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Meet Benjamin Cowen!
7 Plays1 year ago
Let’s jump back Into the Cryptoverse and get to know my absolute favorite crypto YouTuber Ben Cowen!
This episode Ben takes an hour away from the charts to show us his more personal side. In our interview, Ben shares how he built his brand Into the Cryptoverse from 1-2 videos a week into a full-scale business, his secret to staying calm during market volatility, and what excites him the most about the future of Web3.
We also have a timely discussion on the role and responsibility of crypto influencers and the grey area regarding paid promotions.
And don’t worry - you know it wouldn’t be Behind the PFP without a few curveball questions! We ALL want to know what price bitcoin needs to be for Ben to get out of bed!
*Bonus points if you’re an Into the Cryptoverse subscriber and you get the inside jokes*
If you're not, sign up for Ben’s free newsletter here: https://itcnewsletter.webflow.io/
I’ve been watching Ben’s videos for two years and it was an absolute pleasure to get know the man behind the lines, charts and yes, the PFP.
Whether you’ve been an Into the Cryptoverse subscriber for years like me or you’re just meeting him now, I know you’ll enjoy getting to know Ben as much as I did!
xx Jade
P.S. Think you'd be a great guest for Behind the PFP? Contact me at the links below!
Follow Ben Cowen!
Sign up for Ben’s free newsletter: https://itcnewsletter.webflow.io/
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Follow Jade!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cryptoismyjam
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Transcript
Crypto's Financial Revolution
00:00:17
Speaker
this week on Behind the PFP.
00:00:24
Speaker
What would you say excites you the most about the future of crypto? I think it's sort of like a revolution of like our financial system, not having to rely on centralized parties to control our money.
Ben's Introduction and Influence
00:00:48
Speaker
Hey everyone and thanks for jumping back into the cryptoverse. Today we have a very special guest. I have been following Ben's channel for two years now. He is a chartist extraordinaire. He's also been a huge inspiration to me both in the crypto world and also in starting my own YouTube channel. Ben, thank you so much for coming to chat with me today. I have to say this is a bit of a surreal feeling going from watching your videos three times a week to being able to talk to you.
00:01:18
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here and thanks for following my channel last two years. Hopefully it's been somewhat helpful.
Navigating Bear Markets: Lessons and Insights
00:01:25
Speaker
It's been very helpful and I have to say your calm, cool, collected voice of reason has kept me sane, especially during the recent market hysteria. So what is your secret?
00:01:39
Speaker
I think after you've experienced a couple of bear markets, you kind of become apathetic. I think you can reach that apathy stage quicker than if you haven't experienced it. Because we've seen Bitcoin drop 90% before, 85%, 84%. We've seen this happen many times before.
00:02:02
Speaker
It's one of those things like when you recognize that we're in a bear market, it's like, all right, we have to spend a year at least going down. And, you know, it's just sort of a matter of time and then we'll come out of it and hopefully head back the other way. But I think honestly, a lot of it is just experience dealing with the exact same market conditions many times in the past. And and if it's your first bear market, of course, it's always quite a roller coaster. But then by your second bear market, you start to think, oh, I get it. Like, it makes sense now. It's it's very cyclical.
00:02:32
Speaker
I know that you've been, I don't know about fully invested for a long time, but you've been following the markets for a long time. And your experience is this bear market, the worst that we've experienced? Yeah, I guess it depends on how you define worst. So like in terms of price drawdown, obviously it's not, at least not yet, right? Like the last bear market for Bitcoin was an 84% drop before that 87, before that 94. And so far, I think we've only gone down 77% or so.
00:02:59
Speaker
Um, so from a, from a drawdown perspective, I don't think it's, it's as bad, but there are some other elements that I think have made it somewhat worse. And it's these constant, like sort of slow up trends that lasts for months. And we've had like five or six of them. Uh, whereas in a lot of bear markets,
00:03:20
Speaker
they don't necessarily always follow that type of structure, right? Like where it's just like a slow grind up for three months and then again, three months and so on and so forth. So I think from that perspective, it is harder. If you look at the length of the bear markets, this is the second longest bear market so far. So we've, this is our fourth bear market. The first one was short. The second one was the longest one we've had. And then 2018 was sort of the third longest. But, or no, I think the,
00:03:50
Speaker
second shortest. But this one is so far the second longest bear market. And if we see another low in like two weeks or after, it will be the longest bear market. So from a price drawdown, it's not the hardest bear market.
00:04:06
Speaker
at least not yet, but from a time perspective, which, you know, like that time-based capitulation is arguably a harder thing to deal with than the price-based capitulation. I think from that perspective, we are getting to that point where you could start to argue that it is the hardest one. I think it's affected a lot more people because in prior bear markets,
00:04:27
Speaker
We didn't have nearly as many people in the space and just the magnitude of reach that the cryptoverse had. It wasn't really felt throughout the world, I think, like it has been this bear market. The collapse of a lot of these major platforms this year has really affected a lot of people in a magnitude that it didn't happen last cycle. Then I think for me,
00:04:54
Speaker
you know, probably the 2018 bear market was the easiest. Well, it was somewhat easy, but mainly because I didn't have a public presence, right? Like when you have a public presence, it can make the bear markets a little bit harder because you're constantly, you know, you're constantly sort of second guessing yourself and you know, a lot of people are listening to your opinion on where things are going. And so from that perspective,
00:05:18
Speaker
It's personally made this one a little bit harder, maybe than the last one. But yeah, I mean, price draw down, not so far. Time-based wise, it's getting pretty long. And within a couple of weeks, it could be the longest bear market. It's almost like we want to just rip off the Band-Aid and get it over.
