The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Youtube, Amazon FC Ambassadors & Other Tech News Aug 16, 2019

Episode Date: August 17, 2019

Youtube, Amazon FC Ambassadors & Other Tech News Aug 16, 2019

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, come in here live on a Friday. Holy crap, what day is it? It's August 16th, 2019, and we're doing news and tech. We had a great interview earlier today that's also going to be separate on another episode of the podcast. You're going to check that out. We interviewed Oliver Del Camino camino and this is going to

blow your mind he started a hemp uh podcast hemp session podcast hemp session being one word and he started it and within uh 30 days he was bought out by a public company uh and uh rock and roll he got over like 72 million hits off of Google. Evidently, hemp, pot, CBD, all that sort of stuff is like the second biggest search thing, according to him, next to porn. So hemp is really hot right now. It's so hot right now.

Was that my Zoolander impression? Oh, crap. Now I'm going to get a cease and desist from Warner Brothers, whoever the hell did Zoolander. Probably might help if I put the lavalier mics on. Yeah, do that for the Facebook and Periscope audience. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys.

We got some interesting things to talk about today that struck me so much that even though we did an interview today, I decided to do a business news and tech podcast as well because that's just the kind of fucking guy I am. I've got to give you people something the hell to listen to on a Friday while you're, I don't know, guzzling beers at the brewery there. Whatever the hell you do on Friday, I don't know, whatever. Anyway, so let's talk about some of the news, some of the stuff that's going on, some of the interesting things. Friday is always usually an interesting news day youtube has shut down music companies use of manual copyright claims to steal creator revenue this is something that's close to my heart being a youtuber uh the channel's got over 54 million uh minutes viewed on the chris voss show

youtube channel but as like a lot of creators, my channel is going dead because we're losing the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and algorithm of helping out the top 10%. Basically, what YouTube's algorithm does is it feeds the top 10% of creators, most all of the business. And now, if you look at trending,

it's mostly sponsored posts and it's films and it's films and and it's uh it's film companies buying ads and and music buying ads so you know i kind of figured that was eventually going to come it's kind of a sad thing uh but uh uh i'll tell you a story a few months ago i got or actually i think it was a month ago, I got notification on three of my gaming videos that are from Destiny 2. And Bungie is the corporation behind Destiny 2, and they're really good to gamers.

They're really good to streamers. They're really good to people that share their games. And so they don't usually file copyright claims because they're smart. They see it as advertising. And that's one of the reasons destiny got so big is because streamers were sharing their stuff and somewhere around the time destiny first came out there was kind of this thing in fact i didn't want to share their videos initially because

i was concerned about the copyright uh claims because back then i think it was like 2014 or so there was still you know game gaming companies were like fuck you we're taking your video because you you know played our music and you played our game um but they've been really cool which has been really smart for them you know you have to kind of play this of like do we want to be smart and do we want to use this free advertising or do we want to be dicks uh and uh so they were smart uh but so i got like uh a copyright claim on three of my bungee videos and it was a copyright against the music which kind of threw me because i was like wait i thought bungee has their own orchestra and they do their own music they usually do they actually have their own orchestra department their orchestra that they have they do it in-house for the most part but I'm like well maybe I

don't know the music that showed up in the video was like third party or something I don't know so I had these claims and the crazy thing about these claims is you can't complain back to YouTube about it and see like hey YouTube this is bullshit. You have to complain to the people filing the claims against you. And if, if they decide that you're full of shit, you can get your channel shut off, especially with three strikes on you. So fortunately I did a Google of this company and I found posts on Reddit where these guys for two or three years now have been copyright stealers.

What they do is they go to channels like mine who don't have big, I don't know, whatever, lawyers, I guess. They're on MCNs or MNCs, whatever they call those things. And so what they do is they file copyright claims against your videos. And they know that maybe you're not going to fall through or whatever. You know, I filed copyright claims on people stole my videos. I had over a hundred videos of mine that were stolen. Um, and, uh, you know, these people knew what they were doing. The intent was there. I mean, when you, when you deal with people who are stolen, it's like

some people, you know, well, I accidentally copy your video, but people were clearly taking my videos and using them. So I got this copyright claim. And I'm like, this is bullshit. I can't complain to YouTube. And on Reddit, it said these guys are copyright stealers. They steal people's videos by doing a copyright claim. And people just give up against them.

So YouTube, it's been announced today. This is in TechCrunch. You can look it up. They're making a change to their copyright enforcement policies around music used in videos, which may result in increased number of blocked videos in the shorter term, but overall, a healthier ecosystem in the long term. I'm all for this. So no longer are these copyright owners able to monetize creator videos with just very short or unintentional uses of music via YouTube's manual claiming tool. So one of the problems I had is I've done videos where maybe I'm in a

restaurant and you can barely, barely pick up like ACDC or something in the background. And I'm usually pretty good at this because I went to YouTube's classes at their LA facility and they teach you all about parody and copyright law and lawyers come in and talk to you and teach you stuff. You learn a lot going to those classes about how, you know, when you're, when you're, you know, you've got a bottle of Coke or something in front of you, you need to either wrap the label, you know, you see this on like TV and stuff where, you know, you need to hide the brand because the brand has trademarks. You know, in fact, I've had Apple back in the day, they don't do it as much anymore, but back in the day they used to be really fucking big dicks, which is

pretty much what Apple does. Um, and if I use the term Apple, they would file a copyright claim on my stuff. If I use the term iPhone they would be fine with it which makes no fucking sense so whatever but so I had to change all my videos take Apple off my videos the word the word Apple and just use iPhone and then it was you know fine with them whatever so anyway so anyway it's good that they're doing this. This is long overdue. The rest of my story is this company files this claim against three of my videos. They're very good videos, and they've got really good views. They're going to be stealing all that money from it.

