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What's up, what's up, what's up? Good morning, good evening, good night, good afternoon.
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I'm grateful to be alive. This is I Will Not Lose Podcast. Let's jump right in. All right. So
So what can we learn from the massive failures this week? Well, what's trending in the news
right now? You got Kyrie, you got Facebook revenue decline. Well, really all social media
declining in revenue. So going to have to see what that means. Facebook just laid off 11,000
people the time of recording this, maybe within the last week or so. So this is coming from the
Associated Press, Barbara Ortre. Facebook parent Meta on Wednesday reported that its revenue
declined for a second consecutive quarter, hurt by falling advertising sales as it faces competition
from TikTok's wildly popular video app. The quarter's weak results raise fresh questions
about whether Meta's plan to spend $10 billion, with a B, a year on the metaverse, a concept that
doesn't quite exist yet and probably never will, is prudent while its main source of revenue is
faltering. It's from the Associated Press. You can go read the full article there. But
this means they have to adapt and change. Great, great challengers, great contenders,
great champions. They don't stick with what works in the beginning. It's a constant growth,
the constant change. So Meta, formerly Facebook, we've seen them kind of innovate or buy a new,
buy an Instagram or steal a Snapchat when something else is popular. So I can't say
we've seen them innovate a ton. Hopefully Metaverse was supposed to be that new thing
that was different. But I mean, social media, if you think about MySpace and what existed before
Facebook and Twitter. Those are two of the really big ones. And it's kind of still seems to be the
wild, wild west a decade or 15 years later. So what kind of thing do they have to adapt? So
Facebook's main revenue is selling your data and pushing advertisement to you. You don't pay a
subscription fee. You don't pay a membership fee to own your Facebook profile. There's nothing like
that. So if you have to think the way that they make money is by you, when you accept all those
terms, when you say, yes, you can share my location, you can share what I like, you can
share what I post, the political views that I have, you're giving all that data to Facebook
and they're allowed to sell it. So we'll kind of dig into that, whether or not that's great or
whether or not that's bad. But Facebook has got to find another revenue stream besides just the ads.
So what is the whole idea of spending $10 billion and the billions of dollars that have been spent in the metaverse? What is the metaverse? What is Zuck trying to do?
So essentially, if you've seen a Ready Player One, Metaverse is something that you completely
immerse yourself in through a VR headset or something along the lines or goggles or glasses
that changes the world around you. And it would essentially be a world and you can dress as an
avatar. You could be a horse, a unicorn, whatever you want to do. That's kind of the social media.
There's things like this that exist now. I can't name any. I don't play any. I don't have a VR headset, but I have tried and it's pretty cool. There's some potential there. But people have been playing simulation games for years on end just through a computer screen.
if meta becomes a thing, not only would they control all that data and be able to advertise
to you in the metaverse, you know, and this isn't a, oh, the metaverse is super scary. It's never
going to happen. There's some really cool things in it. It can bring some people together if the
vision is sought out. I just don't know if people will buy in in time, but all of the messaging,
you know, Facebook owns WhatsApp. That's a huge messaging platform in the world and it's encrypted.
It's not like they're sitting there reading your messages, but they know who's messaging where, from what device.
It's definitely valuable data.
By them controlling all of that, there is no, like, I have a green bubble, you have a blue bubble.
Everybody would have Facebook's color bubble, whatever it is.
So being the only metaverse with no competitors, the only place that you can go for this sort of social media,
it gives essentially Mark Zuckerberg the stranglehold on that entire tech world.
So the messaging, the data, the ads, and this would solve a huge problem like him being able to...
So the problem Zuck's running into now is if you have an Apple iPhone and Apple's best interest is
your privacy and securing your data, they're going to have a button that says, stop this app from
sending data. That's the worst fear for Facebook because now they can't sell that. So by being
able to not be stopped by Google or Facebook or Apple, I'm sorry, not Facebook, Apple or any of
the larger competitors, it's a huge revenue stream. So it makes sense why he's dropping
the tens of billions of dollars on trying to do it. Well, I don't want to say it makes sense.
we're going to have to see in hindsight whether this man's vision is completely
just completely manic or what. But all right. So why is data so important to the equation? So
what you're starting to see is AI helps you. You've experienced this in things like YouTube,
or I don't know if you've come across this video because it was recommended to you,
but I'm creating content. It's categorizing that content. You're liking content. And then it puts
two and two together and says, Hey, you might like, I will not lose podcasts hosted by Tony Ortiz.
