FinTech Fridays | Middle Men Movie Review | High Risk Payment Processing | The latest trends in FinTech, Crypto, & The Payment Processing | B2B Vault: The Payment Technology Podcast

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the payment technology podcast with your host Allen Kopelman, and we'll be providing you educational information about business payments, fintech, decentralized finance, and the technology businesses use in today's world. And welcome to Fintech Friday, everyone!

Yay!

Not only is it Friday, but it's Fintech Friday, so we're gonna end the week out with, uh, some news and updates about everything, you know, fintech related. And also, uh, Allen, uh, said that I I needed to watch the cinematic masterpiece entitled Middlemen, uh, about a company that pretty much led the way in payment processing for the adult industry, right?

Right. And so it's kind of like about, you know, the internet trend, how internet transactions kind of started, right? It was, you know, yeah, a few pioneers in that, in that Space. Who?

I can't remember the guy starring in—

oh, the guy— oh, the star of the movie was Luke Wilson.

Luke Wilson starring Luke Wilson, right? And there was the other guy, James Caan, was in the movie. James Caan. What were the two?

Terry Crews.

Terry Crews was in there.

Terry Crews was in the movie, you know.

And Terry Crews, the two guys, the two—

I don't remember who plays them. Gabinsky. Gabinsky. Now I gotta pull my phone out. The, the two crazy guys in the movie that invented the internet, the internet transaction. One guy worked for NASA and he got fired.

Sneaky Pete. Who was Sneaky Pete? I can't remember his name.

I know, but he got fired from NASA. I'm talking about the actor. Yeah. Oh, the act. I'm looking up the names of the actors. I shut off the phone. And then there was, uh, and then Kelsey Grammer made like a cameo appearance.

Oh yeah, the the state senator or whatever.

No, no, he was the state's attorney or the district. Yeah, he was the DA.

Oh yeah, that was a funny part.

That was hysterical.

That was a good— that was— that's— that to me was like realistic.

Yeah, that was definitely realistic. And blackmail— we'll get into like what happened with, with Kelsey Grammer. That was pretty crazy.

But so the middleman— the whole— the movie is, is based on a true story, right?

So I wanted Justin to watch the movie Because I told them, I said, it's not a great—

like, the movie is terrible.

It's not a great movie, right?

It's a terrible movie.

Like, but being in payment processing, there's not many movies about payment processing. There's one other one called Going for the Green, which is about these— got two brothers that start a credit card product.

We watched like 15 seconds.

It's a really bad movie. It's not that good. And, you know, we're not supposed to even talk about the movie, but I don't care. We're not going to mention it in the thing, but the, the Middleman movie, um, was directed by George Gallo, produced by Christopher Malick, who was actually played by Luke Wilson in the movie. So he was the, the mastermind, he was the business mastermind, and then Giovanni Ribisi and Gabriel Macht were the two guys that were the troublemakers. So they— the movie starts out with them in their apartment and they're just acting like— well, the one guy is a roommate and then the other guy joins them, and then he worked at NASA. And they start talking about they're tired of looking at the basic, just a porn picture The internet was boring, right, is what the premise was.

He said, uh, it's the same, nothing to do, right?

It's the same because you could just look at pictures. So they decided— so the guy said, oh, you know what we should do is just get pictures from all these porn mags and put them online. And they got— so what for? And he says, oh, he goes, and then we could get people to pay us with a credit card subscription, $9.99 a month. First it was $10, then the guy said, no, make it $9.99, which is smart.

Right, because he was right. He says that it's easier for the human, you know, brain to digest $9.99, right? $10. He's right.

And then they decided also like it should be a billing company instead of—

you didn't see like bigboobies.com, right?

Stuff like that and worse, and much worse. Yes, some of the names were funny. And they were like— and they made different sounds based on which website you looked at, which picture 'Which pictures you subscribe to?' And, and, and it was hysterical that they literally, at one point, they were— in a few months they generated $2 million. Yeah, over more than a million dollars. Then they ended up going to Vegas, and they go to Vegas, and when they go to Vegas, they tear up the hotel room and they blow through their money. They blow through a bunch of money, and they're supposed to give money to these Russians because they were the Russian mafia, right? Because they were filming the girls in the— some strip club owned by the Russian mafia guys, and they're supposed to give them money. They didn't give them money, so they got roughed up by the Russian mafia. That was kind of a crazy—

hilarious.