I look on Reddit. I find out that this is a company that's tromping all over YouTube. In fact, I still need to do a post calling out what I did on this. One of the things about me is I'm on a lot of corporations. And back in the day, we had a lot of very successful corporations. When you make really big money, you get lawsuits. They just come. People sue you because you're fucking rich. And then what you learn when you become rich is that rich people use the courts like the mafia uses muscle, right? You don't send somebody out to break somebody's legs anymore because they're your competitor. They screw with you. You just sue the fuck out of them.

And then it comes down to whoever has the most money to pay the lawyers in defense and stuff. And so what I learned having –, having, we had three corporations at one time, we kept adding more acquisitions. Um, and the lawsuits came, uh, you know, employees and, and, and then we were suing people too. I mean, you sue people too. Cause you're like, Hey, that person stole $10,000 from us, from our company. We're suing the fuck out of them. You know, some people stole even more. Uh, and so, you know, you just, you enter this whole world of shakedown and lawsuits and, and everything else, uh, which is one of the problems. So, um, so I learned, uh, to be my

own corporate attorney, my own attorney for my companies and stuff. And after watching my attorneys enough, I'm just like, wait a second, I just handed you 10 grand as a, as a deposit. And, uh, and you just, you went in, did you, did I just see you go on WordPress and print off a template and just fill in my name? Did you just do what I think you did? And I'm like, Oh yeah, this, you know, you buy this database, these templates, and then you just fill in the name and just pump it out and i'm like are you fucking shitting me i can do that in my office and then after a few failed uh a few failed negotiations and where i kind of learned the lawyer game uh i realized i realized you know the game uh and so i went okay you know what i think i can play this game too.

So I started being a lawyer for all our corporations and our personal stuff, which is really hard to do because technically you're not supposed to be a lawyer for a C-corp, but I'd get away with it because I think there was only one time anyone caught me who was a fellow lawyer and then I buried him with so much discovery requests, they forgot about it and I continued on. So it's kind of interesting what you can get away with, especially if you're not an attorney, cause you can get away with murder because anytime, you know, a judge or a lawyer goes, well, you didn't follow the

rules of the court. You're like, I'm not an attorney. I didn't know. And they're like, well, we can't, we can't bias his ability to defend himself. It's in the constitution. You really don't realize how important the constitution is to get sued. So let me get back to news and business. So anyway, I learned to be a lawyer. So what I did is I, is, is I can print just like a lawyer can about five minutes, a lawsuit. I can make a complaint. I know how to file it.

It doesn't cost me a fucking dime to sue you other than the print and whatever it costs to file with whatever court it is. And, uh, and so what I did is I sent these guys who sent me this notice that Reddit was reporting was a bunch of scammers. And I said, this is your 30 day notice of intent to sue, which is what you do when you're an attorney. And I implied that I was attorney without doing it because you can't do that. That's illegal. But I implied that I knew the law and I was serving them with a 38 notice and I wanted the service for their company, the legal service for their company.

When you're an attorney, you ask the other company, what's your service address or who do you want serviced or who's your attorney so that we can serve notice of intention to sue on you and so i sent them a 30 day notice of intent to sue and i said we're going to defend this rigorously our understanding it's a scam we're seeing this on reddit but the problem was i couldn't do this with youtube i had to do this directly with these motherfuckers that were trying to hijack the chris voss youtube channels and i'm sure if i would have let them get away with it, they would have went and went after more of my videos. And there's 3,500.

I'm not going to lose them. There's a lot of these Bungie Destiny videos that I did. So I wrote him a 30-day notice of intent to sue. It wasn't the full legal thing, but I said, we need to serve you this. So I need to know who your uh person is that we can serve this upon son of a bitch man they had that fucking thing undone in like two or three days they let the whole thing go and back the fuck off but i did some reviews right or i did some uh research on some of the other videos on on youtube talking about these people these motherfuckers have been

tromping all over youtube filing filing copyright complaints, stealing people's videos, and most of them don't know how to deal with this stuff like I do because I was going to go forward with suing them. I'm like, I'm just going to make a problem for you. And sure enough, they let it go. They just totally released any interest to it whatsoever. But the problem was, is I got, I got noticed back from YouTube saying, okay, so you filed a complaint with those guys. Keep in

mind, if you're found to be still in violation and you're fighting it, you can lose your channel, which is fucking scary, which is bullshit. And these guys know it. And so they're out, they're out, uh, they're out, uh, stealing people's content. So anyway, long story short, I beat him and, uh, they moved along, but I saw a lot of other creators on YouTube complaining about how they're getting ripped off, which is even worse because they're getting ripped off by YouTube. YouTube just does not give a fuck about creators anymore. They want to sell you $50 Google. Uh, what is it? Google TV, YouTube TV. They want to sell you a $50 YouTube TV, what is it? Google TV, YouTube TV. They want to sell you a $50 YouTube TV.