If you do like the similar type of videos and nobody else is using your account,
you're going to see recommended videos that are things that you like. When you watch a video,
the next video after that is going to go well. When you see ads that come up, they're going to
be relevant to you. They're not going to be trying to sell you diapers if you have no kids, etc.
So is it a terrible world to have the world customized to you? No, not really. If you're
a TikTok user, you see the algorithms using your data on your For You page. Reddit has the home
page where you kind of customize it and say, this is the content that I want to see. Now,
what's terrible about that is you, I don't necessarily like your for you page. Or if I
go to my son's for you page, it's for him. It's not for me. I'd like to see an equation where,
uh, well, it'd be pretty interesting to see if AI can take all of your data, all of your images
and create a TV show or a movie that's completely to your interests that relates to you. Uh, we're
seeing more and more in the form of like DALL-E and Mid Journey where you can input a command and
AI comes back and says, hey, here's a three monkeys dancing around a fire wearing birthday
hats. And the AI knows what all those inputs are and draws it. Just do a quick Google search. It's
not quite mainstream yet. I don't worry that my career as a graphic designer is over because AI
I took it, but it's curious to see where it's going and how all this data can be crunched by
AI machines and stuff. So this begs the question, when you're learning from failure,
is it better to improve upon the failures of somebody else? You know, the goal of this podcast
is not to lay out a whole bunch of failures so that somebody can avoid all of them. It's really
just to train your mentality into thinking that, okay, there is a success in just about everything
that we see. So you take a Facebook, which wasn't the first social media, improved upon like a
MySpace. My younger listeners won't remember MySpace or they've probably only heard of it,
but don't remember it at its infancy stage. But there's nothing that lets you customize your code
and Facebook and different things that MySpace had. So it innovated on different areas of the
social media. If you remember, MySpace had like a top five. I think they adopted favorites and
Instagram, but it's not like a public thing. I mean, that was a big deal. If you weren't in
somebody's top five and you were in their top five, I mean, that was like the early version
of blocking people. It was great. But yeah, it created the illusion that it was your space.
You could create it, you could do it, but you don't own the data. And so it's curious to see
as the internet evolves, are people going to be pushing towards having their own dot coms
as cookies go away? Are we going to see people focusing more on owning and creating their own
data and creating value behind that, that's definitely the goal. It should be the goal
with your business or even with this podcast. I have plans to kind of capture the data and be
able to monetize it in a different way. So what kind of innovations, what kind of failures and
innovations do we see? So Twitter, purchased by Elon Musk in this whole debacle this year,
They had the brilliant idea to charge $8 for a verification logo.
So some might say this is a brilliant move by Elon Musk to monetize a platform whose
revenue was declining and he's going to make his money back.
Let me tell you what happened.
The trolls took over.
So I don't have, I'm not going to pull it up.
Somebody had sent me, but people were buying the verification Elon Musk and posting political
things against his, uh, against his views, against his views and people without reading
underneath saying that it was not Elon Musk. They just see the verification and the name.
Uh, people were imitating sportscasters saying that coaches were fired, players were traded.
Um, and as a place that's supposed to be quick information is, is completely short-sighted,
completely short-sighted on twitter's ends a laugh but we'll see what they end up doing
not sure how they're going to innovate uh one of the great things about twitter as a platform was
its character limit and forcing people to be concise and creative in the way that they posted
and how they shortened links and it was its own way to communicate still great for news still a
very fast way to get video or text out there, but not sure what the future of it. I'm not a
Twitter user. I have a handle, but I might have some stuff that posts to there, but I don't
actively post to Twitter or surf Twitter. I'm not on Facebook. I am on Messenger, so people can
still message me on Facebook, but I don't find a value in scrolling there at all. Maybe once every
four weeks, I'll scroll through TikTok. I think it's great to understand this stuff. And being
that I do paid advertising, it's part of my career to be on top of social. But as a personal consumer
of it, I really just kind of put content out and don't don't take a few in. But that's just my
opinion. There's still plenty of people who love Twitter and want to see it do something.
