Artificial Intelligence Takes Over First Quarter 2024 | B2B Vault - The Biz To Biz Podcast | Episode 255

You are now watching the Biz to Biz podcast with Allen and Justin. 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 Larry David of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And in today's podcast, we'll be discussing payment trends for June 2024, which is completely ridiculous that we're already at the end of the month of June. But yeah. So there's a lot of interesting things that happened over the course of only a month's time. So what better two guys than to give you that rundown? How you doing, bro?

I'm doing good. I'm getting used to Justin with a small beard.

Oh, that's, yeah, that was an announcement. For those that listen to the podcast who don't know, I have had like a 7-inch beard. I don't know.

You were trying to go for that Duck Dynasty.

I was definitely not going like Duck Dynasty because I did not mess with those guys.

Rabbi beard.

No, not a rabbi either. But yeah, man, I shaved my beard off. I was talking to my granddaughter and I was like, should I shave my beard? She's like, Yeah. But then she seen me the other day and she didn't even, didn't even care.

What'd your wife say about the beard?

She hate, no, I got, to be honest, I got the haircut itself is terrible.

Uh-oh.

But I'm gonna stick with it. I'm sticking with the barber.

Okay. I'm just, Hopefully it gets better.

It's gonna get better. We're gonna work it out.

Okay.

We're in for a long-term relationship. No diddy. All right. How are you? What else is new, man? Anything new on the board?

Florida Panthers won the Stanley Cup.

Shout out to the Florida Panthers. Yo, I remember when they came into the league as the expansion team. Yeah. And I wanted the starter. 30 years ago. Yeah, I know. I was 13. I wanted the starter jacket so bad, the pullover, and I was poor, so I could never get it, right? But anyway, um, that logo, the OG logo to the Florida Panthers, is so dope.

Yeah, it's crazy.

They should definitely go back. The new one looks like it should be on like, uh, I don't know.

I don't like when the teams change the logos, like the Dolphins, the original Miami Dolphins.

What changed about the Dolphins logo?

They changed it.

It took the sun out or something.

No, they had like a smiling dolphin and now it's mean.

It's like, football, you want a little soft-ass dolphin tackling you? You want a mean dolphin tackling you?

Well, we want the mean Dolphins on defense, but you know, the logo—

No, you gotta be mean on both sides of the thing.

I don't know, I still like the old logo.

I just read that, damn it.

Same thing with the song.

No, you just messed me up. Oh. 'Cause I was gonna say that I read that there was a baseball team, was it the— Well, all these names. Anyways, there was a team in the Midwest I'm gonna have to— and their name was the Spiders, right? And they changed this to some stupid-ass shit. Like, I'm talking about way back in the day. Now they're like, what is it?

Well, there's some baseball team called like the Bananas or something.

That would have been so cool. Have you seen that? That's a joke. It's like Harlem Globetrotters of baseball.

Oh, that is?

Yeah.

Oh, I thought they were like in the minor leagues or something.

They are, but it's still like the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball.

Oh, okay. But they're actually in a league.

Yes.

Well, are any of those people trying to get on the, like, up to the majors, or they're just—

guy was just playing. I don't know how that all works, honestly. I don't quote me. I don't, I don't follow minor league baseball.

Okay. No, but I'm just saying, like, Harlan—

shout out to the Wisconsin Rattlers though.

Okay. We don't even have— do we have a minor league team? And down here, I guess, Jupiter.

Yeah, it's called the, uh, it's the part of the Marlins. Miami Manatees.

It is Jupiter Jumping Jacks.

Jupiter Jackasses.

I don't know, they have a team up there in Jupiter. That's where the Marlins thing is, and I think St. Louis also plays there too at the same stadium.

Yo, I am a hater of all Miami sports teams except— no, I'm not. I'm not. You like the Heat? No.

No.

What? Come on, bro.

Y'all remember when—

I go back home and get murdered.

I remember when we went to the game, Justin was all happy. Milwaukee was killing the Heat.

Yeah, and then Giannis didn't play. So I was like, all right, this is interesting. And then Jimmy Butler came out in the second half and had like his career game. So there's that.

He was unconscious.

Yeah, whatever. And that other guy, Hero, he was actually having a pretty good game too. But he's collapsed, his career is kaput.

Hero is very up and down.