They're doing all this backend with channels. They're doing all this backend with, with, uh, major news companies. They're just flooding the system. They don't care about the little guy anymore. They don't give a fuck. So if you think you're going to get rich, your kids think you're going to get rich on YouTube, that shit is fucking dead. Unless you

can make like some weird, unique thing, whatever. Great. And you may still see a lot of people with views. I have a lot of views on the Chris Voss show on some of my channels, but the checks and the payments are shit in the toilet. Uh, and they used to be really good, but they're not anymore. And so if someone is selling you also to get rich on YouTube, they're fucking lying. Ask to see what they get paid on their AdSense because they're fucking lying. And you know what? The last few snake oil salesmen that I've seen get into this business and promise people that they're basically being the information sellers.

And you're like, why are they selling the information? If they can get so rich on YouTube, why don't they just go get rich on YouTube instead of just selling the information? Because they can't get rich on YouTube. And if you challenge them and ask them to see their ad, their ad sense and their money they're making off of YouTube, they don't have their channels monetized because they know that if you call them on it, they can't fucking prove that they make any fucking money off it other than to sell you consulting and bullshit, snake oil salesman. Anyway, I'm sorry. I'll move on from my youtube riff but i'm really really happy here

that youtube is shutting down these music companies thing because one of the other problems they had is if you just got like three fucking notes of like anything music wise like you were walking by a shop and it picked up like three one to three notes and they could put that together as like hey that's our that's our chord pattern or whatever you know they could file a thing on your video and you're screwed and there were some videos i made that were really freaking good and really interesting and i'm like this is going to make me a lot of money and son of a bitch some music in the background got picked up that i didn't notice and I'm really good at noticing it um and uh then I got screwed but you know that's the way it is I my job is supposed to be to uh make sure as a creator that stuff's not appearing in my stuff so really good news for YouTube

really long overdue they they've been needing to do this for a long time there's been there's been some people that have made really good money and become really big channels and they claim to have had contracted deals with companies uh to use their music royalty free or they paid them a small amount or something like that or it was like a promotional trade i get that all the time people are like hey man we use my music on sound whatever it is and uh you know you can use it for free and i'm like no i know how this fucking works because the same way when you get rich like what happens is is and this happened to a i think an asian girl who does a lot of makeup she's really good on youtube and uh she

did one of these deals with somebody and i believe she had a writing at least that was the impression i got and what happened was her channel got really fucking huge. And so they sued her for money. And, you know, sometimes they just sue people just to shake you down for cash, man. Because they think you're going to pay out just to make you go away. I said to somebody, I said, why are you suing us? And they go, because you're rich. I'm like, what?

That's it? Yeah. Yeah, you got money. You can afford this. Okay, man. All right. So anyway, uh, that's the big picture on YouTube and, uh, you learn some other shit. If you ever get rich, be careful with your money and hire a lot of fucking lawyers. In fact, don't hire, well, hire some lawyers. Let's put it that way. Uh, another thing that's kind of got my underwear in a twist, this is kind of interesting. You know, we've lived since 2016 with the Russian bots and bots, and Twitter's been breaking down on this stuff. But lately, there's been a story that just seems to be getting worse for Amazon,

if you've been following it. This is on Bellingcat.com. Amazon's online Bezos brigade, I guess they're calling it, unleashed on Twitter. So this is pretty interesting, and I've been talking about it throughout the week, if you've been following on the Chris Voss show. What it is, is Amazon has gotten some of their employees, because there were so many stories about how bad the floor was and how bad the working conditions were and you know people falling asleep and you know indentured servitude slavery sort of conditions there at the Amazon warehouses so what Amazon had done is they created these Amazon FC ambassadors and the story went viral this week so if you haven't got a chance to catch up to it, either go to Bellingcat.com.

I think the Washington Post had a story that we featured a day or two ago, but it's really interesting the PR spin that's going on that Amazon's using here. So I want to give you a thread that you'll find on Bellingcat that's really interesting. This gal named Diana Wild,

you can find her at at rules obey her, uh, on Twitter. Uh, she called out one of these ambassadors channels and, uh, and she called out a couple of them. So she wrote one and she said, are you a robot or did the, did they make a bunch of AIs to lie to them instead of helping real workers? And one of them replied and said, no, I'm not a robot, ma'am. And he misspelled ma'am, which is interesting. I just shared something from the FC that are all from me and my experience. That would be a crazy technology to artificialize.

