Mayor Of New York Indicted For Fraud? | 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 daredevil of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. What's up, bro?

Payment processing news, all kinds of crazy stuff going on in the world. Yeah, everybody's getting locked up and fighting crimes for the payment processors, chargebacks. That's why I called you Daredevil. I don't Okay. Yeah, we got to fight. You know, merchants have to fight off the fraud. Yeah, it's getting out of, you know, fraud's getting out of hand, not just for, you know, on the merchant side, but also for us. The amount of people trying to obtain a merchant account with a stolen identity, you know, it's just out of control. I was talking to somebody yesterday about it, said out of every 100 applications they get, less than 10 are real. 90% are people trying to pull a scam. I can dig it, man.

I'm ready to pull some scams.

I'm ready to pull some scams. And, uh, let's see what else is going on. Happy Gilmore 2, they're filming, and they announced Travis Kelce has a cameo.

Who's that?

He was the tight end guy. He's the tight end on Kansas City Chiefs.

Oh, you know, so no, I don't.

Okay, he's the one dating—

Go Brewers, bro! Why are we talking about football again?

I don't know, talking about Happy Gilmore.

I know why we're talking about football, because you don't want to talk about baseball because the Marlins suck. So Happy Gilmore is back.

Yeah, Happy Gilmore is back in the— and, uh, and the— well, what whatever. The WNBA is in the playoff season. Indiana Fever are out. Caitlin Clark's, uh, I don't think—

I don't follow.

Okay, well, she had a record-setting season, but they lost 2 games to the Connecticut Sun.

Shout out to the Connecticut Sun.

So they're out of the playoffs. Caitlin Clark set like— I don't even know. I don't even—

I'm just, I'm just—

she broke, she broke a whole bunch of records. Nobody should be hating on Caitlin Clark.

I don't give a shit about Caitlin Clark's beating record in the WNBA. I'm sorry, I don't. I really don't. I just don't. I don't, I don't want to follow the WNBA.

Well, I never followed it either. I followed her from college. It was, you know, my Iowa connection. So I hear she's from Iowa. And then, you know, got P. Diddy trying to get out of jail. Now the mayor of New York is in jail. You hear about that?

Yeah, we heard about that.

That's kind of crazy. But the other thing, this is something, you know, a story that I started following because there was this woman named Vani Hari. Have you ever heard of her? No. So she has this website called foodbabe.com. And, you know, food has kind of been in the news a little bit with RFK talking about food and food safety. And she was before Congress the other day testifying about 'Why are American companies allowed to poison us?' And she was giving examples of— you can pull it up on Instagram— she was giving an example like french fries. And french fries in Europe have 3 ingredients in it, and french fries in the United States have like, whatever, 20 ingredients.

Yeah, but when you look at the label, it also says 'natural flavorings' on the label in those other countries. What the hell are natural flavorings? So at the end of the day, it's all bullshit. I don't believe that. I don't believe that.

You're not—

you can't tell me for one second that you're putting a French fry into a bag and putting it in the freezer and it's going to be good for 2 years, bro. That's bullshit. Like, I don't believe it. It's impossible, man.

I know. I read when I was a chef, right? I learned that they take all the potatoes, like in Idaho, You know, they grow all the potatoes and they put them in these huge silos and then they pump them full of nitrogen to keep the— to keep it shelf life.

Yeah.

To increase the shelf life so the potatoes don't get bad before they ship them out. Exactly.

Because a potato, if you put it in a shipping container and it's in there for 24 hours, bro.

Yeah.

Them shits is going to start cooking.

I'm sure.

So like, I don't— Yeah, man, food safety in America is a big deal. I believe it. I understand it. I'm terrified. There's a huge— I don't know if you've been hearing about this, but there's like all the ports are about to close down because the workers are about to go on strike.

Yeah, I was following that story about—

On the East Coast.

The, what do they call it? Longshoremen.

