. Um, they don't have to earn it. Uh, and that's just the way it is. In my companies, I finally reached a point where I got so much tired of the sexual harassment and the people fucking in the desks and in the middle of the night and the different, uh, hookups that were going on in my office. Uh, I told, uh, and I think it was after my secretary ran off with one of the other guys in the office and she caused most of the sexual harassment complaints in the office because she

was just such a overly flirty problematic girl um we uh i told my secretary i says the next person i hire i want someone who's as butt fucking ugly as you possibly can i want someone who really gives a shit about their job does it well and isn't trying to get away with being pretty and not doing their job. I want somebody who really is appreciative of their job and rock and roll. I want to jump out of my fucking shoes when I walk out, when I walk into the office for the first time and see her and be like, holy shit. Okay. And you know what? My secretary did that. She found this gal that could kick ass

at doing her fucking job and she didn't sit around doing her nails. She didn't sit around doing her makeup. She kicked fucking ass and did her goddamn job. I love people like that. I'm the same way. I'm not getting by on pretty anytime soon if you've seen me. But that's kind of the study that I found over the history of all my thing. I've seen people get promoted because they're better looking and their job skills are far less and they're really horrible managers once they get promoted. And then you're like, why did we make that decision? I'm not saying that's always the case, but I found it to be a majority of the time. And I mean, there's even studies and research you can find that people that are better looking

get hired and promoted better and make more money than people that aren't. It's just one of those things. We're a very shallow society, and that's how we work. But I got to tell you, my best employees were never my pretty employees. My pretty employees, they always had to go home

so they could go to the bar and clubs and I don't know what else the hell they asked to do. But I don't know what pretty people do. But my best employees were not highly communicative, skilled. They weren't people. A lot of times some of my best employees were my, what's it called, introverts. They weren't huge communicators. They

weren't huge, uh, PR bullshitters, if you will. Um, you know, they didn't spew out a lot of bullshit. Hey, are you doing your job? Right? Oh yeah. Chris doing the best job ever. I can man. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm the best. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, man. They used to be like, Hey man, you doing, you doing okay there? Yeah. I'm just, I'm the best, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, man, they'd just be like, hey, man, you doing okay there? Yeah, I'm just really busy doing my work, man. Leave me alone. I'm not going to bullshit you because I don't have time because I'm actually working over here.

And in thinking back about all my best employees, none of them were pretty. So I'm concerned about this AI thing where it's looking at your facial, your ability to communicate, your ability to do stuff. There are people that are really good introverts. And they're not good at skill sets of being PR people and being highly communicative. But they're really good fucking workers. I mean, really good fucking workers.

And that's my experience as being a CEO. So you can take it or leave it. You can call me BS, whatever you want. Until you've had a few unemployed, so you can take it or leave it. You can call me BS, whatever you want until you've had a few unemployed. Then you can talk to me about what you think. Um, that's been my experience, uh, working for us, uh, a bell company. I oversaw over 800 people. Yeah. Give me ugly people every fucking time. Now there's always exceptions to rule. That's not always the case. There's plenty of people that work hard. But I am telling you, if you're running an AI software system that's looking at how pretty people are and how well they communicate and how well they talk and present themselves, that's a shitty fucking way to figure out who good workers are. There's a lot of good

workers that they're not good at communicating. They're not good at bullshitting. They're good at just sitting down and doing their job. And I would go into my offices and at 5 o'clock, half of my good-looking employees would be standing at the door, punching their thing as soon as that bell hit 5, and running for the door like some kind of track sprinter where they're all in that position of taking off. And I go into my employees' back offices and there would be my employees who weren't pretty, who weren't highly communicative, who weren't PR agents basically of their own bullshit. Very quiet, very internally driven and introverts. And they do their work.

