GRTiQ Podcast: 199 Lark Davis

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Lark Davis (00:00:17):

Come on, just change your logo. Put a dog up there. Look, jokes aside, big data is obviously one of the most important things moving forward when we bring it together with AI. So data queries, on-chain data, all this kind of stuff becomes an absolutely critical part. Again, as we mentioned earlier, crypto is the value layer of the Internet.

Nick (00:01:04):

Welcome to the GRTiQ Podcast. Today, I’m speaking with Lark Davis, an influential crypto content creator and the driving force behind the widely followed YouTube channel and newsletter, Wealth Mastery. Many listeners know Lark for his approachable and often humorous take on navigating the ever-changing landscape of crypto markets. His journey into crypto began in 2017, sparked by a suggestion from his mother, and he quickly transitioned from a career in education to become a well-known voice throughout the industry. Lark’s insights into market cycles, meme coins, and the future of decentralized finance have earned him a large engaged audience. And during our conversation, Lark will share stories from growing up in a small Appalachian town in the United States, moving to New Zealand, traveling the world, and how all of those experiences shaped his relentless drive. We also take time to explore his thoughts on meme coins, the current market cycle, the role of community engagement and the future of the crypto industry. I started the conversation with Lark by asking about his early experiences growing up in Appalachia and how moving to New Zealand as a teenager influenced his outlook on life and career.

Lark Davis (00:02:19):

Well, where I’m from is not where I’ve lived most of my life, I guess. I grew up in a very small ex-coal mining town in the Appalachian Mountains of Western Pennsylvania place where there’s just nothing. Nothing except an old coal mining town where everything’s falling apart. There’s an old asbestos plant down the railroad tracks. We used to go play there as kids, which is probably not the best place to play, but anyway, that’s what we did. It was an interesting place to grow up, but my mom for some reason … We got the internet in the mid ’90s. I remember starting with WebTV and stuff like that, actually trading magic cards and stuff back then. It was a good time. But she got the internet and she got this idea like, gosh, there’s a gosh darn big world out there. And so she started looking at internet dating and all that sort of stuff and she met some guy in New Zealand and then we moved to New Zealand and that’s where I lived most of my life from the age of 16 until, well, quite recently. New Zealand is my home. I’m a New Zealander. So I’ve been in and out for a long time. I’ve lived overseas multiple times in that time of living in New Zealand, but New Zealand’s home.

Nick (00:03:16):

How much of that background growing up in that part of the United States … And again, for listeners that are familiar with the US, again that’s sort of understood as a poor, resource strained region of the United States, and here you are growing up right in the thick of it and you’ve gone on to build this incredible media platform and traveled the world. How much of growing up in Appalachia drove or informed your view on career and what you wanted to do?

Lark Davis (00:03:40):

It is one of the poorest places in America, Appalachia. The town that I grew up in, the average wage in the town was something like 50% below the national poverty line. It’s an interesting experience growing up and it’s a weird thing. The only reason we had money to get out of is my mom got hit by a bus back in the ’90s and got an accident settlement from that. That gave us $60,000 or something. Not a lot of money. I guess $60,000 was a lot more money back in the ’90s, but anyway. Not like crazy amount of money but enough to leave and so we left. Looking back on that experience of growing up in that place … Because once we left and we came to New Zealand and I saw how, oh, actually the rest of the world’s not as messed up as Western Pennsylvania, and so it kind of gave me an interesting respect on things.

(00:04:24):

It’s funny, because I actually went back as a teenager. I went back when I was 17 and a half for a few weeks to visit some friends and I got there and after a week of partying and drinking some beers and stuff and I was like, “Holy crap. I need to get out of here ASAP. What the heck am I doing back in America? This is like everything wrong with …” And that’s just small town stuff. No shade on that small town or the people there or anything. A lot of good people there, but just wasn’t my life path. And going to New Zealand really opened my eyes to everything that was out there. I started traveling a lot, traveled extensively in Asia. Went all over the world and started spending more time online and started selling stuff on eBay and stuff back in the early 2000s and flipping stuff, going garage sales and finding nerdy stuff like Warhammer figurines and flipping those for cash and doing stuff like that. It was an interesting way to grow up, but definitely inspired in me that not something I want to go back to.

(00:05:22):

I was in a place in New Zealand that was quite a wealthy place but also quite alternative like hippie place. And so my mom went there for the alternative hippie vibes, but it was also sort of up-and-coming, fancy place where they got a lot of vineyards and vineyard restaurants and millionaire mansions and stuff. And it kind of got that idea in my head like … I’d worked in restaurants and stuff there through university and I’d meet literally millionaires and billionaires sometimes and you start to realize these people are exactly like me. They’re not something special. They just made different decisions. And so I started thinking about how can I make different decisions that’ll put me on a different path to not being in this standard job, standard life sort of scenario.

Nick (00:06:02):

Well, speaking of decisions, you eventually go on to university at the University of Auckland to study political science. If you go back in time and frame what you were thinking about in terms of career and why you were pursuing that degree, what can you share about that?

Lark Davis (00:06:16):

It’s fascinating because by the end of the degree, I had realized enough about everything related to politics and that I never wanted to do anything related to politics ever again. But it wasn’t like partisan politics BS. Yeah, I participated in the local electoral parties and had a lot of friends and stuff and I was the campus president for Amnesty International and stuff like this, and that was all a lot of fun. And I went into a political studies degree with minors in French and Spanish on the idea that I wanted to actually go overseas and work like field work. Going and doing stuff, traveling the world and doing aid projects and stuff like that. I thought that’d be something really interesting to do with my life, but was not my path. You start to realize how wildly competitive it is to get that and I just didn’t have the language skills and stuff to get those jobs.

(00:07:09):

And then by the end of the five years in university, I also realized, shit, I don’t really want to do any of this stuff anyway. It sounds like a great idea. But then I started to realize I could go and compete and I could get the skills necessary to reach those levels and I could have gone to work at Amnesty International. I could have gone to work at Oxfam. I had a lot of connections at those, but those were like one year unpaid internship kind of work thing where, okay, work full-time job during the week and then work full-time every night and every weekend nonstop in order to work for free. But that would’ve given you the job experience to get to the next stepping stone and get those kind of jobs. I said, okay, well that’s the path I could go down but then started thinking like, “Holy crap. What am I doing? It sounds nice to do all of this stuff, but really what am I doing? This is crazy.”