uh kanye's still in the news you can go back and check i did a deep dive on
kind of his behavior what it means for everyone what we can learn for it so you can go back and
check out that episode it's called uh be impeccable with your words kanye you can check that out i'm
not going to go a ton into it but on the topic of social media he did purchase parlor so i'm
curious to see what happens. I mean, it's a massive undertaking. Don't know if he actually
has a vision or if this is just another billionaire flex. I mean, it's amazing. You
see these billionaires, one gets a yacht, they all get a yacht. One gets a spaceship,
this guy gets a bigger spaceship. So now I guess the new flex is buying social media platforms
or creating their own. So I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon takes a stab at something just to own
the market share in it you know amazon's involved in a lot of stuff that people don't even know
gaming and they they want to touch like every industry i mean the the buyout for twitch was
insane insane and there's people who don't even know what twitch is twitch is a streaming platform
similar to youtube but a lot of live video so it's not so much content that's put up it's live video
And streamers have massive amounts of people following them and donating for them to continue to create content. So it's insane. But putting content out, putting words out there, whether it be a tweet, whether it be a video, long form podcast, I mean, you run the risk.
People can take any little clip of something that I said, and if you don't break down the full speech, it's broken down. People can clip just a little bit. So you have to understand the power of words. You have to realize what you're taking out there and what you're putting out there.
and it's tough. I think about it all the time when I'm going through my show notes and I think,
what am I going to be speaking about? What's going on? What can we learn this week?
And continuing the experiment, you know, I hate to call this an experiment, but this really is a
let's see if we can be consistent. Let's see if we can keep spinning it and shape our mentality.
And it's therapeutic for myself. It's a reminder. They say the teacher becomes the student. So
as much as I keep promoting all this stuff, trust me, I'm sitting there on my own and I'm like,
wow, you know, I cannot lose. How can I learn from this? So hopefully you guys all jump on that.
Let me know how we go. So on the power of words, who else messed up this week? So Kyrie Irving,
not going to go a ton into this, but it is what everybody's talking about. So
we have to, you know, this is right along the lines of what we said with Kanye. So for those
of you that don't know what happened, Kyrie Irving is under fire right now. On October 27th,
and this is an excerpt from the New York Times. On October 27th, Irving tweeted a link to
Hebrew to Negroes, Wake Up Black America, a 2018 film driven by anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish
people lying about their origins. Among its false and outlandish claims is the assertion that the
Holocaust never happened. For a week after Irving posted the link to the film, he declined to
apologize or say that he held no anti-Semitic beliefs, prompting the Nets on November 30th
to suspend him indefinitely. He has since apologized, but the fallout continues. On
November 4th, Nike condemned hate and anti-Semitism and suspended its relationship with Irving
effective immediately. Irving, the seven-time NBA star, has been with the Nets since 2019.
He won a championship with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016, but over the past few years,
he has often been discussed more for his off-court views. In a 2018 interview with the New York
Times, he suggested that the earth might be flat, and over the past year, he had refused to be
vaccinated against the coronavirus. All right, so Mr. Irving, you have the right to think, feel,
post, share, whatever you want. Why was it such a big deal? Well, the documentary itself,
and I'm not sure. I haven't watched it. I can't tell you. I'm just reading reports of stuff.
I'm not sure if Kyrie watched it, to be honest, but he posted it with no caption, no comment,
no context. So it wasn't like saying, hey, we need to not listen to this. So you can take it
as an endorsement saying, Hey, we're going to put this out there. Uh, he said, commented and said,
you know, he doesn't agree with it. It wasn't his intent to hurt people. He didn't make the
documentary. So it comes to stand like you promote music. If you promote something that
has a message that doesn't like, or you have, you know, somebody put a racist lyric in an old song
in the 50s? Do we cancel their legacy now because things have changed? It's tough when you look at
the fact that Nike and everybody has these powers. So what are the sentiments? People are sitting
here in response, people to the Kanye backlash, the Kyrie Irving, they're still saying, see,
see, see, Jews control the media. They're able to go and swing this power and do this. So
what is actually happening? Are they protecting the interest of something that we've been taught
to always prevent this anti-Semitism? Is it something that we can come together as a group
and take action against? Has it happened before? Well, you have like Roseanne Barr going and saying
things about this person, that person looks like a monkey. ABC at the time had black women in power
and Roseanne Barr was cut or canceled.
