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here we go yo yo good morning good evening good night good afternoon good dusk good dawn
whatever time you're listening wherever you're listening from shout out to my spotify listeners
apple podcast audible amazon music if you're on samsung's pod chasers geo savan deezer google
podcast stitcher and youtube if you're watching in thanks for giving me a reason to get dressed
today come in live from my voice to your phone computer headphones tv car stereo smart watch
Bluetooth speaker. It's 2022 people, almost 2023. It is getting really crazy the way I'm able to
record and the way you're able to listen wherever you want, whenever you want. You could have been
anywhere in the world, but you are here right now. Take a moment to be present and recognize that it
is now, right now. Wherever your now is, whether that's working, running, exercising, cleaning,
laying down, flying, driving. Be grateful we're alive. Failure can be frightening. However,
as Winstead Churchill reminds us, success is all about going from failure to failure
without losing enthusiasm. Without losing enthusiasm is the big part. A lot of people
are excited when that bell rings. Get that first punch in the face and it's like, damn,
you want to crumple. But we're going to keep moving without losing any enthusiasm. I'll be
honest, man. Episode eight, my enthusiasm is higher than it's been even doing episode one. So
hopefully I can ride this. I'm not naive enough to think that the original happiness of getting
started with something new won't eventually fade, but that's why you got to set it up and think of
any problems that could occur. Just roll with the punches as you go. This is I Will Not Lose
podcast where we explore stories of success learned from failure, what's going on in the week,
how we can learn from other people's failures, etc. So let's jump right in. Announcements. It is
December 11th, 2022, and we're recording. So we're coming right around to the Christmas season.
We since got the Black Friday results in, and I have to stick my foot in my mouth. I'm pretty
sure I went on the air saying that I just don't think Black Friday is going to be a big hit,
whether it be because of the recession, whether it be because people are just so content with
shopping online. I don't know. But between in-store and online, this was a record breaking
year. I might as well just throw out 20 million billion because I don't know the number. It wasn't
the billions, but this was big for retail. So who knows how long this recession will go or what will
fade. But I can tell you what, it would have been a lot scarier had Black Friday not done well
because everybody would have started pulling their money back even crazier. You know,
I'm not an economist. I just watched what happened in 2008. And a lot of those people
are still alive. So I would like to think that something we can learn from the 2008 recession.
But maybe I'll see reaching my network, see if I can get an economist on to discuss that,
because it's pretty interesting. If you don't look at it with a fear of doom and gloom and
just realize you may have to change some things that you have, uh, it's, it's doable. It's
definitely doable. Uh, one thing I have refused to change on is coffee. So even if I buy the K pods
and I make coffee at home, I've tried instant coffee and boiling water and just making it like
that. It's not about the caffeine. It's not even a caffeine addiction. Something about
getting a cup of designer coffee before you get started in the office. So whether you get your
designer coffee from Starbucks, Dunkin', Tim Hortons, doesn't matter to me, but you know what
I'm talking about. Black coffee's damn near $4 anyway, so why not just pay $5.25 and get a
grande and for 75 cents more you can have an extra eight ounces so why not get that you know
it's harder and harder to justify and there really is no cheap solution so i am guilty i will be the
first to say i'm spending way too much money on coffee but hey it's what we can do so let's see
what do we got going on there's a couple of things i have in my notes today i wanted to talk about
complacent thinking wanted to start talking about new year's resolutions whether you guys have yours
now or whether you're going to wait till the 1st to make yours. I made my New Year's resolution
last year, but now as it's coming up to the 1st, I don't know if I'm going to keep it. We'll see.
But yeah, you know, you got to be open to hearing a new way. So if you're a complacent thinker,
it starts to get a little bit scary. And you think about the world of complacent thinking,
and the farther you go back, I mean, the Earth was the center of the universe. The Earth was
flat. The concept, America didn't exist. I mean, our entire world changes with paradigm shifts.