And I'd ask him how they were doing and they'd be kind of bugged that I was you know putting the spotlight on them or or sometimes you know I'd be like this these people are really good I really like them and they didn't like that at all these are people they don't really see attention they just want to do their job they want to do their job really well they want to get paid and they want to go home they don't want to get fired and they know they gotta to compete with the pretty people. So they're, they're focusing on doing their job and they hope that you'll recognize it for them, but they're not going to fight,

feed you a whole lot of bullshit. And I love employees like that. I love people that are just good workers. They're going to do their job. They're going to give a shit about their job and they're not busy looking in the mirror and you know doing whatever they're doing with other people in my office on top of the copier so anyway that's my wrap on that i don't know what you think about it because everyone has a perception of what is uh good looking and what is not and certainly do you really want a machine designing if you get a job i mean at least you know when i was a kid and i had to look for a job I could always at least hustle like in the job thing I'd be like oh yeah you know I could let my personality kind of rain through but like with this they're just

looking at your face and like how will you communicate like you're like you're some kind of fucking anchor is gonna be on the goddamn channel 6 news and we gotta find out the focus group is to fucking approve you so that people will tune in you're you're you're asking for a fucking desk job where you're going to be working in a fucking cubicle and somehow you got to be anchor man fucking communicative ready it's like it's like what it's like, what the fuck? You're going to be in a cubicle, man. What the fuck? You know, I could see if you're using this, like, okay, well, this is going to be our front desk PR spokesman sort of person, but whatever, man, I'm just glad I don't work for other people. Um, and, uh, that's that. So let's move on to other stuff in the tech news. I hope that

semi entertained you or offended you either way I hope you are mildly entertained. VentureBeat is reporting that Firefox 70 arrives with social tracking blocked by default. It's a personalized privacy report that can show how many trackers have been blocked and performance gains that are built inside of it. So there you go. Social tracking is blocked.

Make it harder for your exes to stalk you. I don't know what that means. According to the Washington Post, or as we like to call it around here, because that's too long of a syllable to say, you can say, wop-po, wop-po. Or for some of you, depending upon your region of pronunciation, WAPO. I don't know. That's not funny.

Anyway, New York State's Attorney General says 46 attorney generals have joined its antitrust lawsuit into probe, I should say, antitrust probe, which probably would come to law soon. Let's face it. Into Facebook. Separate from DOJ and FTC investigations, look like Mark Zuckerberg coming over to heat. I don't know how they're going to break that up. I mean, what do you do with Facebook?

You're a monopoly. Well, there's no one else that can face this. So you're a monopoly. Well, why is it our fucking fault? No one can get good. So anyway, there's going to be that all going on we talked about on the show before about how politics might rule the day and everything else according to the new york times facebook as well has announced a pledge of one billion dollars in

a package of grants loans and land as part of a partnership with california to help build more affordable housing uh yeah if you've ever been to silicon valley that is a buttfuck of traffic that is the most stupidest place on earth and what's even funnier some parts of san francisco you go they have the miles and miles of land which i guess they're owned by colleges or some shit i don't even know but you're just like can you expand the fucking highway so that we're not parked in traffic you can literally in goddamn Silicon Valley walk to places faster than you can use the fucking freeways. And you know what? In SoCal, people are really nice.

If you need to move in, people understand that you just got to let traffic flow. If you stop it and impede it, you have problems. Not in Silicon Valley. They're fucking assholes. They will not let you fucking in and drive like shitheads and you know that's the step man don't go to silicon valley serious if you if you hate traffic that's like the worst place on the fucking earth to go and i don't know why because they're all like up their ass like every other car is a goddamn tesla they're like

i'm saving the world yeah but there's 5 000 motherfuckers of you buying those goddamn things and driving them you're still putting out so much fucking toxic shit and all the batteries that it costs to make them god knows what happens to them when they when they go out of service and thrown in the dump trash it costs more to take and turn on those fucking batteries and repurpose them. You know, it's like a uranium dump with those fucking batteries. There's only so much shit they can do with acid, you know, because acid doesn't really work and other stuff. Anyway, you get my point.

I'm kind of on a rant today. What's going on? According to Variety, the Verizon is giving away the Verizon. No, just Verizon. It's giving away Disney Plus for free for one year to all of its Wios customers on unlimited data plans to Fios and 5G internet customers. Good for them, Verizon, giving away watching movies for free on unlimited plans, I guess. Oh, wait, hold on. No, hold on. No, I see. Oh, wait, hold on. No, hold on.

No, I see what they're doing here. It's eligible for a 12-month free offer. After that, they'll start charging you. Tricky. I see what you did there. I see what you did there, Verizon. Yeah. Okay.