But these two guys are just like simply like whacked out on drugs, and the one guy basically worked at NASA, and he goes, oh, I can figure out how to do a credit card transaction, give me $15.

That was the beginning. So we kind of— no, but I was like, give me a place.

Yeah, we're all— no, but so whatever, they make it, they have this whole thing running, right? And then it's a disaster and they're about, you know, 5 minutes from being dead. Yes. And that's when James Caan comes in.

No, well, and Luke Wilson. So yeah, Luke Wilson, James Caan is an attorney. Yo, we're gonna end up telling you this whole story. The movie is, like I said, it's not— it's, it's It's pretty bad, right? It's not like, oh, it's awesome, it's one of the best movies I've ever seen, but it's, it's good. It's got— they tried to make payment processing funny. The story was very serious. There was some violence in the actual story, so whatever. But, uh, yeah, man, when—

but it's a good business story too.

When James— I like the part when Will Wilson, Luke Wilson, uh, got a part of it, you know.

He—

so Luke Wilson plays a guy who's like a businessman He goes and fixes businesses that are failing.

Um, he was fixing a nightclub.

Yeah.

And he blew it up and it was doing great. His business partner was, uh, he had his friend Terry Crews as his best friend.

Yes.

And Terry Crews was his, uh, his enforcer, enforcer guy. But what's funny is like, I like Terry Crews because he was like a comedian and then he was on, um, that America's Got Talent show. And he was at my— he was in one of— like, I love— I'm an Adam Sandler guy. So he was in the remake of The Longest Yard.

Oh yeah, for sure. Hey Mom.

Hey, this is Owings, Justin's mom. And, uh, so, you know, so it's a— it's funny, like, so it's funny to make fun of people, like, you know, like from their different movies that they've been in.

Yeah, man. Uh, Terry Crews's role was pretty good. You know, there's some—

he was a tough guy. He was the tough guy.

It's just stupid. Like, I think about the movie, there's some really stupid parts of it. And, you know, like, I would have never watched that movie if Allen would have said, yo, like, a year ago you would have watched it and you would have said, this makes no sense to me.

But after being in payment processing for like a year You look at the movie and you go, wow, that really, that was pretty, it was interesting to see how, you know, it skyrocketed.

It went from them. So I went from an idea to them implementing the idea, to them realizing that they needed help so that they had, that's where the Russian mob comes in. So they're—

give them the girls, right?

So here's the help. So the guy first— I can't remember the guy, the guy who played Sneaky Pete. He's sitting in California, he's snorting cocaine, he gets on a phone call, the guy loses whatever, he moves out to California. The guy who gets fired from NASA, he gets fired from NASA, so he moves out to Cali, him and Sneaky Pete, whatever, for the— for this, uh, they're going back and forth. And this is like— it was hilarious for me because they're like in this apartment and, oh, they needed a certain back and forth about ideas. And the guy's like, you can't call me stupid. And then they start fighting. And then it's like the guy from NASA, the light bulb clicks, and he sits behind a computer and he codes out a program for people to take payments anywhere in the world. And from there, from that very moment on, is everything is just hitting the fan.

But the crazy parts were, we noticed in the movie that they were driving a Hummer, and then what else would they drive?

Cadillac Escalade, right? And that was based in 1980 or whatever it was supposed to—

when it started, '89, '90, whatever. Didn't make any sense.

There was no Hummers on the street unless you were a part of the United States military, uh, and Cadillac did not produce Escalades yet, right?

So that was kind of weird.

So there's a few things, like I said, the movie was— it was just like a really low-budget movie.

Yeah, with some pretty large names, some pretty good-sized names.

The cast was amazing, right? Like, I was, I was tripping when I seen like all the names on here. I'm like, how did I never hear this about this movie? And then like 20 minutes in, you're like, oh, because it's pretty bad, right? Like, it's—

yeah, but the business part of the story, right? Because they were trying to make it cool.