00:05:37
Speaker
That would be nice, right? It's always sort of a dream, but these bear markets, they like to sort of slowly bleed for a long time. And then they quietly bottom, right? When everyone stopped asking if the bottom's in, right? Then they quietly bottom, and then we start to come back out. When no one is left, but you'll still be here. Yes, I'll still be here.
00:05:57
Speaker
So for people that don't know you or follow you, you actually have your PhD in engineering and you're only recently full time crypto.
Ben's Journey: From Education to Crypto
00:06:05
Speaker
Can you give us a quick background on your life and how you came to this point?
00:06:09
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So, um, I did my undergrad in math and I started off as aerospace engineering. Um, and then I, I actually did an internship in NASA and then I switched it to math and physics. And then I ended up graduating with just a bachelor's in math, a minor in physics. I think it was like two classes away from like a major in physics, but I got accepted to grad school and everything. I'm just like, I'm just going to go to grad school. I'm not gonna stick around any longer. So then I went to, um,
00:06:38
Speaker
I went to grad school, I did a master's in nuclear engineering, and I did a PhD in nuclear engineering. So it was quite a transition, right? Like aerospace, math, it was math and physics. And then I decided to cut it back to just math. And then I still got into grad school after I cut it back to just math. And so I was happy. And then nuclear engineering, I did my PhD. It took like five years.
00:07:04
Speaker
And then after that, I was really following the markets back then. So I remember back in 2013, some of the graduate students in the lab, we were all talking about Bitcoin because we saw it skyrocket up. And then we were watching it just come plummeting back down to Earth. And that was really fascinating.
00:07:25
Speaker
And, and humbling to watch, you know, to go through that experience. And then, so then 2014, 2015, the market, the market got really quiet and I was just focused on, on, you know, graduating, right? Like getting my degrees and graduating. And at that stage, if I'm being honest, I like, I wasn't even fully convinced.
00:07:44
Speaker
that Bitcoin was going to be a major thing. We still hadn't really had that many bull markets for us to really know. Now, when you look at a chart, it seems obvious, but when you only look at the chart from 2011 to 2014, it's not necessarily that obvious that this is the path that would have eventually taken.
00:08:04
Speaker
So, yeah, and then, you know, I graduated from my PhD in 2018, and then I wanted to start a YouTube channel back then, but I couldn't because I started a postdoc at a national lab and I was like, well, if I start a YouTube channel while I'm doing this, I won't be able to do, you know, I won't, I can't really spend too much time doing both. So I decided to just do the postdoc. I did that. And then after a year of doing that, I
00:08:32
Speaker
I decided to start the channel because I got fairly comfortable with my job and I didn't feel like I had to burn the candle on both ends to get my work done. I started my YouTube channel in the summer of 2019.
00:08:47
Speaker
And it was pretty quiet for a while. Not a lot of people cared, you know, um, like one of the first videos on my channel is, is talking about like the Ethereum Bitcoin valuation when it was like 0.017 or something like really low, like below 0.02, I think it was really low. And I was like, gosh, it's so undervalued. Like, why is it so undervalued? And then I made videos like,
00:09:11
Speaker
maybe like once or twice a week, if that for five or six months. And then in like October, November timeframe, I started talking, you know, started talking a lot more. Like I made a lot more videos. I spoke a lot about Bitcoin a lot more, which is what a lot of people care about. Right. And, and then my channel kind of took off and I mean, it took off
00:09:36
Speaker
I think partially because I was lucky. I mean, right. It's, it's nice when you get a bull market. Um, and then also, you know, I, I was able to find sort of like, uh, my own, you know, my own focus, right? Like, you know, the looking at charts in different way. Cause actually one, one thing I really struggled with and maybe forgive me if I'm rambling, but one thing I really struggled with early on is it.
00:09:57
Speaker
who's going to want to hear me talk about Bitcoin because there's already like a thousand channels that talk about it. No one's going to want to hear this. It's the market saturated. But I found out that wasn't true. There actually was plenty of room for new voices in the space. And then in 2020, things started to look up and I was like, all right, it feels pretty good. And then you know what happened in 2020 and all the markets crashed.
00:10:22
Speaker
And, uh, at that point I realized, I was like, well, you know, I thought, I thought we were going to go ahead into a bull market at some point, but now I'm not, I'm not really so sure how long, how quickly it's going to occur. And then the fed decided to print trillions of dollars and everything, absolutely everything took off. I mean,
00:10:41
Speaker
You didn't have to be that smart to make money, right? Like if you put it in almost any cryptocurrency or any stock back then, there was a good chance it was going to go up because they were just flooding the market with so much, with so many dollars and people wanted to find a home for that
Building a YouTube Channel: Growth and Persistence
00:10:55
Speaker
money. And a lot of people found it in crypto. And then my channel grew pretty quickly.
00:11:02
Speaker
You know, the first thousand subscribers is the hardest. First 10,000 is the hardest, right? But once you hit those major milestones, it actually becomes a lot easier. So I know you just started your YouTube channel not that long ago. Just stick at it, right? All you need is a couple of videos to go viral, and then the YouTube algorithm will start being very kind to you.
00:11:22
Speaker
That's wonderful advice. Thank you for that, and thanks for sharing. I'm just wondering, do you miss going into the type of engineering work that you did all the schooling for? Does that still interest you?
00:11:34
Speaker
That's a, that's a good question. Yeah, because that was hard because I'm like, well, I just spent my entire life getting this job, you know, and actually it was like, though it was the perfect job for me, actually, because I, I, you know, my, my PhD was actually in, um, uh, like molecular dynamics simulations of radiation damage in ceramics and my
00:11:53
Speaker
You know, the job that I had was, I mean, when I, my postdoc was on something slightly different on like equation of state, but then like I started to do some more of the molecular dynamics stuff and I was like, wow, like this is the, literally the job I spent the last five years training for, um, you know, in my PhD and.