(00:07:56):

Because I’m going to go and I’m going to work for free for years for Amnesty International, Oxfam or whatever. Then what? Then I’m going to go and get an entry level job maybe overseas with one of these guys. Probably domestically but hopefully overseas. And I’m going to be making basically minimum wage or not quite minimum wage, but just a little bit above. And so I’ve gone to university for five years. I’ve worked years for free. For what purpose? And I’m going to be basically not in poverty my whole life, but I’m never going to get ahead. Even to get a house in New Zealand after I work 20, 25 years saving up, it’s going to take 10, 15 years to get a deposit and then the rest of my life just paying off that. This is crazy. What kind of life is this? I don’t want that life. So I gave up on all that kind of stuff and just left New Zealand for a few years and went to Eastern Europe and hung out teaching English, having a good time.

Nick (00:08:47):

What was that transition like for you? If you hit a wall so to speak, with the pursuit of political science and any vision you had for that, this transition into education, what was that like for you? Did you discover, hey, this is my life’s calling, this is the gateway to my next big thing?

Lark Davis (00:09:04):

Not necessarily. I didn’t look at it like that. I looked at it as something that I enjoyed doing. I’d been a teaching assistant for two years in university prior to that and I really enjoyed doing that. That was a lot of fun. That’s probably one of the most fun things that I did and my five-year degree was actually working as a teaching assistant. I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. It was great. Connect with the students and all that fun kind of stuff. And then I went overseas to teach. I’d become kind of obsessed with Eastern Europe and learning Russian and stuff like this. And so I went to live in Ukraine first and then to live in Russia later. It was sort of an entry into that world to be able to go there as an English teacher. So it wasn’t that I had this incredible desire and passion to go be an English teacher.

(00:09:40):

I looked at as, okay, this is something I enjoyed teaching. I liked teaching. I really enjoyed the years that I was teaching. It was fantastic. Teaching little kids English and stuff. It was super cool. I had a great time. But it was never going to be the thing I was going to do for the next 40, 50 years of my life. So even back then I was just finding different ways to do internet entrepreneurship and a lot of that was just freelancing and stuff online and trying to cook up different ideas to create online business, none of which worked out even close to. But an inspiration was there to keep pushing for that kind of stuff. And in 2017, crypto landed on me and I took off with it.

Nick (00:10:18):

Before we transition to your story entering into crypto, I want to ask you this question about traveling and how that’s informed your view of the world and of people. And whenever I get the opportunity to speak with somebody who is as well traveled as you are, I’d like to ask these two questions. So the first one is, what’s the one thing everybody’s got to go see? If you get the travel bug and get the opportunity to go somewhere and see something, what’s your recommendation?

Lark Davis (00:10:43):

That’s a great question. Man, there’s so many amazing places I’ve been. Part of me wants to just say Thailand because it’s so amazing. It’s a beautiful country, such great beaches and stuff like that. But I think the better answer would be … And if I guess it’s your first time ever going, go to Thailand, but if you’ve been to Thailand before, maybe one other place, Mexico or something, whatever, go somewhere a bit more challenging, somewhere that’s going to be … Really puts you in the deep end. One of my favorite trips of all time was actually going to China in … This was maybe 2003. I think I was 19 or 20 and I went to China for a month. And this was early. China was not the China it is now. There was no English anywhere. There were no English signs anywhere. I was basically the only white dude in most places that I went and nobody spoke English for a month and I couldn’t read any of the signs and it was such a wildly fun adventure because it was just such the deep end of experience. And obviously China’s not like that anymore and it’s developed a lot since then, but there’s a lot of great experiences out there to have.

(00:11:45):

So throw yourself in the deep end of some experience. Don’t just go to the resorts, don’t just do what’s easy. Doing what’s easy is fun. Thailand’s fun. Thailand’s a great time. But go to China. Go to Russia or something where it’s just a different world from what you know and it’s not just the simple tourist experience, it’s actually a travel experience.

Nick (00:12:04):

And the second question then I want to ask is about what you learned about humanity. I’m not like you, I’m not as well traveled and actually have a little bit of travel trepidation, but you wonder sometimes is the world as safe as it appears or is it dangerous? Are people kind? Are people not kind? I mean, what did you learn about humanity by visiting all these different parts of the world?

Lark Davis (00:12:28):

Everybody basically wants the same thing. Everybody wants to be happy, take care of their families. Everybody’s inherently good. As a tourist, you might run into people trying to take advantage of you because you get in situations like taxi drivers and bullshit like that trying to overcharge you, and that’s just because you’re the tourist in that situation. But if you run into just regular people, the amount of hospitality you’re going to experience and just decentness from people who don’t need to help you but they’ll go out of their way to help you, it’s really incredible. And you just realize how, despite everything that you might see and the crazy shit online, despite everything you might see, we’re all in this together. Everyone’s after the same thing and we might have slightly different ways of seeing the world, but it’s really beautiful. You start to realize just everyone’s just on the same journey together and we’re all here at the same time in this little ball spinning around through the vastness of space and it’s really incredible to just see how much we are and how silly it is to think that other people are somehow less than because they come from a different place or speak a different language or have a different religion or whatever it might be.

(00:13:37):

So coming from a very, very small town in America, mind you, traveling is one of the things I think that absolutely opened my mind more than anything and opened my view of what the world is and what’s possible in the world. Because this is the thing is back in the early days of my traveling, I was … What do they call it? Broke packing. Don’t have very much money, but you got your backpack and somehow you’re in Thailand with 500 bucks in your pocket. I don’t know how this is going to work. We’re going to make it work. It’s amazing what you can do. People are sometimes afraid to get out there and, “How am I going to stay in hotels?” Just find the cheapest damn hostel you can. I was getting … Again, this is 20 years ago, but getting $5 a night hostels and stuff like that, or $5 a night rooms in some places depending on where you are and you just make it work. Oh no, they’re rough. There’s no air conditioning. It’s just a slab of a bed and a shared bathroom and stuff. But you know what? You’re there. You’re making it happen. You’re meeting people and you’re going out. You’re having those experiences that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

Nick (00:15:37):

So let’s go back then to 2017. As you mentioned there, this was sort of a pivotal moment for you that would shape largely why we’re talking today and how you’ve built this incredible media platform. Take us back in time, tell us about that first introduction you had to crypto and what that light bulb moment was for you where you decided to make really a life pivot.

Lark Davis (00:15:58):

Sure. Bitcoin had been on the radar. I never bought any, but it’d been on the radar since 2012. Was around the peak price and was getting a lot of media attention and we were talking about it actually in the Auckland University in my tutor’s office. We were all talking about Bitcoin. I thought, “Gosh. That’s gosh darn interesting. I should buy some Bitcoin.” Didn’t buy any Bitcoin, bought beer instead, but such is life of a college student. And so I’d kept an eye on it. I had this little currency app and it had New Zealand dollar, Russian ruble, Ukrainian hryvnia, euro and Bitcoin on it. So I’d always keep an eye of what’s going on with that. In 2017, my mom called me. She’s like, “You got to get into this Bitcoin thing.” She’d been listening to this guy, Jeff Berwick, anarcho-capitalist sort of stuff, and she’s like, “We got to into Bitcoin, but I don’t know how to buy it, so you have to go and figure it out so I can buy some.”

