2023 Was A Crazy Year! Crazy Events Of 2023 (2023 Recap) | B2B Vault - The Biz To Biz Podcast

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the biz to biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Sergeant Slaughter of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And in today's podcast, we'll be talking about 2024, you know, all the crazy madness that happened in, in business, personal, 2023 personal, but in 2023 in general. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 2023. How you doing, man?

I'm doing good.

I like your hat.

Yeah, I like your hat. That's a nice hat.

Dr. Seuss.

Yeah, and I've got the, uh, Uncle Sam or Apollo Creed Rocky Balboa hat. Let's remember, to me it looks more like Elmer Fudd, but whatever. Let's remember in the Rocky movie, of course I remember Apollo Creed, man.

Apollo Creed whooped Rocky's ass.

Yeah, in the first fight.

Yes, he did. Anyway, man, how you guys— what's got going? How you got—

how you doing, man? Doing good. Busy week, a lot of stuff going on. Finish— try to finish the year up strong with a few, a few sales.

There was like 3 contact forms last night. Did you see that?

Yeah, one of them is some fake guy. Oh, that's that thing you found, was you found 10 websites that were exactly the same.

Called and asked about his application.

Yeah.

Interesting.

I think it's funny. They don't call because when you call them on the phone, they don't answer. Some Google phone number, you know, that's how scammers roll. Yeah. They just arrested some scammer on charges of stealing like up to around a million from one lady. And then altogether about $2 million was 3 dudes from Nigeria and they were targeting older women on this Silver Singles website.

It's terrible.

And then they got them to—

Is your hat itchy, bro? No, my head's itchy. It's like making my back of my neck itch.

No, you're sorry. I can't do this.

No, it's not. It's just making my head itch. And I'm going to go with my trusty Wisconsin Badgers hat.

So now they— so now they arrested them. They have ordered them to pay back all the money. And threw them all in jail. It's 3 dudes from Nigeria that got into the U.S. and scamming people on them.

Were those the guys that really had like the trillions of dollars that they were trying to give me that I was in?

I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know what they told this old lady, these old ladies, but yeah, you know, you used to get those emails where I'd get an email like, is your— you're the lost family member of such and such, they died, and the middle of Africa as a, uh, what are those people that call that go to travel everywhere and they try to—

they're missionaries.

Missionaries, yes. She was a missionary in Kenya and she left you $3.8 trillion, right? Click this number and call now. Anyway, man, one of my friends fell for a thing like that. That's ridiculous.

And listen to this, some guy mailed him a box of checks and they were cashier checks on this bank that was bought by the Bank of America. Because I checked it out to see like where, you know, the guy said, oh, can you check this out? Where, you know, is this a legitimate thing? But I was like, I'm not putting that in my bank account. And the guy was so dumb, he went to the bank and deposited like 3 of those checks, man. The bank froze his account. They somehow found out that that I had talked to him or something because in his phone they called me up and they go, I said, oh, the guy came to my office. He said, oh, are these real checks? And I said, well, that bank went out of business. You know, we can't help you. We're not in that business.

But he had all that happen this year.

No, not because then what are we talking about? I'm just saying it's scams.

Watch out for scams. Watch out real quick. B2B Vault. Year recap. We had our 200th episode. Uh, our number 1 ranking episode was ranked— was number 154. Uh, it changes— big changes coming in Visa and other card brands, so go ahead and check that out. And, uh, we also broke 1,000 views on one of our, uh, videos, so that was really cool. Yeah, and we switched a few other things up But yeah, man, the quick rundown for B2B Vault, quick couple of accomplishments.

Yeah, a lot of accomplishments.

He was on a— he was just interviewed on a James Shepherd podcast. What is it called? CC Sales Pro.

Yeah, CC Sales Pro.

So shout out to James Shepherd. That was a big accomplishment for the B2B Vault.

And he never interviewed anyone from a— that had a podcast before. So that was kind of fun.

Cool, cool.

Talk about it.

So when I was Sean, the social media manager and videographer and all around dope guy, he came up with the idea of, you know, a recap for 2023, but not like a businessy type style, you know what I mean? Right. And before he even said that to me, I kind of was already doing that, you know, like trying not to keep it so serious and whatever. But the first thing that came to mind of 2023 was Sam Bankman-Fried's curly afro, bro.

Like, dude, that guy really, man, that besides that, you know, the government put the kabash on crypto, That guy put the black eye on crypto.

Crypto in general got its ass whooped in 2023.