00:12:10
Speaker
I was like, how am I going to give this up? How do I justify the five years I spent to get the degree? How do I justify giving all that up? But then I found myself
00:12:26
Speaker
I got to the point where I realized I couldn't do both. I couldn't do a good job at both jobs simultaneously. Early on, I could because this crypto stuff was not very demanding. I could make one video a week and no one would even watch it. It wasn't really that demanding. But then, once you have more people watching and more people emailing you and commenting about things,
00:12:53
Speaker
then you kind of have to figure out, well, I can't, I can't do this in a very effective way if I also have a full time job doing something else. So it was actually a really, a really hard decision. Um, and it took me, it took me about a year to make it because I started my YouTube channel in the summer of 2019, but I did not quit my day job. I was not done. My last day was actually in January of 2021. So I actually can, I continued to work.
00:13:19
Speaker
my day job basically until Bitcoin right before it went into that final distribution phase at 64K. When I quit, I looked at my desk and I was like, am I really doing this? Am I really leaving or really walking out that door?
00:13:38
Speaker
Uh, but actually I don't really, I don't regret it at all. I think it was the, uh, the right decision and I don't even think about it anymore. I don't think I could go back. Honestly, I don't think I could go back to, you know, to that type of job. Cause I like being able to just be my own boss and kind of control my own schedule, that sort of stuff.
00:13:54
Speaker
That's incredible. And I think this is something a lot of people who are interested in and are looking at working in the crypto space are dealing with, you know, myself included. I have a day job, but making that transition into a very risky, volatile industry. You know, how do you have the confidence to do that? But I love your story and I appreciate you sharing it with me.
00:14:14
Speaker
It sounds like when you first started your channel, it was something you just wanted to do for fun. Did you have any idea you were going to build up into the cryptoverse, into the brand? It was today. You've got a full website with trading indicators. You've got a private alerts channel. You do three private videos a week plus a bunch on your public channel. You have merch. You've got NFT collections. Did you imagine this was a thing?
00:14:38
Speaker
No, no, I did not. I mean, well, I think it happens to a lot of people. If you go, if you go ask any of the guys that, you know, um, any, anyone, any of the people that started channels back in 2017, 2018, 2019,
00:14:54
Speaker
I don't think a lot of us had no idea what it was going to become in terms of how big it was going to get. I think we just all have this vision that it is the future and we struggled to understand why other people didn't see that.
00:15:14
Speaker
And, you know, it was just a grind, right? It was like a grind for a long time. And actually, a lot of people started their channels well before I did. I mean, like Altcoin Daily, Aaron and Austin, they started like in January 2018, I think. And they were there for the whole bear market.
00:15:31
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, like a lot of people started these YouTube channels and they didn't really go anywhere for two years, but they put in the work, right? They put in the work during those two years and I think they helped, you know, I think they helped
00:15:49
Speaker
remind people the importance of crypto during the hard times and kept at least certain people interested. Obviously, there's always going to be tourists that come and go. Then by the time the bull market came, all those people were quite happy to see their YouTube channels go parabolic. If you're in crypto today, or if you're thinking about starting a YouTube channel, or I know you recently started one,
00:16:14
Speaker
Just got to keep at it, right? And then eventually, eventually the cycle will come back to us in the bull run phase. Exactly. Now, one of the things I wanted to ask you about, you've become a prominent opinion leader in the space.
Ethics in Crypto Influencing
00:16:28
Speaker
And I really admire that you've stuck to your guns and you haven't done any paid promotions and you found a way to build a successful business without doing so. I want to read a tweet that you wrote on November 12. Sure.
00:16:41
Speaker
In the bull market, everyone was showing affiliate links to all these centralized platforms that are dropping like flies. Now you know why I never did. Since it's such a hotbed topic right now with FTX, Celsius, Voyager, what do you think is the role and responsibility of influencers making content, you know, talking about
00:17:06
Speaker
you know, these platforms that they're getting paid for, you know, where do they draw the line? I was hoping you could speak about that.
00:17:13
Speaker
It's a really good question. And I think honestly, a lot of people are still figuring out the answer to that question. I do want to be clear. First of all, I recognize that affiliate marketing and paid promotions and all that sort of stuff, it's sort of like the backbone of social media, like large social media presence. So I get that a lot of people
00:17:37
Speaker
kind of have to do it. I don't know if have to is the right word, but I think the argument that they would make, and I think like even as a skeptic myself, I can understand is if they want to be able to do what they do full time and dedicate, you know, hours and hours and have a team of people that edit videos and all this other stuff, they have to make money somehow. So then how do they make money? Well, there's several different ways, right? So there's AdSense,
00:18:04
Speaker
So through YouTube, if you have a large enough channel, I think you need like a thousand subscribers or something like that. And once you reach a thousand subscribers, you can turn on AdSense and you can make money from that. Right. And I mean, I don't do it. I don't, I don't turn AdSense on, but I don't really think it's that bad of a thing. Like I think people should turn it on if that's what, if that's what can get them to, um, you know, make content more frequently.
00:18:26
Speaker
If it's going to give them the freedom that they're looking for, then by all means, I think they should turn it on because it's a great way for people to escape other potential jobs that they don't want to do. If you love this, then why not do that? There is AdSense. That's one clear way. That's basically where
00:18:44
Speaker
YouTube, Google, they put ads on your videos. They're not ads you're necessarily going out and promoting, but I don't think... People aren't going to say it's your fault that YouTube are in this ad on your video. You can't really control what YouTube does.