And a lot of times people say, hey, I'm not going to adopt that. Nobody's going to adopt that
because I won't adopt that. And you have small neighborhoods of people who don't adopt. But
it's funny. I was doing some Christmas shopping and I'm driving around with my mom and we're
talking about electric vehicles. I was telling her about the 500 mile drive that we're going
to talk about in a second that Tesla achieved over the past week. And she was just saying how
people aren't ready to make the jump to electric vehicles, at least completely. People in the town
where she's from just talk about whether it be safety issues or they're not going to be able to
find a charge and they're never going to do that. Meanwhile, there's tons of engineers solving these
problems as we speak, but people are still thinking it's never going to happen. So there's
a couple of examples I wrote down just on that theme, but to go more on the Tesla truck and what
happened. So over the past week, and again, I'm going to hit this disclaimer every time you guys
are coming to me thinking that this is the first time you want to hear something. That being said,
don't worry if you're missing out, if this is the first time you're hearing it. Tesla completed a
500 mile drive with a semi truck, fully electric on a single charge with an 81,000 pound load.
This, as some people would say, defies the laws of physics. So this isn't going to be a super
into it. You know, I was actually looking at some of the engineers going over the math and
calculating because Tesla hasn't quite put out everything. They put out some of the ranges of
like how much the battery was pulling. So there's engineers deciphering how much charge the truck
had going uphill versus downhill, which brought me onto something that I didn't know. But I guess
electric vehicles recharge themselves due to some law of physics with potential energy where
if they're going uphill, they use charge faster. But as they're going downhill, they can put
some of that energy back into the battery. So I'm reading notes on Quora or Reddit,
I can't remember, about how they broke down and engineers and naysayers that were saying that
essentially this would break the laws of physics. So I'm going to cite electrek.co for this that
I'm about to read. But this was the problem and why people were saying that it would never happen.
people like Bill Gates, people much smarter than me. The problem is that the batteries are big and
heavy. The more weight you're trying to move, the more batteries you need to power the vehicle.
But the more batteries you use, the more weight you add, the more power you need. Even with the
big breakthroughs in battery technology, electric vehicles will probably never be a practical
solution for things like 18-wheelers, cargo ships, and passenger jets. Electricity works when you
need to cover short distances, but we need a different solution for heavy, long-haul vehicles.
Gates wasn't the only one with doubts about Tesla's Semi back then. We also reported on
comments made by Daumer's head of trucks, Martin Darum, who said that Tesla's 500-mile range broke
the laws of physics. Quote, if Tesla really delivers on this promise, we'll obviously buy
two trucks, one to take apart and one to test, because if that happens, something has passed us
by. But for now, the same laws of physics apply in Germany and in California, end quote. Daimler
has since brought to market several of its own battery electric trucks, but none of them has a
range close to 500 miles. Okay, so Tesla put out their evidence is a chart as well as a time-lapse
video of the non-stop video of the truck making the 500-mile drive and passing through. I forget
where to where, but 500 miles is a long way on a single charge wherever you go with that sort of
weight. So you take all this into consideration and now you have engineers going nuts, trying to
break everything down, trying to figure out what they did. The most recent one I saw was that the
load wasn't 81,000 pounds. That might've been a few hundred pounds lighter, which makes a huge
difference as I'm looking through all the math. But hey, what does this mean if it is a single
charge? I mean, transportation still is one of the largest industries. I mean, your stuff has
to get from somewhere. When you order something from Amazon, it's sitting somewhere and it has
to get to you. Your milk has to stay refrigerated the whole time it's being transported and other
goods that stay refrigerated until they get to the grocery store or to your refrigerator.
So online shopping doesn't quite cut out retail.
It doesn't, stuff still has to get shipped.
I mean, there's places that don't have access.
They're not, you know, I have, luckily I live in Allentown.
I have access to almost everything in the city and I'm less than two hours away from
things I don't have access to in New York or Philadelphia.