Like, how can you make payment processing cool?

Yeah, but the cool part was it's like Here's two guys in their apartment that made like over a million dollars, right? Then they get in trouble. Luke Wilson comes in, right? And he must have— he had money because what did he do?

He paid off James Caan for $200 grand because James Caan knew that these guys were on to something, right?

But he paid them $200 grand without even having a deal.

Without even a deal.

Yeah, he put it— he's figured out, like, he's gonna at least get the Russian mob off their back, right? And then he was gonna get back his money, was his plan. He wasn't planning to be in it for long.

No, he, he, you know, he was a real straight and narrow, so like he didn't want to be anything.

Yeah, he had a wife, porn industry. Yeah, but my favorite line from the movie was, and he said it like a bunch of times, he goes, no, I'm just a middleman. This is a, uh, we're just an internet billing company. And they were standing on a golf course. And I never— there was a Hilton Hotel.

That was a good— that was a good, you know, way of rationalizing what he was doing, right?

But he said, do you call Hilton or do you call them pornographers? Now, Justin's too young to remember this, but back in the day, right, I remember they would have those SpectraVision movies in the hotel.

Really?

Yeah, they would have these porn movies you could rent in the hotel room. I remember that. Yeah, SpectraVision. They were horrible. Okay, I don't remember if you knew that.

So that's why— I mean, I'm from the era where you would go and sneak and watch the, the, the screen when it was like all messed up because public television would sometimes get to— anyway, right? But I'm just saying, people, you— if you know, you know, because you know who I'm talking to.

Yeah, exactly. And then— no, but what was funny was he's like, oh, you're not calling the hotel people the pornographers, right? Because they've got—

because they're showing porn on every station in that damn—

yeah, they got porn on every TV in the hotel, hotels everywhere. Everybody's got porn, you know. So he's like, oh, you know, you have that. And then, you know, because he wasn't—

it's not like he was filming it. He wasn't hiring the, the, the people to be in the movie.

And he kind of blew it up because he had the idea, said, oh, instead of producing the porn, which is the guys were doing in the beginning, and take it, right? They were producing it. They were shooting the girls in the Russian strip club and stuff. He's like, no, we'll just get theirs.

We'll just get all these pornographers to come and we'll just already doing it, right?

And we'll just get a percentage, like 10% plus the processing fee.

Yeah.

And then you see them, they go to a warehouse, and then they have their own building, and they're raking in millions of dollars. And then everybody's trying to get in on the deal with them.

And then the two dumbasses— I'm sorry, excuse my language— decide that they're not really happy with the situation.

Yeah, they didn't like Luke. They were— well, no, they were just on so much drugs they got paranoid that Luke Wilson was like running the show, which he wasn't, over a little part. Yeah, but the one part that was kind of crazy was when he pays off the Russian mob, right? And the Russian guy shows up, right? And that story got crazy at the end too because it was a— there was a complete like double cross going on. Oh yeah, you find out at the end of the movie But the Russian mob guy shows up and he expects to get $400 grand, and they give him $450 grand. And then the guy's like messing around with them, and Terry Crews, you know, goes off and just dots the guy, pops the guy in the head with a punch. And the guy goes, 'Oh, that was a good punch.' And then all of a sudden they look— oh, the— let's look— and there's blood. And then the guy just collapses. Boom. Curse, splat, and they toss the guy and they get a boat. You see him out in the ocean. They throw the guy out in the middle of the ocean somewhere and they tell the Russian mob they don't know what happened to the guy.

I came and got the money, man. He must have ran off with your money, right? I would have said the same thing, ran off with the money.

That's, that's when they— we see the Escalade in the movie, right? And on the way—

oh yeah, they're on the run after that part, right?

Right. No, they were chased.

No, they were on their way to Vegas.

Well, on the way to Vegas, we saw him in the Hummer. Oh yeah, that's right. And then at the airport, Terry Crews was driving the big Escalade in a car chase, which didn't make any sense. He's chasing a limo. Yeah, it's all good, but it was—

they tried.