Yeah, but he put the black eye on it. And now even the owner of Binance—

I would say the opposite. I would say that Sam Bankman-Fried got a black eye for having a crypto business. Crypto in general got black eyes. All, like everyone, they all got whooped up and down.

Everybody's in trouble though.

Like Rocky did in the first Rocky.

Yeah, they didn't look good at the end.

No, I mean, you know, the other guy from, uh, F— what is it?

No, Binance.

Binance.

Yeah, he got his passport taken and he got thrown into jail overnight. And then the guys from, uh, Coinbase are being, being hung out to dry by the SEC.

Well, that's because they told them to go frick themselves.

And then whoever runs like the Bitcoin convention in the US, right, they They saw their convention really crash out.

Oh yeah, I mean, crypto in general took a hit. But at the end, just now recently, you know, you've been looking at it and it's been creeping back up. Bitcoin was at its highest it's been in years. Shiba Inu is still doing, you know, like it's creeping on the come up.

Yeah, they're inching up. They're inching up.

Shout out to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.

They're inching up, they're not shooting up. This time.

Yeah, yeah, crypto, crypto, and crypto.

Um, you know, I think social media was big in the news this year, especially because, well, I think you're, you're your homie. I think that the two, the, the biggest, the two biggest stories for, uh, social media was the Elon Musk, you know, Mark Zuckerberg fight.

I wish that would have happened, man.

Yeah, that would have been good.

You know what would have been even better? Oh well, would have been super— it wouldn't have been better, but it would have been cool like if MTV would have bought back those, those death matches when they were clay, right? And then just had them do that fake. That would have been awesome too.

Yeah, that would have been pretty cool. But it was pretty crazy because they were showing Elon Musk practicing some fighting and Mark Zuckerberg was doing all this martial arts stuff.

And Mark Zuckerberg would have whooped Elon Musk's ass, bro.

Probably Elon Musk looks more like—

he's tall in that, but Mark Zuckerberg, Zuckster, what do they call him, Zuckermaster, whatever, man. Shout out to Mark, what's his name, Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, shout out to you for making—

you know what else was good in 2023? My boy Adam Sandler made a movie, The Hustle, the basketball movie, right? Everybody thought— people thought he should—

that was a great movie. Yeah, it was a good movie.

They thought he should have got like an Academy Award for that, right? So he got dissed.

I don't know if he should have gotten an Academy Award. Come on, man.

I don't know, but he should have got something. And so he did get a good movie, I'll say that.

I don't know if it's deserving of an Academy Award.

Well, he ended up getting this Mark Twain Award instead.

Well, there you go.

It's a huge— and they like did a— and then instead of him like just getting the award, it was like a total roast. Good. So it was pretty funny.

I like those things.

It was very, very funny. Um, One other, and then the other social media thing. Oh yeah, I would say is the fact that, you know, Elon bought Twitter, changed it from Twitter to X, and then, and then, you know, Threads taking a poop.

And did it though?

Well, it's not really doing a lot. I don't—

I, I kind of like it. Is Threads like the new Twitter?

You don't, you don't— Sean says—

Sean, the shaking his head, saying no, it's not the new Twitter. And then the other thing is, do you think that it's replacing the new Twitter?

No, they have to do a lot more for it to do that.

And then the reason I'm saying that though is, yeah, because like the way it's set up, it's Twitter.

Not really. How come? I don't know. I can't make heads or tails of how the thing works, so don't ask me.

You make a post or whatever, you can put media.

I see a lot of just junk on there. I don't know how the feed works.

So you know what, I think the feed is— so as to someone who recently like has been cleaning up, not the— not cleaning up my social media account at all because whatever, it's my personal one, but I'm cleaning up the people who I'm following, right? Uh, and so when I imported the people that I followed onto Threads, yeah, it's the same people.

Exactly.

So my feed is— I don't have a problem with it. I don't know, it's all creative, not really artists, and I'm not really graphic designers.

I'm not a big, uh, Instagram user, so It's not good for— doesn't— I don't have—

got it. Anything else is social?

Yeah, the fact they started charging people pay to— you know, you have to have a membership, huh?

Oh yeah, I guess it was this year.

Yeah, this year it started charging for Twitter.

X started charging verified checks, and I think they got to rethink that, right?

If they ask me, you— they need to rethink that. They need to— like, if you own a business, you get the check mark, and then your business accounts get check marks. And not separate checkmarks for everything. That's just ridiculous.

Or if you— well, what if the person doesn't want to be verified? What if he doesn't want that attention?

Well, then just do it on the business. But at least if you have multiple accounts, it's for all your accounts. One price for—

that ain't gonna work.