Yeah, the longshoremen. They're all the people who operate the cranes. That pull the containers off of the ship, right? They're like, yo, if y'all don't pay us right, or whatever deal that— and that they're trying to restructure. And I heard that it's the— there, because that's like a union type of thing, and not even type of thing, that it's a union, right? And so it's traveling all the way to the West Coast, and I can imagine what kind of problems this is going to cause for the grocery stores, for all the— this shit is just like, just like during COVID when no one could take No one— you couldn't move anything. So, uh, this is crazy, man. It's crazy, bro.

Yeah, well, the— somebody need— they need to do something to step in and solve that issue because that's gonna— you think we have inflation now, we're gonna have a much worse inflation and we're gonna have a lack— we're gonna be, you know, unless you're buying American products, all of a sudden everybody's going to be running to the store buying 20.

You can't buy American products because China owns and Japan owns all the farmland in America now. So like, they grow all the food, they ship it to Japan.

Yeah.

And we don't even— that's why we have a food shortage. Like, I could keep going. Like, yeah, totally. It— 40 years ago, uh, Americans were growing like some crazy amount, like 40 to 50% of their food, bro. Every average American. What is that today? 1%. That's gross, bro. And the fact that like in Florida you're supposed to register your garden with the state Really? Yes.

Oh, that's crazy. I didn't know that. They want—

because they're going to come in there and they want to make sure that you're genetically spraying shit and you, you're not passing diseases.

And oh, I guess they think maybe you're going to sell it. I mean, if you're not selling it, you still have to register your garden.

From, from the way that the, the it reads, everyone who has a garden bed in their backyard that is growing needs to register it with the state of Florida.

That's crazy.

It's ridiculous.

That's crazy. I know. I do know that DeSantis is not approving any foreign companies from purchasing any more farmland in Florida. So I know that they passed a law on that.

Yeah. And I know a bunch of states have done it. Yeah. A bunch of states. Yeah. Indiana, because the one guy— the Indiana guy, he put it all together. We talked about it on the podcast. He said Why are these— this company buying all the farmland and it's all above the aquifers? So it's above all the fresh water that Indiana has, and they literally own like a whole bunch of it. And so he presented it to the board or whatever, and they, they stopped— put a stop to it so they couldn't keep buying more land. But yeah, it's a— this tragic, man.

I mean, I was reading a whole thing where some companies like produce chicken in the U.S. And then instead of having like the slaughter, they— they know we talk about this all the time. Yeah, they ship it to China and then ship it back. I mean, I don't want—

the packaging is insane.

And I saw this whole thing about Whole Foods now that you got to check all the packages in Whole Foods. I know, I know, but I'm just saying like food safety is becoming a huge, huge, huge issue now, you know.

And it's insane, man. Like I look at the back of my packages all the time. You know, I am definitely a label reader.

I, I—

my grandmother instilled that into me though.

Like, yeah, the least amount of stuff is the best stuff. Yep, exactly. Least amount of it, the least amount of ingredients. But yeah, check out this lady's website, foodbabe.com. I was watching her testify before Congress. I was a little shocked.

Speaking of Congress, did you hear Kamala talk about her opportunity economy.

Yeah, but she doesn't give any specific information.

That's what I was thinking too, man. I'm like, okay, yeah, every middle-class American deserves an opportunity to generate wealth. Like, what? That you, you presented no solution again. To the middle class that is running America.

And they want to increase taxes to corporations, which is going to chase companies back out.

She didn't talk about anything about that, about the opportunity economy. We're talking about the opportunity.

I understand that, but that was part of her opportunity economy, was taxing the—

she didn't say nothing about taxes, bro.

I watched the whole thing.

She was talking about making jobs in America, manufacturing in America again. Which is all fine and dandy. That's true, right? That's very true. This $25,000 tax credit to start a business, like, what is— what is a tax credit? And if you ain't giving me $25,000 to start the business, what does that even mean? I don't understand. Like, how the hell— where are we gonna get the money to start the business to get the relief from the $25,000 that we make off the business? Yeah, you just— you make no sense.

Yeah, tax credits don't make sense because usually, like, any tax credit you get requires you to spend money.

Exactly.

