james’s posthaven

With my left toe hooked and a firm grip on my right, I lunged my left hand for the next hold. I reached, missed, and gravity threw me onto the cushioned floor, kicking up a cloud of chalk. On my back, I stared at the empty wall and groaned dramatically into the bouldering gym. 

I rolled over just as two kids, no older than 10, entered the bouldering area. I pulled myself up and moved to the spectator area to grab some water. They sized up the same climb I just struggled against. It included a long overhang section, a difficult climb by any measure, but especially hard for someone with less strength. One kid started to climb.

As the climber struggled in the same tricky section I failed, the friend suggested: “try a heel hook.” 

The climber swapped the toe to a heel hook with immediate results: “Oh, that’s much better.” 

I thought to myself: I should try the heel hook. 

After struggling on a difficult section and losing steam, the climber jumped down. Fist bumps and encouragement greeted the young climber. I signaled a small golf clap.

Watching the young climbers got me thinking: bouldering might be the best individual sport for teaching people how to handle failure. 

All sports teach some degree of perseverance, perspiration, practice, teamwork, and dedication, but if I had to pick a single skill to learn from sports, it’s the ability to deal with failure. It enables someone to get up and try again, because life will inevitably knock you over.

Each action in bouldering embodies a tight feedback loop. You either get past the current hold or you can’t and the consequences are apparent—you fall down. There’s a visceral feeling in the body when you face a hold that could lead to your tumble. Staying put does no good, either, as you’ll eventually run out of muscle endurance. Press forward or fall from the wall.

Despite being a solo sport, the community feels like a big family: friendly, open, and helpful. Climbs are even called "problems", so it creates a science-like collaboration in problem solving. Between climbs, the community is observing, encouraging, sharing, and discussing suggestions or improvements with complete strangers. Regardless of whether you want to work with others, your success and failures are broadcast publicly. There is a spotlight effect to bouldering: only one person can climb a section of wall. As a new entrant to the sport, it is daunting to be on the wall when a bunch of foreign eyeballs are on your back. Intimidating at first, over time, this builds comfort with learning and failing publicly. I felt self-conscious while climbing the first few times and now, I hardly think about it. I suspect this is where the supportive bouldering community derives: everyone knows how scary it is to get on that wall and fail in front of others, so we support each other since we all empathize with that sensation. Failure is an expected byproduct of progress in a bouldering gym. 

Compare these traits to other popular solo sports like running, cycling, and swimming. There is no feedback loop with each stride, pedal, or stroke. On any given day, an endurance athlete will always be able to perform these motions, so what constitutes failure? It's not always clear.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn from these sports (I was an avid cyclist for years) and I know other individual sports contain great lessons. But, against the metrics of rapid feedback loops and openness to failure, bouldering scores high.

To take this a step further, bouldering also teaches the vital concept of fallibilism. In David Deutsch’s book “The Beginning of Infinity” he states: "fallibilism entails not looking to authorities but instead acknowledging that we may always be mistaken, and trying to correct errors." He argues this funny sounding word along with creativity, are the keys to human progress. 

The overlap between the ability to deal with failure and fallibilism is large, minus one specific detail: authoritative knowledge. Fallibilists don’t look to authorities for knowledge, resulting in a willingness to disregard the status of a source in exchange for the truth.

Bouldering exemplifies fallibilism in a physical way. We improve through a simple cycle of falling down and getting up because we believe the errors can be corrected. You learn from the climbers in the gym regardless of their physical appearance: younger, older, man, woman, or child as I learned at the start of this essay. There’s a lesson to be learned from observing another climber, regardless of their background. 

This culture of open feedback welcomes public failure to teach an important life lesson: climbing up a wall will result in failure, but it’s worth the challenge. Like any sport, it helps when it’s a ton of fun and you’re surrounded by supportive people.

I just finished one year at Terraformation. I learned a lot about reforestation, carbon credit markets, and native ecosystems. There is one non-obvious topic I learned about: how to build an off-grid home. 

Build is a strong word. This post is not focused on doing-it-yourself, rather on assembly from multiple partners. I got to work with key pieces of an off grid project: Shelter, Power, Water, and Waste. I'll cover these areas. I’ve yet to purchase and develop land myself, so I won’t cover land acquisition, permitting, and preparation. 

