Nomadic Nodes: Revolutionizing Work and Life in the Ethereum Ecosystem | Brendan Lucas - Wishart

[Music] this talk is non-technical so if you were hoping I was going to talk about how to run a starlink node off of an Apple Watch and starlink this is not the right stage this talk is more of a thank you and a love letter to the eth crypto space because I live and travel full-time in my converted school bus I'm here to tell you what that's like um I'm here to tell you why I think this community enables me to do that and I'm here to thank you all for being a part of what enables this kind of Lifestyle for all of us I'm Brenan Lucas and as you can see from my various phone backgrounds this is where you can reach me if you're looking for spoilers from this talk then uh you can check out my girlfriend's Instagram on the right where our travels are all too well documented I'm the co-founder of WT Consulting we're a consultancy for smart contract and data work uh we have a small international team we're currently hiring and always looking for cool projects to take on so send me a message if you need things done or want to be put to work so you've probably seen that there's a large number of people who spend Winters in Thailand while working and seem to travel full time and in some cases they're living it up on the beach while working hard and contributing meaningfully to various projects in our space don't get me wrong I'm making it sound like eth is one conglomeration of various ways to take vacation Pati but seriously there are some real downsides to working with you DG like having your family members constantly ask you what crypto to buy or be mad at you because Uncle Fred lost all of his Savings in bitconnect or accusing you of helping people launder money or being worried that you spend your time dejing your savings into random alts I do that but it has nothing to do with my job so you can relax Mom but working in this space does mean that I get to live in my bus wherever I want to park it just for a little bit more context on how much less sketchy that is than it sounds this is a little tour of my house renan and Sophia and for the past 2 and a half years we've been living and traveling full-time in our 40ft off-grid converted School Bus here's a 30second walkthrough of our bus when you step in you're right in our living room with our 9ft L-shaped sofa across from that we have our two work desks that fold up and down this is our L-shaped kitchen with a big fridge and plenty of pantry space there's a bathroom that's got a nice size shower a vanity and our toilet is tucked over the wheel well and in the back our bedroom area features a big closet and our comfy queen-sized bed and that's our bus it's small but it's got everything we need to live and work comfortably I have absolutely no doubt that some of you thought I was talking about a steel box with a mattress in the back people are constantly thinking this is going to be a really really sketchy bus but it's it's not that sketchy there are some elements of sketch I do have to say that there's a few less showers than probably most of you are used to when you're trying to make the water last you do what you have to do but for the most part it's pretty fancy living so I've been in that bus for two and a half years traveling around Canada the US and Mexico and it's been amazing so far High highs and low lows for sure definitely some stressful situations can come up while you're living in a bus but honestly I have to say that being nomadic has been really really wonderful for me I'm not trying to tell you it's for everybody but it's kind of cool so I'm going to tell you a little bit about what it's like I'm going to go through some of the Lesser known facts maybe some pros and cons but more importantly I'm going to talk about how we're able to live like this and not just in a bus but all of us out here who are making life look like a vacation what's making Winters in Baja and Bali possible I hope that many of you have come to realize already that this is a result of our community's values the first value I want to talk about is being output focused have you guys seen that movie Moneyball well there's a very famous scene in there where all the recruiters are sitting together and wondering what the be will make the best recruit and they talk about a lot of idle things like how attractive the players girlfriends are or what bar fights they've been in the last year and in the end they come to find that one thing really matters getting on base and apparently it revolutionized the sport Sports industry I don't know what just matters to us though to me do they ship that's the only thing I have to care about I don't need to worry if developers are working the same hours every day or the same days every week if they ship quality code at reliable rates that works for me I don't even care if someone smokes weed all day for some designers I've met it seems to be a really beneficial practice somehow all I care is are we shipping quality code at reliable rates the second more broad goal that we have or sorry value has many positive externalities we value being decentralized we have we have a value that anyone should be able to contribute no matter where they are geographically what they look like what they sound like and they shouldn't be judged by those things being Global is a big part of decentralization and because of that core value by and large the ethereum ecosystem encourages us to be comfortable with time differences and making working around them and making that activity normal and because of us valuing decentralization and because we're output focused those two values really come together to bring us the fact that for the most part the ethereum ecosystem is remote first this is true of tech and large but I think it's very uniquely prioritized by our space the goal is to be working with the best people in the world not the best people in the city that your company is in all of that comes together to bring us a space where we are remote first where we are time flexible where we can hide our face and voice and choose to show up to work as a Catgirl if we want we can obscure our names we can work in any time zone to collaborate and we can show up to work as the people that we are instead of the people that the suits want us to be this is a really wonderful set of values that I think we can be really proud of we take that very seriously at WT as I'm sure many companies in the space do as well another thing we