Yeah, so the Panthers won the Stanley Cup. This is, you know, you probably have no idea, but Forbes put out its 50 greatest rappers of all time. Right. That was hilarious. The list, to be honest, had some names on there that I would have never thought. Um, but their top 3 was Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, and J. Cole. Jigga Man, K. Dot, and Cole. And coming in at 50 was Talib Kweli. And my, you know, I—

where was Eminem?

I don't know.

What about Beastie Boys?

I don't know, they weren't on there. Eminem might have been on there, but Beastie Boys wasn't on there.

Beastie Boys.

But Rock Marciano from, uh, NY, you know, upstate, came in at number 37. That was cool that he was on there, and he even mentioned MF Doom. So it was a very interesting list. They had Cardi B on there.

I know she's a rapper.

Cardi B. Yeah, she raps. I don't know, I mean, greatest rapper of all time, top 50, I don't know. But yeah, I thought that was, uh, hilarious.

Okay, I don't know about— I don't know, I didn't see the list, didn't see Nas anywhere really.

Oh no, he was number 9. That's right, Nas came in number 9. He should have definitely been— but no Ray Quan. There was a bunch— yeah, anyway, there's a bunch of people that should have been on there. It's my personal list. This is their personal list.

Okay.

To me, it was pretty trash.

Ice-T on the list? I don't think so. How can you not have Ice-T?

How can you not have Ice Cube?

You gotta have both of them, Ice-T and Ice Cube.

As long as Vanilla Ice ain't on that list, then you're good to go.

Although I think Vanilla Ice probably has I guess I think his song is probably one of the most popular songs of all time, no matter how bad it is.

Ice Ice Baby?

Yeah.

I mean, it's not— it's a radio smash single that has stood the test of time.

I mean, it's probably played at a lot of parties too.

I've never been to a party where they turned on Ice Ice Baby and it was a good thing.

Okay, I don't know.

You know, for me, when I hear it, I hear it at sports arenas. You hear it in sports, like when you're going to like, ice, ice baby.

If somebody has like a nickname, I don't know, there's like, you know, all those dancing videos. So it pops up every once in a while, people dancing.

Do you remember when Nola, uh, In Living Color Made fun— when Jim Carrey made fun of this song? No. He did this— he did like a Weird Al. Oh, he did like a Weird Al version of it. Oh, it was great. I wish he would have did more of that. So Jim Carrey's hilarious.

So you want to jump into your first news story? You want me to go first?

Uh, no, I got something real quick. I thought, uh, well Sean had an idea to talk about deepfakes, right?

Right.

And I kind of was doing a little bit of digging around it, and I mean, you know, deepfakes, that's not like a new technology, you know, it's been around for about 5 years now.

Oh yeah, definitely.

But, um, what I did find that was really in like It is a huge business. And not meaning like deepfaking celebrities in a sense, right?

Right.

But just businesses paying for fake, you know, it's probably a lot of it is probably like training videos, right? You know what I mean? So like, I just didn't really under— you know, I didn't think how big of a business it was booming. You know, you go down the rabbit hole, it's kind of hard to get, uh, to the— to, to the, to the people or the, the, the companies that are using it. No, that are— you know what I mean? That you can go and say, hey, I want a video of Mickey Mantle promoting my company, right? You know, I was having trouble finding that. I didn't, I didn't find any of that, right? Like, I was finding videos, you know, stuff more for avatars, etc., etc. But in doing this little bit of research, I stumbled across this article, right, about a woman Yeah. Apparently she has like a YouTube channel, right? Um, so she's kind of, I don't know, she's fairly recognizable or whatever. She's probably got a decent following.

Okay.

Um, so this woman was, one of the videos that this woman had was she was describing her most recent divorce from her husband.

Okay.

Well, that video had came out like a year ago. Okay. Fast forward to like, I think it was in April, April, May, one of the two. She gets a phone call and it says, hey, I just seen this video of you and you were promoting some ED, erectile dysfunction medicine, right? No Diddy. And, um She's like, what? I was just in a video promoting some products, but it wasn't for that. And she was like, yeah, it was so strange. It was like, it was on YouTube, blah blah blah. So eventually I guess she's seen the video, right? Um, and it's literally the video of her, same clothes, same living room. She shot the video in her living room, same everything. Yeah, except she's talking about her husband's problem with ED.