I didn’t build an off-grid home at Terraformation, but their products are off-grid seed labs. There's good overlap and I’m sharing what I’ve learned with future James, who will one day build his own off-grid retreat. 

Shelter

This is the biggest cost for any project. Conventionally, we’d think of hiring an architect to draw up a plan, engineers to scope the land, and builders to bring materials on-site. I think it’s easier to compress a few of those steps and work with a prefabricated home builder. What does prefab mean? This means most construction is completed off-site in a centralized manufacturing facility. The partially completed structure is delivered to the property and installed. Usually, the last 10% of a prefab build is completed on-site (i.e. completing electrical wiring, foundation, and fitting pieces together).

Building a new home in the Bay Area or Los Angeles runs in the $400-600 per square foot range for a perfectly flat lot. In more remote places, costs don’t actually get cheaper because labor often needs to travel to the build site. In South Lake Tahoe, quotes for interior remodeling run around $300 per square foot. Imagine what it would cost to build from scratch! On top of this, build cost is a moving target due to contractor or material delays. Prefab comes with natural advantages in cost and time due to how the homes are built. Two modernized prefab home builders (Connect Homes and Cover) run in the range of $200-400 per square foot, with much faster build times. In the case of Cover, they promise a fixed price, which is unheard of in the construction world. 

How should we compare prefab home builders? Both Connect Homes and Cover are based in Los Angeles—no surprise as housing is a major issue in California. Both companies use similar models: they do 90% of a home build in their factories in LA and then ship to site for installation and configuration. Each takes a “lego block” approach to building. They choose the size of the smallest piece and use that as the building block for the rest of the structure. 

The key difference between the two companies is the size of lego blocks. Connect Homes uses the structure of a shipping container, roughly 8x40’ as their smallest lego block. Cover uses a panelized wall to create even smaller lego blocks, compact enough to fit inside a shipping container or in a truck. Their pieces don’t need a crane to lift on-site. The difference between the two comes down to installation, customizability, and shipping cost. 

The nature of shipping cost means Connect Homes will cost more to ship. Their lego blocks are large, similar to customized shipping containers and as a result, shippers charge extra for having to deal with containers that are slightly customized and different from the majority of the containers that they own. As an example, we were quoted nearly $20,000 to ship a Connect Home module from San Bernardino, California to Kona, Hawaii. Cover has an advantage in shipping cost: the products can be placed on a truck or inside shipping containers–so they don’t look different from other eCommerce goods and come with better shipping rates. 

In terms of customizability, Connect Homes allows for two story buildings (even higher if they wanted to), because of their steel beam structure. At the time being, Cover only builds a single story, but I suspect this is a limitation of resources and engineering effort. Both companies will allow for customization at the design level, but since Cover uses smaller lego blocks, more customizations are possible.

Hopefully this gives you some idea on how to think about tradeoffs between different structure types and prefabricated home builders. There are many more out there, but these considerations will allow you to compare providers. I’m excited to see how the prefab space develops. We’ll see building costs come down even further as some of these companies grow (Connect and Cover are early stage startups), but if I were doing a project today, I would go with a prefab as it’s already a 10x improvement over the incumbent. 

Power

To power our seed banks, we used solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, and a backup generator. Coincidentally, our seed banks used what an average home in California consumes in electricity per day (roughly 20 kWh). Our system came with 24 solar panels rated 365W each (REC), 16 kWh battery capacity (Blue Ion), and a 5.5 kWh gasoline powered generator (Honda). This was built for a region with tons of sun, but if you’re in an area with less sun, you’ll need a larger solar array. Solar and battery installers are ubiquitous enough at this point that providers will scope the exact system you need based on your location.

What’s the right way to think about trade-offs within the power system? We'll start with the largest cost component, the battery.