All right, so what else do we have up on the thing? ZDNet, former SAP CEO, Bill mcdermott wow killed that one bill mcdermott has been named chief executive of cloud automation platform service now he replaces john donahue will become ceo of nike wow i'm doing i'm in the wrong business clearly uh and cnbc is reporting in prepared remarks for congress mark zuckerberg argues libra you know the cryptocurrency coin they're they're trying to pitch but now everyone's leaving paypal left and a whole mess of other people left will extend america's financial leadership and that china is pursuing similar product projects well there's that what are you going to do with it?

According to The Verge, U.S. lawmakers debut a bipartisan bill that would force tech giants to make user data portable and interoperable via an API-like interface for secure transfers. That's kind of weird. I don't know how they're going to do that, man. You're talking about billions of users and make their user data portable for everyone that doesn't even seem profitable let alone a solid business model I love how a bunch of old guys who probably don't even know how to tweet or use a phone they have

like assistance hey can you put that on the Twitter for me they're like my mom yeah I put something on the Twitter the Twitter did you, they're like, my mom, yeah, put something on the Twitter, the Twitter, did you just read my thing on the Twitter, it's not, it's not the Twitter, mom, it's Twitter, actually, she's really good at, at technology, she's really good, sometimes she's smarter than me at technology, but you know what I mean, it was funny in the early days, she'd be like, I'm on the Twitter, sometimes in the morning after coffee, I'm on the shh. Anyway, you get the point. According to Vice, the FTC issues its first ever ban on stalkerware

as it bars RetinaX from selling an app that monitors mobile devices unless a legitimate use for them is shown. Well, jealous husbands everywhere and wives have nothing to go on except for those GPS trackers you can attach below the person's car. Not that I'm condoning that behavior in any way. This is kind of interesting. TechCrunch Medium says it will now pay its partner program writers primarily on reading time, not claps.

The platform has paid $6 dollars to 30 000 writers since 2010 holy shit how much is that thirty thousand dollars or six million divided by thirty thousand dollars shit where have i been oh my god uh this is probably death knell for those poor people watch for your checks to go down uh i was part of the YouTube partner program. I still am. And, uh, we used to get paid, uh, per views. And then they came up with this bullshit program where they was called, uh, you get paid by how long you keep people on the system and how well they keep watching videos. Even they watch other people's videos. So this is doing a partner program, uh, primarily on reading time, not claps. Uh, so uh so yeah that's gonna go down have

fun with that guys this is what happens you contribute to these places you build them up they make a bunch of money and then they go you know we don't really want to pay you anymore because we're huge we don't need you anymore it's kind of like your first two ex-wives or maybe it's your first two ex-husbands. I don't know. Whoever got the better end of that deal. The Verge, browser-based UI design and prototyping tool. Figma gives user public profiles to share design files and works in progress as part of a community platform. It's like GitHub for developers. Figma, the browser-based UI design and prototyping tool, is giving users public profiles to share designs and works in the progress. That might be interesting if you're a developer.

You might want to check that out. Engadget is reporting task management app Todoist is going to get a major update to its mobile, desktop, and web apps, adding sections to side projects for better organization and more. I used Todoist for a while. It was pretty good. You know, my biggest problem is I'm really lazy, and I hate doing tasks, so I don't make any tasks, and therefore nothing gets done.

So there's that. It's a miracle this podcast goes off every day. If it does go off every day, what were you doing last weekend, Chris? Nothing. Anyway, Android Central, the Pixel 4, this is what we start off with, and Pixel 4 XL support fast wireless charging on any quad charger, unlike the Pixel 3, which needed Google's own Pixel stand for fast charging. Yay, Google.

I like that. Don't do that proprietary crap. That's an Apple move. You should do what you're doing. Kai Chargers, everyone has one these days, or at least I do. There's like 50 of them running around the office and everything else. And so then you can do that. So anyway, the interesting thing here is it's an interesting world,

and it's coming at you fast. Watch for our next segments on Product Hunt. We'll review some of the top different things that we liked on Product Hunt that's kind of rude the day. And all that good stuff. Be sure to give us a like. Subscribe to us on YouTube.com. Forge us, Chris Voss, hit that bell notification button.

Go to Spreaker, Spotify, Google Play, iTunes, and subscribe to the show and watch for more news daily. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.