Wow.

And she has no idea. She didn't—

well, she got real approval.

It didn't even say.

That's crazy. I mean, I see these videos when I'm scrolling through like Reels or TikTok sometimes, right? And you'll see—

I just was like, holy shit. Like, yeah, because what can she really do though?

I don't know, but I see these videos that have like Mark Cuban, other people from Shark Tank, Kelly Clarkson.

Well, I'm saying you see them, but I'm— I was trying to actually find it. You can't because you can't go to a company and get it because it's not happening.

Well, somebody's making it because they're making it and they're promoting a product. I don't know if the social media companies like find it and then later remove it.

I mean, honestly, I've never really even seen it.

Oh, I see it all the time.

Of AI of, let's just say, Allen Iverson, the AI version of Allen Iverson.

I've seen those two products.

I've never seen any of that.

I've seen a bunch of those.

What the hell?

Where do you—

what do you— what are you, dark web?

Nothing. It's on TikTok, dude. Just go through TikTok.

See, I don't use— I'm not a TikTok.

No, no, but I'm just saying, go through the reels, punch in something like Well, probably because I'm searching for like kratom or something. And then all of a sudden, you know, some bunch of nutraceutical products pop up and then you see these like, it's like Mark Cuban and you can sort of tell like because you can't see like his mouth moving, but it sounds like him.

I mean, I'm not saying I haven't seen any of these fake videos of like celebrities and shit, but I don't see them as often as you describe.

Okay, well, it's, it's out there. I mean, look at that. Thing we were talking about the other— this morning about the person who went viral for the disgusting video. Now the girl, it's all over the internet. Everybody's doing a— well, that's inserting her into a video.

That's not artificial intelligence.

I know that.

I'm just saying, like, video editing.

Okay, video editing. Yeah, but that's— see, they don't have permission to use their likeness. No, I don't know how that works.

That's— she would have to see it and then send a cease and desist, I guess. Yeah, but not in that. So in my search, I did find this one company that does, uh, it's called Tencent Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and, uh, it's really cheap, and they call it digital humans or digital avatars. And it's fairly cheap.

Well, we saw that.

Make videos, right, of like you or me and just, you know, promotional videos.

Oh, you send them your picture?

I don't know how it works. Oh, we didn't go through the process.

There was a couple of those other— where's— there was that one Cynthia or whatever.

This one though looked actually— they had— there was reviews on another search or someone else talking about this company, which led me to find this company.

Okay.

Because a lot of the other companies that are talking about they doing it, videos look pretty—

training videos, mostly. They're mostly training videos. You upload like training material and then they put an avatar to operate a forklift inside of a warehouse with busy traffic, and then they just have a person talking in a freezer. They don't actually show people, but But talking about AI, like the big story come out this morning is about, I guess, Facebook and the EU government of the EU and the government of the US not so happy with Mark Zuckerberg.

And, um, this shirt is really itchy. Sorry.

I know, because Facebook says they want to access everybody's posts, ads, pictures, etc. And train their AI. What they need that for, I don't know. And then there's some complicated multi-step thing that you have to do to opt out of it.

Yeah.

And it was posted on, uh, what's that— the guy's name, the cyber guy, whatever his name is, who's on the news. He posted like the whole— it was a pretty long process of how to opt out of this AI thing. And now the government's getting involved because they don't like it. It's very intrusive, wouldn't you say?

Hmm. I mean, when you sign up to Facebook, it literally says they own your content from jump street. So like, what the— what's the big deal?

It's pretty—

what is the— what is the training They already got it, man. I guess that's what I'm saying. Like, I don't— I— again, what are you going to do about it, dude?

Nothing. I mean, I don't even know if you opt out of any of this stuff.

If it does, I have a hard time believing that it's gonna stop it from like reading your posts. Exactly. Because someone has to read your posts, right?

Or something. Because there's supposedly some guidelines or some sort of Yeah, well, I don't think somebody's reading everybody's post, but something is—

no, a gate— yeah, the AI searches for keywords, and if it looks at your post, if it gets flagged with some negative or derogatory shit, it gets escalated to the actual human, right? But most of the time it doesn't even see a human, right? It just makes a decision. And then that's why some stupid-ass post from 2014 doesn't meet its guidelines and has been because whatever.