The range of battery cost is as wide as the quality. Given cost of maintenance or replacing a battery in a remote area, I think it makes sense to invest in a high quality battery that will last 10+ years. An important battery terminology to understand is cycle count. Cycle count is the number of times a battery can be discharged in its lifetime. A cycle count of 1,000 means a battery can be used and recharged 1,000 times before end of life. A threshold always accompanies a cycle count, for example: 2000 cycles to 50%. This means it can be drained to 50% battery level and recharged fully for 2000 cycles. When it drops below the threshold level, the cycle count also goes down. So, you want batteries with high cycle counts and an ability to discharge to a low percentage (batteries cannot go to 0%, since you need to leave some juice to turn on the system). Most residential home batteries have low cycle count and high thresholds. The reason is simple: residential homes tied to the grid only drain the battery in blackout situations and therefore batteries are not often cycled. It’s important to specify to your solar and battery partner that you are building off-grid, because that changes which models to pick.

Solar panel technology is straightforward and the contractors will size the system for you. You may want self-cleaning panels if you are in an area that doesn’t get too much wind to blow off the debris and dust, but 3xx Watt panels are recommended at this point in time. 

With any solar panel and battery system, you will need a back-up generator. The sun doesn’t always shine and you don’t want to be left to the whims of the weather. Always be prepared. A generator running off diesel or some other carbon fuel is a requirement for any solar panel system, preferably one with an autostart function, detecting when your batteries are about to fall below a dangerous threshold (i.e. 20%) and automatically kick start the generator to either charge the battery up to a certain level (i.e. 35%) so that you can survive the night until the panels are pulling energy again to power the home and charge the battery.

Water & Waste

Water for human use comes in a few ways: pumping from a source, water catchment, or water storage. The location, rainfall, and proximity to water determines the most efficient water solution. In all cases, there will be some type of filtration, usually through reverse osmosis. Regardless of how you source water, storage is the most cost effective way to have more water on hand. This also provides water redundancy (always be prepared). 

An interesting company called Source happens to have the perfect solution for off-grid situations: Hydropanels. Their panels use solar to create a differential in the humidity to condense water from air, which is then filtered. They literally pull water out of thin air. The best part? These solutions are standalone and don’t need to plug into a water source, which makes them a perfect fit for off-grid needs. Based on my discussion with them: each hydro panel costs $2,000 and 2 Hydropanels produce 6 Liters of water per day (equivalent to a 12 case of 500mL water bottles). It’s less efficient in colder climates (where you have less of a water concern), but the variance between dry and humid places is only 10%, provided there is enough sun (the company is based in Phoenix). 

Since you won’t be ordering from Amazon Prime too much, most waste will be compostable. The 7 foot compostable toilets from Phoenix are the favorites we used: easy setup, low maintenance to the tune of once a year, and works with or without water. Since requirements in waste can drive water needs, water and waste considerations should be handled in tandem.

I did not spend much time around water systems for other uses: washing hands and dishes, showers, and flushing the toilet, so I’ll refrain from commenting. There are a ton of people detailing their off-grid systems on YouTube, such as this grey water system that reuses water from laundry to landscaping. This is a critical rabbit hole for any off-grid home.

Upon writing this, I realize how little I know about off-grid. Recycling water systems, land preparation, and permitting process are just a few things that I have huge gaps in. This is a starting point and I hope to follow-up this post in the not-too-distant future with further learnings!

I’ve written a little bit about my crazy little brother—how he set a goal of running a marathon once a week for a year while working as an Engineering Manager at Strava (a mobile app for runners & cyclists). He failed, running only 21 marathons in 21 weeks.

He ran his first marathon in 2018 and has amassed 52 marathons in a span of 4 years. So, it’s safe to say that he likes running. But if you ask him about how he got started, he did not set out to be this ambitious.

As a kid, my brother was allergic to the outdoors. One time, the family was going on a camping trip. The car was fully loaded, packed to the brim for a weekend getaway. Just as we were filing into the car, Daniel declared that he would not be joining us on our trip. A fight ensued between him and my Dad. Next thing you know, Daniel escaped on his bike to hide at his friend’s place. He later told me he went to Mountain Mike’s to eat a medium pizza first. We canceled that camping trip because Daniel literally ran away from the outdoors.