He misspelled that, thoughts. I'm actually a picker inside of FC prep items and was given a chance to be an ambassador here in social media. And so this young lady, Diana Wilde, at Rules of Bear on Twitter, says, how much are you compensated per tweet like this? Because she's curious because what we found is there's a small army of these guys and they have multiple accounts. Some of them aren't accurate, which is kind of interesting from an ethical standpoint um they're not who they say they are in other words they're kind of like hidden bots that are pumping out you know oh amazon floors the greatest place there's candy and shit and and you know it's like the chocolate factory from willy wonka in here oh my god it's so wonderful jeff bezos oh he's so great um so uh so she asked somebody how much they compensated per tweet because obviously if you're working

for amazon you're being compensated i mean unless you're not compensated but then you wouldn't be working for amazon it's really weird how that whole thing plays out, doesn't it? So this other gal named Audra, who also is labeled as an Amazon FC ambassador, she replies, I don't get compensated per tweet. I get paid $15 an hour, whether I am answering tweets or out on the floor stowing, which I guess is her job title, stowing. I don't know what that does. Stowing? What do you do? Next time somebody asks me, Chris, what do you do?

I'll be like, I stow. I stow. I do stowing. What's stowing, Chris? I don't know, but I do it a lot. Anyway, she writes, I do this two days a week, and two days a week I stow. So basically, what this young lady, Diana Wild, finds out, so they're paying you to tweet that you like your job,

which is tweeting about liking your job, which is pretty brilliant on her part. You've got to love it. And this gal named Cindy says, laugh out loud, no. We are not paid to say that we like our job. The FCA role is to educate others about what we do on our day-to-day at Amazon. It's happened that we, it just, this is weird how they put it, it just happened that we enjoy what we do.

So that's what she wrote. And then Diana Wild writes back, laugh less. Yes, you are paid to say that. You like your job. It's your job, but you're not educating anyone. You're attempting to reeducate. And Amazon invested in in-house propaganda rather than bettering its lowest tier employees' lives. So basically what's come out of the threads of some of these people that are calling out some of these ambassadors for Amazon is,

hey, look, man, you got a shitty job at Amazon. You're working the floor. You're, you know, passing through 50,000 boxes a day for the stupid Chris Voss show to get delivered and stuff. You know, they're paying, uh, I don't know, minimum wage. And you're just like, Holy crap. Can I get a break? Um, and, um, and so then Amazon comes to you and goes, Hey man, there's people saying shit about us on Twitter and how bad this job is. And I'll tell you what, you can get a couple days off if you just go sit on Twitter. You don't have to work the fucking line, the assembly line, but you can go on Twitter and maybe you'll tell everyone how well you like your job. Because if you're an ambassador, are you going to go on there and be like amazon

fucking sucks holy shit i just got off the line and what a oh man i'm slaving away i've i got blood on my fingers uh you know whatever you know you're not going to do that and they know that right so they're they're basically using employees to do this. Now I could, if it was a PR company, you know, companies hire me to promote stuff. They hire me. I go to events. They hire me to promote their stuff at events and stuff. And yeah, if I found a bad company or shitty product, you've seen me trashing online. Uh, you've seen me trash companies. You've seen me trash products. You know, I'm pretty much an asshole. If I, I've had people want to hire me and I go I'm not doing I'm not working with what you're doing no or I've seen your product and I hate your product and I just can't believe in it you know most

products I can get behind there they're usually always good companies but there's a few products that either I know the company's a piece of shit or the product is a piece of shit and I don't care how much money like if Trump came to me and said hey Chris we want to have you show up at the rallies we'll pay you one billion dollars i'd be like probably no maybe for a billion i don't know can i sell it for a billion a billion dollars but no i don't think there's any amount of money that i would sell out for i don't think i'd sleep with myself if i did it like two years from now i'd have a gun in my mouth just going what did i do i'd sold the fuck out um anyway uh so they're basically it's a way to shut up it basically it's a way to shut up your employees so if you got employees

that are like in their spare time going, fucking Amazon sucks, you know, they're posting anonymous shit on boards talking about how anonymous or about how Amazon sucks. One way to shut them up and flip the flip. The script is like, you know, get them talking positive online and then,

and then they're not talking negative and they're basically getting paid to do that. They're basically getting paid to be the thing. But the incentive is, is you get to get off the line, the slave line for, you know, one to two days a week. Right. And if you're really good, you might get more time. If you say really good stuff about Amazon, you might get really good time. Ah, and they're like, well, maybe, maybe I can get off the line and move up into PR. And Amazon's dangling that in front of you. Like, maybe you can. But let's see what sort of good shit you can say about us.

Look, man, I like Amazon. I think they're a good company. I do think there's some real concerns about their floors and some of the different stories that come out about what's going on that need to be addressed. But maybe they should focus on just paying the employees more because maybe if you paid the employees more and treated them better, they wouldn't be complaining on social media. Oh, stop using logic, Chris. Stop making sense.

It's kind of interesting. If companies pay well, they don't seem to have too much of this problem if they treat their employees well at least that that's the impression i get i don't know um so it's it's really weird because it's an army of bot accounts and they have these people at different facility fulfillment centers that's what the amazon fc means uh ambassador the other thing is too is it creates something for the employees who also are like, I'll say good things about, too, if I can get on this fucking line. My hands can quit touching fucking cardboard for two fucking days.