No, but it was a great— the whole movie is just crazy. And these two guys that like invented the whole thing, they're just snorting coke and smoking pot and taking pills and messing around with the, uh, the, the porn stars and the whole thing. And then everybody's got a porn website and they're at the Asian Awards.

That's when things go bad though. It's like, uh, yeah, Luke Wilson gets with a porn star too. Yeah, of course.

And oh, let's tell the part about the FBI shows up. Let's talk about that. Oh yeah, so we actually looked this part up and it's true. And it's true. The guy says that made the movie that he has Proofs, there's facts that it— that this is actual truth. So the FBI shows up at their office. They think that that's it.

This is not the movie. We're talking about the real people who started this payment company, the payment processing, right?

Yeah.

Feds show up.

Yeah, the feds show up and they think that they're done, right? They think they're done. The feds show up and instead they say to them, they go, well, you know, We're following what you guys are doing and, you know, you guys can actually help us. At this point I'm laughing, right? Because I'm like, what is he talking about? So they're apparently monitoring the website, their website, and they're monitoring— there's people from all over the world getting onto this website, right? And back then there was no laws about, you know, anti-money laundering, where's the credit card coming from, like now, like tons of countries are blocked, right? You know, you can't use a credit card from certain countries in America, in America, vice versa, on a website. Not gonna happen. And so they're like, oh, well, these terrorists are watching this one porn—

your website.

Yeah, yeah, this— they're watching a couple of porn stars, different ones, on the website. So we want to know when those porn stars are going to go live, right?

So they basically were like— they gave the FBI convince the owners of this payment processing company to basically like let them into their network.

Yeah.

And then they agreed because I guess the, the way that the FBI was saying was like, yo, they like the girls who are like in military uniforms and they have weapons and whatever, whatever. So they'd agree to all this. And it effectively worked. Like a whole bunch of terrorists would log on to their website. And they would sit there and they were able to track their IP address. And from there, they were able to have like, they were, they were capturing military strikes, all kinds of stuff. Just because of it, they caught up on this porn site, man.

I, that part was hysterical.

That was a, that part That was one of the better parts of the movie, right?

And the porn star lady was like—

I mean, you gotta watch the movie to see that part, right? No, it's way too much to talk about on the—

but the porn star was fun too. She's like, oh, I'm helping America.

Yeah, she was excited.

One of the girls, she's helping America. So that was pretty crazy. And then the part where Luke Wilson's son gets in trouble, this was also one of the good parts.

I like that part. Yeah, that was good.

His wife calls him, oh, your son's in trouble, blah blah blah, he's in trouble with the police. School, was arrested, and it turned out that, you know, he hacked the school computer and changed his grades.

Shout out to him.

Yeah, that was pretty funny. And then he convinced the school to drop the charges because he bought a gym, paid for a gym. Yeah, for the school. So they dropped the charges, and then he goes to see Kelsey Grammer.

But the state district attorney of Texas was still gonna prosecute the kid because for whatever reason, and that's when Luke Wilson comes in there with some, some mighty dandy paperwork, pulls out the papers, he's saying, hey, he goes, hey, what would everybody think if they saw you going to this website, blah blah blah dot com? Yeah, show me your beep dot com. And he kept going down the list and Kelsey Grammer's eyes are just getting huge, bigger and bigger and bigger. And then it just— he just says, do you know you just tried to bribe a state district attorney? And it worked. So the DA just drops the charges on the kid's son, and then it really— from there, it's like the snowball is just— it's just trying to—

well, that's those guys that got on— they were taking more drugs, and everybody's trying to screw them over. And then James Khan, he was mad that he didn't get cut in, but he was under like federal indictment, so they didn't want an investigation. So, so then he's trying to weasel his way in with those guys, and then they make a big mistake with child porn.

Well, not Luke Wilson, not Luke Wilson, the other two guys, under his nose, right? The other two guys, whatever, they got brainwashed by James Khan. They got introduced by this other guy. He was a hustler. He convinced these two guys to put up an independent porn site.

Yeah, but it was still being billed through that company.