This is how my family knows Daniel. Someone who loves the computer, playing video games, building things online, and hanging out on IRC. So it’s confusing to see Daniel as an accomplished ultra-runner. Last year, he completed his first 100k and plans to run his first 100 miler this year.

During a recent trail run with Daniel (yes, he still runs with mere mortals like myself), I asked him how he got into running and whether Strava was the impetus. Turns out, it was a complete accident. He had already signed up for a marathon prior to landing the job at Strava. He started running because a persistent co-worker at a prior company kept asking him to run. Daniel begrudgingly caved one day and he’s continued the activity ever since. He tells me running is “fun”. 

I suspect we have different definitions of fun. Anytime I visit home, my dad and I play catch. We hurl the baseball back and forth, sometimes accompanying a conversation and other times in meditative silence with only the intermittent thump of a ball smashing into the glove. Now, this is fun. My Dad and I are giddy whenever we have time to play toss, often at the utter bewilderment of my mom. She doesn’t understand why it’s so fun for us. I suppose she has another definition of fun.

As we were huffing and puffing our way during an uphill segment of our run, I asked him why he ran so much. He struggled to find words, until drawing an analogy: “it’s like playing MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). They follow a simple formula. You kill monsters, do quests, strengthen your character, and level up. Monsters and quests get harder and you level your character. The cycle repeats until you reach the max level. Then the game developers raise the max level and release harder monsters and new gear and you continue onwards. What’s the point? There is no point. The point is that there is no point.” 

The ramp from casual runner to ultra-marathoner is a steep one. Fun might be the reason to start an activity, but it’s not the reason to push against bigger and bigger challenges. Fun eventually becomes challenging, if pushed far enough. It’s a fine line between fun, self-indulgence, and dangerous addiction, often crossed without recognition. Sometimes, crossing the line is the only way to truly understand the boundaries. 

There’s a sinister interpretation of his analogy: video games perpetuate themselves with extrinsic rewards, a never ending ladder. For runners, one mile becomes a 10k, which turns into a marathon, and eventually becomes an ultra-marathon. 200 mile races are a thing. Where does it stop? How does one stop if there’s no clearly defined boundary and the external prizes only get bigger?  

As a concerned sibling, I pressed Daniel further to understand what ensures he doesn’t go overboard. He broke it down into three components: understanding risks, removing comparisons, and a pulse on enjoyment. 

Exercise addiction is real, but Daniel’s answer on risks relieved some of my fears. In his own words: “I think in terms of going overboard / safety with trail running, there are like two parts: The body (injury, fatigue, dehydration) and nature (weather, getting lost, running out of light). I’ve pushed different things a tiny bit overboard, enough to learn the lesson.” The clarity on risks and recognition that the line was crossed is a sign of mature awareness. It doesn’t mean I don’t get spooked when Daniel tells me he will be running for at least 24 hours later this year.

Extrinsic rewards only have power if they’re viewed as the goal. This is where I think Daniel’s analogy to MMORPGs is actually a healthy sign. He doesn’t give the running game’s levels too much importance and doesn't compete against his peers, instead, he focuses on whether he enjoys his runs. 

There’s an added benefit to focusing on enjoyment: if you truly enjoy an activity, it’s easier to struggle when it gets hard. For example, Daniel was never an early bird (do you know any early bird gamers?). But, he’ll wake up at 4am to get a head start on a long run. We might consider waking up at 4am to do anything as insanity, but for someone who enjoys an activity, it’s simply required to get to the fun stuff. 

When we enjoy an activity for the sake of the activity, we will go through hell or high water to make it happen. Obstacles and setbacks don’t appear difficult while challenging goals seem inevitable. Even when we fail, we know we will be better for it. Plus, we think it’s fun.

I won’t be joining Daniel on a marathon run anytime soon, but my Dad and I will attempt to play catch in the 10 minutes between meetings today. I’m not sure what I set out to write, but this post started out as I’ve described above: writing for the sake of writing. Here we are. 

Freshman year of high school, I stepped into Mrs. Sutton’s 9th grade English class. At late middle age, Mrs. Sutton fully embraced the eccentric hippie vibe: adorned with rattling bracelets, beads, and necklaces, she wore long kaleidoscope shawl dresses and worn leather sandals. A legendary figure at school: she taught high school English to one of the other English teachers. I heard hallway whisperings about her classroom antics and streaks of madness and wow, did she live up to them.