And then you get a tax credit back, but that doesn't do anything if you're like an S-corp or if you're an S-corp or you're a sole proprietor. There's no, you're not going to get any money back because you still have to pay income tax, right? So they're talking about business tax. Business tax is only off if you have a C-corp.

A $25,000, a small business generating $25,000 in revenue. Off its first year. Like, that's a big feat. Like, that's not something to laugh at, I feel like, right? Like, a small business that made $25,000 profit—

oh, profit? Well, you gotta be doing about $50,000 to $100,000.

That's what I'm saying. Like, that's what I meant, not just $25,000. Like, so that they're able to, to, to, to even access this $25,000 tax credit, right? Most businesses aren't even going to get there.

Right, exactly.

So what are you doing? That's— that doesn't— shit, that shit makes zero sense to me. So I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong and maybe I need to be more educated on— no, it doesn't make sense.

It doesn't make sense because unless you're putting money, unless you're providing like financing for businesses, right? When the other person who was President Trump, he— him and Tim Scott, the guy, the senator, We're not talking about that. I understand that, but I'm saying they created these opportunities.

I didn't get no opportunity zone. I didn't see no opportunity zone.

Well, don't— it was—

you can throw that out and they actually have it in Fort Lauderdale. Yeah, sure, go over there and see what the opportunity zone looks like.

Well, I'm not sure what exactly—

it's bullshit. And you got the qualifications to get approved for it is ridiculous.

Okay, well, that's the problem.

Yeah, so don't, don't make it seem like they did this great— I'm not— grandeur thing, bro.

Help some people, sure, not everybody.

It people who were in, that were in, they had an in, right? If you don't have an in, you ain't getting in. So yeah, that opportunity zone is— yeah, no thank you, I'll move forward. So yeah, I don't know what the hell to do with that. But good luck. I hope to hear that you have some— because I don't want to vote for Donald Trump. I'm just saying it out loud. I don't want to, but Yeah. Did you see Marvel is accused of using AI for their latest movie poster?

Wow. That's crazy.

The dude who's going to be playing Sentry in Thunderbolts.

Yeah.

Which is, I'm really excited for because it's one of the newer— not newer. No, it's not. Thunderbolts is like an Avengers type thing. There's a bunch of guys in there. But yeah, it's one of the newer comic books that I actually kind of remember reading, so I hope they don't mess that up. This is the one— there's some good characters in there. I think it's going to be good. But I thought that was nuts to see the guy have 6 fingers, you know, and the fact that it's Marvel. Like, bro, you're Marvel. Pay your artist to draw you a movie poster.

I don't, I don't know, man.

Like, like, Marvel was like the, uh, the peak of like, you know, like comic books and creativeness when I was a kid. So like, to think that y'all are getting so lazy to just— yeah, that sucks, man. I, I feel bad for the future, for the youth.

I mean, I just see like a lot of things happening now where I'm reading about how AI is reducing employees at different companies. It is things like that. It's kind of wacky.

You know, it's going to happen. I mean, I think a lot of people are very naive. People who are like super comfortable in their like day-to-day data entry job, their customer service job, their Um, you know, their content creation job, the shit that, you know, the yawning on the podcast job. Um, yeah, those types of gigs, man, like they're going to be gone. And I think that people are really—

people can still yawn.

They get complacent. And, um, you know, what's not that?

I think business owners get—

it is that people get complacent in their jobs and they think that they're— they they don't, they're not replaceable and they'll be there forever. That shit happens to everyone. Lots of people.

Yeah. But the thing is, I also, I talk to business owners, right? So I talk to business owners and I'm like, well, how do you guys do this? Or how do you guys do that? And I was talking to somebody the other day and they were like, yeah, we fired all the people that worked on their social media, their video editing, their website. Except one guy for their website. The rest of the people, they canned them all.

That sounds like a terrible idea.

And I was like, why did you guys do that? And they said, oh, we did that because we had our— we, we just decided we outsourced it to some, like, this company, and they do it for less than half the price of what we were paying, like, 4 employees. So they got rid of 4 employees.

That's terrible.