I get a goddamn break in here. You know? Wow, man. You got everybody fighting for some cheese, man. Got all the mice fighting for some cheese. And I'm not trying to talk badly about amazon workers they're wonderful people i just i just feel like they're being manipulated and they're being screwed with and this is something that really should be a pr effect

and i i'm pretty sure that they can't just say anything what they want there's probably an approval process that's been like what did you write okay that's fine yeah we'll let that through i don't i i it would be interesting because this would be fun wouldn't it it wouldn't be interesting if one of these guys just went fucking awol and they could and there was like no filter and they can be like yeah man uh there's been this gun in my head on this fc ambassador account and and like but like no one's here today. So I'm going to tell you a really fucking is, uh,

I'm just waiting for that to happen. But I bet Amazon's got a flip switch on it where they can just go, what's going on at accounts gone. Yeah. Bye. And see what's really interesting about these ambassador counts. They've made an army, an army of them as well. Now get this. This is really

what's interesting in the article from Bellingcat.com per 2018 reports, the ambassadors were given an extra paid day off and a $50 gift card. So it's even more that they're getting paid to defend Amazon from online detractors, people talking shit about them online. They're like, hey, I work at Amazon. It's really great. They give you a paid day off and a $50 gift card. Maybe you should just do that with people normally, man.

Maybe you shouldn't be slaving them 80 hours a week. So it's interesting. And they've got all these bots. One thing that's interesting is someone's created a spreadsheet about 53 ambassador accounts. There's 29 Americans, five Spanish, seven German, four British, four French, two Polish, and three Italian ambassadors. And what's interesting is they're using different links.

Some of them aren't really honest about who they are. They're very bodish, if you will, but evidently they are different human beings. But some of the different services they're using kind of belies what's going on in the whole menagerie of an assembly line sort of thing. Uh, there's a picture on billing cat.com of one of the Amazon workers slaving away on a laptop, you know, saying good things about your employer. Um, it's kind of interesting and there's actually a picture. I really like what they've done on billing cap, but this is a story. I believe it was, uh, from whatever. Um, and, uh, they're even showing some notes on some of the people. Um, so, uh, that's interesting as well. Um, yeah. So you've got these people that are ambassadors, uh, paid to not slaving away being bribed

to defend Amazon for being a great place to work. And you're just kind of like, whatever, man. Now I get paid to play. I get PR agents that are hired to do this PR departments, social media departments that are hired to do this. That's their pay to play. That's a given. You kind of know, okay, it's the marketing thing. It's going to be their spin.

When you're kind of dangling and playing and messing with just normal employees, And, you know, and I'm sure if you don't say the right thing, you might be taken off the little free day, free payday, free $50 thing. So it's kind of like a proverbial gun to the head if you really think about it. It's not from like, you better say some nice shit. But it's like, you better say some nice shit. Because if you don't say your shit nice enough and convince enough people, we'll probably take you off the line. You're going to be back to slaving away in the sweatshop. So, um, kind of interesting. I don't know how you feel about it. You can find me at Chris Voss on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, send me what you think. I'm kind of interested in your comments, what you think about this. Take a review

of the Bellingcat. Uh, some of the other articles, if you listen to the podcast from earlier in the week, we referenced and read some articles about this Amazon thing. It's kind of become this viral sort of thing where people are going, what? Let's get into some of the news because that's what you tune in for is the coverage on the news of the day. So let's talk about some of the things

that are going on. This is kind of interesting. Five years later, the New York Times did a deep dive into Gamergate's origins and how conspiracy-fed trolling tactics it took mainstream Five years later the New York Times did a deep dive into Gamer gates origins and how? Conspiracy fed trolling tactic tactics it took mainstream are now central to post-truth Information Wars and this is really the world war three of our age is trolls and different conspiracy theories Post-truth information wars. This is really what we're into. And the sad thing is we're not that bright of a freaking,

what's the word I'm looking for? We're not that bright of a citizenship. And so a lot of people are falling for it. I mean, Jesus Christ, the Nigerian scam thing on Craigslist where they still, if you put something up for sale on Craigslist, you still get the guy who writes you and goes if i send you a check and then you know i'm gonna send it for extra and just wait for it to clear and then send me the thing and you're just like oh my god wow what a deal yeah and it's just

a rip-off but what's amazing is that's still working from the 90s man from the fucking 90s there's still idiots falling for the nigerian. They'll write you and go, we just found an account that has $13 million in the bank of Nigeria, and you're the sole heir of it from some guy you've never fucking heard of. And people are just like, oh my God, that's real. That's how stupid this fucking idiocracy is that we have. So anyway, this was another interesting story that kind of surprised me in the cryptocurrency world. Um, and, uh, I guess it's a thing. So, uh, Coinbase buys, uh, I believe it's called Zapp and um uh what's interesting is

they're not only a buyer or seller where you can go to them and buy cryptocurrency but they have a vault in the swiss mountainside for storing bitcoins what you store bitcoins in a fall in in a mountain wait i thought it was a virtual currency so i i guess what coinbase is doing is creating a fort knox or they bought a fort knox uh in in switzerland in a thing and they're gonna put five percent of all bitcoins in circulation and store them there they're hoping that what that's going to do is drive people to want to invest more in bitcoin and make it more popular because uh people will feel more secure because like there's a fort knox of bitcoin which is really weird because it's like wait it's virtual currency like you're just storing it on a computer like here in utah where i'm up visiting right now book right now they have a

granite mountain up in one of the canyons and it's like fully you know it's just like super granite and they have a giant vault in there and so they'll put films in there and all sorts of and it's super cool and and it's basically you know designed to you know survive a nuclear whatever and then but it's also really cool, so it's good for whatever materials you put in there. But they store, like, real goods in there. So it's interesting to me when somebody's like, we're going to store Bitcoin in a virtual currency in a vault.