but there are some still remote places in Alaska. So anything that can even put a chip in that
trucking industry and provide either a more efficient or cheaper way to do it, you're going
to have huge jumps in an industry moving towards this. If Tesla wanted to, I mean, it's competitors
like Amazon. I believe Amazon was investing in its own trucks or did, or a percentage of their
fleet is their own. I don't know how many of them are electric or whatnot, but there's a lot of
places that need to get things transported. So this hitting the market could change a bunch of
things. And it's strange. In the light of everything going on with Elon Musk, he's sort
of like this weird engineer celebrity, probably has way more notoriety than anyone like Tesla or
anyone has in the past. And he's become a pop icon. So a lot of the stuff that he does shouldn't be
news, but it's going to be trumpeted to the front. We've spent so much time worried about his tweets
that we're forgetting that the company is still making huge strides in engineering. So big shout
out to Tesla if you guys did achieve this. Big shout out if you didn't. I mean, I hate lying on
data, so I hope you guys did not change or try to mess with this experiment and we can learn
something from it, but we'll see. We'll see where this goes. But you have this idea of
complacent thinking. This really had me thinking about people who say nobody will shift. I keep
quoting the 2008 recession. This was a big time for me because I had been laid off from Circuit
City and I decided to start a branding business to help people with logos who are also starting
their businesses. One of the things that I saw happen during that time is there were things like
Google Hangout, which it's still a thing, but it was much different back then. Video chat was not
the way, it wasn't where it was. And honestly, even at the beginning of Corona, it wasn't quite
where it needed to be. But they made huge strides as people moved towards working remotely. In 2009,
I struggled to get people to do two things. One of them was log into a project management system
to check all of their stuff. And the biggest thing I got was, oh, I got to log in. I got to
remember another password. And it's like, okay, people have a point. People don't like to change
the way they do things. So a lot of people have some sort of, they pay for software to keep all
their passwords in one place, or they use the same computer because Google has the password manager
and they make it easier to do stuff. But you let writing down a password prevent you from using
cloud-based software and you're still emailing Word documents for somebody to save and make edits
and send back. And it's like, you know, there were things like Google Docs and there was cloud-based
things for collaboration that people just weren't using. So when I tried to get people to go on to
Hangouts. And Zoom, you still have to do this. No matter what video player you use, you have to
download a client and then it opens up. Well, people didn't want to download something from
Google, especially not called Google Hangouts. Oh, and it's free? No, that's a virus. I won't do it.
So nobody would put Google Hangouts onto their computer and video chat.
Something happened in the corona. It was like that climax where everybody's talking about
something. If you remember when Facebook and Twitter were still kind of new and there was a
whole generation trying to figure out what are all these kids doing on this social media? Is social
media going to be a fad? And I remember going out to networking groups and I said, how many people
think Facebook is a fad? And this was 12 years ago and 90% of the room raised their hands. They
didn't want to hear anything that I had said about using it to network or grow reach. And now here we
are in 2022, Facebook is declining, but people are still going to be logging into that app.
The usage rates, the amount of users that still use that app, they complain about it,
but they use the app to complain about it. So they're not going anywhere. You have to learn
to adapt to things that are happening in the world around you. Otherwise, you just become
complacent, you just become fearful, you become grumpy, and you get mad at the rest of the world
for changing around you rather than adopting onto something else. So nowadays, it's not even a
thought. People have video. There's still people like Apple with the FaceTime, and they make it
difficult to video chat between Android and Apple devices. But I did get my father-in-law to download
Zoom on his iPhone, so now I can help him with tech support without driving out to the woods,
even though I do love making the trip out as property is beautiful. It's just sometimes
there's more efficient ways to do things. And especially if people are agreeing to pay me
hourly, they should absolutely be okay to us doing those hours as absolute efficient as possible. So
I'm all for meeting in person, but if there's a way around it and don't get me wrong, I don't
think Zoom replaces in-person meetings. There's still some things, contracts that you just have
to go over in person. Um, so it's just a matter of adding a new tool to your tool belt. So sort
of other complacent thinking that I see. So I have to, it's on my list to watch the, uh,
it's an ancient apocalypse, Grand Hancock's series. Um, so I discovered Graham through
Joe Rogan's podcast and essentially he has a theory that 12 to 14,000 years ago, there was
an apocalyptic period and there was a heavily advanced society before then. His backing is
all sorts of megalithic structures that are appearing in farm. So essentially, you don't
go from just farming and raising crops to building huge pyramids and megalithic structures. Something
is usually coercing that. So I'm interested in hearing this. And before I even get a chance to
watch the series because I've heard multiple episodes of him on Joe Rogan. It's something
I want to investigate for myself. I'm seeing all sorts of press coming out saying that it should be
considered science fiction. Now, in the world of academia, a lot of stuff is theories,
and there's a lot of people who agree on a theory and mainstream. And the sake of science,
I hate to say it, but a lot of academics, and think about it, there's pressure to be the first
to discover something, the first to put out a paper on something. So you're not over here
collaborating with other archaeologists and saying, oh, what did you find? What did I find?