But it's still right. It's still, you know, whatever, under the table, under the radar of Luke Wilson. It's just another site. Like, he wouldn't— how would he know that it belonged to them? Right. But unfortunately, this douche, dirty bird decided to use children on the website. So obviously, that's disgusting, wrong, should be outlawed, whatever it is.

Wilson actually punched him out. Went right—

yeah, in the movie.

And yeah.

But yeah, so then they're making tons of money off this site. And the feds, who— same fed who came to visit him about the terror— working together for the terrorist operation— were like, hey, man, just wanted to show you out of respect, you know, Uncle Sam loves you, blah blah blah, but your business partners are having an underage pornography website and you're going to jail, basically.

Yeah, everybody's going to jail.

Everyone, everyone.

But he ends up double-crossing everything.

It was the—

so the end, which was crazy at the end.

I guess it wasn't that bad of a movie.

No, it wasn't that bad.

It's just that there's just some really bad parts. There's some really bad parts. The acting— some of the acting is terrible.

Terrible. The fighting, the two guys fighting, it's like silly. You're like, what is wrong with these two guys? But they're on drugs, and once you put that to it, then you say it's okay, I guess.

I don't know.

No, I'm just saying. But I, I enjoyed it for the business aspect. Yeah, just the business aspect is like pretty intense.

It It's showing you like how many payments are processed and what's going on when they're sleeping. And it's right before, like, they are really blowing off. They're like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and they come running into there. And they're like, middle of the night, and they're at like $7 grand in less than 24 hours. You know, that's— that was, as an entrepreneur, that was awesome to see, right?

Like, yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

Like, that part of it, like, when they, you know, as he— as the story's going on Um, he meets with that fed and the fed tells him to get out, right? And Luke Wilson is trying to figure out how the hell he's going to pull this off. And it just so happens that he has a meeting.

Yeah, he has to go to see the Russians because he's got to give them some money. Oh, because they kidnapped— because they kidnapped Luke Wilson's maid's kid. They thought they took his kid. But they grabbed the wrong kid.

Terrible.

Which was horrible.

So terrible.

They took the wrong kid and they—

so he was going to give them—

so people were just hopping. So people are just hopping in now. So we're talking about this movie Middleman, which is about a credit card processing movie, right? You know, because there's people hopping in here now.

So yeah, the Middleman movie is amazing.

It's not amazing. So the end was crazy. So at the end, you know, at the end, we don't— should we give away like what happened at the end? I don't care. Oh, whatever.

If you haven't seen this movie by now, it's whatever.

You'll see if you watch it, you watch it. So they tell Luke Wilson, oh yeah, we want you to sign the company over. So he says to them, oh, do you mind if I backdate this? So he backdates it like a year, like 6 or 8 months. He backdates the whole thing. And then the Russian guy Font says, the— oh, I know that you killed my, uh, cousin, cousin, and, and you, and, and, and you ripped me off for 200 grand. He's like, 200 grand? He goes, he came, he— we were gonna give him 450 grand.

And then James Caan was the guy that was trying to scam, scam by adding another 200 to the—

right, another 200 grand to the ticket.

So that—

so then he gets— the Russian guys shoot him in the gut.

Not a good way.

Not a good way. James Caan, I think, has passed away.

Rest in peace, James Caan.

Oh, you know what my favorite James Caan movie was? Rollerball. That was pretty badass when he was in there.

A little bit.

That's before your time. A little bit. They made Rollerball Part 2. I do.

Yes, they did.

That was pretty good, but Rollerball 1 with James Caan is pretty badass. Jonathan, do you remember—

is there, is it— is there a movie about like rollerblades? Oh no, that was, that was on actual TV. Remember the women were on like rollerblades and that there was like a competition and they would like hit each other really hard?

Oh yeah, well that was like— they had— what is it called? Roller derby.

Roller derby, that's what it was called. There's like whole tournaments for that.

So then, uh, so then the rut— the— so Luke Wilson leaves, goes back to his family. In one piece.

Well, probably was skipped.

So they get—

they sign back, they sign the— they get the kid back, he drops off the money, he signs the contract. The Russian mafia kills James Caan for being a dirty son of a gun. Uh, Luke Wilson and the kid, they leave with Terry Crews.

