Beware Fake Meta Messages How I Lost My Instagram

I'll give you a little anecdote on that. This probably happened to all of you guys at one point or another. I'm sitting on Instagram, I'm doing my things, I get a message, I'm like, oh, my account's been hacked. Oh, okay. This is an official message from Meta. Oh, all right, that looks official. You need to recover your account by hitting this button. Okay. And I did and boom, my account is gone. Immediately all of my social media channels across the Meta were taken and I'm starting to get text messages on my phone saying, hey, would you like your account back? It will cost you about $50,000, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, right? But I was trusting because it had that Meta tag on it, right? Meta, oh, Meta is so much a part of my life. I'm on it every day, four to six hours, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And I got bought into that. Let me ask everybody a question. If somebody walked up to you and said, hey, Somebody just picked the lock of your car. Let me have your keys and I'll get it fixed. Would you give me your keys? You do it every day. You do it every day. Yeah. So it's an amazing thing, the susceptibility of what is presented in front of you and your ability to sift through it as a filter, right? Because I want to naturally be a skeptic in everything that I look at, but I also have confirmation bias. I also have a lot of things that are going on internally in my own head that is not giving me the ability to be 100% critical thinking at all times. And I don't think I want to be 100% critical thinking at all times, but in some of these instances, I think there's so much coming, the inputs are so bad coming in that I cannot accept that the outputs are going to be any better, right? But one thing I'm encouraged about is We live in the 21st century. I was born in 1978. I'm 45 years old. Most of my family is black. And we live in this time where we are crossing divides within this country. And it's being led by all the people that are in this room. And we are so much closer in terms of our culture than what people really want to believe. And we get so distracted by things that are such garbage that we could be doing better, right? And we could be doing better by the fellow person to our left and to our right. I challenge any one of you to walk past, when you leave this building, you will see it, a homeless individual on the street. I challenge you to stop and have a conversation with that person and find out what's going on in their head, right? And ask yourself, how can I do more for my fellow brother and sister are citizens of this country. That is how we will be stronger, is leveraging the differences that we have and this ability to bring this pot closer and say, this is our treasure, this land and what we have been given here, this liberty that we have every day to do whatever we want. Because I know I raise my hand to fight for everybody in this country, not a select few. It doesn't matter if you're gay, straight, black, white, it doesn't matter. That's what we are here for. We can be better every day by making these choices.