Got rid of 4 employees. They said it was either that or they were going to go out of business. Business. They said they were spending a lot of money on employees. I mean, I see it all the time, every place. I mean, listen, you go into restaurants today, you go into a retail store, tons of places are completely understaffed. Yeah, I mean, you walk into a huge store— like, I was in the mall the other day, um, to see my son who works in the mall when Rebecca was here, and when we were walking by one of the big stores in there that like a bunch of the gates down. And I said, why, wonder why they have all these gates down, right? Because he said like multiple entrances to get in one of these. I don't want to say who it is, but a very large store in the Sawgrass. And my son said, yeah, he goes, they don't have enough.

We're not going to get in trouble for saying it's whatever.

He's Forever 21.

Adidas had a bunch of Adidas. Yeah, the other day I was trying to, I something back for my daughter and I was like trying to get out and I kept walking into the door and shit. I'm like, why is this blocked off like this? But it's because they don't have nobody to work there.

Yeah. So they had, so they have the gates pulled down. They used to have all these gates where people could go in and out of the store.

Well, that's to stop theft.

And yeah, well that's what it's for. But he said, oh, they don't have enough employees to watch the doors anymore. So that's what they had to do. Yeah, they just have one in and out of the store.

At least every store you go to, it's almost like they have their own like armed security guard.

Some of them do.

I mean, listen, you go to Nike, does— I'll tell you one thing, Nike has a police officer outside of their door every time.

Like, like especially the shoe stores. I notice when they have a sale, they'll have definitely security outside and a line, and they only let a certain amount of people in the store at the same time. Yeah. At my son's store, they do that, Paxun, during Christmas time. They have a limit on how many people they let in the store.

Also, it's always been like that. And then, yeah, but now I was like, here, it's like, I mean, besides like on whatever day that is, that was, I did it one time in my life, but I didn't actually do it. Like I drove there and left and waited. I chilled in the car for a second.

Yeah.

You know, did my thing. And then I went in afterwards, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

It was the time for Tickle Me Elmo. And boy, when I tell you, people were getting their ass whooped in the parking lot. People were stealing shit. That was a— that was like Walmart.

They would have TVs on sale. People would be duking it out to get those TVs. I mean, but every place, like I was at Costco, right? So the, you know, there's a whole thing going on. Oh, Costco is Now installing a thing at the front door. So they usually have like a greeter or two there. You have to show them your card. Now they're going to put a new entrance and you have to scan your card before you can go inside.

So what is the, the, the, the person that's on Social Security who looks forward to talk to somebody? That's the only time they see someone the whole week.

What are they going to do? I don't know.

That's messed up, though.

Yeah.

Listen, I don't know if they're gonna— AI has this job and has, you know, technology has a use, but you're talking about— that's jacked.

And I see now, like, when you go to—

there's certain ladies— this one lady at BJ's, she's so nice to us every time we go. Like, I'm gonna be sad as hell if I go there one time and she's not there and I gotta scan my card because there's a machine there instead.

It's crazy, I know.

But what's the—

I don't know, when you leave —when you leave there— you still got it. There's dudes there check, you know, people checking your thing.

Until the technology gets to the point where it sees what's in your cart and it can go like that instantly. Right. Then they won't need somebody there.

That's kind of hard to do at a Costco. People got stuff piled up in there.

I mean, for me, it's like X-rays. So, I mean, it doesn't seem like it's that big of a deal. Probably they could tell by when you're by the I mean, for me, it'd be by weight of cart, probably. They could judge by that or some shit. I don't know. People are a lot smarter than me to figure that out.

No, so there's this company that I talked to one time. It's called Remote Eyes. And basically, they install cameras in businesses over a cash register. It can watch how many items got rung up and then how many you put in your basket. That's what I'm talking about. So it knows, right? The camera knows. And then if it sees something that it doesn't like, it could send an alert, a text to the person, or alert them, hey, there's a customer over here doing this or that, or even stealing. It watches people in the store, can watch the bartender to know like, oh, the bartender poured 4 drinks. Yeah, Big Brother.

Sure, I get it, I get it, I get it.