00:18:59
Speaker
Honestly, I've actually received emails saying, even if I don't have AdSense enabled, they still reserve the right to run ads on my channel if they want to. I don't know if they've done that, but obviously, they have the right to do so. It's their company. It's their business. No one else is going to tell them what to do, so if they want to do it, they can. That's obviously one way. I think that way is okay.
00:19:22
Speaker
Even though I don't do it, I think it's okay. I think it's a perfectly legitimate way to monetize the channel. There's other ways, of course, there are ways you can post affiliate links to things like centralized platforms. And that could range from exchanges to
00:19:41
Speaker
like lending platforms, obviously Celsius or BlockFi, obviously those went under. So I know that hit a lot of people fairly hard. I mean, and I've experimented myself with centralized platforms, right? Like it would be a lie to say that I've never used any centralized platform I have. To some degree, it's hard to navigate crypto without ever using some of them as just like an on-ramp or sort of experimenting with the different tools out there. So that's another way is you promote that stuff.
00:20:09
Speaker
the main reason i didn't and i you know i think people you look at my channel and obviously i never have but when i first started it's hard it can be hard not to because the reason is because people will reach out to you and they'll offer you a lot of money right and they'll say hey if you post if you post this we'll pay you x amount of money to do so um
00:20:34
Speaker
And it's hard at first because if you're not making anything, if you don't have AdSense enabled or if you do, but it's not really bringing in much money, not enough for you to quit your day job or something.
00:20:48
Speaker
It's hard because, you know, it's like they're sort of like dangling this money in front of you. And all you have to do is, you know, say a few words about the platform or post an affiliate link. And so I think it can feel like easy money for a lot of people, especially when they first start their YouTube channels. The problem is that a lot of people don't actually do their own due diligence on these platforms and try to figure out if they're actually legitimate or not. The other problem is that
00:21:14
Speaker
We don't even always have tools to be able to do our own research. They're private companies. They don't publish everything. There's no way to really know which ones are always legitimate or not. I took the very conservative approach, probably the most conservative approach that I could take, and that's just simply
00:21:33
Speaker
I'm not going to talk about any of them. I have spoken about them. I have mentioned them before. I've acknowledged their existence and said that these platforms exist. Obviously, you have to buy crypto somehow. Obviously, a centralized platform is a way that you can do that. I've used them myself.
00:21:53
Speaker
But the hard part is when in the United States, which is where I live and where, according to YouTube, where 40% of my audience lives, there are not sufficient regulations to in place to regulate these platforms. And so you don't know what it is that you're promoting. I will say, you know, maybe in five or 10 years or however long it takes,
00:22:14
Speaker
perhaps promoting some of these platforms might not be as risky of a bet. But the problem, I think, that a lot of influencers are paying the price for today is that they spent 2019, 2020, and 2021, and even 2022, posting their affiliate links everywhere, talking about all these platforms. So not only were they getting wrecked when these platforms went other, but they got a lot of other people wrecked. And yes,
00:22:41
Speaker
What people say, I mean, I think people should be responsible for their own decisions, but if you're constantly shilling an affiliate link to people, then if that platform goes down, you're going to have to be understanding that those people you shilled it to are going to be somewhat justifiably upset about that.
00:22:59
Speaker
And so that's what's happening, right? Like a lot of people talk about these platforms, they all went under. Well, not all of them, at least not all of them yet, right? A lot of them went under and now they're sort of like a reckoning and people don't like that these platforms were shilled with very, now it seems like really little accountability. It's sort of just like, all right, we're going to promote this stuff like crazy.
00:23:21
Speaker
And then the minute it goes under, we're going to say sorry. And then we're just going to do it next cycle again and rinse and repeat. So that's an issue. And this is not the first cycle this has occurred.
Recognizing Scams in Crypto
00:23:32
Speaker
It also happened last cycle too. There were tons of scams back then, ICO scams that people were promoting. And if you had a big following, you could post an affiliate link to some of these ICOs. And if people used your link or they used your referral code, then that person would get paid.
00:23:49
Speaker
A lot of those ended up being scams. You have BitConnect back in 2017. That was a scam. So many of these things happened, and they happen every cycle. And a lot of the people that talked about these scams back in 2017, they actually sort of just went away, and a lot of them stopped making videos. This time, I think people are a little bit more resilient, and they're saying, well, sorry, but we're still going to keep going on.
00:24:17
Speaker
And then, of course, the other side of it is probably the worst. And that's getting paid, taking deals to promote these micro cap altcoins that no one's really ever heard of. And they created it five days ago because maybe they hired someone on Upwork or something to just code an ERC20 token and just
00:24:39
Speaker
Go simply create an ERC20 token, create a website using WordPress, pretend like it's the best thing ever, and run an ICO, and then all you have to do, right? All they do is they do this. And I know this is what they do because I get offered all the same deals that all these other people get offered. I get offered all the same deals. All these scams that I've seen, I was offered allocations in a lot of those projects. I just said no.
00:25:05
Speaker
You know, I just said no. And so there's sort of this loophole where I think a lot of people will say, well, I didn't get paid to promote it, but they got like an allocation in the project, right? Like they receive some tokens that they will, a lot of times I think they'll pretend like that doesn't count as payment. They're like advisory shares, right? Or something, they'll be like the advisor for the project. And so they'll get some tokens and they say they weren't paid.
00:25:31
Speaker
Then a lot of these end up just being pure scams. They pump up and then they sell off. One thing I really like about this bear market is there's been the birth of a lot of on-chain detectives that are going in and finding out who did all this stuff. It's fascinating.