Yeah.

Uh, and yeah, yeah.

And then the two dudes that started the whole thing get indicted for child pornography, child pornography. And then they start blowing in, trying to blow in Luke Wilson and Terry Crews for killing that guy. They're like, we don't know what guy you're talking about.

No, he says, where in the ocean?

Where in the ocean is he?

And the one guy, Sneak, the guy from Sneaky Pete's like, in the ocean. We don't even know, like, whatever, you know. And then He, he's saying like, yeah, that's all— he's trying to blame the character, Luke Wilson's character, Jack Harris. Jack Harris. And, uh, and the feds are like, yeah, well, you know, that might be true, but he signed over the company over 6 months ago. So what, you know, it's on you guys.

And then it—

yeah, that was the end.

That's it. Then the Russian mobsters escaped United States to who knows, Moscow, Moscow, supposedly. Yeah, who knows? We don't know.

He's probably cool with Putin.

Yeah, they're chilling over there. And whatever, everybody, Luke Wilson and Terry Crews, probably chilling out. Whatever.

I mean, so if you're in the payment industry, or like, fin— financial technology, or just want to, you know, see where this all started. I mean, for me, it was interesting to see like the— like, just the creation of it, like, Because I'm— I, when I seen it happen, I, you know, I could see it like, yo, that's literally how it would happen. Like, some guy's good at coding, and decided to find a solution to a problem. And they did it, you know, I mean, it wasn't perfect. I mean, obviously, the internet was just starting, everything was dial-up.

Oh, yeah, that you hear the modem and everything.

Yeah, I mean, it was nostalgic. But, you know, I wish, I wish that, that— because the— from reading, you know, I did some research on it. So at first, the guy, the, you know, the, the guy who wrote the whole story, yeah, he wanted it to be a TV series. Oh, I think it would have made a little bit more sense.

It would have been good on Netflix for sure, like now.

Yeah, they would do it a good job.

Oh yeah, it would be great now. Yeah, but they would get— they need to get Luke Wilson. Because he was good as that.

I like Luke Wilson. Luke Wilson is, you know, I guess he's—

I like Luke Wilson.

He's all right.

Yeah, he's an all right guy. I like Terry Crews.

Terry Crews was funny. Terry Crews.

Yeah, he tried to have his, like, his— he tried to be like a little comedic with his tough guy character. Yeah, he tried to be like very comedic.

Yeah, that was good.

I mean, so I was telling Justin, you know, a story about one time I signed this guy up with a t-shirt company, and the guy says to me, he goes, oh, I'm starting this porn site, right? And I'm gonna have live porn in this big house in Hollywood, Florida.

And I was like—

and he takes me over to this place, and it's similar to what this was going on. And this was like in the year, like, 1998. So, you know, around that time ago. Yeah, 20 years, 20-something years ago. So 1998. 99, around that time. And it was this internet billing company. So I go sign them up for credit card processing, they get approved, they process for like a month or so. And then this guy with the porn house, he gets on, um, he gets on Howard Stern Show because he knew somebody.

Oh right, who?

Howard Stern. And he gets on there and he starts telling them how he's got porn stars and they're going to be in his house. And tons and tons of people sign up, but the bank holds all the money because they get worried because it's, you know, hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars. I mean, it's on the Howard Stern Show. The thing— people are signing up, they're blowing the thing up, right? It's like 1995, they're just blowing up. The server crashed, right? And then the server crashed, and that— and then the bank returned all the money to all the people.

Terrible.

I made a little money for a few months, and that was the end of that website. But you know, porn is one of the biggest money makers on the internet. It has been to this day, right? And many companies that probably don't want to talk—

adult—

no, no, content in general right now. But I'm just saying, like, many of the credit card processors— no, no, like First Data used to process porn. No more. You know, they don't do it anymore. Heartland used to do it. They don't do it anymore. You know what scared them? No, I think that they just— I think that— no, I think that— I think that, you know, as those companies went from private to public, that they just decided like, hey, this— we're not going to be in that business.

So where do they go for them?