No, but I'm just saying it's kind of crazy. Like, that technology's been around for a while. I mean, we have a couple clients that use it. It's pretty, it's pretty crazy. But it's, you know, It's, you know, it's watching. The other thing I was talking to somebody about was passwords. You know, passwords. Everybody wants to get rid of passwords. I have some websites now, I go to the website, even though I have the password saved in my password program, now wants me to log into my password program to get the password before I can even get the password out of my own password program. More people need to go to this like magic link thing. Where basically it sends a link to your email and then you click it and then you can access your stuff. I don't know, it's just the password thing is crazy about how many people are getting their passwords stolen.

I, you know, yeah, websites. I don't have a problem with it.

No, I mean, not me, but I'm just saying, yeah, there's just—

I was most of the time, man, it's like the older generation because you guys have passwords 123456. Uh, and that's to your fucking bank. Sorry, I didn't— you know what I'm saying? Like, so like, it's crazy. Yeah, people, you know, passwords, it does get the two-step verification, and there's a lot of extra, extra-ness that's happening right now.

I like the two-step verification.

I do not like two-step. I, I— it's a love-hate relationship. It's a pain in the ass, that's for sure. It is. So definitely Um, especially at work, or if you're like in a shitty area and you know your signal's bad and you're connect— you know, you can't— you're trying to take care of something. I— that happened to me not too long ago where like it lit— like my phone wasn't allowing me to verify my face. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? Like, I didn't know— I didn't have my wallet. So I couldn't pay. So I literally, I didn't know what to do and shit. And I'm like freaking out in line. And then finally, like, whatever, you know, I wiped the shit and did all this and stood like this and was like this. And finally it went through and I was able to tap the thing. So yeah, I get it, man.

My face thing, like on my phone, for some reason when I changed my glasses, it's like not working. I tried to redo it. Now it's just the password when I want to get on my Apple Pay or whatever. Except to put in the password. Yeah, because if for some reason I can't— I went to the phone store, they tried to reset it, it won't reset because I changed to like bigger glass, different glasses. Even though I rescanned everything and all that and reset it, it still didn't work. Yeah, that's crazy. But I was reading this other—

that's probably because you got the iPhone 15 and the new one just came out.

So, and I was watching this other program on business news and they were talking about like the biggest danger for— two biggest dangers for scams right now is scanning QR codes. Yeah. And then taking you to bogus websites. And then the other thing is like I sent you an email, oh, is that email from Elegant Themes? Is that real or fake? And they were talking about all these people getting these email, oh, I need to add. And then this just happened to somebody that I know, a vendor who we're trying to work with., and somebody sent somebody in their office an email. The person clicked on the email. They thought it was their website vendor or their host. Right. In essence, it wasn't. It was a hacker. The hacker got in there and jacked up their whole website. And now that website's got hot— the website basically got kind of hijacked. What was the domain? They're not there. The domain that looked like it was from the person who works on their website.

No, I'm saying what the— because usually when hackers attack someone, it's because they're like, there's a reason, like the URL is, you know, it's— there's a purpose. Well, whatever.

I don't know what the purpose was, but the person—

they didn't ask for no money.

Um, yeah, they wanted money to fix the website, so the guy said no, he's not paying them. And now he can't fix the website and they're going to probably have to rebuild the whole website.

Well, yeah, I mean, if he doesn't have a backup of his website.

Yeah, well, that's what I asked him. I said, don't you have a backup? I said, I can get— I said, I can give you Justin's phone number. You can help him, you know. And then I didn't hear from him because I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm not paying the person because they want like $100 grand. He goes, it's not going to cost $100 grand to make a new website.

What is the business?

I don't want to get into it. It's confidential.

But if it's— how does he know it's not going to cost?

Well, he doesn't know. He just, you know, he doesn't know.

He's just like, doesn't want to speculate on, oh, it's not going to cost $100 grand. But yeah, I want to do some really technical, uh, and I got— it was a freaky-ass shit going on.

It was basically like an informational site about their products. Whatever. I don't know, person went in and jacked up everything and, you know, jacked everything up, and then they called GoDaddy and this and that, and they can't get the person locked out of the system. I don't know, they had to go change the password.