00:25:49
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, there's sort of like a range of different ways that you can monetize. And of course the way that I do it, because I mean, I have to do it somehow because I have employees, like I have four software developers that, I mean, I don't, I mean, I make my own content. I make my own videos. I don't edit my videos or anything like that, but I have a website and, you know,
00:26:09
Speaker
I have to maintain that website and I like to build on the website. And so I have four software developers that work on that. And then I have two people that do some more of like the moderation and so, you know, social media type stuff. So like I have one person that he like cleans up a lot of the, you know, the YouTube comments and stuff. And because there's so many bots, right? And it can, it can ruin the experience for people if they go to the YouTube comment section and it's just a thousand bots.
00:26:34
Speaker
So if you're going to support a lot of people working for you, then you have to have a way to monetize. So I just do it with my own website, which I think is honestly the best way to do it. If you can create your own product and then just sell that. And if the market will tell you if it's valuable or not, and if it's not valuable, market will tell you that, right? And no one will care about it. And if it is valuable, the market will like it, and then you can continue to build it.
00:26:59
Speaker
So it's just a different way. And I think people need to be very careful about how they approach the market this time, because there's a range of things that you can do. And the money can sometimes seem easy, especially if it's just like printing, that they print some ERC-20 tokens and they'll say, all right, we'll give you a small allocation if you talk about it. I think the right thing to do is just
00:27:26
Speaker
say no, right? Cause I mean, kind of have a responsibility. I feel like to your, to your followers, to not, to not, you know, just pump stuff up, just, uh, you know, just to see it come crashing back down partially because, you know, you're someone's awful. I'm not talking, you know, just in general, if people are, are sort of offloading their advisory shares that they were given, um,
00:27:50
Speaker
It makes for very, very muddy waters. And I think the crypto space really needs to figure that out. Hopefully they figured out for the next bull run. Cause if we, if we go through the same thing again, I don't know. I don't know if I can take it.
00:28:04
Speaker
You kind of answered my next two questions already. The first one was with all the talk of regulation coming to crypto, do you think it'll hit the influencers and the advertisers in the space which you did talk about? And then the other thing that you brought up without me even asking you is on the premium channel, you've spoken before and I found it very valuable about the different types of promos and scams that have reached out to you as your channel has grown and what red flags that we should look out for. And once you've shared that with me,
00:28:33
Speaker
it became very obvious and I could start to see through certain people that were promoting these. As a new retail investor in crypto, I would have had no idea and I was that person who was buying those projects that we're getting talked about that people were getting paid to do so and I didn't know that they were maybe dumping them while they were talking about it. I really appreciate you sharing that with us. I think it's important that people know. It'll happen to you too. If your channel keeps growing, people are going to start reaching out to you.
00:29:03
Speaker
I mean, I'm not even, I don't think it's anything big yet, but that's why I think it's important to talk about. For sure. Yeah, it's an important topic.
00:29:12
Speaker
There was one tweet that I wanted to read you also that I just think speaks a lot to your character. Someone wrote to you and I thought this was pretty amazing. Someone wrote to you. I remember when someone tried to send you a super chat and you told them to go buy some crypto, you can't fake integrity. And I think then that tweet just pretty much sums up everything you just said and the reason why you are my favorite YouTuber.
00:29:38
Speaker
I will say like I don't think if people turn on super chat like it's fine right like that's one of the ways that you can probably monetize and it's not a bad thing right like if people want to do it that way it's just like that's like the super chat stuff is probably not going to be something that's going to help someone go from having a day job to then like quitting their day job and and doing something else
00:30:00
Speaker
The whole idea was like, to me, it seems silly to give me $10 so that I can see your question. Just go put it in the market and hopefully it'll be worth $50 in a year or something like that. That's the general idea, especially during these times. One of the things to do during a bear market is just tune out for a while, DCA occasionally, and just wait. Switching gears a little bit, what would you say has been your biggest accomplishment or proudest moment in the crypto space?
00:30:30
Speaker
I think having a voice that's heard by a lot of people is nice to some degree. It's scary. If I put out a video, I will often get notified via email, Google stuff that'll say I'm quoted in two or three articles the next day.
00:30:47
Speaker
which can be quite scary. I never would have thought that I would have been a guest on some of these even larger channels like Coin Bureau, right? I mean, they got over 2 million subscribers and now they're having me on once a week. These are things that, and there's some people I followed back in,
00:31:07
Speaker
you know, like 2017 that I thought were relatively good YouTube channels. And now my, my channels larger than theirs. So I would say, I mean, just creating a large YouTube channel, like 700,000 subscribers is probably, I mean, that's a fairly big accomplishment, I think, but I think probably the bigger part of it is not losing your
00:31:27
Speaker
Not giving away your integrity to build it is the hard part. You know, that's probably the biggest because I think it's not it's not always hard to build a YouTube channel because if you if you make it super clickbait, right, you can get subscribers, but it's hard to build one.
00:31:42
Speaker
and maintain your integrity, I think. And I think also, I mean, honestly, building the Into the Cryptoverse brand in general and having a telegram channel with 40,000 people that talk about crypto. I mean, it's a public channel, but just creating all these communities, I think has been very, very, very helpful.
00:32:03
Speaker
I would like to think that my contribution to the space is giving people the ability to talk about crypto in a non-sensationalist way and viewing it in a more realistic perspective. It's been really fun to watch your channel grow. I think I was a sub 100K follower and watching you get to this point in the growth, it's been a really incredible process to watch. On the flip side, what would you say has been your biggest challenge that you faced in your crypto career and how did you overcome it?
