FEDs Are Lowering Rates! What Does That Mean? | Bitcoin Rising! | Biz To Biz Podcast

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 Nostradamus of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. What's up, bro?

Well, my prediction was correct that I made on the podcast the other day.

Yeah, and Trump cheated. So there you go.

All right, well, they can go out and file some lawsuits and do whatever.

Yes, which—

that's it. That's the— that's the excitement for today. But they're still counting votes.

I'm not excited, dude. Who, bro? The vote don't count. That shit don't count. Like, the fact that, like, we're still, like, even sitting here rambling about putting a little check mark in there and believing that that shit is real? Come on, bro. They called the election before the votes even came in. So the general population who votes for someone, it don't even matter. So like, whatever. The whole election process, democracy, all this shit is just trash. I don't even care. Burn it down to the ground, man. Burn Babylon down to the ground.

Listen, it's like Mr. Wonderful said when they interviewed him. It's like, doesn't matter who's the president. You gotta wake up the next day and deal with it. And if you're a business person, you own a business.

You know, it's difficult. It's a lot easier to say that except when you, but when your children are Black and you gotta tell them that America's too damn racist for them to be able to—

Let's not get into that.

Bullshit, that's a real thing to get into. Like the fact of the matter is that you have to tell your children like myself who are mixed race, they're like, yo, America will never, white America is never gonna elect a Black woman for president. And that is terrible. So America's a very racist place. Okay, well. Still. Carry on. And he cheated. He cheated, he cheated, he cheated.

All right. Well, that's not the, I'm Jewish and I deal with plenty of antisemitism in my life. Okay? Throughout my entire life from when I was a kid.

There's one thing that I was told. There's something that you can't do. You can't compare your problem, your Jewish to African American.

I'm not comparing.

You cannot do that.

I'm not comparing.

And there's an issue that I, you, But every time I bring that up, you bring up your people's plight. And that's, that's, that's, it's like contradictory of getting over something. Like, but let's move forward, bro.

Okay, whatever. To me, it's that every, that's, you want to talk about hate, hate needs to end.

That's it. Agreed.

Okay.

That's it.

You can shake on that.

All right.

So here's a big story, one Justin's going to like. In the world of, I don't know, borderline hip-hop, these Olympic sensation from the land down under, Raegun, is retiring from breakdancing.

As she should.

So I thought that was like the funny story for the day. Over backlash from her viral performance And I don't know, she's been making videos and then announced yesterday she's retiring from competitive breakdancing.

As she should have. But, you know, hey, teachers, I'm glad, you know, whatever.

She still won't admit that she did that kind of as a parody. I don't know why she—

She has in her own way. She's answered the questions in her own way. She, to me, she felt like breakdancing was never really an art at all. And she was making a mockery of the shit. So, and when it blew up in her face and she quickly realized that you can't do that and that the hip hop community is very massive and vast in all parts of the world, you know, good for her.

Okay. Hanging up the cleats.

Cleats.

Yeah. Sneakers or whatever.

Hanging up your fat laces, your Pumas with fat laces, man. Yeah, man. That's wild. I don't know. People are still hating on the breakdancing thing in the Olympics too. And they still, I looked, I don't know, a couple months ago. And cause when they were talking about, they took it off the thing. They didn't take anything off of it.

They haven't. Haven't decided yet.

They haven't put anything on. On the schedule, right? There's no schedule even made, right?

So they haven't decided whether it's on or it's off. Yeah.

And I would, I would be hard-pressed that, especially it's going to be in LA.

Yeah. Yeah, it's in LA, I think.

Come on, man, you know how many—

yeah, they gotta have breakdancing.

Yeah, the dance culture in LA is so dope. So yeah. I don't know.

Uh, you want me to go down my list?

I mean, I got stuff, man. I mean, it's just crazy, like, how, you know, the businesses and, like, investors— like, US stocks went to a record high yesterday after the announcement of Donald Trump. Yeah. And I just, you know, and they say, like, because of his tax breaks and the tariffs and all this other shit, man. It's just, you know, how come for me it's just like, how do you not invest in the people first? But I don't know, man.

Yeah, but that's just private investors investing in the stock market. Look at Bitcoin.

Corporate.