On a normal day, you might have found Mrs. Sutton at the front of the class with her eyes closed in bliss and hands held towards the sky, as if she were being carried by heavenly light. In a few moments, you’d find her announcing Shakespeare lines from the depths of her soul like a possessed artist: "O! for a MUSE of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention." 

On other days, the sight of poor legibility from one of her students would trigger her: “What is this CHICKEN SCRATCH?! Why are you writing in chicken scratch!!”. For some reason my memory remembers it as “chickenshit”, but I think she used that for other kinds of misbehavior.

While Mrs. Sutton was verifiably crazy, she understood creativity at a deep level and knew how to impart this skill onto her students.

Her creativity methodology came in the form of “freewrites” written with pen and paper, always in cursive. The rules of a freewrite were simple: (1) 30 minutes of writing (2) your pen cannot leave the paper and you cannot stop writing. Mrs. Sutton didn’t care if you wrote the same word over and over for 30 straight minutes. Write whatever you want, just don’t stop writing. During freewrites, Mrs. Sutton resembled an angry drill sergeant, pacing up and down the front of class with hawkish eyes scanning for pauses in movement.

As a chickenshit high school student, freewrites seemed like a useless waste of time. Begrudgingly and out of fear for Mrs. Sutton’s outbursts, you would write and write and write. Sometimes, the same word or phrase is repeated for 20 lines – until a Muse throws a magic brick at your face and you latch onto something and start writing substance. Even on the worst days, no student ever wrote the same thing for 30 whole minutes.

So, imagine my delight when browsing Twitter and stumbling onto a collection of tweets explaining how the most successful artists of our time manage creativity:

• Billie Eilish talking about using constraints in her creative process.
• Ed Sheeran using the faucet analogy for creativity, how you need to empty the crap before you get to the good stuff.
  
• John Mayer demonstrates in real-time how he clears out the junk.
  

All of them followed Mrs. Sutton’s exact process: use constraints to unclog or clear the creative pipes by letting all of the crap flow out first, then you’ll eventually get to the good stuff. 

Thank you Mrs. Sutton.

By now, NFTs are mainstream jargon so I’ll focus on why the generative art space is a constructive long-term investment. If you are looking for a primer on NFTs, I would start here, here, here, and for the video inclined, here.

What is generative art? This overview of generative art history provides a concise definition: "It is the practice of creating systems that then autonomously create art". 

Modern generative art is generated by computer algorithms, but generative art existed well before the invention of the computer. Natural language rules or procedural steps without any technology is also capable of creating generative art. We'll focus on modern generative art, which grew with the arrival of computational power in the 1960s. Artists used computers the size of your living room to run algorithms that generated art. Today, a simple laptop will enable a curious generative artist.

A unique feature to generative art is that the artist does not have full control over the outputs. They’ve combined orderly code that executes repetitively, the serendipity of random chance, and the possibility of beautiful errors to generate the scariest type of art for any type of creator: one in which they cannot control the end result.

The generative artist is tweaking, adjusting, and cajoling an algorithm into satisfying outputs. Generative art started out as a way to create many outputs, from which, the artist would cherry pick the best. The recent wave of generative art has been dubbed “long form”, where an artist must build an algorithm good enough to generate 1,000 outputs that are aesthetically pleasing and unique while fitting under a unified project title. Tyler Hobbs of Fidenza fame wrote about the art form and why it’s so challenging (a fantastic read).  

5 key themes behind on-chain generative art as an investment:

• Selective pool of artists compared to other digital art 

• Transparent and reliable provenance 

• Digital art will create a larger market than the traditional art market

• Limited storage requirements compared to traditional art

• Native art form to the digital art medium

1. Constrained pool of artists

Generative art is naturally constrained to a self-selecting pool of artists, gated by skills and interest. The skillset is an unnatural cross between someone who is both design oriented and code competent. Finding a single good designer or a single good programmer is challenging on its own, let alone someone who is capable of doing both well. Not only do they have to write clean, efficient, and objective code, but they must march to the tune of their own drum to impress upon subjective senses and deliver mind-bending art. Mix all of that together and the population of generative artists creates a natural scarcity for the art form. As a result, the cornerstone projects in generative art stay relevant longer since it’s difficult to replicate the mix of skills required to create these masterpieces. 