Let's put this all together. You're looking to be that person that breaks the story. So academia has
a weird way of not necessarily being collaborative, even though if you think about
science and the idea of science, people don't prove things for their own notoriety. There's
not a ton of money in science. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson disproving Pluto, that pissed a lot of
people off. You've got textbooks that have to be rewritten. You've got things that are taught this
way. And it's just another example where you have something stuck in your head. And for some reason,
people get very upset when you change their way of thinking or offer a new way of thinking.
So one thing I try to do personally is be open to new information. If somebody brings something to
me. I may say, okay, I've done it this way 95% of the time, but let's explore that little 5%.
Let's see what we can change and do. So I'm always open to hearing a new way to improve on a system
and I'll test it and then I'll go back to the way that works the best, whether that's the new way
or the old way. But you can't just shut yourself off to everything. In the idea of hearing something
new or doing something new for yourself, you got New Year's Eve coming up. A lot of people
look at this as a time to let go of our past and move into our future.
I've been really on the mentality of staying in the now and not really spending too much time
regretting the past or wishing to change it or changing the future or being fearful about the
future. But it does make me think, what can we change? It's been a hell of a year. I've done
a ton of things. I've had accomplishments for myself, whether it be increase in health,
weight loss, starting a podcast, something that I've always looked to do and that I've been able
to do consistently every week since I've started. There's upgrades and things that I want to do
to the podcast. Just some things that make the production time a little bit faster.
changes that we may make on our New Year's Eve episode, we're going to go and we're going to
have some ideas. We go this way or we can go that way. And we'll get an idea of which one
works as we build the audience and turn this into something.
Big shout out to everybody who's been over to the studio. It's interesting. So I've done it
a couple of ways. One, I've had somebody over, recorded a podcast and just gave them an idea of
what the set was going to look like in post. And they were blown away. They were like, there's no
way where we were sitting looks like that. So that's insane. Then I've had people who have seen
it and then come and be like, yeah, but where's the, wait, you do all that here? So it's like,
wow, it can go one of two ways. But did have a popular videographer over recently. I'm not going
to put them on blast just because we got to get the paperwork out of the way before they can come
on as a guest. I've really liked them to promote their work and do some things like that. But it's
fun. We're just playing around with the equipment. And if you haven't had the chance to get on a
podcast or be in a studio, if you're like me, you're young and you're watching this stuff and
you're like, why are they wearing headphones? What is he doing with that? How come he moves
away from the mic when he's coughing. And I'm watching people and starting to put it all together
for myself. And it was fun just kind of going through and testing the equipment and explaining
why we wear the headphones and how everything works. So it'll be interesting. I did want to
put a piece right here for the holidays. I was thinking about my decorations and I've been
talking about it for a few weeks. So I decided, well, this is something I have to get retail.
I can't go and do it online. I'll go out shopping, check the thrift stores, put something nice
together. Then we'll record the podcast a little bit later. So first stop was Burlington, I want
to say. Did we go to Burlington first or the Dollar Tree? I want to say we went to Burlington
and I'm looking around. They have all sorts of little things. I'm taking a look at YouTube and
looking at the set and thinking, OK, what would fit here? Is that going to be in frame? Should
I change the frame? Should we throw some garland around the table? I really want to be festive and
have some fun with this. Didn't quite find anything until all of a sudden there was these,
they were like red Santa boots with the black straps, the white rim. And they were like,
they had white tinsel and presents and stuff coming out of them. It was just a really cool
crafted piece. 15 bucks. I was like, bet I'm going to get this. So I go and I'm waiting in line
and there's about 15, 20 people in a line in front of me and all of them have carts full of stuff.