Bitcoin went up to $76,000. I mean, it just skyrocketed.

Everybody who has money started investing yesterday, Allen. It's not just big people.

Bro.

Everything. Anybody who had some bread, yeah, who could spend some money, they spent this shit. They started spending again as soon as he, as soon as he was announced.

And then I was reading this thing about tariffs, right? Because I wanted to research what tariffs were about. So I was reading back, and before they had any income tax in the United States, all the money that the government how they raised money was all on tariffs. So all imported goods had tariffs. All those tariffs went to the government, and then we as the citizens did not have any income tax. And then 1962, and then as soon as they flipped that around— it was actually— it was way earlier than that, '42, in the— in the '30s. It dates back.

So then someone in the '60s did something else too that messed this shit up. Yeah, it messed it up too. Lyndon B. Johnson.

So What they did was is they lowered the tariffs on people because after World War II, they're trying to help like all these countries, Japan and China, and get them to be more developed, you know, countries. But then we weren't—

burning the hell up, and then they were trying to repay them, right? So they were making bed, laying in bed with them and giving them money, right? My back scratches yours.

Right. But then there was no tariffs. Right. So then that's how they— then they started taxing the hell out of us. But the thing is, is like when we ship stuff to China, there's 100% tariff on those products. And that's why Trump is saying he's going to raise tariffs so that we can lower taxes. Actually, when they lower, like especially payroll taxes, that enables people to pay their employees more money. Enables the businesses to save on the matching money, and it puts more money into the economy. And actually, the government collects more taxes because there's more people working, it's more stuff, more activity going on. So it's been proven, it's happened numerous times in the history of the United States. Yeah, when those policies are enacted— Clinton did it, Reagan did it, Trump did it the first time. It invigorates the economy. But we'll get off of all that economic lesson on tariffs. So like, uh, can you believe that Black Friday deals already started dropping? So there's like 2-for-1 TVs at Best Buy. You can buy one, buy one, get one free. Yeah, that's crazy. No, I'm just saying, I mean, everywhere is Black Friday.

Yeah, I don't know. I can't relate, man.

I'm just getting—

I literally can't afford to buy a TV.

So I'm getting just— I'm just saying there's just tons of emails out. We're not even close to Black Friday and you can already get these.

Businesses are hurting. They should, you know, they're trying to hit anywhere that they can.

Any people are, you know, they got to get their inventory because they're going to have new inventory coming in. They got to flip their current inventory.

Good luck. So must be nice.

That's just what's going on there. The Fed says they're going to drop the rates 25 basis points. The only thing that I saw last time when that happened, CD rates went down, but the interest rates on loans didn't really go down much, and interest rates on credit cards didn't go down at all, right? And that's pretty much— I think is way, way too high. I don't know what the government can do about that. You know, you always hear about Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And when you see like credit card rates where they're charging 27, 29% to people, I mean, that's just out of control. It's just crazy. And we have the highest credit card debt in the history of the US going on right now. Mm-hmm. It's the highest it's ever been. And that's what's going on with that and Bitcoin. You got any other stories?

Uh, I seen, uh, OpenAI purchased Chat.com from the founder of HubSpot. The founder of HubSpot, uh, bought it for a project a while ago, I guess, for like $15.5 million. Wow. Um, yeah, so he decided that he wasn't going to use it.

Um, yeah, they were trying to push that thing at HubSpot, like this whole chat thing and some AI thing that would do all your HubSpot stuff for you.

Yeah, I guess I'm not a fan of HubSpot. Um, I've never used it. I shouldn't say I'm not a fan of it.

I've never had the, uh, it's, it's very— it's on the very—

I've never had the purpose to use it. I've never had, you know, the, the client or the person at the company, you know, has never been that large scale. Um, but so yeah, he got it from the founder of HubSpot. And, um, a lot of people were wondering how much he sold it for, you know, because, uh, I mean, $15.5 million is a lot of money.

Yeah.