Challenges of Predictions and Influence
00:32:32
Speaker
I think the biggest challenges are when you get things wrong, because there's nowhere to hide. If you say something, if you think something's going to happen, and it doesn't happen, everyone's going to remember that. It doesn't matter if you're right about
00:32:48
Speaker
If you're right about five things and then you get one thing wrong, that's what people are going to remember. The last thing you said, that is really hard. I did not realize how hard that would be. Even the best people in the world, the best traders in the world are never going to be 100% correct. Honestly, they're probably lucky if they're 55% correct. It's very hard because
00:33:14
Speaker
As creators, we want to put out things that people find valuable. And one of the things people find valuable are making predictions about things and talking about what we think is going to happen. So just to give you an example, some of the things that I've previously said that were very, very difficult were, I think the first one that really hurt a lot, and I don't even really talk about this point anymore, but
00:33:37
Speaker
XRP. I bought XRP right before, and XRP was a coin I wrote in 2017 and it did quite well. I know a lot of people don't like it. I'll leave that to the side. I just view it as a way to make money, honestly.
00:33:53
Speaker
I talked about how I thought it was a good buy at like 40 cents or 30 or 40 or 50 cents. And then literally like the next day, the SEC sued Ripple Labs. And the price dropped like 50 or 60% in that following week. And I didn't know what to do. I'm like, well, crap. I publicly put this video out there. The video is still there. It's still there after all these years.
00:34:23
Speaker
And oh my gosh, I took a risk and it didn't pay off. Now, eventually, obviously, it went up, but no one cares about that. I mean, it doesn't really matter if eventually it goes back up. People live in the here and now. So that was hard. And then there's been plenty of other things. I mean, I was very quite bullish in 2019, 2020, and 2021. I said, I think we're going to have diminishing returns. That ended up being a thing. And I feel like I got the April to top pretty well, but I
00:34:50
Speaker
the November top, I was kind of late on. And it really took me until, really until January. I'd like to say I realized it by December, but honestly, I was still pretty stubborn about it. And it wasn't really until like the January timeframe that I even considered that the bull market was over, you know? And so that hurt a lot. And I think that kind of coming to terms with that. And then in February, I made a video where I basically just said, all right,
00:35:19
Speaker
we're in a bear market. Like it sucks. I was wrong. We're in a bear market. And then I put out a video like tips for navigating the bear market. And basically it was just like altcoins are super risky. You should take a cold shower and reconsider if you think about buying them in 2022. Cash is king. So I tried to atone for it, but at the end of the day, it doesn't mean that people forget that stuff. So those are probably the biggest
00:35:47
Speaker
You know, the biggest ways I feel like I've been wrong about things and it's really hard because you have a lot of people depending on your opinion about the market. And if, you know, if and when you're wrong, which everyone's going to be wrong, if and when that happens.
00:36:03
Speaker
It's really hard. The pitchforks come out quickly. I mean, it doesn't matter if you don't, even if you don't shill scams, if you put out a theory and it ends up being wrong, people still call you one. They'll still call you names and stuff. That's probably the hardest part, I think, about being a creator in crypto because everyone wants the predictions, but the minute they don't come true, they don't like you anymore.
00:36:27
Speaker
You can't make everyone happy, but at least since I've been following you, I have to say you've gotten a lot more right than you have gotten wrong. And I used to think that I was smarter than you, which I don't know why I would with all of your PhDs and degrees. Just since I've been following you, you sold Luna as it was crashing, you know, around $50.
00:36:46
Speaker
you know, you called FTX and FTT before that crashed. And you just posted the other day your very first channel when you said the theoretical top for Bitcoin. This is what three or four years ago would be $70,000. I wish I'd stuck with that. I wish I'd stuck with that. Yeah, that would have been nice.
00:37:04
Speaker
You have to give yourself a lot more, a lot more- And to be fair, a lot of these things occurred on the private channel, not the public channel. So like the public channel, people might not even know about some of that stuff, right? Like they probably have no idea, cause I don't talk about, I don't talk about a lot of stuff on the public channel, just because I have to, I feel like I have to protect, you know, like I don't want to expose people to things that are going to be very, very risky or, you know, like, and I always thought Luna was incredibly risky and I was like, you know, 20%
00:37:34
Speaker
return. It seems like it's not going to last forever. And yeah, I mean, we do the best we can and some things turn out right, some things turn out wrong. Hopefully at the end of the day, it's a net positive on the space.
00:37:47
Speaker
I hope that people watching this video truly understand the value from your premium subscription. When I first signed up, I think I bought the Lifetime membership. I don't know if you know, but I think it's about $3,000, which was what he was training for around the time. And we finally found something that does not bleed against.
00:38:14
Speaker
Well, I'm not, maybe not right now. It might bleed against it in the future. I mean, if Ethereum, if Ethereum goes to 10 K or something in a few years, there's an opportunity cost of course, but yeah, no, it's, it's good. I mean, I, and I also say to you, like, you know, just for full disclosure, like if, you know, with regards to the premium side, it's only really for people that, um, you know, that have sizable portfolios and actually have money to work with. Like, you know, if someone only has a really small amount,
00:38:40
Speaker
you're probably just better off DCA-ing into Bitcoin over the long term and then just waiting, right?
Success in Crypto: Time and Patience
00:38:46
Speaker
That's probably, and that's something that I think people have to remember is that the secret, one of the biggest secrets to crypto is just time. It's nothing more, nothing less, right? You look at the chart and yes, there's bear markets and yes, they suck, but we tend to go back up eventually. If you could have dinner with anyone in web free, who would it be and what? Oh gosh.
00:39:09
Speaker
That's a good question. I mean, I, you know, one person who I'd like to actually, I met someone not too long ago who knows his dad, but I would like to talk to Vitalik at some point specifically because, you know, a lot of people call me a Bitcoin maxi, but I'm not, you know, like I'm really not.
00:39:34
Speaker
I would like to talk to some of the leaders of some of these larger projects.