So to go and say that you're kind of stuck on these strings,
no, you're being held accountable
for the things that you say.
And at the end of the day,
maybe you should have just apologized and kept it moving.
Maybe some people are saying,
well, they shouldn't have the power to say
that you need to apologize for your views
and things that you say.
Look, a lot of people look at these people as heroes.
So is it a little bit crazy?
that somebody has the power to end your career. Well, I mean, I guess you just watch what you say
at the end of the day. We go and we look at all these things. This reminds me of a book,
The Valley of Dry Bones, The Conditions That Face Black People in America Today.
So the reason I'm bringing this up is this book is about conditions that black people face.
and it's amazing because this was i think written in 88 and maybe maybe earlier than then
uh i will actually fact check that i'm real big on not googling things on this but let me see when
the valley of dry bones came out uh it's bringing up the uh yeah this is why i didn't want to get
into this anyway book came out a long time ago and we're still facing a lot of the same problems so
rather than say, oh, it's messed up that Jews control the media and that they're able to cancel
this, why not say, all right, well, what can we do to put things in power to protect the best
interests of our people? They mentioned things in Valley of Dry Bones, like you always have a
Chinatown and the price of tomatoes is cheaper in Chinatown. Why? Because all of the vendors get
together, bulk their order, get a lower wholesale cost, and then pass that on to the consumer.
there's nothing stopping having a you know a black chamber of commerce or saying things now
it's touchy when you go and you say this and if somebody clips this area it could absolutely sound
like i'm a separatist it could absolutely sound like i'm a i uh well actually i don't know if
you could spin it and you could spin anything but people could say i'm a black supremacist
absolutely not the case but when you go and you see things that other communities are doing
passing dollars between themselves, educating themselves financially. Just having somebody
in your family that's financially literate that can go and tell you what to do with generational
wealth and not be in a position where you can't trust anybody and you don't know what to do.
This is a real problem. Shout out to the guys, they were bringing it up on Flagrant too,
or Flagrant it's called now, Schultz and Akash. Shout out to those guys, but they brought up a
really good point about that. So what do we do? Do we get angry at, I don't know, I guess everything
is taking sides, but I just go back to, and I have it on record and I said it with Kanye,
it's really just a matter of protecting and letting our children know why this sort of
rhetoric is dangerous, what it has led to, what it could lead to. But I am putting a staple in
that. I've beat the dead horse way too many times on it. So we've talked about billionaire flexes.
We've gone over the buyout, whether or not it's better to improve on an old system or create your
own. I mean, if you think about it, Snapchat created its own system and Snapchat still exists,
but you've got reels, you've got TikTok, you've got, you know, TikTok is structured a little
different. But that whole portrait style video, that's the wave. That's what Reels is stealing.
That's an Instagram. If you don't think that Instagram is favoring towards Reels,
go and post something and post the similar message through your Reels. I've had posts
that have gotten two likes. I've posted a Reel of something similar and people have come up to me in
the street saying, hey, I saw you doing that. I saw you doing this. Their algorithm is absolutely
favoring towards reels. So, you know, Facebook meta didn't go and say, okay, well, we're going
to create this portrait format. They said, man, everybody's on this Snapchat thing. So let's go
ahead and buy those up and let's go from there. As a creative, I'll go on record saying this,
I don't think anything is original. I think every creative thing, even if you sat there,
drew it yourself, didn't look at anything, you've referenced something, your brain has
saw something so you know what a giraffe looks like so you're able to draw it and somebody else's
brain did something similar so you know the the difference is that you have the connection you
have the ability to put it out there and see all the other iterations that other people did you're
not tied behind telegrams and things like this uh brilliant idiots podcast he brought up something
I thought was really interesting, but they said, um, I completely drew a blank. I'm not even going
to edit that out. I'm not even going to edit that out. I'm human. Things happen. I do have a show
notes, but I try not to stick completely to them. This is not a monologue kind of go. And there's a
topic I want to dive a little bit better on. I'll kind of go into that, but just want to kind of
put some notes out there for the future, for people who may have been laid off from Facebook.