And, uh, so he, he wrote a post on, um, LinkedIn, and he was just saying, talk— he was like giving the backstory about how, why he bought it. It was for a side project. Blah, blah, blah. Sam's a good friend of his. He's known him for years before OpenAI was a thing. And they were talking and the way he sounded, it almost made it sound like he just gave it to him. Because at the end of the paragraph of his post, he was saying how, you know, he's not really hurting for money. He doesn't,, you know, care about that type of making money off. He doesn't care for making money off of good people, he said. And that he basically also, I mean, he didn't get, he didn't give it to him for free. He was alluding to the fact that he, uh, got shares in the OpenAI, and I'm sure that's worth more than $15.5 Because I mean, at this point, their last evaluation was crazy.

Oh yeah, that's insane.

$157 billion or some shit. Yeah, something like that.

I don't know.

It's a quarter, almost, almost a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Crazy, man. Did you hear this story about the company Character AI? It's where you can get on their app or get on the website and then you can create like a chat friend. Like I went on there, you could chat with the Zohan. Didn't really work well on my phone, but on my computer it actually has like the voice of the Zohan.

No, I've been messing around with the X Grok. I've been playing with that.

What's it called?

Grok.

Grok?

It's on X.

Okay.

It's built in right there at the bottom on the left. You could ask it to be like vulgar and shit.

Uh-oh, that's crazy.

It's pretty awesome.

So let me tell you what happened. So this character AI chatbot, now there's a massive lawsuit because this kid here in Florida committed suicide. And they say the mother— yeah, I heard all about this, 14 years old, and he committed suicide because the mother believes that the AI chatbot, he believed that if he killed himself, he would join the AI chatbot in the cloud.

Mm-hmm.

Or something. But I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they fixed it since that happened because that was a while ago. It was in February.

I read something about it and it was saying something about how like it said to come home to me. Right. And to take that to the point where it's saying kill yourself? Because it didn't say kill. No, it didn't say come home.

Yeah, it said come home to me, but he was also sexting with it. But then I don't know if you—

but because he wasn't in the house, right, when he was doing that, right? And that's why, you know, listen, I'm not—

I'm—

this shit is sad, right? Yeah, it's very terrible that he killed himself.

For sure, 100%.

And I think that this is just another— this shit is more so— I don't want to say it falls on the parents, right? Because, you know, I'm a father. There's stuff that I— that was going on I had no nothing about, you know what I'm saying? And it was all on the internet and stuff like that. Um, glad I did find out because— but that's my point. I am proactive, right? You have to be in your kids' shit all the time, 24/7, especially that young.

But also people in general, and it kind of accelerated during COVID became very detached from personal relationships. And all of a sudden, everybody's chatting.

I mean, the whole United States of America got put on house arrest. Right. So whether they understand that or not, if you've never been on, went and through the justice system and actually been to jail and prison and put on house arrest and probation, and you were actually, you had to follow these guidelines, right? That's the exact same shit that happened during the fucking lockdown, right? So people don't, the, I feel like the, the general population of America doesn't even understand what happened to them. And so yeah, they do have PTSD.

Yeah, people got messed up. Yeah.

Because we couldn't go certain places and we had to follow these rules. And I am the total opposite. And for them to even see me conforming and following these rules out of fear, for a moment I had to take, set myself back like, wait a minute here, man. I'm outside. I do not have to have a mask on, right? This is ridiculous, right? I am going fishing with my children, right? Like, I'm doing— I did—

I broke all the rules.

I went for walks, I went to the park, I did everything. Like, I was not gonna do—

I was doing all that.

But I'm getting to the— what I'm trying to say is, like, I think that a lot of these kids and the parents, they don't understand this what that does to a person psychologically when you're forced to do something and you have no choice, right? You take your clothes off, you go take a shower, you do these things, these things, like boom, boom, boom, boom. And if you don't do them, there will be repercussions.

Oh yeah, people were spraying all their groceries down with Lysol packages.

I mean, people were spraying their groceries, they're putting gloves on. Touching the food. It's just so confusing. Anyway, like, it's just sad that like the, that these, a lot of the youth just had to pick up and go, right? They had to hit the ground running. Doors open, boom, school's back. Everything's back to normal. Good luck. And that was not the case because these kids were confused. They were mad. They're angry. I mean, people were losing their jobs. Our family was super strapped for money. I wasn't working.

People were cooped up in their house.