You're like, wait, that's just a computer. But I guess it'll be cut off from the world, so it'll be unhackable technically but i don't know how that affects the bit chain so uh i don't know man that's kind of weird so anyway that's happening with coinbase only you saw the riddle on how that makes any sense but they're hoping that by i don't know having this little sort of vault security thing that can make people feel safer about cryptocurrency, which is hard to do these days. I don't feel very safe about it.

Let's see. What else do we have in here? Backed BAKKT says it plans to launch its physically settled Bitcoin futures contracts on September 23rd after getting approval from New York State's financial regulator. So this is kind of interesting what's been going on with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is now it's really becoming like the stock market. You have these players that come in. In fact, for a long time, the short sellers showed up in Bitcoin

and just trashed it when it was up around $20,000, took it back down to $600. And there's a lot of other factors that went into that as well. But the short seller is coming into a market. If you've ever studied being a stockbroker, I studied being a stockbroker years ago. I understand monetary policy. And at one point, I think I had NASDAQ level 2 trading where I was just one level above the guy who was on the floor and was a day trader for a long time. I think I had Nasdaq level 2 trading where I was just one level above the guy who was on the floor and

Was a day trader for a long time the These these guys are doing future contracts. So basically they're it's almost like commodity where they're you know basing on futures and short sales and long-term contracts of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency so it's becoming a normalized sort of currency, if you will, or a normalized sort of stock, if you will, where people are buying it. And of course, with the Chicago Board of Trade, the CBOT, I think it is, you know, they're investing in produce and orange juice and, you know, all those sort of things that are commodities. So, you know, here you go. We're getting to that level of crypto coin where there's just much more adoption on it. And, uh,

maybe we'll see a day, it's going to be a long time coming, or it's going to be a lot of hurdles before the, before the fed starts really dealing in cryptocurrency, but technically they're letting their banks start to do it. Um, so there that. Even Facebook may, you know, whatever that Facebook thing is, they floated that as a trial and as a test to see what sort of arrows they get. And I think they're going back to the drawing board with it. That's my opinion. You can take it for what you want. An internal letter, Facebook moderators, this is from The Intercept,

in Austin claim Accenture managers pressured on-site counselors to divulge information on trauma sessions one counselor quit uh they're really interesting stuff about these people that are hired and they're paid minimum wage they're put in these kind of slave uh sort of environments where their job is to look at some of the most heinous stuff that's put on Facebook or sometimes the internet, uh, vice versa. That's, you know, transposed onto Facebook. So they have to look at kiddie porn and they have to look at, uh, you know, scat videos, just the heinous of the heinous, which I would never want to see because there's certain things I, you, I mean,

you just don't want to have in your head man and I've seen enough things in life where I'm just like I really didn't want to see that like one time I saw I think it was Saddam Hussein he got hung and his neck broke when he fell and and I remember watching it and I went you know I really I really wish that was not in my library of references so yeah so I think there was another time where I saw Leo Laporte actually post something and now I can never watch Leo Laporte again poor guy but hey man gotta be careful what you post on your on your phone but you know I every time I see him i see i go oh yeah that uh he's a really nice guy but uh you know there's some stuff you just can't unsee you want to see it so i wouldn't want to

see that stuff and evidently a lot of these people it's very damaging for what they're seeing and they're getting paid like minimum wage to do it and my howard stern fan i used to be back in the day and then he just got too plain for me and I got really pissed off about the three-day contract with the thing and it just kind of got old. I really got familiar with the formula. Someone on Periscope's asking me if I was a Howard Stern fan. And what else do we have here on the news some of the stuff that sticks out to me um this is kind of interesting ars technica is reporting that federal judge rules georgia will have to fall back to paper ballots if it doesn't replace his electronic voting machines with a secure

system for 2020 uh i'm not going to be political here but i gotta tell you we've got to get this fixed um we have got to get um the got to get our polling protected, our voting machines protected. We have all these old-ass voting machines. They're easily hackable. If you've ever gone down to the hackathons that are down in Las Vegas, they were just here I think earlier this month, and I forget the name of it, but they go there and they hack stuff and there's like kids breaking into these electronic machines it's scary and we're not

passing legislation at least through the senate that will give money to these states to protect their machines this is the thing that makes our whole republic our whole constitution our democracy run it's one of the most important things we need to protect because once we become a country where people feel that that's bullshit, they will stop voting, they'll stop caring, and then that's kind of how we got here. So there you go. It'll just get worse. And God knows, can you imagine worse? So there's that. This is also interesting from Vice.