Should have called me.

Well, I told them, I said, you know, you got to call somebody, a website person who can go in there. You got to reset. So they reset everything from GoDaddy, but they don't know, they don't think they had it, they don't know how to—

whatever. Shame on you. I'm sorry to hear that.

That's what I'm saying, you got to be so careful with like links and where they're going and check the— my mom sends me emails all day long, right? Yeah, I know, man.

You gotta be careful. Bleacher Report said that the Brewers are going to the World Series, bro.

Okay, that'll be great.

They're gonna beat the Mets and the Dodgers. Okay, so yeah, man, I mean, I know you wanted a top party. No, no. Okay, I don't, I don't, I don't know. I don't want anyone around my house. Okay. Stay away from me.

Okay. What did I want to talk about?

No, I mean, I— we're running out of time, but the, uh, the one thing that I wanted to talk about, we both kind of mentioned it, was the, uh, Google paying Character.AI $2.7 billion for their chat— for their chatbot. Yeah. The backstory for that for me is that, that caught my attention was the guy is an ex-Googler.

Right. He was one of the first 100 employees.

Exactly. At Google. And he is— he's like the godfather of AI. Like, he's literally the guy that has, you know, responsible for the large language models that we know today. And I, you know, you never hear about these kind of dudes. His name is Noam Shazeer. Yeah.

48 years old, I think he said he was. They hired him back.

Yeah, he quit because Google wouldn't release his chatbot in 2021. Right. That is shame on Google.

Like I said, he started, he started inventing it like in 2017. Yeah, he had all kinds.

It's this guy, uh, obviously is a super genius, you know. Um, and Google really wanted him back if they're going to partner with his company 2.7 bill and then on top of that pay him, you know what I mean? So he's obviously a very important person.

Yeah. His LinkedIn is changed now to Google. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. I went and looked at his LinkedIn. Yeah, he's changed already that he works for Google. I actually went on there and was pretty funny. I was trying to make it work on my phone. It didn't work, but it worked on my computer. You could chat with— I was chatting with the Zohan. You know, I love that movie. Yeah. And it talks back to you.

That's crazy. Yeah, I'm gonna check it out. I had, you know, I wasn't much into it. And you can make your own. Remember we were talking real quick before I wrap it up. Did you remember we were talking about Three Mile Island? Yes. The largest US catastrophe related to nuclear. Yeah. They got an open date. Right. In 2028.

Wow. Yeah, I knew that. I heard they're going to start.

They started rebuilding. That's crazy. No, 2028 is going to be open. Right.

But I'm saying they already started. They already started rebuilding it, the reactor. But they're going to build a different type of reactor this time. It's going to be a different— yeah, it's going to be a fusion reactor versus what they had before.

The, the, the money that they're putting into that is crazy.

Well, they have to do something because we have to have alternative energy, and they found out real quick solar and wind is not going to do enough to power electric cars.

Solar would, but it's just because the infrastructure was not built for it.

Exactly, that's the problem.

But solar could definitely do it. Well, it could. We know that it could do it.

The problem with a lot of the stuff that they're using is they haven't developed storage, right?

It's infrastructure. We don't need to go into it. It's all infrastructure. But solar could definitely do it. Wind is not the answer. Yeah, we don't have that. The water turbines, that thing is— that's another one, but Solar for sure. But, uh, yeah, man, renewable energy. I don't know about nuclear, not a fan. Um, haven't you seen Three-Headed Fish? I mean, you just watched The Simpsons.

Yeah, younger people that don't know about the Three Mile Island accident. No, I don't remember that shit. And they don't even remember like Chernobyl.

I remember Chernobyl just because of whatever. But yeah, man, so let us know your thoughts on the, uh, on You know, I'd love to hear about, you know, if you know more about the opportunity economy, something that I don't know. Drop your jewels on the Three Mile Island thing. What you think of the Brewers is what I really want to know.

Yeah, tell us what you think about safe food in America. Peace out. Peace. Carpe diem. B2B ball.