(00:16:43):

My mom is a crypto OG. By the way, she’s probably got more Bitcoin and Ethereum than most of the people listening I would be willing to wager. Anyway, that’s a different conversation. But she wanted to get into it and she was interested about it. And so I said, “Okay. Let’s figure this out. I’m going to figure this out. Something that’s been our radar and I’m in this transitional phase where we just moved to a new city and stuff like that, so I’m going to go and figure this out.” And just started looking into it. And back in 2017, it was a lot harder to buy crypto by the way, especially in New Zealand. Other countries had easier on and off ramps. So it took a few days to actually figure out where do I even buy crypto.

(00:17:17):

And so finally bought some Bitcoin off of Coin Mama I think it was, and they charge 10% fees or something like that. It’s absurd. Because paid with credit card. Anyway, but I was like, “I got it. I finally got it.” My first Bitcoin I bought for $2,500 or something like that. I was like, “Yes. I’m in.” And then I said, “Well, now what? Now what? Okay. So now I’m going to buy a couple alt coins.” Bought some XRP, bought some Digibyte, bought some NEM. The only thing that’s relevant of those three, by the way, is still XRP and I sold that back ages ago. I haven’t held XRP 2017. But anyway, besides the point. I got to this point where I thought, okay, this is all very fun and exciting, but how do I go deeper? I’m really passionate. I’m really excited about this. You literally go through those nights where you’re not even sleeping, you’re just up buzzing all night like, “Holy crap. I need to mine Bitcoin. I need to get a Litecoin miner. How do I start?”

(00:18:08):

You start just going through all this stuff in your head. And so I actually started trying to earn crypto by posting on a social media platform called Steam, the Steam blockchain from back in the day. I think Justice Sun ended up buying it a few years ago, and I have no idea if it even exists anymore. But anyway, so the Steam blockchain, you could post an article or a video there and if it got an upvote, it was worth money. So if you’re a minnow like me, an upvote was worth like a penny, but if you got upvoted by a whale, you might get a 50 or $100 upvote and like, okay, yeah, now we’re cooking. So I’d just post stuff over there and have fun. And I started posting just random stuff and then I started posting about crypto, and of course the crypto posts all started doing super well, and it took a long time to write those so I started posting videos to YouTube where I’d just talk, just share my thoughts and people would ask questions of me because I came from this educational background.

(00:18:57):

I’d say, “Well, I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’d like to know the answer to that question. I’ll go find out the answer and I’m going to tell you guys what the answer to that question is.” And so that’s how the content started was going through this process of trying to teach myself about cryptocurrencies, but also educate people about the things I was finding out because I figured other people probably want to know the answers to this too, so I’ll make videos and post it. And then the YouTube channel just started taking off at the right time, right place to an extent, but it was also a relentless commitment to just keep doing it.

(00:19:25):

And in November 2017, I quit my day job as a teacher because I’d been burning the candle at both ends. I was waking up at 3:00 AM to teach, and I’d teach till 10 AM and then I’d make videos from 10 AM to 9 PM, and then I’d teach again, and there’s four hours of sleep a day, just grinding nonstop. But I loved it. It was so exciting. And so yeah, quit my day job in November 2017 and just went all in, which was a crazy time to go all in because then the bear market came. But even in the depths of the bear market, I just used it as a time to keep perfecting the craft and thinking about how I want to move this forward and just survive that period and then get through. And then the next bull market came and then everything got very exciting again.

Nick (00:20:06):

Where does that hustle come from? I mean, that’s a lot of drive. Like you said, you’re putting in a lot of energy in both directions here. How would you explain to somebody where you get that hustle?

Lark Davis (00:20:15):

I think it’s just from having grown up the way that I did and for so many situations, just having to be completely on my own in the world and realizing that you just have to make it happen. No one’s going to come save you. There’s never been anyone out there just drop money on me at any time. You just have to push. When I was 18, I moved to Hawaii back when I was still a US citizen a long time ago. I moved to Hawaii on a one-way ticket with like 25 bucks in my pocket. I had no idea what I was doing. I was like, I’m going to make it work. We’re just going to figure … I don’t know, but we’re going to figure it out. And I got there and just started grinding and ended up finding a hostel where I could sleep at the hostel in exchange for cleaning the hostel and then you just figure it out. That kind of mental attitude where I don’t know, but I’m going to make it work and failure’s really just not going to be an option here. And then you just keep showing up and you keep doing it. You do what it takes to make it happen.

Nick (00:21:14):

At that point, when you’re starting the YouTube channel and you’re really just getting started, what’s your view of crypto? Is it this new asset class that’s highly speculative and it’s really just for investors with a keen eye for opportunity? Are you also seeing or recognizing there’s some underlying technology tied to it where we’re sort of on the cusp of a new internet, if you will?

Lark Davis (00:21:37):

One of the most important technological advances since the internet itself, essentially. We’re at a very interesting time where we have crypto and AI happening at the same time. And to an extent, these technologies have been brewing for a while, but now they’re really taking off in a major way. But the thing that stuck me with crypto beyond just the speculation … We all love the speculation to make money. Okay, that’s a lot of fun. We enjoy that. But the thing that really kept me into it is what it is. I mean, this is the value layer of the internet that’s being created. In an AI era, crypto is becoming so much more important. The ability to verify real humans on chain, to verify real transactions on chain, to verify truth on chain is going to be massive, and the nexus of crypto and AI will be absolutely huge. So look, this is what kept me in, and this is what really motivated me to keep being in. Oh, the money’s great. We all love the money. It’s fantastic. Made plenty of money over the years in crypto. But people make money in bonds too. People make money in all kinds of bullshit. But crypto’s fun. It’s a fun industry with fun people and the vibes are good. We’re memeing all the time and we’re having a good time, and it’s just very fun place to be.

Nick (00:22:50):

When you think about the emergence of this technology, like you said, the value layer of the internet, which by the way, I really love that framing, do you see the emergence of this? Where did this come from? Why does this even exist? Do you see it as sort of a technological revolution where maybe that ideology was a revolution against the sins of web2? Do you see it as more about an economic revolution? How do you see

Lark Davis (00:23:15):

It? Bitcoin and the wider crypto space and Bitcoin being the tip of the spear, essentially, it’s all interconnected. This is the thing. Bitcoin’s not just a financial revolution, it’s a political revolution, it’s an economic revolution, it’s a freedom revolution. When you start to really boil it all down, there’s so many things that interconnect here. Look, there’s this whole layer on top of it of meme coin degeneracy and all this other crazy BS, but that’s just basically a wildly free marketplace, essentially. And if you believe in freedom and people’s ability to do the things they want to do with their money and their time and their energy, crypto is a wildly free marketplace. Compare it to the stock markets where, oh, the price moved more than five percent so we’re going to put the circuit breakers on. No one’s allowed to trade stocks for an hour. That’s ridiculous.

