THE Cambridge Connection - Episode 64

Credit Counselor. That’s $2 that could very well go towards a coffee if you’re eating out. Come on. Yes, but people put the gift card in the car. They don’t see it.

They tuck it in a drawer. This sounds like it’s what you do. Where’s your data coming from? Your pocketbook? My house, yes.

Setting up the crypto conversation

Okay. Now, so we all know for our listeners, that is a personal opinion, not necessarily scientific. So look, lots going on in the world right now. We talk about recession, all of that stuff, but more importantly, a lot of volatility in the crypto world. And the beginning of the economy going bad, it already started.

And then we have some scandals going on, some things happening. And this is why our guest today is a crypto expert. We’ve had him on before. We’ve got to talk about these things because I’m telling you, I don’t care what headlines say, it’s here to stay. The crypto movement is a faction of people that believe in it, that don’t trust governments and the way that they handle money.

So this is kind of like gets into the whole Republican versus Democrat. Republicans, oh, capitalism solves everything. Democrats, oh, bigger government solves problems. Either way, there’s scandals, there’s wasted money. It’s our money that we’re either investing or our tax dollars are being spent on things that we have no control over.

So these are the problems that we run into when we’re trying to develop the wisdom of our listenership and our friends and our family to deal with these things. It seems like one big bombshell comes down and then there’s another one. And what’s 12 months from now? Is there another one? And it’s all about educating people, too, and keeping up with the current events that’s going on, too.

It’s just so important. We cannot have people just throw their hands in the air and just say, oh, well, whatever. There’s a lot of people that have probably lost a lot of money in the recent scandal with FTX, and we’re going to get into that. But this is, whether you’re investing, look, the Madoff scandal, right? Yes, I was just going to bring that up.

There was so many people, high profile people that were involved on the FTX thing, Tom Brady and Giselle. Stephen Curry. Yeah. Yeah. You see some people that were invested in it and trusted someone to move forward.

Believing in it. Exactly. So these are important discussions. This is why this show is amazing, because I feel like we get into these things to raise the awareness. We don’t necessarily have the answers and we can only get so far with a guest in the 28 minutes we have to do the show.

Right. I mean, we might not be as influential as Tom Brady. No. Not yet. And not with the Giants anymore, since you went ahead and blew it.

So what we’re going to do is we’ll take a quick break. We’re going to get on with our guest and we’re going to talk about cryptocurrency, State of the Union, talk about the scandal, because people need to understand how these things happen and how you may potentially be able to protect yourself. This is Gordon Oliver with The Cambridge Connection. We’ll be right back. If you’ve lost income during the pandemic and have fallen behind on your rent or mortgage payments, Cambridge Credit Counseling can help.

Guest introduction and company background

Talk to one of our HUD certified counselors at 1-800-CAMBRIDGE. Welcome back, everyone, to The Cambridge Connection here with my drenched giant fan co-pilot, Tina Marie. I’ve thought out. OK, you’ve thought out, but you still said you were called. O.

Ben, welcome back to The Cambridge Connection. Hello, hello. And actually, we’ve changed the name of our company. io, it reroutes, so we’re all good there. OK, well, with that said, this is great breaking news we’ve got.

So Ben, why don’t you tell our listeners about your history and your company and the name change and all of that. Let’s let’s understand a little bit about what you’re up to. Sure. So I’ve been active in the crypto world since 2017, started my own public relations agency with my friend Ivan Perez, who’s my co-founder of HAL Labs. And we’ve worked with the media to break a number of big stories.

We’ve helped brands get their identity and their footing in this world. And we’ve helped demystify the technology a bit. So it’s really been a great ride. We’re really spending a lot of time in what we call Web3 now, helping projects figure out digital collectibles and how they want to get involved in crypto. And we still work on the finance side as well.

So we’re a well-rounded bunch and we enjoy what we do. OK, Ben, if I could ask why the name change? What prompted that? Sure. So we were we were almost exclusively a public relations agency when we were operating as Multiplied.

And we wanted to change into something that was a little bit more full form because we’ve been helping projects not just with their media presence, but with their marketing, with industry connections. We’ve had the pleasure of working with people like Quentin Tarantino, Steve Aoki, Doja Cat. We’ve worked in the fashion industry. We’ve worked in the sports industry. And so as we continued, we figured the branding needed a little revitalization to reflect the fact that we were more than just PR and marketing.

Now we were going to be a lab, a force of creativity and experimentation in the space. Well, congratulations on that. Obviously, it just sounds like since 2017, you continue to morph and grow and expand in an industry that just really is seemingly to the average person. in the wild, wild west. Yes, indeed.