I was hustling, trying to, you know, just trying to make ends meet, doing websites for $100 and shit. Like, you know, just trying to make it, you know what I mean? And yeah, so people need to talk about it. Like, all of my two youngest kids, they're in therapy now 'cause they have to talk about like what's going on. Stuff changed up there.

Yeah.

For everyone. For everyone. If, especially the youth.

I remember one experience I had during COVID and it really freaked me out. So I had to go to the grocery store, right? So I get in the car, I drive up to the Publix and they were only letting a certain amount of people in. Right? So now I have to stand in line outside with a mask on. I don't remember if it was hot or whatever. And you start to like— you could only see people's eyes, right? So you start seeing like people's eyes and everybody's staying 6 feet apart from each other. So this line is like massively long, waiting like an hour to get inside the Publix, even though I got there at 7 in the morning, right? I had to wait for like almost an hour, okay? And then you have this mask on and then you're walking, you know, you're looking at people and you could see like the, like fear. Oh yeah. Like in people's eyes. And it was literally like, I was like, I like closed my eyes for a minute and go, okay, you gotta like just get the fuck out of the store. Yeah. I need to get outta this place. Yeah. Like as soon as possible. So I did my groceries,, right? And I got out of there, and then I had to go to the store again. And I was like, after the second time, I was like, there's no way I can do this. I was trying to do Instacart, and I couldn't do Instacart. And then one of my friends was telling me, goes, no, what you do is at night you do your Instacart, and you put it in there, and then you send the order at like 6 in the morning. And then the Instacart people can get— they letting them in the stores like an hour before they even open. So I was like, okay, start doing that. I was like, I can't go in the store anymore because it wasn't the fact that I was in the store with a mask on, right? It was the fact that I was looking at these people and they were like looking at everybody like, oh, that person's gonna cut a fart or cough and then I'm gonna lose, they're gonna lose their mind, right? Or someone's mask is gonna fall down.

I mean, when people would cough during COVID and you were outside, bro, that shit would make the whole, like it would be like lights on and roaches. I remember sitting there one time and I literally, I had like a sneeze attack, right?

I just had to be laughed because I had that.

I just literally had a sneeze attack in the middle of the— I don't know, you know, something got in my nose, whatever.

I mean, I was walking Rocky one time and I went—

when I see, you know, when I sneeze, the whole office, it's like Achoo! Like the walls shake.

Oh no, I hear you in my office.

The walls shake, man. And so like the person, they were like, I can't believe you did that. And I was like, what the hell was I supposed to do, man? I had a mask on.

Right.

And of course I'm sneezing like this 'cause I'm not a savage.

Right.

My grandmother would slap the shit out of me in the back of the head if I would just be like, achoo! Sneezing all over the place.

Right.

No, I was raised properly. You cough in your arm, you'd sneeze in your hands, you go and wash your hands, you have a hanky. I don't have, I'm not that old, I don't have a hanky.

I don't have, I don't do hankies.

I'm about to though. My dad does. You know, I was starting to carry around a cotton, you know, like a hanky. But I blew in it a couple times and I forgot about it. And then you go in there and you go grab it again and it's just like, like tape.

Orphan.

It's like trying to pull part tape. So, uh, that can't be very cleanly. You got to remember to put those things in it. I— whatever, I smoke— I smoke— indulge in too much cannabis.

Okay, no, so you know what the big—

the other thing I wanted to talk about is that they voted no on recreational cannabis in Florida.

I kind of figured Central Florida, the B— the B—

it wasn't a lot. I mean, it was like It was a thin margin. 3%. They needed 3% more people. Right. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think they were trying to say one—

they were trying to scare people on TV because they were saying, oh, you're going to be able to smoke in a restaurant. You're going to be able to smoke at work.

And yeah. So when you're outside and you're eating your meal, you want to smell a cigarette? Like, come on, bro.

I don't want to smell people smoking weed when I'm outside. I don't care.

I wouldn't. So But my point is this, it's okay to smoke cigs. No, it is. Right now you could go outside and eat at a restaurant and you're not— shit, bro, I was just in Miami, man. Come on, man. Like, I was just there.

Most places do not allow smoking inside or outside.

It's not inside, it's outside. What are you talking about inside or outside?

Most places, yeah, go— I go places outside. Yeah, they do not allow smoking.