do with our priorities is we allow people to swap days so if someone wants to work on Saturday and then take a Wednesday off they're welcome to as long as it doesn't conflict with other team members that they might be blocking with work or with a meeting that they might have to attend one of my co-workers said what reason are any of us going places on Saturday and Sunday other than to coordinate with other people who have those days off and it really hit home for me because just a few days ago I decided that it made no no sense if I wanted to go see these manatees to go on a Saturday or a Sunday that Park was going to be full so instead I was alone with my friends on a Wednesday after I worked that Sunday oh I forgot to play these so now that I told you how ethereum enables me to live the way that I do I'm going to talk a little bit about what living like this actually looks like for me I'm going to address some common concerns and maybe some unknowns first I'm going to over the three PS people power and pooping I'm actually kidding I'm not going to talk about pooping but if you want to talk to me about it after it's a pretty common question in the nomadic space there's there's just some different systems out there so we like to compare notes anyways first let's talk about people or Community a lot of people tell me oh I could never live in a bus that couldn't be for me it's I need my people too badly and I can't lie when I went to leave in this bus originally I had to say goodbye to collocating with a lot of really close friends and it was hard I had friends who were within a 30-minute Drive of me and some that were right next door that you know I don't see nearly as often because I haven't really been back but on the flip side there are nomads everywhere digital and otherwise who are traveling like this we're really only ever alone as much as we want to be sometimes it's nice to get Space right now I've left my bus in Florida in a city of about a thousand or sorry a pop-up city of about a thousand people all school buses Vans and RVs and I guarantee you that uh well actually I couldn't get a live stream link but Sophia would have been watching this talk with no less than five of our friends in our bus right now anyways there are nomads everywhere I promise Community is not such a big thing we Caravan together for months at a time if we want to anyways power a lot of people think I could never do it because I need so much electricity well we have a ton of electricity on from the Sun and solar has gotten really inexpensive we've been running everything off grid and it's kind of one of the coolest things about living there is knowing that I built this mobile power station that could would stay on the apocalypse and keep me uh running the AC we actually made a video a little while ago about um running a hot tub off of our solar for a few days in Mexico if you have time check it out it was pretty fun but anyways I don't know if you know but hot tubs take a lot of power so we we've got some Watts another question I get all the time how often do you move uh for us it's usually around 1 to three days that differs you know that's that's just a personal choice sometimes it's nice to veg out in the woods or on a beach especially during tax season so we can catch up on some things but we safed at some places for like a week our record is 14 days on this really awesome surf break in Mexico but otherwise we like to keep moving we travel pretty aggressively big question that comes with that is how much do you spend a month on fuel it's about $400 a month and we drive about 16 hours on that 16 hours is actually like the same amount as the average American commuter which is kind of cool so um yeah obviously if we're trying to drive that 16 hours and we're at California it's not $400 okay I have time to address one other concern that I plan for anyone to shout out so if you have one please I'll I'll try to address it all right oh yeah I actually thought that was going to be it too starlink easy done next no I'm kidding I actually don't have time for anymore but yeah starlink makes it really really easy to um you know configure your router even when um you can load a VPN on there and look like you're showing up from anywhere which is not really well I mean vpns are valuable but I'm not trying to spoof my location for the most part um yeah starl makes it really easy uh oh yeah I know what you're thinking this is pretty impressive maybe but I don't know this sounds so expensive I don't think I could ever live like this well let me be sure assure you that my altcoin portfolio was not very kind to me during the bear so I'm going to get into the stats of what it costs to get into this but fortunately my girlfriend made a montage a few weeks ago this video of our school bus conversion tour went viral and we got a lot of questions about how much it cost to convert a schools bus into a tiny home so let's get to it it cost us 2,600 us to buy the actual bus when we got it it had all the seats in it and it was already running great for the actual Renovations we ended up spending around $112,000 us we saved so much money by buying most of the things in our bus from Facebook Marketplace and from stripping old RVs so if you really put your mind to it you can save a lot of money that way that puts the total cost of our school bus conversion including the bus itself at around $14,000 us the great thing about building out a bus is that you can absolutely customize it to your own liking and you can spend as much or as little as you'd really like if you're interested in bus life you should definitely give us a follow as we'll be posting lots of tips info and bus lifestyle videos I feel like I absolutely have to say just cuz people trust me to write smart contract code that that rounding error or you know the addition error that's intentional so that the Instagram views go but anyways not expensive as you'd think all in we were actually about 144 but again that error not super expensive not super inexpensive but really achievable if you fund it while you build it I built it out in 5 months and honestly I think I would have been a little bit better off to be unemployed if you're trying to keep that timeline it's it's pretty intense eth is an amazing space as I mentioned but if you try to keep that timeline while working I promise you you're going to let some slide for fortunately for me I worked at a tri five fintech startup at the time so I made it to my meetings and no one really