There's other banks. There's about 3, 4 banks. I mean, you know, recently, like, the biggest ones is OnlyFans and Pornhub. Those are the two— the two biggest. Both of them got slapped around by the feds. Oh yeah, I mean, all sorts of problems with, um, underage people and all that. And then as of, you know, most recently, MasterCard being the one that was— came to the forefront. Usually it's Visa, but this time it was MasterCard, you know, came out with new rules for all the porn sites. So somebody's putting up a porn site, especially if there's going to be live streaming video they have to have a whole compliance document prepared and everything. And it's not so easy to get credit card processing because, I mean, all the content has to be monitored.

I wouldn't— I couldn't— I, I— look, I'm a man, and of course, you know, whatever, but, you know, like, I just— I, I couldn't be a part of it.

No, I'm just saying, like, it's— I'm just saying it's out there, you know what I'm saying? It's just out there. I mean, it's not—

I mean, I do business like how we do business, but I wouldn't want anything to We're the middleman. Yeah, I'd be the middleman all day because we're just facilitating.

You need a merchant account, we introduce you to the, uh, we introduce you to the bank or the credit card processor who will process the transactions for your business. Well, I just say, as long as you have a legal business, everything's compliant.

I mean, we got daughters though, so I mean, that's the hard—

well, no, I'm not a person that believes like that should be going on, but I'm just saying, at the same time, it's gonna go on. I mean, it's crazy. Like, I was at the airport recently now, and they were announcing on the, on the speakers, like, and there was a lot of signage too about, uh, trafficking.

Oh really?

Yeah, about human trafficking. Good. If you see something, say something. If you see, you think somebody's being human trafficked, yeah, you know, and there's a lot, you know, that's part of the, you know, that's this part of our world that we're in, you know. It's terrible. And it's, you know, the internet You know, I always say this, the internet is good and bad. And we even talked about the metaverse, right? Like the metaverse, like, are people just gonna sit in their house and wear goggles? And that's gonna be their life? Like, it's kind of crazy when you think about it.

Yeah, I mean, I don't— I can't remember who I was just talking to about this. But, you know, I think that it is, as far as education-wise, I think that it's going to be amazing. It's going to be one of those things that students will be able to, to learn in ways that I never could have imagined.

Can you imagine you want to learn how to fix something, you can put on the goggles and then watch somebody fixing it?

Yeah, that's really cool.

And more of a 3D kind of a situation.

Now the rest of the, you know, when it comes to like, going to like concerts in the metaverse, or, you know, art galleries, some, I mean, some of that, I guess that can be cool, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm just not from the Roblox era, right? I'm from the James Bond 007 on Nintendo 64 era, you know what I mean? Like, I don't even understand how to play a video game.

And so for me, I mean, I've paid for enough video consoles.

For me, the metaverse is very interesting. I think that it's going to be cool to watch it evolve over the next couple years. I do like— of course I am, you know, we're all— there's that group of people like that are gonna submerge themselves in that. Yeah, fully, right? And there's going to be some bad things that we don't know about it, like the game Sims, and there's other games that are similar. When you talk about— when you think about video games in general, you know, I mean, there's— people are still trying to blame video games for mass shootings and people doing all like—

well, I think it somewhat desensitizes people.

I don't know, I'm not a psychiatrist.

Neither am I.

So I— we're both assuming, but at the end of the day, I think that, you know, like, the metaverse will be great, but go outside into the real universe.

So if you need a merchant account that's on the high-risk side, we can help you with that. And, uh, you know, hope everybody enjoyed our talk about Middlemen.

Go watch it for yourself.

Yeah, go watch it.

I didn't think I was gonna like it at all. Like, I— and then in the first, like, 3 minutes, I was like, okay, this has my attention, right? Like, not saying I'm into anything that happened in the first 3 minutes, but it was like, whoa.

No, it's the, the aspect that I enjoyed about the movies, like the business aspect. Like, you see a guy invent something, right?

Oh, I liked all that.