This feels a whole lot like 2008, where you have a lot of major companies. I mean, prior to 2008,
layoffs were not a common thing. They were not a common thing. So since then, a lot of people have
fallen back. And being a creative entrepreneur, I've helped a ton of people create logos. I still
create logos on a regular basis for people starting businesses or rebranding their business
that exists. And you see a big uptick of it. Whenever there's a recession announced right
around 2008, I started the business and had a plenty of opportunity. So if you are getting
laid off, if you haven't been laid off before, if you've never lost a job and you're working at
Meta, I just want to tell you the future is yours. You still have your talents. You learned some
great things. Think of it like a relationship. Don't hate your ex. Be thankful for the time that
you had, the person that you grew through them. So don't be mad at your company. Move on. You
really can't lose. You've got what everybody understands is a layoff. So it's not like you
were fired from your job. You'll have a gap on your resume. If you stay in tech, there's other
tech companies that may not be hiring right now, but you also have the ability to start your own
software and say something like, former Facebook developer, create software, the world's really
yours. So best of luck to you. It's a great time for entrepreneurialism. And if it wasn't
post-COVID or pre-COVID, it definitely is post-COVID. There is a ton of opportunity.
There's distribution. There's Cash App, Venmo, Zelle. I mean, when I started business in 2009,
it was hard to get money to you. And it's not great to wait for a paper check,
wait for your bank to clear it and not be in a position that you have to pay the instant money
and pay the fee in order to have your own money. Having a great cash flow and being able to accept
payments through Cash App, even though PayPal was a thing for some reason, people are just
used to using the Cash App. I don't know if it's the big green thing. And no, I'm not sponsored by
Cash App, Venmo, PayPal, Twitter, Instagram, any of these things that I shouted out,
I'm still growing. No sponsorships just yet. I can tell you, as a note to myself, I do want to go
deeper. I had thought of making the podcast less frequent because you just run into,
okay, here's what happened throughout the week. Here's some notes. Here's how I want to pull this.
And I am going out on a limb. I knew I would do this with the concept of the show and finding things and focusing on failures. It's worked out for over a month so far. If you've been listening in every way, every episode so far, shout out to you, man. You're my power users and I'm going to work my best to create this show, something that you want to tune into every week.
my goal is to not post a show late but you know what sometimes it happens i'm currently recording
this on the drop date so a little bit late this week but hey we're gonna have this grow into
something i'm continuing to have a ton of fun uh you have to realize i'm sitting here in my basement
alone talking to a microphone speaking to notes but i have to visualize that there's people out
there listening. I don't get any sort of instant feedback, but whether it's a week or two later,
I do see your comments and I do see people commenting on an episode that was in the past.
So big shout out to everybody that is engaging, letting me know you're out there, letting me know
you're listening, commenting, keeping the conversation going in the comments on YouTube.
Thank you very much. I want to shoot this out to my future self. I will have 25,000 followers
in 2024. I want to tell myself that this wasn't a dumb idea. People do appreciate the work that
I put in. So if we're a little bit late, if we're on time, if the consistency is there,
it's a marathon, not a sprint. Keep going, Tony. And know that this is out there. It's recorded
forever. I'm a human. I'm growing. My views may change, but just know I spoke true to myself at
the time of the recording, and I always will. And people who know me, I'm not the sort of person
that won't come on the mic and apologize and say I was wrong about something or I didn't feel it.
For the most part, I don't get into polarizing political stuff, but you'll already know that
by listening in. My goal is not to offend anybody. My goal is just to lose, to fail,
and to learn from it. All right. This is I Will Not Lose Podcast, stories of success learned from
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