Gab, if you're familiar with Gab AI, Gab AI experienced a huge growth spurt in H1 2019. Similar web data shows its traffic between January and July grew almost 200%, and unique visitors are up 180%. If you're familiar with Gab AI ai it's another white nationalist site it's a site that kind of plays itself to conservatives and gop people but really the kind of ultra crazies um wait didn't i just that was redundant anyway um so it plays themselves to that and it and uh so people that go there they like that and usually they're the people that are getting kicked off Twitter, YouTube, Facebook now for being, uh, crazy with their stuff and causing issues, you know, and being dangerous

to other people. So, um, Gabby, I has kind of been that, but it's kind of scary and seeing, you know, this huge increase in white nationalism, terrorism. And I got to tell you, I'm more scared if I'm out in public. I'm not scared about the person wearing a turban or the different Muslim things. I'm not scared about those people. I'm not scared if you're dark-skinned. I am scared if you're a white guy who's middle-aged, who looks like me,

or you're some angry incel now. Now I'm kind of starting to watch. It used to be I's middle-aged who looks like me or you're some angry incel now now i'm kind of starting to what used to be i was watched for guys look like me just angry old men who had guns and can afford it but now it's becoming these these incels these young guys who can't get laid they can't figure out how to ask a girl out and they're really angry about it and and so they pick up a gun because they're short on everything else when it comes to, uh, body parts, let's put it that way. And, uh, so this is scary. This, this is being, um, this is being encouraged at the highest level in the office of our country. And to see that Gabby I is having a 200% was a 200% increase in unique visitors in six months. That's crazy.

That's crazy. And that tells you what's happening in America. We are going crazy town. When you get somebody in the White House who isn't encouraging people to be nuts, who isn't encouraging white nationalism, white terrorism, and all this stuff. So if you know someone who's on Gab AI,

that will tell you everything that you need to know about them uh i finally i i normally have accounts on every different social media site and for a while there i had one initially i saw joel calm posting about how great it was and he was making fun of why people feel the frog is racist which is interesting because he was deflecting but uh uh because the white nationalists adopted the frog as a racist frog they basically made it that way so joking around and being like why did why are liberals so stupid they think a frog's racist that's because white nationalists made it a racist symbol you dumb ass um so uh gab I got so toxic that I finally pulled my account off, I don't want to be, at first, I just kind of hid it, and I'm like, okay, so I'm just going to use this to watch what the fuck is going on here, because there's some crazy ass shit on here, and then finally,

I just went, no, man, I got to get off this thing, because I don't want to ever be caught on it, it's like, I don't have an account on 8chanchan or I don't believe I have an account on 4chan. I have to check. For a while there, I bet way back in the early days, 4chan was kind of funny. It was kind of like a funnier, meme-ier Reddit, but that went south quick. So, yeah, man. Gabby, some of these different sites that are out there. And, of course, they're going to have, what's his face?

I think the guy from 8chan. They're calling into Congress to talk. So that'll be kind of interesting as well. This is another interesting story that borders on political. The New York Times is reporting in a letter to Congress, the Trump administration has axed, wow, man, where am I from? Axed? Holy crap.

Is asking lawmakers to reauthorize a law that lets the NSA gain access to logs of phone and text records. Do you remember Edward Snowden? Do you remember the Obama administration? And I don't think it was the obama administration's fault the shit started back with bush where he authorized the nsa and the secret courts to spy on americans and so i believe obama if i recall right you can correct me he kind of inherited that program well everest snowden called all that shit out because i believe

it was brennan testified before the congress no, we don't spy on Americans. And then everyone's like, oh yeah, you want the real truth? And he called it all out. And, uh, so then we found out there were all these programs that were spying up here in Utah.

They were, the NSA has a building and they were scraping just like every fucking thing they possibly could keeping so much data. There was like no way to process that amount of data like it's the same it's the same bullshit that i hear when the fbi is like we want to start monitoring social media so we can stop stuff they rarely can ever stop stuff rarely unless somebody turns somebody in they rarely have been able to stop stuff off of scraping and and i believe there's laws in the books that police departments can't do it,

where they can't spy on people. So they have to be careful, too. Now, there's some people that need to be spied on. If you turn them into the FBI, you turn them into your local police department, they're technically supposed to keep an eye on them. But it depends on the level of what they're doing. But this is kind of interesting. The Trump administration, and I'm not being political here, they want to get access to those logs again, and they want the NSA to have access

to the logs that got taken away from them. Now, what's scary about this is the Trump administration has gone after people who talk badly about the Trump administration, and they've gone after them trying to use the FBI, the NSA, different things to find out what they're saying who they are find out who's hidden behind certain accounts who's playing anonymous behind certain accounts basically to squelch free speech and anybody who's critical of them this is even scary because they're removing the head of the NSA. Yeah, it's the National Security Advisor. I forget his name.

And her second in command. And they keep trying to put in some wackadoodles in there like they do with everything else they do. That can basically politicize the departments and become conduits of information that Trump can get a hold of and use them against political enemies. This is very scary shit. This is like high-level shit. If you read about Hitler back in the day and how they squashed some of their political competitors,

I mean, there was one time where they just murdered everybody. I forget what they called it. Wasn't it something Saturday? Or it was one day and they just fucking decided to kill everybody. everybody I forget what they called it wasn't it something Saturday or there was it was one day and they just they just fucking decide to kill everybody and and so this is really scary what's going on they're trying to replace the top of the NSA and they're going and saying they want this stuff so how do you feel about that I mean do you would do you really want the government being

like hey what did you say in social media when you've seen your text thing about Trump you so and I'm not being political this is scary shit this is technical this news this is business stuff it's kind of interesting what's going on our thing and we kind of beat this fight with Edward Snow, and now we're going back into it with the technical things. And how about you? But I don't like my phone records screwed with and who I'm talking to and what I'm doing. It's bad enough that Alexa and Cortana and Amazon and everybody else

are transposing or were transposing up to this week. If you're listening to the earlier Chris Voss shows, we talked about how they've now been busted at having contractors. They've been paying all this money to, to transpose your conversation you're having around your house. So if somebody listening in going, Hmm, Bob and Diana had some interesting kinky discussions or your sex.