Well, do it for like up to 3. Okay, something like that. Give a, give a make it a little bit better.

Do you think Twitter or X is worse, or do you use Twitter?

X? I can't— Twitter, I think, has gotten worse.

In what way?

What's changed?

Nothing's changed.

I don't know. I just don't think it's— I don't know. I, I never knew how to use it in the first place, so I'm the wrong person for that. I did get a private message the other day, but most of it's all always people trying to sell me something.

Twitter's like the Wild Wild West again. Anyway, uh, ChatGPT released.

Yeah, big. AI is like definitely like— if, if you have to look huge for 2023, if you have to look at like what's the big story for 2023, AI is like one of the top, got to be in the top So I had a little, I had a little note on there, a little asterisk.

So ChatGPT released March 14th, and then March 31st, Italy banned it. So I just thought that was funny, like, you know, it's— they were like, it reminded them of Terminator as well, right?

You know, a lot of, a lot of companies banned using it too. They have it on their restricted list. They don't want employees going on, uh, OpenAI.

EU has all kinds stuff banned.

I don't— I mean, oh yeah, the EU's banning stuff left and right over there, like all kinds of craziness on top of the, the AI.

Do you remember when the guy, what's his name, um, I can't remember his name, but they call him the Godfather of AI from Google, he resigned, right?

Yeah, he was warning everybody, oh, the dangers of AI.

Yeah, then the guy, Jeffrey Hinton, shout out to you, Jeffrey Hinton.

And then the other guy from AI got fired. And then, then all of a sudden Microsoft offered him a job. And then next thing you know, he's back at OpenAI. And all of a sudden Microsoft, so AI are doing a partnership.

Speaking of that guy, yeah, what was his— what's his name? Sam Altman.

Yeah, Sam Altman.

So I follow this one character on, uh, one of my social media accounts, and he He's kind of like an investigative reporter, right? Not kind of like, he is like— he's not— he just doesn't get paid to do it, right? And, uh, so he was taking a deep dive into like what the hell happened with, uh, you know, ChatGPT, whatever— what is it?

OpenAI.

OpenAI. Um, and, uh, basically The 3 people that took over this board are terrible people. Uh-oh. Okay, and the, the one old wrinkly guy that's like, take— like, he's really a piece of POS.

Okay.

Yeah, man, so you should watch. I'm gonna send you this video on, on that, that I found, and then You should watch his Joe Rogan interview.

Oh, he was on Joe Rogan?

Yeah, last month he was on there. Last month.

I like Joe Rogan.

Yeah, shout out to Joe Rogan. Any, uh, any— anything else with AI? Not much, huh?

Uh, something—

a lot of advancements, I know that.

And, you know, there was a lot— remember the other kind of crazy story was this guy that was one of the former heads of Cash App that just got killed randomly on the streets.

Well, that was happening like crazy. Everybody who was involved with crypto or like, uh, like these tech companies were just getting whacked.

Yeah, there's a bunch of like crazy weird, uh, deaths. Shit ain't weird when you're thrown in jail. Yeah, yeah, or tossed in the clink.

That too, that too.

Yeah. Yeah, that's just literally crazy, you know, craziness.

Yo, do you remember when Mexico, uh, revealed that they've had aliens?

Yeah, that was nuts.

They were so tiny, man. I— when I think of an alien, I think of like this supreme, like, being, right?

I don't know, they re— they— I don't know if they remade it this year, but they did like— remember the movie Independence Day? There was like a redo of that.

That was a couple years ago.

Oh, the whatever. But I'm just saying, like, I think of aliens like that, you know?

Are you like a squid?

No, like they're gonna come down. There's been a bunch of movies like that where they come because the alien side of the ship looked like a little—

like a walking squid, right?

Right. No, but I'm saying there's been a bunch of movies where like these aliens land on the land in the US.

I don't see— like my My magic— I'm a comic book head, bro, right? So like, I imagine aliens like that, like Star Wars, like purple looking like Drax, uh, you know, all different types of just beings, right? Like things.

Yeah, Star Wars, or you think—

yeah, yeah, you grew up in the '80s, you kind of have, you know, you were— we had a lot of cool shit to watch, or Star Trek, you You know, the first couple movies, I still, you know, I gotta revisit the one where they saved the whales. I gotta revisit that one.

Yeah, that's a crazy movie.

That's a good movie. That's when Spock did the Vulcan thing to the dude on the bus, like, "Chill, bro." Yeah.