And I say that because you mentioned Quentin Tarantino. Meanwhile, we have this FTX scandal. Some are calling the CEO scam bankrupt fraud that I saw on Twitter, but it’s actually- The Bernie Madoff of the world. The Bernie Madoff. So it’s actually Sam Bankman Freed, right?

So this is where people get into trouble. Number one, when I look at a lot of conversations in crypto, the average person is just not gonna get it. And in relation to that, like financial advisors that are slowly but surely getting involved and from advisors that I’ve talked to, very leery because that’s a whole nother book to be able to offer people to invest in. And because it’s seemingly unregulated, very hard to understand the actual mechanics of it from a cryptocurrency to an NFT to all the things that are involved in the industry. It sounds like the work that you’re doing is really trying to break through that to try to help bring credibility to an industry that recently just took a bombshell in credibility and just adding to lack of trust.

FTX collapse and trust issues

Can you speak to that a bit? Right. Yeah, you know what I love about crypto is we have a bit of a mantra and it’s verify, don’t trust. And the problem that we experienced with the FTX collapse is actually a legacy problem. And it’s a problem of centralized trust, which is largely what the crypto and blockchain ecosystem is pushing against.

And before the FTX crash, there was a number of people that were incredibly vocal about how dangerous some of these centralized exchanges could be and what the ethical practices were behind the scenes when you don’t have that transparency. So if anything, this is a shakeout, it happens. Crypto is not without controversy. All new technology is not without controversy. And those controversies, as they come to surface, is evidence of killing viruses and healing.

So I think this makes us stronger in the long run, but in the short term, yeah, people are hurting. People are angry, justifiably so. And it’s gonna change a lot of the philosophies and it’s going to change how we’re approached by regulators and hopefully it opens the conversation for bigger players to start getting involved where I felt like Sam was getting a lot of love in Washington, where other people had stronger voices. So let’s hope that they get elevated. With all due respect, when you have anonymous opportunity to donate money to politicians and you can’t identify how much that looks like, we all know why he was a darling, right?

We all know why he was able to get in there. And this is the problem with our politics. Not gonna get into that today because that’s just a whole nother rabbit hole. It’s like 50 million rabbit holes that we can go down. But anyway, so question number one for you, and I think I’ll give you my answer, is crypto dead?

No, not even close. Here’s what my, just in tracking it and having you on, again, glad to have you back, from a year ago, so much has changed since you were on. And this is an ecosystem that’s not this small little thing that people can make go away. This is a change in the world in the way that business is done and money is exchanged. And it’s not this small little engine.

It is a huge engine. It’s just the regular people, they haven’t really accepted it yet. But the people that believe in a different way of doing things than what currency is in the world today, it’s a machine, and I don’t think it’s going anywhere either. Right, so the best evidence of that is as early as December 5th of this, this December 5th, BlackRock, a very small company, right, $10 trillion asset management firm did an about-face and said that crypto is ready for mainstream investment. So that’s on top of all the chaos that’s happening.

These firms are still saying no. It’s time, prime time is coming, it’s here. We can’t escape this. It’s an inevitable technology shift and we have to prepare for it. And we saw the same thing with JP Morgan and a bunch of the legacy institutions that were initially against these things.

And we’re gonna continue to see those guys kind of turn their heels and point the other direction as they figure out how this works within their paradigm and their world of managing money in ways that advantage themselves and their clientele. Okay, so FTX was an exchange that even Kevin Leary was seemingly promoting at one point, which I wonder how he’s dealing with that as far as the- Well, he got $15 million to promote it. Oh, well, there again, money- I’m sure he’s okay. What do they say? Always follow the money, right?

Exchange safety and decentralization

Follow the money? So- That’s right. We’re gonna probably come up against a hard break, but real quick, when you see this happen, are crypto exchanges safe and how do you know that? We should be very, very skeptical of, I would say, most of the crypto exchanges out there. I think from a on-ramping perception of I wanna get Bitcoin for the first time, I think there are plenty of exchanges that are fine for facilitating that.

Coinbase is probably the most prominent that everybody knows. They did the Super Bowl ad that was the bouncing QR, not the Larry David- Absolutely, I remember that, yep. Pombry. You know what I’m talking about. So you can go on there, you can buy your Bitcoin, your Ethereum, and then you can transfer it off the exchange.

And that’s probably the best way to get involved in crypto rather than keeping it on there and trusting that whatever you bought is actually being custodialized by them. And so I think that’s gonna be a shifting mindset is how quickly can I actually claim ownership of my crypto keys and move my Bitcoin into a self-custodialized wallet? The trading function is where it gets tricky because there’s plenty of decentralized exchanges that are direct. It’s peer-to-peer. It’s cutting out the middleman.