(00:24:01):

And it’s only open Monday to Friday, nine to five, excluding bank holidays. I mean, come on. Crypto is a global phenomenon and it’s an absolutely global powerhouse. And one of the things that I think is so amazing … Because here’s the deal. If you’re a dude in Nigeria, you probably can’t get very easy access to US stocks or most any stocks anywhere in the world or let alone send your money overseas because of capital controls. But crypto, crypto is available to anyone anywhere, and this is one of the beautiful parts about it. If you have an internet connection and a phone, you can do crypto, and that’s amazing. It’s just kicked open the door to finance for everybody all around the world and it’s a very, very exciting thing.

Nick (00:24:42):

In 2020, you launched a newsletter associated with all the work you’ve done called Wealth Mastery. What can you tell us about how you went from the YouTube channel to growing a huge following to deciding to launch a newsletter and what it does?

Lark Davis (00:24:57):

Yeah, sure. The newsletter was really wanting to build more of a business and not just be an influencer. To really build a business in the web3 industry and so to build the Wealth Mastery website and to build the newsletter around that, and there was a lot of course mistakes made in the early days of that. We launched on a terrible platform, which didn’t let us segment our audiences. And there was this website newsletter service called Review, which was terrible for a whole variety of reasons, a terrible place to launch it. But anyway, that’s where we launched it, and then later on we professionalized it a lot more as it actually started making money. So we had money to invest in that, in building a website and all this other stuff, and we got an incredible research team. So really it just came down to I want to take what I do even to the next level.

(00:25:42):

So it’s one thing to just be the guy who makes the YouTube videos and we do some affiliate marketing, we do some sponsorship deals, whatever, and it’s great. Fantastic. But I wanted to make more of a business out of it, something more professional. And so that’s why we launched the newsletter back a few years ago and it’s gone incredibly well since then. We’ve had huge success with the newsletter, and obviously there’s been trying times like 2022, 2023, we just ate crap for two years essentially in the newsletter. But it’s been a lot of fun to run a business. Obviously it’s a challenging internet business to run. There’s a lot of newsletters out there and it’s tough making the numbers work sometimes. You got to find enough sponsors and sell premium products, etc, etc. But generally, it’s been a really good experience. It’s been a lot of fun running essentially a second business. Because I know a lot of it is based on the Lark Davis brand, but that is its own brand and it’s its own business and it’s really taken on its own life since then.

Nick (00:26:38):

And I’ll put links in the show notes for any listeners that want to subscribe to that newsletter and learn more about that Lark Davis brand. This question I want to ask you is maybe self-serving to myself, but I’m sure there’s other listeners that are curious about this because it’s a little bit of a business principle, but how did you scale it? What’s the insight or what did you learn along this incredible path about scaling an idea from just an idea to something like you’ve created today both with the newsletter and with the YouTube?

Lark Davis (00:27:09):

Scaling’s hard. It gets easier as you go. Going from zero to one is hard, and going from one to a hundred’s hard, but you start to gain momentum and going from 100 to a thousand becomes a little easier and a thousand to 2000, et cetera, et cetera. So momentum definitely helps, but scaling is always hard. And if you want to talk about scaling your newsletter for example, it’s hard because you need to keep getting people coming as people unsubscribe over time, people stop opening the newsletter so you have to have a constant grind to get more people in, which means you create content all the time, run paid ads. But when you’re running paid ads, it’s highly competitive because you’re going after cryptocurrency investors so the cost per lead can be really, really high. And so you got to get really on point ads and you have to have good ads team.

(00:27:51):

And so we’ve got a whole team of people. We’ve got a whole ads team and all kinds of stuff going on. And then in terms of actually the video creation process as well, it’s a very similar thing. Scaling the channel essentially comes down to continuing to grow that subscriber growth numbers. But the total number of subscribers, whether it’s on X, where we have almost 1.3 million now, on YouTube, we almost have 600,000 now. The total number of subscribers sounds very impressive and it’s obviously an incredible achievement, but a lot of it’s also a bit of a vanity metric because really what it comes down to is how many of the people that are passively following you actually engage with you? Do they comment on your stuff? Do they buy your products? Do they click on your affiliate links? Do they watch your videos? Or they’re just subscribed and they don’t watch your videos? All this stuff matters at the end of the day, and that’s really, I think the core metric is how engaged of a community do you have and how engaged is your community and how much do they show up for you. And for me, I try to show up for them as much as I can, bring as much value as I can all the time, which in turn gets more people showing up because they understand that.

Nick (00:28:59):

When I launched this podcast and to present, I always envision the listener as being somebody who wants to learn about crypto and web3, but through the lens of the stories of people participating in it. So they’re not technical, they don’t get a lot of the news headlines, but they’re interested in this thing. So I’m going to introduce it to you through the stories of people like you, Lark. When you envision people that subscribe to the newsletter or to the YouTube channel or follow you on X, who do you envision that follower being?

Lark Davis (00:29:32):

The ideal customer avatar. When you’re building a business, and especially around the newsletter, you have to imagine, okay, who are we actually making this for and who do we make our content for? And it’s an interesting tightrope to walk because essentially every time you make a video or a newsletter, you have to provide value for the people who have been with you since 2017, who have been in crypto even longer than that potentially. So you have to find value for the people who’ve been around, but then you also have to understand at the same time every single day there are new people coming who know absolutely nothing, and so you can’t go too deep in the weeds on stuff. So it’s about keeping ideas simple to an extent and understanding that you do have this constant situation where you’ve got essentially different audiences. But in terms of our ideal customer avatar, I imagine it as somebody who’s a millennial. Professional of some variety, a real estate agent, a lawyer, someone like that. Someone who already invests. They have a stock portfolio, maybe they have a rental property, they have a nice car or something like that.

(00:30:38):

Somebody who’s got money and they’re interested in investing. And this is again, the ideal customer avatar. This is everybody. I’ve got people who are 70 that watch the channel. I got guys who are 18 that watch the channel. I got housewives who watch the channel, all this kind of stuff. But we talk about who’s the person in mind and writing to them. And so this millennial person, they’ve got the wife, the kids, the job, the dog, and they want to stay up to date because they’re interested in crypto. They’ve listened to Michael Saylor on a podcast. They’re hooked. They understand, okay, Bitcoin’s revolutionary technology. I invest in tech. I have Tesla stocks, I have Apple stocks, whatever. I want to invest in Bitcoin too. I want to invest in Ethereum, maybe Solana, maybe a meme coin. And so we try to distill information wise for this person, the key things happen.