And then Scotty walks into that like shop and he goes, "Oh, you haven't invented this yet, but let me show you." And then he puts a form, writes this whole formula and the guy invents like the strongest plastic in the world.

Oh yeah, that's right.

That's how they put the whales in the— into the Starship Enterprise.

What else happened this year, man?

What else happened? Oh, so just recently, this woman walked into, uh, Goodwill, buys a $3.99 vase, takes it home, has it sitting around for a couple days, looks at the name on the vase, says, Carlo Scapra or something like that, finds out it's worth over $100,000. Somebody—

wow—

tossed it out to Goodwill.

Nice. Yeah, you just brought that up the other day on the podcast. The guy out in, uh, Portland found those Spike Lee Jordans.

Yeah, found— yeah, Spike Lee Jordans that are worth, what, 10 grand?

I'm sure he got a little bit more than 10 grand. I hope they got more than 10 grand.

Well, they put it in the auction, so You know, the other thing we saw this year is everything like whatever. I saw a couple of funny jokes on Facebook. One was, oh, I made a lot of bad decisions in my life. One of them was that I didn't buy Crocs. I thought that was kind of funny. And then the other thing is, who's Temu and why are they following me on Facebook?

Yo, Temu, man. Temu is hella aggressive with their email marketing, dude. I literally blocked you guys. And you are still sending me messages.

Yeah. And I get—

I don't, I don't mess with that. Like, I don't like it, you know? Like, it's— I'm starting to realize, like, I never even bought anything on Temu. I downloaded the app and created an account because my pops was going nuts about it, and he had Temu packages stacked to the ceiling like you see on those Amazon commercials.

Really?

I swear to God. What was he buying? Just shit trinkets, flashlights, swords, knives.

Was any of it good?

Some of it, yeah. Some of it was actually really useful. Like, someone is saying, you know what I'm saying?

Oh, you told me about one thing you bought and it broke right away.

Oh yeah, the, the nice flashlight thing. Like, we had it for one day, I, I went like this and the whole fucking thing fucking popped right out. It's a, you know, it's, it, it's not, it's not quality. You're paying for a dollar. If it's $1.99 for a reason, right? Like, so like it, but even Joe, we asked him to buy me this sunshade.

Yeah, right. That's the thing. That's the thing I was talking about.

Yo, I literally, the, it was as thin as this piece of paper, man. Right? Like, and we're in South Florida. So one storm, bro, that thing was out of here. And I was just thinking like the sun itself I'm gonna come outside and is this gonna be on fire?

Like, so no, but I'm just saying, like, this Temu all of a sudden came out of nowhere and they're selling stuff like a dollar, pay, it's free if you pay for shipping, and there's like every cockamamie item possible.

Like, you can buy everything, bro.

Yeah, but how long does it take to get here?

Buy a stove on Temu, man.

I don't know if I'm buying a stove.

I'm just saying, you could buy a truck. A little truck.

Yeah, that you built yourself. Oh yeah, I did see that. I saw a guy who made a video about that. He bought the thing and he put it together, and it's, it's great.

Yeah, from my understanding.

Yeah, dude, like, anyway, it was like $2,000.

Yes, bro, it's like a Toyota or something like that.

No, it's some Chinese brand. Yeah, it's some Chinese, uh, it's some Chinese manufactured by someone. It's a truck, actually. It's like a small tiny pickup truck made by this Chinese company.

Yes.

And I was like, that is insane.

It's actually— I would buy one, but I don't know if they're street legal.

I don't—

in America, I don't know.

That'd be interesting.

They only go like 40 miles an hour or something.

But the thing's like only— it's only like $2 grand or something.

Imagine a windstorm with that though.

Oh, if you went through a puddle like the ones that were outside.

That thing would be floating down the—

Boom, you'd be gone.

Down the intercoastal in a second.

Yeah, if you're driving that around in a 45-mile-an-hour wind, that thing's gonna blow across the road. It's probably— about as strong as a golf cart.

Last month though, I will say I had some very disturbing news, man. I was sad to learn that Colombia is out trying to sterilize Pablo's hippos.

That's nuts.

So for those in the audience that doesn't know, Pablo Escobar once had like a zoo you know, in his property and he had hippos and he couldn't handle them. So he let them go.

Right.

And now they're just running rampant in the rivers of Colombia. Like they're really destructive. Like they destroy the banks of the river.

Yeah, they go crazy. Those hippos, they go nuts.

And they're super territorial. So they're dangerous animals. But at the same time, it's sad that they're trying to stop them.

And also, you know, what are those things that make this— what are those things that make the dams? Beavers.

Beavers.