2. Transparent and reliable provenance

Provenance is defined as the validity of the artwork along with the transaction history. Provenance is so critical to the validity and trust of a particular piece of artwork, that it might be the most important thing, more so than the artwork itself. The criticality of provenance is highlighted in the must watch documentary on Netflix, Made You Look. It follows a major art scandal where expert art analysts and historians were duped by some Rothko fakes painted by a trained Chinese artist. Watching this made it click in my head: the digital world is so conducive to tracking transaction history that it’s easy to overlook the importance of such a simple feature. In the traditional art world, tracking provenance requires humans who are prone to mistakes. For on-chain generative art, this is stored directly on the blockchain, as the transaction occurs. There’s a single source of truth and a quick search will reveal whether a piece of digital art is fake, whether it passed through a set of famous owners, and what price was paid. 

3. Digital art market will be larger than the traditional art market

If I had told you in 2010 that the traditional advertising business (TV, Newspapers, and Radio) would be eclipsed by their digital counterparts, you’d probably laugh at me. In a decade, online advertising has nearly doubled the size of offline advertising.

From Benedict Evan's 2021 presentation "The Great Unbundling"

If we look at early numbers for the offline and online art worlds, we see something similar: The traditional art market is roughly a $1.5T dollar asset class with $50B in transaction volume in 2020. In 2021, a year where NFTs exploded onto the scene, $20B in transactions exchanged hands. Not bad for a young industry. 

When communities go online they create infinite permutations of audiences and advertisers, creating a world larger than what we could have imagined in the traditional offline world. NFTs connect and enable a larger population of collectors and creators in ways not possible through the traditional art world. Anybody with an internet connection can get involved and I'm a perfect example: If you had asked me 5 years ago if I’d ever become an art collector, I’d call you crazy. Yet here I am writing about the art industry. 

4. Limited storage requirements compared to traditional art

Storing an expensive piece of art in the traditional world is not a trivial process. This makes sense. The store of value is a piece of art created decades or hundreds of years ago – it is a physical object and liable to water, fire, UV rays, or forgetful misplacement. Global freeports are dedicated to storing expensive goods of the ultra-rich, like a military grade Amazon warehouse for the most secretive and valuable items in the world. It’s impossible to place a dollar value on this cost, since it’s such a secretive industry, but an investment susceptible to accidental loss can only be collected safely by those able to pay the high costs associated with protecting the art. Compare this to the requirements for securely storing a valuable piece of digital art: high security storage can be performed without a 3rd party and just a few pieces of hardware available for less than $100 (multisig cold storage). The storage requirements of a digital good are infinitely smaller than a physical good, exponentially expanding the collector base and increasing demand for generative art and digital art.

5. Generative Art is Native to Digital Art

While the market growth of digital art is not specific to generative art, the tailwinds for the entire industry amplify the native art forms. Generative art is native to digital art. Modern generative art is created with an algorithm written with computer code. It is shared with the world through a digital medium: minted online, tracked on-chain, transacted with internet currency, and showcased with web tools. The moment digital art reliably maintained provenance was the moment a new medium of investable art was created. If you are to believe the digital world will grow into a vibrant ecosystem, then generative art is the beautiful centerpiece worth showcasing in an office (physical or online!). 

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While these reasons drive my own investment thesis behind generative art, I recommend anybody looking into this to join the community, interact with artists, collectors, and read up on the history of the space. 

Generative art will become an asset class larger than traditional art is today, but it doesn’t mean all generative art will hold value over time. Just like in the art world, there are periods where certain types of art are appreciated and fads come and go, while the best artists retain their value. Within generative art, one will still need to be able to pick projects that will hold value over a very long period of time. Even as a staunch believer in generative art as an investment, the best advice is to buy art that pleases the senses. The worst case is enjoying a beloved piece of art while supporting an artist on a cutting edge medium.