(00:31:21):

Okay, what’s the big news in the market that you need to know today? What are the charts looking like today? What’s the big stories that everyone’s talking about? Okay, these meme coins are really hot, or there’s this new AI meme coin trend or whatever it might be. To keep people up to date on what’s actually going on and in the market and trying to distill that in a way that’s fun. Of course, I like to have a little bit of fun. I know some people kind of take the dryer approach, but we crack jokes, we have a good time. Try to make light of this is investing at the end of the day. I know crypto investing’s fun and there’s a lot of silly stuff going on, but it can be pretty dry if you let it be so I try to have a bit of fun too for that ideal customer person because I think that they’re going to appreciate that. They’re going to appreciate the millennial humor. They’re going to appreciate the memes and the GIFs and the movie references from the ’80s man and stuff like that. Yeah.

Nick (00:32:11):

You’ve grown this brand into the upper echelons of followers on X, subscribers on YouTube, and most of us, myself included, we just don’t have that large following. And so when we see people and brands like you active on crypto Twitter, you got large share of voice, large following, really control, I would argue, a lot of the narratives that people follow and track. How does somebody like you make sense of crypto Twitter? I mean, it seems like oftentimes it’s accessible. Other times it seems like it’s the most valuable thing people could be tracking because there’s a lot of signal there. So take us into your mindset. How does somebody like you occupying the position that you have view and perceive What happens on crypto Twitter?

Lark Davis (00:32:56):

Oh, yeah. Well, that’s an interesting place. That’s for sure. The funny thing is, again, the big numbers become a bit of a vanity metric at a certain point. Because there’s a lot of very small accounts that I follow that provide huge value. You see them finding things early and you see them doing great defi tutorials and stuff like this. There’s a lot of great content creators out there that are just out there grinding and they don’t have very big audiences. So if you’re new to crypto X, then I would say go and find some smaller accounts and try and engage with what they’re doing because there’s some pretty cool people out there doing some pretty cool stuff.

(00:33:31):

This is the thing is because the account is so big now, we have to be careful with the content that we do. We can’t just say like, “Oh, hey, check out this low cap meme coin,” or something because too dangerous for us to do. We don’t want to get people to get burned. We want people to make smart investing decisions. We want people to succeed in the markets. So a lot of what we do is cover in the news, memes, insights, short videos, stuff like that, all that kind of stuff versus like, “Hey, here’s the hot new meme, coin alpha to go buy.” And it’s tricky. You want to provide value for people, but you also don’t want to give them … It’s like you want to give them their oats, not their chocolate.

Nick (00:34:14):

Well, as we’ve painted along this interview, you’ve been around for a long time. You’ve seen a lot of ups and downs in different parts of the crypto cycle and the evolution of the industry. I want to ask you just a couple questions on that topic. And so the first one is, where do you see us right now in this present cycle? We’re recording this middle of November, 2024. Where do you place us and what does the road ahead look like?

Lark Davis (00:34:42):

Sure. I think we’re entering one of the final phases of the cycle. And here’s the thing. If you’re listening to this at the time that it’s published, I’d like you to understand that it’s getting late, realistically. The best time to buy was 2023. 2024 gave an incredible amount of great buying opportunities and some of the big alt coins, literally … Polkadot was an example of this. I sold this recently because I was just so fed up with the price action and just I needed a fresh point of a similar market cap. I went into NEAR Protocol instead. Literally two weeks ago, the price of Polkadot was almost 50% less than it was during the FTX collapse. And I was like that’s mind-blowing for me. How’s this even possible? The depths of the bear market. We’re now 50% or 30, 40% less than we were then. Craziness. Markets are nuts sometimes, man. I don’t even know what to make sense of that, to be honest.

Nick (00:35:40):

Well, let’s talk about themes then. Every cycle seems to bolt onto a couple of top level themes. What’s the theme going to be this cycle? And just inform maybe the way I’m thinking about it, I thought it would be like these ETFs. I’m no longer sure. Sometimes they’re part of the narrative, then they go away and then they’re back. Meme tokens are super interesting to me right now. AI. So I mean, there’s a couple of different ones. DePIN seemed like it was in the running for a while. What do you see as the narratives playing out?

Lark Davis (00:36:13):

So as we move into this final phase of the market, we talk about the final phase of the market, so we’re looking at is there six months left, 12 months left? 12 months probably max, realistically. And you’ll see a lot of people getting really, really excited near that peak, whatever. We’re going to go forever. Super cycle’s here, and the good time’s never going to end. Oh, the good times always end. Remember that. The good times always end. Right now we’re seeing there’s two main categories that are getting the most mind share. Now, this is the thing. You can go and invest in really good technology question is do you want to be right or do you want to make money? And for a lot of people coming to the market, they want to make money. They don’t want to just want to donate their money to a bunch of nerds who are making some incredible technology that nobody in the market really understands and or cares about.

(00:37:01):

And this is an important thing. There’s a reason why simple narratives do so well in the market. Why meme coins do so well in the market. Because it’s an easy idea to understand. There’s not much to figure out. They took a dog and they put a hat on the dog. That’s it. Okay. You don’t need to understand cross-chain transfers or ZK Starks technology or trustless bridges or sharding or any of that complicated bullshit. Man, they put a hat on the dog. It’s all you need to know. It’s genius. Genius. Okay. So simple ideas are doing really, really well because a lot of investors … I mean the learning curve in crypto … I think a lot of people who’ve been in the space for years completely forget this and they get in their ivory tower about what should or should not be. The reality is the learning curve on crypto is insane.

(00:37:48):

Because it’s unlike anything else you’ve had to deal with financially. And people like simple. If you’re going come in and say, “I want to invest in this space. I understand. Okay, maybe I’ll buy a little bit of Bitcoin.” But what else? Okay, I want to buy this thing because I don’t understand any of this other stuff. It’s like asking people to explain to you how to put together an iPhone and what the chips do. People don’t have any idea, but they know they like iPhones. It’s a simple concept. Pick it up, I call somebody. Boom. And that’s the equivalent of meme coins. So meme coins and AI have basically been nonstop dominating the mind share of social media when it comes to crypto. So that’s something that you can fade that if you want, but money goes where attention goes. And attention right now is in a very few certain places.