Yeah, they're like beavers as they like go and they—

well, they'll just destroy. Yeah, right. They'll— they tear the whole environment up, the ecosystem.

And then, you know, you got this thing going on we talked about before in Canada where they all of a sudden like repopulated all these wolves in Canada. Now they're starting to come across the border.

Yeah, because they got no place there. Because, yeah, they got no place to go.

So you have these ranchers up there in like Montana, Washington. They have cattle out there and all of a sudden, you know, there's some wolves out there munching the cattle.

You see all the wild buffalo that are running around out there now? Yeah, that is awesome. They gave me the chills. Like, I literally, I seen like all the wild buffalo that are literally running around Colorado and the plains, the Great Plains of America. That's interesting.

Yeah, they repopulated that, you know, maybe Kevin Costner's show Yellowstone, you know.

What, did you watch Yellowstone?

Yeah, that was a great show. Very violent.

I was gonna say, bro, it ain't nothing about no damn cattle.

He had a cattle ranch.

Oh, I'm thinking the other one. No, what's the other one?

What, dances?

I was thinking of Ozark.

Ozark? No, Ozark, there was no cows.

No, just heroin.

We need Ozark to come back. They got to finish up Ozark.

Yeah, they do, they do.

Lincoln Lawyer's coming back.

Another sad thing that happened, like, just tragic, was the whole, uh, the OceanGate submarine implosion.

Yeah, that was crazy, dude. That was nuts.

I—

you couldn't have paid me to get in that thing.

That was on The Simpsons as well.

That's, that's weird. That's— The Simpsons predicts a lot of stuff. How's that possible?

I don't want to speculate, and I don't want to confirm nor deny. Okay, but I will say that there is another episode of The Simpsons. Yes, where the entire world loses power. There was a movie in— guess what year?

2024.

You have the correct answer.

There's a new movie on Netflix And that actually happens in the movie. It's a brand new movie on Netflix.

Get out. What is it called? Google.

I don't know the name of it. Someone's got to Google it up. New Netflix movie. I can't remember. And then all of a sudden there's like a cyber attack and planes are falling out of the sky. No, I don't know. It's not called that. It's brand new. I just watched it the other day. It was great. And the other crazy thing that happened this year is They arrested somebody for the Tupac murder, right?

I ain't even gonna say his buster-ass name.

Well, whatever. I mean, I'm just saying, like, after how long ago did that happen?

It's all by design. I don't believe it at all. Like, it's just— yeah. And then I would say this, speaking of hip-hop though, because you just got me going. Okay, because I have a whole little section here, hip-hop 2023. Rest in peace, True Goy Plug 2 from De La Soul. Man, he died in March of 2023. And literally the month after that, all of De La Soul's music was uploaded to the streaming services. It's something that they have been fighting for. They've been, you know, fighting for their— what is it? The pub, the pub, you know, the publishing, they've been fighting for.

Publishing rights.

Yeah, for that for many years. And they finally got it back, dude. And, you know, and unfortunately he had passed away in March before he could see that come to. That was really sad. Also in 2023, hip hop turned 50.

Yeah.

Shout out to hip hop. Shout out to Afrika Bambaataa. Psych. No, we love DJ Kool Herc. Afrika Bambaataa was a great, you know, contribution to hip-hop, but he had some stuff going on. And my top 3 hip-hop albums of the year. Number 1 is Killer Mike entitled Michael. Great album. Number 2, Westside Gunn, and then You Pray for Me. And my number— and number 3 is my all-time favorite MC Nas. He dropped Magic 3. With Hit-Boy. So, man, it was a great year for hip-hop. And my sleeper or, you know, album for everybody to go check out is the Larry June and Alchemist album. What's it called? The Great Escape.

I don't listen to all that. So, you know, I was watching on Amazon a special about Tom Petty. Mm-hmm. And he had a bunch of unpublished music. So the guys in his band got together, they put together, they were gonna release all this unpublished songs.

That's dope. The Rolling Stones just dropped the album too, if you're into that.

It's cool. Yeah.

So man, that's 2023. We did it, man. Shout out to you, man. We did another 2023. I don't even know how many episodes recorded, but thanks for all the listeners.

Come on, Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, come on.

I don't want no violence. No violence for '24. Fake fight, fake fight. Let's do all peace and prosperity. Much blessings and abundance to everybody. Everybody who listens. Health, wealth, and prosperity. Keep the peace, y'all. Subscribe to the channel. We love you.

Carpe diem. Seize the day. Get out there, make it— do the hustle, make it work, make it work. Yep.