noticed but all completed and our 9o FES in tow we hit the road we got about as far as Cambridge before uh I needed a new turbo actuator so that's about 7 hours after we started but other than that no issues for a long time and life got pretty good we figured out how to make small work and we learned a lot about how to work effectively in our space and let's be real in a relationship we learned a lot about living together that tiny ass space though I'm going to surprise you now a little bit by saying that I spend way more time talking about how big this space is than how small it is all my friends are in vans so they're always saying oh my God this living room so much space to work so much space to entertain I like to say I live in a vanin we've been all over in the last two and a half years and um pretty much to every state I've gotten to keep speaking French uh I speak Spanish now almost well enough to get most things done after our two winners in Baja although I know a little bit more bus vocabulary than dual linga would have wanted me to and I've had some really credible experiences along the way when we were in Mexico I started surfing about three times a day uh once in the morning once in the at noon for lunch and then again at Sunset I got to swim and paddle board with humpback whales oh that's a video I forgot to play I got to fire off guns with some locals in Montana an experience that left Sophia with nightmares for weeks but I'll be honest pretty cool we got to live at the Golden Gate bridge for a few days um actually twice and we've managed to go skiing in May in the Alabama Hills I've really gotten to work with some of the best views as my not so virtual background where I really felt like this e space was giving back to me uh I was in Oregon because we moved so much I remember everything based on where I was at a given time but anyways I was in Oregon and and the startup that I was Consulting for at the time started really scrambling so I stepped up into a head of engineering role along with taking ownership of their front- end code from a technical perspective technical ownership perspective and I started putting in like 16-hour days for about two months and I know what you're thinking there is no possible upside that can come from these circumstances but I think you're wrong it was amazing for me uh for about two hours every day I committed to spending time with my family girlfriend and dog but each day we got to do something that was just completely incredible uh we went to Hot Springs uh I went one Wheeling on the beach with my dog uh we got to go down Cliffs we did cold plunges um swimming paddling in rivers and lakes aquariums um that thing some hot springs it was really amazing so at the end of those two months even though I was all nighing once a week I felt like I could do more I felt like I was still living the best life that I could be so I was ready to keep going I did not and I want to say that I don't believe that those kind of work conditions are sustainable longterm and you're definitely tanking your longevity as you do it but in that case I was having fun all right more Shilling as I mentioned before I and my partner Matias run WT Consulting we are hiring and if you're a or Network that has wanted to ship a project that you haven't had the technical capacity or resources for please reach out we'd love to scope it out in conclusion I want to thank you all for what we've accomplished in the strength of our convictions is truly revolutionizing the way that we get to Cod to work it's allowing us to have fun solving some of the hardest problems in the world while prioritizing flexibility giving us rich full lives and the ability to to make both of those a priority so thanks I got 3 minutes if I don't know if we do questions at these so yeah water depends so we usually try to run out every like two weeks but um if we're showering a lot then you know we'll go through it in like no honestly like two weeks is pretty much the fastest we've ever drained it unless we're trying we also have a jeep that we tow behind us so the Jeep is actually able to go get water from like various places especially when we're like parked up on a beach so we don't want to leave or whatever if all of our friends are around we don't want to lose this spot that our massive rig is holding on to so yeah great question thank you can you was it strapped or stuck oh stuck in the beach or mud yeah that's a great question um you've probably heard of a lot of Vans getting stuck especially if they're driving pro masters it's the front wheel I don't know why they did that anyways um we're lucky it's a Canadian I'm Canadian by the way that's but anyways it's a Canadian bus it's got this sweet mud snow setting and a really really powerful engine compared to its size this is going to be a little bit too bus nichy but if you have a 59 then you probably have a little bit less ability to get going in the sand I've seen a lot of my friends get stuck that way but yeah in when I've been stuck one time and it took us about 10 minutes to get out of it we got this sweet mud snow setting so you can just plow through the Soft Stuff any others oh yeah that's a great question um have you ever felt unsafe so one time when I was in Mexico I was getting work done on the bus and they kind of broke something and they like didn't want to cop to it and then I asked them a question about like business insurance and then um subsequently he was like that doesn't exist here here and then I started taking pictures that's when like it got hairy for a second I got a little nervous they got like six men and they drove me all the way home they like followed me home so I didn't go to the cops that was the only time I ever felt like actually unsafe but like even I was getting one time this guy tried to Rob Us in Kansas City he tried to take the scooter we had off the back I just like knocked on the door and was like dude what are you doing like we're here it's F like go away but like it's okay anyways so even then I wasn't really like feeling unsafe although I feel like I should a lot of times in America cuz like y'all have guns and maybe I shouldn't advertise this but like we super don't so yeah great question 23 seconds I should probably get off stage but anyone any last ones oh yeah I'm sorry I got none of it oh yeah sure you know what yeah that's I'm more responsive on telegram let's be real the Instagram is my girlfriend's I'm not I'm not actually on the internet all right thanks so much guys