(00:38:35):

Obviously Bitcoin gets huge amounts of attention. The Solana ecosystem, the base ecosystem, AI, meme coins on base and on Solana are getting a lot of attention. So these are areas where investors have been outperforming. So if you’ve been investing in Layer 2 governance tokens, you’ve had your ass handed to you this year because those have performed terribly. Terribly. That’s not to say that those Layer 2 networks are bad. Arbitrum’s a great network. Optimism’s a great network. I use them frequently. But you don’t need their governance tokens, and the market’s definitely decided that you don’t need their governance tokens. A lot of these big tech fully diluted value coins. Eigenlayer. Eigenlayer came out, man, and it’s this crazy piece of new, exciting technology for the entire Ethereum ecosystem, but it’s nerdy and it’s too complicated. Restaking your Ethereum and data availability. Or you can buy a dog that’s got a hat on it. What are you going to choose? The dog with the hat, obviously.

Nick (00:39:38):

I want to ask you then this question about the fundamental nature of these cycles. And so I’ve had a lot of guests on the podcast who have talked about the evolving nature of cycles themselves, and a question is, are these going to start flattening out? I mean, are we going to start looking like TradFi a little bit here, the S&P 500, things like that where the peaks and valleys aren’t as dramatic and we flatten out. In other words, did you OGs capture all the value of these incredible cycles getting in early?

Lark Davis (00:40:07):

Well, yes and no. Over time, you will see probably some reduced volatility near the top, but here’s something for the people who make that argument that we’re not going to see any of these kind of crazy markdowns again. In 2022, the price of Facebook felt like 70%. Something like this. About as much as Bitcoin did. So that’s a pretty established company. And a lot of other big tech stocks had similarly crazy drawdowns. It’s all part of the thing. It’s all of the cycle. When markets go risk off in a serious fashion, they go risk off really hard and tech stocks suffer big time, and crypto is basically a beta play of tech stocks and they suffer even worse.

(00:40:50):

So with Wall Street coming in and all that stuff, I mean, yeah, maybe future markdowns for Bitcoin are only 50, 60% instead of 70, 80%. That’s going to be winning. That’s what winning will look like. Maybe that’ll happen less frequently, but really we basically move in big four year liquidity cycles globally for market phases and stuff like that. So crypto generally hasn’t been immune to any of this stuff. In the earliest days, we were so small that none of that stuff necessarily mattered that much. But as we become more and more linked with traditional markets, we move more and more with the broader macro spectrum of how things move around in markets. So I think we will be more and more essentially located within the broader waves of macroeconomic factors that affect markets.

And we will see massive markdowns still, but we’re only talking about the top assets because you might see, okay, well Bitcoin’s going to go up to million dollars in the 2030s, and then, oh, what’s the upside left? 100%? 200%? We’re going to go to $3 million by 2050? Yeah. But do you think people are going to stop making meme coins? You think people are going to stop speculating? You think people are going to stop coming up with new ideas or new ICOs or new games or whatever it might be? Of course they won’t. Of course they won’t. We’re still going to see massive speculation in this pretty wild west market still. And that’s the ability to go and create a mean coin in five minutes and stuff like that, that’s what gives this market a lot of its fun edge that keeps people coming back and keeps people essentially just piling into this market.

(00:42:25):

Because the allure of making money quickly really brings people into the market. Meme coins are essentially the gateway drug for crypto right now. They bring people in. People come in because they want to get rich quick and then they put a thousand bucks in and 99% of those people are going to lose that thousand bucks. But then they still create a Solana wallet and they bought Solana in order to buy that, and now they’re on chain and now they’re learning about stuff, and maybe now they’re going to buy a little Bitcoin. Next time they’re going to try to make a slightly smarter decision. Instead of buying the new Pump.fun meme coin, they’re going to buy 500 bucks a dog with a hat and 500 bucks a Bitcoin and now they’re investors. Now they’re taking things a little more seriously.

Nick (00:43:03):

It seems like there’s a ton of fun right now on Twitter and other places about Ethereum, which is interesting to me because it seems like Ethereum has always had a ton of respect for the real builders, the real tech-driven people in the space. What do you make of all of this?

Lark Davis (00:43:20):

My Ethereum bags, man. My number two crypto holding. I think personally that Vitalik should never have a girlfriend ever again. We need to get this guy totally celibate. Lock him in a room somewhere. Him and all the Ethereum devs. No more dev cons. No more girlfriends. No more of this stuff. Only coding. Only coding, guys. Okay? Now look, jokes aside, Ethereum has definitely taken some big hits. The ETFs were dead on arrival. Only now we’ve finally started to see some kind of flows in ETF products now at about a half billion dollars total positive inflows. So something’s finally happened. And they launched a pretty rough time in the market, and the SEC kind of screwed over Ethereum ETFs by delaying the actual launch after the actual approval and all this kind of stuff. So there’s all that to consider too.

(00:44:06):

But the fact of the matter is that right now Ethereum is in this weird situation where the main chain sucks terribly. I mean, I did a transaction on Uniswap on the main chain because some stuff still happens on the main chain, and I had to pay 40 bucks in fees or something, which I got the 40 bucks, it’s fine. However, that’s not a great place to onboard regular people. I mean, you lose sense of reality. $40 to make a freaking crypto transaction. That’s the equivalent of an average person’s half a day of their wages. That’s insanity. That’s crazy for a freaking transaction to buy some meme coins or whatever. That’s broken. That’s super broken. So the Ethereum main chain is basically only for early crypto investors, whales, people who’ve got a lot of money to be able to use it. So the Layer 2 ecosystem is beautiful but also a total mess because everything’s fragmented.

(00:45:04):

Liquidity is fragmented deeply across a lot of these Layer 2 networks, which are total garbage and don’t need to exist. I mean base, fantastic. Love base. Linea’s got a lot of potential I think as a future layer, two. Optimism, Arbitrum. Maybe ZK Sync, maybe Mantle. You don’t really need anything else than that. Even one or two of those you’d probably cut. So all these other things that are launching out there and that have launched, Mode and Scroll, and I don’t even remember the names of some of these things. There was so many of these Layer 2s launching. We don’t need them. And the problem is it’s a very bad user experience. Now, if you just want to be on base, fantastic. Easy. Love base. Big base fan. But if I want to move my money from base to Optimism, I need a bridge and I need to have money in both those places.

(00:45:49):

I can’t fully drain my accounts. They’ll send it back and stuff. And then I get over to Layer 2, number two, and I want to do a swap, but guess what? Half the dexes there have no damn liquidity, so where am I going to find a … Liquidity is really bad on a lot of the Layer 2 apps actually. I know Uniswap’s across quite a few of the big Layer 2s now, so if you need to do something, do it on Uniswap. But if you start using some of these competitor dexes and stuff like that … I can remember when I was farming the one of the airdrops, maybe ZK Sync or something like that. Or maybe it was Starknet. I think it was Starknet actually. I was trying to do a $100 swap or something of ETH USDC just to put those transactions in and there was five or 10% lost liquidity.