That’s what blockchain does. And it’s saying, if I wanna trade in an ecosystem, why go through a broker when this technology is set up specifically to cut the brokers out, minimize the fees, and get direct access? The problem is the trade-off. People want things that are convenient and easy. And centralized exchanges are very good at that.

But they’re hard to scrutinize because how much of a cryptocurrency that they have on the ledger is not always as transparent as we would like it. And this is what we’re running into with FTX, where they’re saying, we have enough money to facilitate the withdrawals. That’s not true. Money is being misallocated and used elsewhere. And obfuscated, we don’t want that anymore.

We want complete transparency and visibility. So that’s where we’re headed. Here’s where I think the battle comes in, Co-Pilot. When you see names like Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen and Steph Curry that have entrusted. Very influential.

You’d have to believe they have some pretty powerful people around them to put some pretty big money into something. And they’re staking to lose just a tremendous amount of money. That has to make people very squeamish about getting into it. We’ll take a quick break. This is Gordon Oliver with The Cambridge Connection.

We’ll be right back. Are you having trouble paying down credit card debt? Cambridge has been helping people safely pay down their debts for more than 25 years without settlements or bankruptcy. Call us at. COM.

Wallets security and crypto adoption

♪ Welcome back everyone to The Cambridge Connection here with my co-pilot Tina Marie and our special guest Ben Noble. Ben again can’t thank you enough this is just such important information I know we cannot cover all of the things that we need to in this show and I hope that you can come join us again as things develop and as the industry grows we need people that can give trustful information and again I can’t thank you enough for coming on and helping us with us today. Yeah more than happy to not a problem at all. Ben what what is exactly like a decentralized exchange versus a centralized? org that was one of the first and one of the most recognized brands they have a lot of information on decentralized exchanges there and you can work into other exchanges if that doesn’t fit for you but I think that’s a great starting point.

Okay so we’ve talked about ledgers a little tiny bit but can you break down for our listeners what is a ledger and how a person can protect their assets? com is becoming almost like an iPhone their latest adaptation of what a ledger is looks very reminiscent of the early iPhone in terms of having all these applications customization and their ability to store everything from digital collectibles to the cryptocurrencies that you transact with but the big thing is that you’re moving your ownership off of an exchange and into these wallets that are cryptographically secure and so security is becoming more and more paramount with the digital world we see that even in the web to world as we call it with people getting hacked and things like that so it’s best to move into those devices and like I said don’t trust verify getting on to a cold storage wallet like ledger can be very helpful for people that want to try to stay safe. This is exactly where I get confused because we’re saying that Coinbase is a reputable exchange but yet you still need to fear that you have your assets on an exchange and it just is a much safer play to move it to your own wallet? Call me paranoid but even even the most reputable companies in the world can have bad actors that work in nefarious ways behind the scenes and it could be one person in that organization that does something wrong and I don’t want to take that risk some people are okay saying okay this is audited there’s agencies that are coming in Coinbase is very very transparent and I wouldn’t say they’re doing anything behind the scenes there’s no indication of that however it’s better safe than sorry right? io that can tell you a lot about that side of things but yes I think it’s best to try to protect yourself and not rely on other people to do that for you.

I’m glad you’re bringing it up because the way I look at it is the people that have developed all of this if I’m not mistaken in the early going were the hackers they were the ones getting data and then saying you have to pay us for your data with this kind of money right? Like so it just makes me... Which is why. Go ahead. No it’s why it’s why the ecosystem the earliest guys here have been championing this from the beginning they don’t trust any exchanges and they’re not your keys not your crypto is the biggest chance of the OG’s and has been around since 2008 and now that people are getting hurt in droves they’re starting to listen again to the cypherpunks and so if you want to see where we’re headed look backwards and see what the cypherpunks were talking about and that is creating systems that are mathematically trusted not trusted on blind faith on individuals and organizations.

Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Well all right how common now are cryptocurrencies? So we were saying 43 million for Americans it’s much much larger for the rest of the world and we saw that percentage shift over the past two three years where the majority of people are at least familiar at this point. I think it’s going to become more popular with younger audiences and we’re starting to see the abstraction of the language cryptocurrency NFT things start to die down so Starbucks for instance is doing the rewards program on the blockchain they don’t necessarily reference the NFT component but it’s there and so this is becoming more used in ticketing systems and all that again just digital ownership verifying being able to do all these things without intermediaries there’s intermediaries in almost every industry and so it really goes beyond finance so and so I see this is very transformative this is you know bottom-to-top going to change the world. So you’re saying no more saving your money under the mattress?