I got a warning about a post I made like 10 years ago. I was like, what do you give sending me a warning for? Well, let's get, you know, whatever.

Get them when we talk about this type of shit. Watch, I guarantee you're gonna get one.

We're gonna get a warning. Oh, whatever, so what? And then the other thing that's going crazy in the news is there's all these breaches. I would find it weird that the breaches happen, but then they always wait till like Friday at like 5 PM is when all the emails come out. I guess maybe everybody's going home from work and not paying attention to like what's going on. And there was like, um, a credit collection company that got breached last— just like, you know, they announced it. And 2 million plus records were sucked away by hackers. So all your— if you use that company, all your information's on the dark web. Then it came out that Ticketmaster was not just hacked once, but hacked twice. And then Ticketmaster sent me a—

Ticketmaster is just a dumpster fire.

Yeah, so they sent me a link to some— to sign— they give me free TransUnion to monitor my credit.

You know what's sad about Ticketmaster? What? Well, I don't know, it just like— because it just reminds me of like my whole start in this technology type thing when I was working at that startup at Twicketer. And it literally was the Ticketmaster killer. It had some— uh, Ticketmaster just says we just could have raised another little bit of more money for some finalization of the project, bro. Whatever.

Yeah, Ticketmaster has way too much control now. They control the artists, the venues, and then they— as the ticket price— if there's a lot of people that want the tickets, they surge the prices. And whatever, Biden is after them with his, uh, junk fee rules. And then the other big one was this CDK Global, which is this software company that provides software to over 15,000 car dealers, which apparently represents almost 90% of the car dealers in the US, and basically shut down all their systems. They couldn't process payments, most of them, without a side credit card machine. They couldn't access their records. They couldn't move money, approve loans.

Um, it is close.

They went to basically a paper system at the car dealership, which ain't gonna cut it, right?

And no one's walking into the dealer— well, not many people are walking in a dealership with $60,000 cash, right?

Exactly. So they ran into a whole bunch of— that probably go to their backup backup systems, and then, uh, which they didn't have because that's why they're all freaking out. Exactly. So that was all over the news.

That was crazy when they were talking to the other guy. He said something about trillions of dollars.

Yeah. Lost because they're— because they can't move money to pay the car manufacturers the money when they sell the car.

Just that little bit of hiccup. Yeah.

They said factories had to close down because they can't really, though. Well, we don't know that.

No, but it was a little dramatic.

Yeah, I think that—

I think to put a halt to manufacturing vehicles.

Yeah, that didn't make sense.

That shit didn't happen. Sorry, I don't believe it. I bet it took longer to repair your car because if you took it to that dealership.

Yeah, because they probably had to write it up in a ticket.

I wonder which dealership specifically, like, they named Auto—

no, they named Auto— I read AutoNation was one, Carvana. Was another one. Um, so there was BMW uses it at all their places.

They were pissed, and they're switching now, and there was a bunch of other— their own shit. I'm surprised they're using a third-party software for that. Why wouldn't they even have their own?

No, they probably have their own. This thing just provides like a spoke in the middle that connects all your stuff together. So you might have different software products and banks and all that, but it provides like the the hub.

I get what you're saying.

The hub for everything, like a dashboard, and then you plug all your stuff in there.

I got you. Kind of like with the SEO tool that we bought, right?

So it's something like that. And then the other crazy thing in the news is this: Apple decides, okay, we're not doing buy now pay later anymore. And they also kind of got— also got rid of their credit card and took it— the bank they were doing business with— yeah, but I thought they partnered with a firm or something. Yeah, now they're partnering with a firm. So that's the bit. No, I mean, originally— no, originally. No, no, no, no.

Yeah, I know that shit didn't work, right?

So now they're gonna—

faster.

So now they're going with— they're going to partner with a firm. This is a turnover.

I thought it's already running though.

It's gonna start soon. And then the other thing that's going on, so I always talk about tipping, so I'll give you my crazy tipping story for the day. The crazy tip story for the day is, and it happened right here, Margate, Florida, or North Lauderdale, whatever. The DoorDash delivery guy did not see a tip on the, you know, that he was getting a tip. So he texted the person, he said, hey, I want a tip, and he demanded a tip. And then when he arrived at the person's house The guy that got into it with the person said, I want a tip, and pulled the gun on the person. So he got arrested.