It was just zero liquidity on these dexes on these platforms. And we don’t need Starknet, we don’t need Scroll, we don’t need all this stuff. 90% plus of the users in Layer 2 ecosystems on Ethereum, which is where all the Ethereum activity is happening these days, are probably going to end up on three networks. Whether that’s going to be … Base is definitely going to be one of them. Whether number two and three are going to be Linea or ZK Sync or Mantle or whatever remains to be seen, but we don’t need a hundred of them. We made maybe three to five and they’ll get 90% plus of the users. So the rest of it’s superfluous.

Nick (00:47:13):

Lark, as I mentioned to you, a lot of my listeners are enthusiastic about The Graph and web3 data, and I’m just curious, and I’d be remiss, and I’m sure a lot of listeners would be angry with me if I didn’t get your perspective on projects like The Graph that have emerged alongside this AI narrative, are tightly tied to this blockchain data story. What’s your opinion on The Graph?

Lark Davis (00:47:35):

Well, obviously what The Graph has done is very interesting and I think the market has proven that we still have room for altcoins that do technical things. What’s the current market cap? Like a billion, billion and a half, something like that. So obviously we still care about technology and there’s still investors that care about technology beyond meme coins. Although if you guys ever wanted to rebrand, keep all the tech in the background, but just put a dog picture instead. I keep telling Chainlink this. They don’t listen to me, but I keep saying to Chainlink, “Chainlink, guys, come on on. Just change your logo. Put a dog up there.” Look, jokes aside, big data is obviously one of the most important things moving forward when we bring it together with AI. So data queries, on chain data, all this kind of stuff becomes an absolutely critical part.

(00:48:20):

Again, as you mentioned earlier, crypto is the value layer of the internet. Being able to properly put that data together, query that data, becomes an absolutely essential thing as we see more AI. AI agents talking to each other, AI agents transacting with each other, all this kind of stuff. The ability to query facts on chain. Think about that. As we see more deep fakes and stuff like this, are people going to have to post everything basically on chain in the future? You have some kind of on chain ID that verifies that you’re a real human and you actually post your video there. I’m just throwing the ideas out here, but somebody needs to query that that’s actually you and not a deep fake. And so all this ability to access data and search through data and categorize data becomes absolutely critical towards the future that we’re rapidly moving towards.

Nick (00:49:10):

Well, Lark, we’re almost running out of time. I do want to ask you one final question before I ask you the GRTiQ 10. The final question is advice. I know for a fact that I have listeners who have been active in the web3 space, either full time or just watching and taking note. They’ve become disoriented. They don’t know where they are in the cycle. They don’t know how to make good decisions. In some cases, this is really important to them to get right. What’s the advice of how to manage your thinking and your discipline as we’re at this part of the cycle for those listeners?

Lark Davis (00:49:46):

Sure. The time to buy is largely over or running out. There’s still going to be things you can throw money into or trades to make, obviously. The one key thing that’s going to separate out anybody who succeeds this cycle and those who don’t are going to be the ability to sell. A lot of you might already be in profits. If you’ve been around for the cycle few past couple of years, you’re probably already in profits on some of your positions. Not saying have to sell them right now, but you need to have a plan to take profits because if you don’t take your profits, the market will take them for you. There’s basically three kinds of investors. There’s the guy who gets in early, times it well buys low, and he has the courage to sell high, and is able to fight his greed and sell high. There’s the guy who comes late, which is probably not a lot of your listeners. I think you’ve got a good web3 community of people who’ve been here for a while.

(00:50:33):

But as we see the Coinbase app surge and we see the Fantom Wallet surge in the app rankings, we realize a lot of retail normie investors, people who are not really into crypto, aside from it’s getting attention now and they want to come in and speculate. Those people are going to be about 90% of investors who come in and they buy high and they will sell low, unfortunately. That’s just the way the game works. And then there’s a third category of people, and this is a very dangerous one because this is where a lot of people get stuck at. They buy early or even if they’ve come in a bit later in the cycle like now, they still buy at good prices and they see massive gains and they don’t sell a gosh darn thing and they ride it all back down to zero.

(00:51:13):

So the round tripper. You don’t want to be the round tripper, right? You want to be the buy low, sell high guy. And you have to have a plan to sell because here’s the reality. We just talked about this a few minutes ago, but this is just to remind people, the cycles are not broken yet. There will be another bear market. It’ll be horrific. It’ll be fast. They come fast. This is the thing. When markets finally start turning, there’s no orderly exit at the top. There’s nobody up there saying, “Okay. Everybody this way. Get in line. Time to sell at the perfectly top price.” It’s just not the way that it works. So when the time comes, you’re going to have to sell basically everything. Now, I always make an exception for Bitcoin because you don’t have to sell your Bitcoin if you don’t want to.

(00:51:54):

If you’re willing to ride it through wild volatility and you’re happy to have a 10 year timeframe on your Bitcoin, it’s the one crypto asset I’m basically convinced is not going to go anywhere. Bitcoin is going to be there. You can hold it for 10 years, you can hold it for 20 years. You’ll be fine. If you’re ready to handle the volatility, you’re not going to panic at the bottom and sell all your crypto. Sell your Bitcoin. Everything else, all the altcoins, I don’t care what you think about them. If it’s the new to paradigm money, this most popular meme in the world, this technology is going to change everything. It’s all going to go down. Here’s some perspective from the 2022 bear market cycle for you. The best altcoins, they went down about 80 to 95%. That was the ones that performed the best from peak to trough.

(00:52:47):

They went down 80 to 95%. Those were the winners. The vast majority of altcoins simply died. Liquidity completely dried up, volume completely dried up. Devs slowly just gave up, walked away. “Oh, whoops, we got hacked. It’s all done. Sorry guys.” Whatever else it might be. Most of these altcoins are going to go to zero. The vast majority of meme coins are going to go down 99.999%. Only a very few altcoins of the meme coins will even make to the next cycle. Stuff like dog with hat or Pepe or Dogecoin, they’re going to make it to the next cycle would be my bet. But the vast majority like, come on, man. The hippo meta, the dead squirrel meta, you think that stuff’s all going to make it to the next cycle? No. Okay. No, it’s not. And a lot of the altcoins, a lot of these Layer 2s, a lot of the dexes, all this stuff, they’re simply going to die in the bear market.

(00:53:37):

So when you have life-changing money on the table, and some of you are going to … Good news. Some of you are going to. The bad news is most of you aren’t going to sell. If you have life changing money on the table, for the love of God, change your life. Please. Because the amount of regret and self-loathing that you will feel for yourself if you do not take that money while it’s on the table will be immense. Do not let the greed get the best of you because it’s going to get the best of a lot of people. You have to fight yourself. You have to fight that inner demon that’s going to tell you it’s going to keep going higher and higher and higher. You’re a genius. You’re not a genius. It’s just the bull market, and it’s a great opportunity. Yeah, it was smart to get involved in the crypto and to hold the assets that get in early enough.