00:39:43
Speaker
you know, dissect some of their vision for the future, because there are, there are some things that, you know, from a fundamental perspective, like some projects, I feel like, you know, like, what are they doing? Like, this doesn't make any sense. And whereas I feel like with, with Ethereum, they've a lot, not everything, I mean, a lot of what they do has, has made sense to me. I feel like they've been ahead of the curve by, you know, ahead of a lot of other projects. It's a probably, probably, probably Vitalik, if I had to pick someone.
00:40:11
Speaker
Okay, that's a great answer. I have to ask you, do you sleep soundly throughout the night? Or do you wake up and check charts, especially during the times of market volatility? Yeah, so I mean, I have I have three kids, so it's hard to sleep soundly all the time. But
00:40:32
Speaker
I don't really wake up in the middle of the night and check charts. I would say I go to sleep, or when I go to bed, I might check the price right before I go to sleep. And then I'll wake up around 6 or 6.30 or something, because we have to get our oldest off to the bus. His bus comes just after 7 AM.
00:40:56
Speaker
And so it's like the first thing I do. Right. Like the first thing I do when I wake up is all right. What's the price of Bitcoin or what is the what's the Bitcoin dominance. Right. Like is it has it gone up yet. I'm getting a little I'm getting a few gray hairs waiting for it to go up.
00:41:13
Speaker
Yeah, probably. It's probably like one of the last things I do before I go to sleep and the first thing I do when I wake up, but I don't really check it at like 3 a.m. And one of the reasons if I check it, if I don't really wake up in the middle of the night anyways, but if I were to wake up at 3 a.m., I still wouldn't check it because if I do check it and there's a major move, like if Bitcoin is shot up or shot down, then I won't be able to go back to sleep, you know?
00:41:40
Speaker
So I did do that in the bull market. So in the bull market, I would check it. There is I distinctly remember I made a video. Actually, I wonder if I could find I should go back and find this video. But there is a video I did. I made it at like three in the morning. I was on.
00:41:56
Speaker
It was right after Bitcoin went to 20K and then got rejected back down to 17K. And I was like, all right, it got rejected. I thought it was going to get rejected, and it did. I mean, it went right back up, right? So it didn't really matter. But I got up, I made a video, and I didn't even have my contacts in. So I couldn't even see the screen, right? I was just like, all right, the price went down. Long term is still going to be a good opportunity, but we're probably going to pull back in the short term.
00:42:24
Speaker
Yeah, I did it back then in the bull run. I don't do it now. One of the things I often said in the bull run was, the bear market is where you can sleep, right? Sleep is for the bear market, plenty of time to sleep in the bear market, and then the bull market, you're just sort of like, all systems go. That's probably because you've prepared for this bear market by stacking cash and your portfolio is mostly Bitcoin, but I understand correctly. Yeah. I haven't bought any altcoins at all this year.
00:42:50
Speaker
Again, I wish I had listened to you a bit more closely, but I- To be fair, some altcoins have done fine, right? Some of them have done fine. So you're actually a really great chess player, and watching your chess live streams when the market is crashing is really kind of cathartic and relaxing. Do you have any other fun non-crypto hobbies, and how did you get to be such a great chess player? Yeah, I mean, I like to play sports.
00:43:20
Speaker
It's hard to play some of the sports now just because I'm, you know, like when you have young kids, it's hard to get out and play some of those things. But I like to play disc golf. I mean, I was the president of the Ultimate Frisbee Club in high school. So if there's any of that stuff going on, then I like to do that. I was also the president of the chess club in high school. So my junior year. So, I mean, I remember back in second grade,
00:43:44
Speaker
they you know i think someone came into our second grade classroom or something and taught us chess and so i was always very excited i got very interested in learning how to how to play it and i have a twin brother actually i don't know if you knew that but i have a twin brother and we would play and then in middle school my seventh grade teacher he was a chess player and he was really good and i spent all year figuring out you know trying to get better and then like at the very end of the year i finally beat him
00:44:08
Speaker
Um, and then, you know, I, I just sort of taught myself, I never really took any formal chess lessons or anything like that, but I do watch a lot of like, you know, everyone always asks me like what crypto YouTubers I watch. There's only, I don't really watch that many. I watch a few, but primarily when I, when I, when I'm on YouTube and I'm not doing crypto stuff, I'm like watching
00:44:28
Speaker
chess tournaments, and disc golf tournaments. And I also like to follow the NBA and college football, college basketball, all that sort of stuff. So all that sort of stuff. And then, honestly, a lot of my other things are just taking my kids' places, like swim classes,
00:44:51
Speaker
Like it was gymnastics, but now they call it Ninja warrior classes, soccer, soccer practice. I was actually, I was actually like the assistant soccer coach for one of my, you know, one of my kids teams not too long ago. So, you know, when you have, when you have a lot of kids, your, your time is quickly filled, just taking them and running them around in different places. We go to, we go to, we go to kids museums like every weekend.
00:45:18
Speaker
That's so cute. How do you have time to balance a full family of three kids, their activities, your activities and this job?
Balancing Family and Crypto Career
00:45:30
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, like right now I'll work until like five o'clock or so and then I will stop working and I'll go hang out with them. We'll do dinner, that kind of stuff. Hang out with them for the evening and then after they go to bed,
00:45:46
Speaker
Sometimes I'll come work some more, and sometimes I won't. It just kind of depends on if I feel like making a video or not. I mean, it's hard, because you have to obviously spend a lot of time. But I mean, right now, it's a lot easier, because it's a bear market. So in the bull market, it's hard, because so much stuff is happening. And you're just trying to keep your head. You're just trying to keep up with everything, keep your head above water. Yeah, in a bear market, I mean,
00:46:14
Speaker
What is it? What is there to say? You know, like it's just all right. It's just a bear market. You know, it's going to, it's, it's a bear market until it's not. And, um, hopefully 2023 is better. I sure hope so. So I have a couple of questions that are designed for shorter answers. I call this quick take. Sure. What is your favorite into the crypto verse t-shirt? The dubious speculation. Yeah. People don't like it though. Cause it's the V neck, but make some more dubious.