And then you see them start to make a bunch of money, right? And then you also see—

because it's literally how it happens, right? Like, I mean, I can be me and Allen, we don't scream at each other, right? But if we're discussing, he likes to use the word, we're having a discussion. And could get— if someone else walked in, and like I said to him in the morning, you know, someone else walks into this office, and they hear us having a discussion, it's not going to sound like a discussion to them, right? But you know, like, that's how it goes in business. Like, if you have, you're, you're passionate about it, And, you know, you want, you want change, you want a better life for yourself and your family. And, and, you know, the way that that started out, it resonated with me, you know, I could, I felt it on a personal level.

Well, we're working on a project now, you know, and we talked about like, you know, I'm passionate about the project, right. And Justin understands probably even more after watching this movie. The possibility, possibilities that it could work. We don't know, right? And, you know, we talk about these things, and then, you know, I'm not a web designer, so I see things, you know, I look at a piece of paper and that's how I look at it. Justin looks at things in a whole different three-dimensional website way, right?

Exactly.

So I tell him like things, and then he, you know, he's got to like tell me, oh well, You know, that's not how you do it on a website, right? I go, I get that, you just got to tell me, you know. But you know, you watch this movie and you see like how somebody basically came up with an idea, turned it into, turned it into a business. Then it got so big and out of hand, they needed someone to come in and manage the business, right? That person came in, managed, which is like this pretty regular, right? Yeah, that's pretty much how a lot of businesses you know, they have to bring somebody in to be the, be the, be the manager, or that person has to learn to be the manager.

And a lot of times they don't, and that's why businesses don't succeed.

Yeah, but some businesses— right, some businesses succeed in spite of the— in spite of everything, you know, they succeed.

It's one thing for my business, I never— I always focused on doing, right, and not focused on the business. And so growing the business was, was very difficult, right?

Well, you have to, you have to learn. Like, that's what I was telling Justin. I was in the hotel business, and, uh, the guy who owned the hotel company said, okay, you know, you know your department, you know your department, you know your department. And he said, no, if you guys are gonna— we're gonna do this, everybody needs to understand what everybody else is doing. Like, you can't complain about the chef and you don't know what the chef does.

Right.

You can't complain, chef. You can't complain about the front desk and the sales office because you don't know what they're doing, right? So everybody had to— I had to go through a program where I shadowed through all the departments in the hotel, the sales department, the catering sales. I went— I spent time in the accounting office.

It seems like a good way to bring people together.

Well, yeah, you're gonna learn. It's just like when we're here in the office, everybody has to understand that everybody Everybody's essentially working together, you know. Justin's making a website, Samantha's helping with the graphic design, Anna's helping handle—

well, I mean, Samantha's come in pivotal, like, right? Because she's doing the branding.

She's—

me and her, we're trying to— we're not trying, we're literally rebranding the company from—

yeah, we're doing— we're changing things.

So there's a lot of work that happens, right?

But also it's a whole different— we're, we're we're working on a whole different concept to bring merch— like they brought porn to the internet. We're working on a kind of a concept to help, to help bring merchant services up to another level to small businesses, to small businesses.

So hey, man, before you finish up, thank you to all of our followers, subscribers, head over to YouTube, subscribe to the channel, please. We're trying to get our viewership up.

You know, Luke Wilson, hit him up. How we talked about his movie.

That would be cool. Yeah, well, follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, B2B Vault, the payment technology.

We're on all the podcast networks.

We're on all the social media, all the popular ones, the ones that aren't so popular, the ones that you've never heard of. B2B Vault is available. Head over to b2bvault.info for any information. You can get caught up on past episodes up there as well if you're If you don't have any, like, you don't want to go to one of the podcast streaming platforms, you could go to betabeefault.info and listen to it right there. You don't have to join, subscribe anywhere. You could just listen to the podcast right there. I think it shows the last 10.

Yeah, or you catch us on LinkedIn. We put the podcasts up on YouTube, on— it's on Facebook. It's everywhere. We're everywhere. Yeah, we're giving We're trying to give educational information to merchants. Today did a fun movie review.

If you find—

I don't know if there's another like payments movie. Maybe we'll make a payments movie. All right everybody, peace out. Carpe diem. FinTech Friday.

Have a good weekend.

Have a good weekend. We're out.

I love you, Mom.