(00:54:18):

You’re able to make profits. The only genius thing in a bull market is to sell. You have to understand that because if you don’t sell, you’re going to be facing utterly horrific losses, and it happens real fast. You’re going to wake up one day and the top will be in, and the prices will already be down 20 or 30%. And that’s a fine time to sell, but your ego’s going to screw with you so bad because you could have sold yesterday for 20 to 30% higher. You need to get out. You need to get out, and you need to sell, man. You really do. Because if you don’t, all that money, all that potential to do stuff like buy stocks when they’re down 60% in the bear market, to buy crypto again, to run the next cycle up and compound your wealth cycle to cycle, or just to have the financial freedom that you probably so desperately want by being involved in the markets in the first place, all of that disappears. All of that disappears if you do not take profits. Please, take profits, guys.

Nick (00:55:14):

Amazing. I appreciate you answering that question. I’m now going to ask you the GRTiQ 10. These are 10 questions I ask each guest of the podcast every week.

Lark Davis (00:55:22):

Let’s go. I’m excited. Let’s do it.

Nick (00:55:36):

Here’s the first one. What book or articles had the most impact on your life?

Lark Davis (00:55:41):

How to Win Friends and Influence People. Fantastic book. Classic book by Dale Carnegie. Beautiful book though. I reread it once every few years. I reread it. Probably read it 30, 40 times in my life, but that’s a really good one. And anything by Tony Robbins.

Nick (00:55:55):

Is there a movie or a TV show that you recommend everybody’s got to watch?

Lark Davis (00:56:01):

One of my favorite movies of all time. Casablanca. Classic black and white film. People don’t watch black and white films anymore. They don’t got time for it. It’s a slower movie. Beautiful movie though. Great movie. If you haven’t watched it, it’s a classic. Go back and watch it. Beautiful.

Nick (00:56:17):

If you could only listen to one music album for the rest of your life, which one are you choosing?

Lark Davis (00:56:22):

Ah, man, that’s a hard one. That’s a hard one. For the rest of my life? That feels like a prison sentence, man. I don’t know. I feel like any one album is going to be brutal over enough time. Gosh darn. Let’s say maybe some kind of classical music. I couldn’t think of any, but I feel like that would at least be acceptable versus the songs just drive you crazy after a while.

Nick (00:56:48):

Absolutely. Not an uncommon answer. How about this? What’s the best advice someone’s ever given to you?

Lark Davis (00:56:55):

There’s been some pretty good ones over the time. I remember I was taking a leak one time with this guy, this Romanian guy. His name was Dragon. Wasn’t his real name. He was called Dragon. And he said, “Hey, got a tip for you. If you just wash it real good at the start of the day, you don’t have to wash your hands after you pee.” I’m just like, “I’m not really sure I agree with that advice, but okay.” No. Okay. Real advice though. This is actually a story from back in 2017 with crypto, and this relates to what I just said. I was bragging to my dad about how I’d just made $10,000 on this cryptocurrency icon, which was like the Ethereum of Korea back in the day. And he said, “Did you sell it?” I said, “No.” He said, “Then you ain’t made shit.”

(00:57:35):

Fast forward, apparently Icon was not the Ethereum of Korea, and it went down 99.9% in the bear market. Now, I got out as a slight profit, but didn’t make the 10 grand. I made like a thousand bucks or something on it in the end. So old man Davis there and his old farmer wisdom. If it’s not in the hand, you haven’t made anything.

Nick (00:57:54):

What’s one thing you’ve learned in your life that you don’t think most other people have learned or know quite yet?

Lark Davis (00:58:01):

That’s a fascinating question. I don’t know, but I think something that’s just a nice reminder is we’re all going to die. We’re all going to die. And all the things you think are really, really important are probably not that important. The stuff that’s actually important and that actually makes real meaning and value in your life is to spend as much time as you can with people that you love while they’re here. Call your mom, call your dad, that kind of stuff. Because at the end of the day, you’re going to die and none of it’s going to matter. So be with your family, give meaning to every day and find the beauty in life, because life is beautiful. It’s really important to remember that.

Nick (00:58:40):

And Lark, what’s the best life hack you’ve discovered for yourself?

Lark Davis (00:58:45):

Best life hack. No breakfast, black coffee. That’s it. Get yourself going in the morning.

Nick (00:58:52):

Based on your own life experiences and observations, what’s the one habit or characteristic that you think best explains how people find success in life?

Lark Davis (00:59:00):

Belief in themselves. This is one of the big things I see a lot of people with toxic money beliefs and stuff like this where they believe they can’t do it. Well, if you believe you can’t do it, then you probably won’t be able to do it, essentially. But if you believe in yourself … And you see people who have just this … As I meet a lot of people and they have this relentless optimism, this belief system that there is no way they’re going to fail. That they’re going to do it. That they are manifesting that into their lives and however you want to talk about that. Whether that’s sort of like, okay, woo woo stuff. I’m manifesting this, whatever. But you put it out there, you set the goal and you damn well do it. You believe that you can do it. You believe that you’re the kind of person who wealth comes to. You’re the kind of person who talks to the girl. You’re the kind of person who, whatever. Finds the opportunities, has the luck because you put yourself at the right place to get the luck. You have to believe in yourself. I think that’s one of the key things.

Nick (00:59:52):

And then the final three, Lark, are complete the sentence type questions. The first one is the thing that most excites me about the future of web3 is?

Lark Davis (01:00:01):

Dog with hat.

Nick (01:00:05):

And then how about this one? If you’re on X or Twitter, whatever people call it, you should be following?

Lark Davis (01:00:11):

Lark Davis.

Nick (01:00:13):

And then the final question, Lark, I’m happiest when?

Lark Davis (01:00:16):

I’m happiest when I’m playing with my kids.

Nick (01:00:27):

Lark, we had the opportunity to talk a little bit before I pressed record. I could tell you’re a good person. Very humble, despite the fact all this incredible success you’ve had. I am really humbled that you would join the GRTiQ Podcast to spend this hour with me. If listeners want to follow you, keep up to date on all the things you’re working on, what’s the best way for them to stay in touch?

Lark Davis (01:00:46):

Come on X, come on YouTube. Make sure you’re following the verified accounts. We have lots of person names out there. Follow us on X, follow us on YouTube, and yeah, check out the newsletter as well. We’d be happy to see you there. We’re having conversations, talking about stuff all the time, so definitely come and join along for the journey.