00:46:45
Speaker
Yeah. I think I showed you, I'm wearing my favorite is what's a few trillion. I actually got this recognized once when I wore it out. That was an awesome day. You have, you have fans. They are out there. What is your favorite trading indicator?
00:47:01
Speaker
My favorite trading indicator. I really like, I mean, I would probably just say I like the logarithmic aggression of the total market cap of crypto because like anytime I get discouraged about prices in the bear market, I just kind of go back and look at it and I'm like, all right, we've been here many times before. So probably that one, just to kind of remind myself of where we are within sort of like the macro crypto trend. Okay.
00:47:28
Speaker
What comes first? 100K Bitcoin or 10K ETH? I think I'll go with 100K Bitcoin because it usually puts in new highs before Ethereum and most other cryptocurrencies. I had a feeling that was going to be the answer, but I wanted to ask anyway. Would you rather draw houses or play chess?
00:47:49
Speaker
Um, I guess it depends. I mean, I drawing the houses in the bull market was really fun because you're, you know, it was, uh, we were sort of rallying into, yeah. So I guess it depends, uh, when it, when it is, I mean, yes, the, the houses are fun, but at the end of the day, like chess is my favorite board game. So I probably, I probably would have to say playing chess. Play chess. Unless we're in a peak bull market, mainly. Yeah. If we're, if we're like at the peak, then it's, it's probably too much fun to not draw houses on the chart.
00:48:19
Speaker
Complete this sentence. Dog coins are? Dubious. I don't want to get in trouble, so. Okay. So then I have a two-part semi-hypothetical question for you. Sure. The year is 2032. Bitcoin is trading for $1 million.
00:48:45
Speaker
Peter Schiff just bought his first Satoshi, and you've finally been approved for your Twitter blue check mark. Now I know it can never happen. My first question, have you gotten out of bed? And secondly, have you scheduled your Forbes interview? If yes, what do you say? If Peter is buying Bitcoin, it's probably the time to sell.
00:49:12
Speaker
I will probably be out of that if Bitcoin is over a million dollars. That seems like something worth getting 100K would probably be worth a million for sure. Then the Forbes interview, I don't know, I might still have to cancel that, we'll see. Playing hard, you bet. A couple of closing thoughts. What would you say excites you the most about the future of crypto and web free?
00:49:39
Speaker
I mean, I think it's sort of like a revolution of our financial system, like not having to rely on centralized parties to control our money and even being reminded of that with the most recent collapses. Unfortunately, those collapses were sort of tied to crypto, but Bitcoin is not responsible for that. I mean, people need to remember that
00:50:01
Speaker
crypto does not make people frauds, crypto just exposes people for who they already were. Bitcoin, I think it's a way out of the financial system that we live in.
00:50:21
Speaker
the idea of just sort of inflating our savings away if you're holding it in US dollars. I mean, I know I say cash is king this year, but obviously it's not king most years because the value of it just sort of is debased and it's trending towards zero over the macro scale, of course.
00:50:37
Speaker
So I think that's probably the biggest thing about Bitcoin. I mean, as far as as far as like, you know, getting beyond Bitcoin, I think like, you know, smart contracts in general and being able to represent ownership of things like on the blockchain.
00:50:53
Speaker
I think there's just so much untapped potential there. And even with NFTs, I don't really talk about NFTs that much, but I think the artwork side of stuff is only sort of scratching the surface at what is
00:51:08
Speaker
what it's probably fully capable of. And then to continue on, I mean, this isn't necessarily specific to crypto, I guess, but the metaverse is also something that I think is exciting. I think we're 10 years away from it, unfortunately, and in a way that people are actually going to really want to use it and stuff, but that stuff excites me too. And what's one thing you wish people knew about you or you hope that they take away from this interview?
00:51:34
Speaker
I mean, I think one thing is probably just I'm just a regular person. I don't really consider myself to be anyone special. Just take my thoughts for what they are and recognize that some things will be right, some things will be wrong. And take the best from everyone. So follow a lot of different people.
00:52:01
Speaker
and take the best from each person. And if, you know, there's things you disagree with, that's fine. But just remember that we're all human, right? We're all trying to find our way. So probably that, right? Like, you know, I just, I'm human and...
00:52:16
Speaker
The general expectation is that I'll be wrong about plenty of things in the next bull market and to hopefully forgive me when I am. Well, Ben, I just want to say thank you so much. I really appreciate you getting out of bed to do this interview with me. I truly feel like this is the start of my crypto journey coming full circle. I know that this isn't Forbes, but I have no doubt they'll be on the line soon. So thank you.
00:52:44
Speaker
Thanks for having me. And if you're not subscribed to Jay, make sure you guys subscribe. Of course, I'll post this on my channels as well. Yeah. And if you guys are not following Ben, I highly recommend you follow his Twitter and his YouTube. I will post the links as well. And check out intothecryptoverse.com. And you also have a free channel now, right?
00:53:07
Speaker
Yeah, there's a, there's a free tier on there. We just sent out like a newsletter and, um, yeah, I think there's like, you know, like maybe like one chart on the website they get access to or something. Awesome. Well, I hope that everyone appreciates this interview and it's been really fun to get to see a different side of you, you know, more than just the charts and the lines and things like that. You're absolutely fantastic. I still appreciate your time and we'll see you next time. See ya.