Okay. Maybe not right there, but you're outside and people are smoking cigarettes.

Listen, I've gone to Miami. People are outside the restaurant waiting online to get in for their reservation, and they're outside firing up joints.

Nobody cares. I would much rather smell the smoke from a joint.

I mean, I walk Rocky.

Smell from your Marlboro Red.

I walk Rocky in the morning, right? I walk by like, because I'm going through the golf course. So you see the back of people's houses and they're out on their patio. I see people out there burning, burning joints up every morning. It's good all the time. I mean, you know, it is what it is. So they should just let it go. They probably all have a medical card. You say I have anxiety, man, you get, get a medical card.

They made so much money last year on medical marijuana. That's the other reason why I feel like it didn't get passed.

Those places stood to make more money.

No, they don't.

Well, no, they would just have—

medical would make— medical would be not— you wouldn't need it anymore. No, people wouldn't— people, listen to me, bro. Okay, people don't— why would you go to the— no one would go get a license for the medical card if it's recreational. That whole industry is good.

Well, I don't know. When you go to Vegas, you go in the dispensaries, they have like one line for the medical, one line for the— one, one line for recreational. So there's obviously not as many people going in for the medical.

Yeah.

But some people go in for the medical because I think some insurance does cover it a little bit. Well, I don't know, but I'm just saying, but they're— they have both. When you go in, they ask you, oh, you're here for medical? But when you go inside the room where they have like all the jewelry-looking cases, you know, probably 20 of them are for recreational, 1 is for the medical. People, you know, so they still sell it.

But yeah, I don't know, I don't remember.

And I've seen that in, uh, other places too where they have both. They have—

that's every time I land in that place where I go, there's just something waiting.

Oh well, if you go to Oregon, Washington, I mean, it's just—

shout out to my Chalice Row, bro.

They sell it everywhere there. No, they sell, they sell it everywhere. Listen, during COVID I was walking Rocky, I had people yelling at me and walking them outside, and they're like, oh, 'Put a mask on, put a mask on.' I'm not even like— I'm from here. The person's on the other side of the street. They're yelling at me to put a mask on.

What, outside?

Yeah. I saw one lady walking and she had—

I'm glad that shit's all over. I'm glad the presidential election is over. I'm glad that we could just shut up already.

You started here right after COVID, right after like COVID. That's when you started.

2022.

2021. It was like right after COVID.

Yeah, right when we got the okay. That's when school started. Yeah, school went back.

That's when I went and I was like, all right, I'll go get a job.

Yeah, because I was tired of trying to hustle. Oh, being an entrepreneur during COVID was fucking trash. We got—

it wasn't very fun for us either. We had a lot of— no, places closed, open, then they're reopening. And we're—

I was just talking to this woman on the phone about it. She was like the the, you know, how did you do during COVID with the digital shit? And I was like, you know, that one month I made $10,000 and the next month I made zero. So like, you know, I couldn't, that feast or famine, my kids were too old for that shit and I had to go work and get a job. So hence me being at Nationwide Payment Systems.

And we born— we birthed the podcast.

Indeed, indeed. I don't even know what episode we're on, like 280? Not yet. Oh, we're almost on 290. Yeah, I know, we're almost at episode 300. So next, next we have to pay more attention to that next.

Okay, so when we get up to episode 300 We'll have to have a special episode 300, the Leonidas episode. The what? Leonidas.

Okay, let's have a watch 300.

Oh, from the show? Yes.

Okay, that's one of my— that's got to be one of the best movies this past 10 years. Well, 20 years, I would say. That shit was amazing. My homie who I was telling you about who does the woodworking. Yeah, no Diddy. Um, he, uh, we had a copy. He knew a guy who worked in Hollywood, right? And he sent us back this, the, the unedited— like, it was some super, like, high-level shit that we were watching, right? And it was before it came to the movie theater.

Oh, okay.

Like Bro, and he was— his TV was the size of this room. Anyway, man, shout out to Kurt. Love you, bro. Talk to you soon. Still waiting on your other guy to call me, man. Anyway, that's the pod. Subscribe to the channel, bro, please.

Yeah, like, subscribe, and share with your friends.

Power to the people. Peace out.

Carpe diem.