What an asshole.

But that's just crazy, like, over tips. And then there's some other crazy stuff going on with Visa and MasterCard, and this is kind of important. So yeah, Illinois passed this law You also had California talking about it. And now, now I'm going to forget the other state. Pennsylvania just tried to pass this law where they're saying they want to pass a law so that when people pay for an item— so let's say you go to the store and you buy $100 worth of stuff. Let's just say sales tax is 7%, right? They want the $7 on that not to get charged for interchange fees. So there's no possible way the payment system sees what they don't want, tips taxed or tips taxed or sales tax to be sales tax or tips to get charged credit card processing fees. Right. But there's no way for the credit card company to do that. They have to revamp the entire system.

Who wants this to happen?

The state of Illinois and now the state of Pennsylvania. And then California is talking about the same thing. It doesn't make sense because you go— it shows me, right, that A, the people making these, you know, proposing these laws have no business experience. They don't understand how the payment system works and they probably never had a merchant account. Because the machine only sees—

I'm just sitting here trying to do the, you know, like, why?

And they want to know what people are buying. Like, they want somehow to know what you're buying. Like, oh, this guy went in a store, he bought a gun, or he bought ammo, or he ate a snake, a rake, or he got her— yeah, or he got a— or did he get the fish?

Or he bought some hoes.

Some what?

Some hoes.

Whatever.

Some garden hose.

Yeah, go ahead. And it's just kind of crazy because the credit card machine doesn't do that. It only looks— it only sees the amount coming through and that's it. And then if there's a tip added, either added at the time of the sale and the full amount is authorized, or—

so he wants— they want your every receipt to look like your grocery receipt?

Yeah, but there's still the credit. Even if it looks like the grocery receipt, the payment company doesn't see that receipt.

They don't give a shit, right?

They're just collecting the payment. So they want to, they want like to get a rebate for people when on the sales tax and the tips. Doesn't make a lot of sense.

It makes zero. It's so confusing when you say the tips part. Why does it even matter? The tips go in after.

No, but they're saying they get charged, the businesses get charged fees from the us, the credit card companies. They want us to give them back the businesses to not pay fees on the tips and the tax.

How do you pay fees on the tips and you're getting—

well, you pay fee on the total amount. If you're—

that's what I'm saying, you're getting paid a fee on a total. It's not, it's not singling out.

Well, they want to say they want to single it out.

That's just ridiculous.

And then there's this Visa MasterCard lawsuit, which we've talked about a bunch, that keeps going on and on and on. Now it's crazy. So now the, they want to come up, of course big business is behind this shit. So they, the rule says that when you sign up for a merchant account, you have to honor all cards. So now they want to, they want to change that and take that out. So let's say I'm Walmart, or I'm, you know, Publix, and I say, I go to Chase Bank and I negotiate a special rate with them.

Right.

Right, so I'm gonna pay. So now I don't wanna take cards from Bank of America 'cause you don't wanna give us the same rate. They make all these rules to help big businesses, but they're not doing anything to help the majority of the small to medium-sized business owners out there get any relief out of this, all these rules. And it's been proven, even when they did the Durbin Amendment in 2010, all these companies came out, oh, well, if you pay with a debit for your groceries and your gas, we're going to give you a lower price. That never happened. They just kept all that money, right? And they're the ones saving all the money, these big companies— Walmart, Publix, etc., etc., Amazon. They're just pocketing the money. And then also When you have these lower fees, what Amazon could go negotiate lower fees with banks, you know, Stripe, Square, but they're not gonna pass any of those savings on to the merchants.

No.

So it's just stupid. It just, you know, I don't know why they just have these lawsuits like this. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. It just, you know, and then it's just dragging on and on. And this lawsuit's been going on for like a decade now. It's kind of crazy.

I would tell that guy to kick rocks.

Yeah, well, there's people in Pennsylvania, these lawmakers in Illinois and Pennsylvania, they obviously, like I said, no business experience, never had a merchant account and don't know how the payment system works. Same with my other buddy Dick Durbin and his whole group of cronies. They need to— they all need to attend a Payments 101 seminar for for the day.

Join James Shepherd's CC Sales Pro.

Yeah, they need to take the basic course.

It'd be probably pretty beneficial.

Yeah, I mean, I did a whiteboard video. Want a part 2?

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