Hopefully. We have to move it. We’re burying gold in the backyard right? Right, right, right. Look again for our listeners I mean I just realized in our hometown where the corporate headquarters is for Cambridge Credit Counseling there’s a store that has a Bitcoin ATM so so again even just seeing that you have you have to wonder like people like look at it and they’re wondering what it is they you know it’s hard to comprehend this if you’re just an average person and you’re not spending a ton of time studying and understanding all these concepts so again this information is just critical when people are dabbling in and I I hear what you’re saying about the younger generation it seems a little bit easier for them to kind of buy into this where the older generation is a little bit more skeptical and then when something like this happens the funny part about it is for the older generation the Madoff thing is just another look of what this looks like right it’s just another scheme it’s just another embezzlement it’s just another huge amount of people losing money so it just puts a ding in credibility and causes angst in a very unknown sector of financial investment and wellness so again this information just supremely important for people to kind of get an understanding of where this is all going and I’m not a financial advisor that’s worth stating but when we’re talking about high-risk assets it’s done in the from the context of high-risk high-reward and so younger people can palette more risk because they have a more of an opportunity to claw back when the risk doesn’t land in their favor.

Yeah, they got time. And so we hear a lot of people, you know, promote, okay, 10% of your portfolio should be in high risk or crypto or whatever. Really it’s about what you’re comfortable with, what your retirement goals are. But it’s just like any nascent technology, there is going to be risk. There’s risk in biotech investing in early stage companies that just IPO’d or got their funding.

There’s risk putting your money in Facebook. There’s risk putting your money in Twitter. And these are mainstay technology companies that have been around forever, forever, forever as far as investors are concerned compared to crypto. But it doesn’t mean they can’t be undone by the next competition, the next data breach, whatever. So I don’t see this as a mutually exclusive, crypto has this problem.

I think it’s about being informed and understanding that you have to be okay with risk, but you don’t give up on a car just because the engine goes out, you go and find a repairman to fix it. Ben, before we let you go, can you please tell our listeners where they can follow you as you put out this great information? Yeah, I’d love to have you guys follow me on Twitter. That’s where I get the most interaction. My Twitter handle is at the NFTs and it’s T-H-E-N-F-T and then E-A-S-E.

So sometimes that confused people, so I have to spell it out completely. XYZ. However, there’s not a ton of information coming out on there, but please follow me on Twitter. You’ll see me post regularly about different companies that we’re working with, different trending news, and occasionally my really bad hot takes. So hopefully you enjoy.

I’m definitely following you. I appreciate you joining us. An absolute pleasure. Another quick break. We’ll be right back to close the show.

Closing thoughts and wrap up

This is The Cambridge Connection. We’ll be right back. Interested in learning more about the advancing world of NFTs and crypto? Follow Howell Labs on Twitter at TryHowell. Howell is one of the leading communication and product studios for the blockchain industry.

They break news on major crypto trends and provide services for companies developing technologies at the intersection of arts, culture, finance, and entertainment industries. XYZ. Welcome back, everyone, to The Cambridge Connection. I’m your host, Gordon Oliver, here with my co-pilot, Tina Marie Mann. What a really good time to have him on, though, huh?

That kind of clarifies some things. So crypto is not dead. It’s not dead. You know, when I read the headlines, I thought, oh, there you go. It’s not dead.

But you know what’s missing? And this is a conversation we’ll have again. Financial advisors, they have to go through the Series 6 and Series 7 licenses to be able to give advice. So the question that’s hard to answer is, where do you get your advice? And how do you go ahead and take that leap into making an investment in a specific NFT or cryptocurrency?

Right. Bitcoin. I mean, obviously, people saw the rise of it. Now they’re seeing its struggle. But it’s here to stay.

It’s here to stay. There’s no question about it. And it’s going to develop. But the more that we can bring to our listeners to know good, safe haven resources to be able to teach themselves, if they’re going to dabble into that and there’s no financial advisor to turn to, that’s what the show is all about. That’s what we’re here for, education.

All right. On to the quote of the week. If we assume that there are normal or standard income results to be obtained from investing money in securities, then the role of the advisor can be more readily established. He will use his superior training and experience to protect his clients against mistakes and to make sure that they obtain the results to which their money is entitled. Benjamin Graham.

Special thanks to our producers, Leah and Lisa. Once again, Copilot, we’ve proven great experts, great information. m. com, click podcasts and the Cambridge Connection and you can see any of the past shows. We want you to be part of the conversation.

org or feel free to call 1-800-CAMBRIDGE.