They're Christmas shopping. And I'm thinking, man, I wish they had a self-checkout. I'd just
ring this up. And as I'm looking at it, there's just some imperfections. And I was like, well,
that's cool. That adds some character. The soles aren't completely painted onto the boots. And I'm
like, oh, there's a black. You would have seen it from here. There was a black mark over the top of
the left footprint. So I'm like, ah, I could go back, find another one. These are probably
hand-painted. There's probably a good one. But now if I get out of line, I need to wait in line
again. So sorry, retail shoppers. I set it right down at the nearest place, pushed my way through
the line and left, left with nothing. So we decide, well, on the way home, we could stop by
Michael's. Michael's has crafts and stuff. They'll definitely have something good. So I go to
Michaels. I look at a couple of things. There was one piece that looked pretty good. It was 50%
off, but I felt like I was settling for it. And everywhere I went, it felt like there was only
one thing to pick. So I said, I need to make some content for the podcast. I need to have a piece
for people to talk about. I need to select it and do this. Then I decided to just talk about how I
couldn't find something in retail. I wasn't going to go to a third shop. I may or may not go looking
online. But we complained about the imperfections of retail. But yet there are still things that
it's best to go and touch and buy. And there's things, even if I go to a store and touch it
and then buy it online, there's still a reason for retail. And I wish that retail would do a
better job of becoming more of a conduit for buying things online. I mean, even if they just
had a next to the self checkout, you can buy something online and you just do it there in
the store so you could see things. These are different ways that you could kind of capitalize
on that. I may buy a piece online, but I don't know the exact size. So I have to go and check
the dimensions of a piece just to make sure that it all fits versus physically holding something
and doing it. But I will have more chances online. I can probably order something and it'll be here
before the next episode, but people complain about online shopping. They say it puts mom and
pop shops out of business. I would say there's some truth to that, but in 2022, 2023, there is
absolutely no reason why you can't also sell your products in a hybrid model and be online.
There are small plugins you can get if you have a website that you can sell things through your
website and accept credit card payments. There are Facebook marketplaces. There are all sorts
of different websites like this where people have yard sales and sell all sorts of used goods.
So they bring the shoppers to you. You just have to have the goods and go through setting up the
logistics of shipping it out and doing things like that. What I do for a career is Google
AdWords and Google Ads. Hasn't been called AdWords in some years now, but there we go with the
complacent thinking. I'm stuck calling it AdWords for life. But they have all sorts of local
campaigns that you can drive people who search Google and make it easier for them to see your
store and hit get directions to go to your store and you pay for that conversion. So there's ways
you could bring somebody to see something online, but then buy it in retail. The opposite of what I
just talked about. But you have to find ways to adapt to the way the world is and stop complaining
about the way the world will be. Um, I'm going to have a, and he has confirmed, we just got to get
him on here, but I'm going to have Alex Blankenberger on here. We're going to talk about,
uh, AI and where it may be going. Uh, we had talked about this about a month ago when a
AI submission won an art contest. Um, and it rose a whole bunch of things about if this was the end
of it for artists like myself, or if people still wanted to go through the empathetic
feeling of making it. So we have some small conversations. I'm going to save that for Alex,
but I do have my own ideas of how artists can adopt to these new tools because they're going
to evolve before the laws that regulate them do. So if you guys are waiting for them to get
together and put regulation for what AI can and can't do. Just know we're still waiting for them
to catch up on intellectual property laws for the last five or 10 years. So good luck with that.
Aye yi yi. So here we are with a not decorated for Christmas podcast, a story about trying to
get it decorated. And you know what? Maybe I just need to grab the next thing that I see and put it
here. Maybe it changes each time, but we're not going to overthink it. In one second, I'm going
to check the time before I go through my notes. Wow. 30 minutes. Go check that timestamp and look.
No, it's not going to line up because there's some in the beginning. But when I went and looked at
my timestamp right now, it's at exactly 30 minutes. I'm getting better at this, people.
getting better. Yeah, I'm not looking at a timer while I'm recording, but I am trying to keep it
consistent around 30 minutes or so. So I'm going to start wrapping up a couple of things I want
to leave you with and a couple of things I want you to ask and think about. What are you doing
for New Year's? What are you going to change? What are you going to put up? Shout out to everybody
who text me what they were going to do for Podsgiving when we went off and challenged
people to drop in the comments things they were thankful for, you guys text me. The whole point
was to have it a group effort. We got no comments, so I'm assuming that none of my listeners are
grateful for anything. Let's change that, guys. Drop something in the comments that you're grateful
for. Drop your New Year's resolutions. We're going to do that on the next couple of episodes and see
where we can go from there. This is I Will Not Lose podcast, stories of success learned from
failure. To support the show, visit the website, shows.acast.com slash I Will Not Lose. Subscribe
on your favorite podcast player, share the episode link, leave a comment, or even just tell your
friend, hey, you know what? You should go and check out this podcast by Tony Ortiz. It's pretty
cool. And they're going to say, oh yeah, where do I find it? And you tell them wherever you want.
I will not lose podcasts available on all streaming platforms.
And they're going to say, well, I don't listen to any streaming platforms.
I don't watch it unless it's on YouTube.
Just go ahead and share them this link.
Thank you, guys.
I appreciate you listening.