And well, I guess we've got to write all that down. Oh baby. Mama, whatever. I don't know. kinky discussions or your sex and well I guess we got to write all that down oh baby whatever you say during sex so there's that so that should be interesting this is interesting as well this is from the economic times India based Twitter like platform share chat which supports multiple regional languages raises a hundred million million round led by Twitter. Twitter is funding their competitor, ShareChat, in India, which is very interesting because it's very Twitter-like. The sources say it's got a $600 million to $650 million valuation and could be the next Twitter in India,

which is weird because they already have a Twitter. And it's international. But the thing about. The problem you have with India. Is India has got a lot of languages. Like a lot. And it's pretty complex. And evidently a lot of languages are very different.

So I actually went on to share chat. To try and see if I can get me an account going. Because I really. I would like to have people from India listen to the show. I'm an audience loving whore. And wow, man, they don't have English. But it's like 16 different languages or some crap that you can choose your language. And, you know, there's Hindi and all the different Indian languages.

But it'd be kind of interesting. I mean, to me, India is a real, uh, potential powerhouse as a future, uh, economy as a future, um, group people as future buying thing. Um, they've got some different issues they need to resolve over there and, and maybe over 10 to 20, 30 years or generation, they'd be become, uh, something that's, become something that's a powerhouse in America or in the world. It could be like another, there's so many people there, and it could be like another China where people are, you know, they've got a mass of people.

It's a huge market base for not only buying goods, making goods, selling goods, everything else. So it is interesting that they've raised $100 million round led by Twitter, and they're trying to get into more of this stuff, and it'll be interesting to see how that comes and how that happens. America isn't going to be the big player in the world. I mean, eventually China is going to overtake us in their economy. They've got the billions of people that are in their country,

and it's just a matter of time until they walk out of, uh, you know, some of their different archaic and poor things and become a real powerhouse. And they're already starting to throw their weight around pretty heavily. Um, India is going to be the same way with, with all those people that they have there. Uh, they just got to fix some, a lot of the different issues, et cetera, issues etc etc it might help if they didn't spend so much time and money in space and and uh making nuclear weapons against pakistan they could never settle that business they'd probably move forward so anyway that's kind of uh some of my interesting stuff there oh there's one other uh thing i want to throw in here apple at nine to five maxes its u.s footprints reach 2.4 million it's on track

to its goal of directly contributing 350 billion dollars to the u.s economy by 2023 i guess what they're mainly doing is hiring a lot of jobs and people and that new spaceship they built out there in silicon valley uh i guess they're really rocking and rolling that thing and, um, it's going to be huge. So, uh, good for Apple. All right, great. That explains why your cell phone now is like 12 or $1,500 or wherever it's going to be on the next round. And there's no longer subsidies for those phones anymore. So you're paying for Apple's us job footprint, thanks for contributing to the economy, now, now if you can just pay that mortgage that you have on your cell phone, that'd be great, what are you gonna do man, welcome to the world, what is it, death taxes and what shit costs,

those are the three major factors of things that always are a given in life so death taxes and paying a lot for your apple iphone which you know i mean i i can't blame him samsung and everybody else's fault suit and be like apple can do what we're doing that too um so there you go you're just you're just a little hamster that big companies look at and they go, how much money can we get out of this motherfucker? He's getting around in the wheel. We'll get some money out of him and get some money out of his kids. Blah, blah, blah. There you go. That's what you're for.

You're just meal in the mill. Something like that. I don't know. Anyway, guys. Fun is fun. Have a safe holiday or have a safe weekend. It's not really a holiday, but weekends should be, every weekend should be a holiday, right?

So there's that. But have a safe weekend. You'll probably hear some shows, things that we'll do on the Chris Foss Show. Be sure to refer the show to your friends. We certainly appreciate it. Go to thecvpn.com. Subscribe there to the multitude of different shows we have. We're actually thinking about starting a weed or hemp show now.

I actually was thinking about it a while ago, but I think now I'm really serious after interviewing our most recent podcaster. Catch that show as well. It will be posted shortly before this one on iTunes and Google Play, Spotify, all those different places. Give the show a great review if you get a chance. We're trying to do like Amazon and get the employees here with a gun to their head to make great reviews for us, but oh, wait, there's only me.

So I guess maybe I'll just go make a great review for the Chris Voss Show. But if you get a chance, I'd certainly appreciate that, and I'd certainly love you forever. But it wouldn't be sexual. Sorry, disappoint. None of you. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you and we'll see you next time on the Chris Voss show. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Gotta love it.