MARCUS: 

The Temple Builders Guild approached us, and they said, “Listen, we would love to power our camp and workshop with solar. We have two weeks.” Having already figured out this system having already started to build it for our camp, I offered to build them a system. Wonderfully, they accepted, and what’s great about that system is that it could scale as they grew. It did get them about three or four times further than a consumer off-the-shelf product would have taken them, even for that same price. I’m excited to put these kits together for other groups and other camps, and to show people how to build this for themselves.

STUART: 

All right. So this is Burning Man LIVE. I’m Stuart Mangrum, and I’m here with… before I even introduce you, I have to know: I think I’m pronouncing the name of your camp wrong, I’ve seen it several ways. I’ve seen it “Chicka Bao Bao,” “Bao Chicka Wow Wow.”

DAVID: 

That’s it. Yeah. Bao Chicka Wow Wow. 

STUART: 

Okay, so a little bit of Bow Wow Wow, like the 80s band, a little bit of Chick-fil-A.

DAVID: 

It was kind of one of those takes like “Bow chicka wow wow,” and we love bao and food, so… a fun, playful camp name. Bao Chicka Wow Wow.

STUART: 

I am here with two of the principals from Camp Bao Chicka Wow Wow. I’ve got David Hua. Hi, David.

DAVID: 

Hi, hi, hi.

STUART: 

And, Marcus, what do you go by? I understand you have a pretty fancy, pretty sexy playa name.

MARCUS: 

My playa name is Next Level, as I tend to be an overachiever and push things.

STUART: 

Okay, then, I’m just going to leave it with that. I’m here with David Hua, and Next Level. You should have some like, walk-on music to go with that name. Seriously.

DAVID: 

My playa name is Chairman Bao.

STUART: 

Oh. Outstanding. Okay, let’s start with you, Chairman. At least a few of our listeners live in culinarily deprived areas where they don’t even know what a baosa is. So, let’s start at the top.

DAVID: 

Yeah, baosa is a nice fluffy dough that’s steamed, and inside has delicious delights. We bring pork…

STUART: 

That’s the cha siu bao?

DAVID: 

That’s cha siu bao. Yep.

Okay, then we bring a custard, and a red bean, for the vegans. And I think we’ve done, this year included, 43,000 bao since our beginning.

STUART: 

So that’s a running count over how many years?

DAVID: 

We started in 2014 as a camp. Nine years.

STUART: 

Wow. You are slinging the bao.

DAVID: 

We brought 4000 this year and last year, and then in 2022 we did 8000.

STUART: 

But you had to step back from that. Why?

DAVID: 

2022 is like that post-pandemic, “let’s go after it!” and, you know, reboot. And the message is more is more. We had a village at that time, and there’s three camps:

• Camp of the Rising Buns, which is our solar sustainability arm 
• We had Titanic’s End, which is our art car moon vehicle
• And then we had Bao Chicka Wow Wow, which is our food offering

And I think there’s 170 plus people in the camp. And we’re like, yeah, let’s go for 8000 bao, build a huge new art car, and try to do solar. So, it was a lot. And then we start scaling that back in 2023 after some hard lessons.

STUART: 

But that’s the way of the camp, right? Always bite off a little bit more than you can chew, and be happy with what you manage to get done.

DAVID:

Stretch goals. 

STUART: 

Stretch goals are everything at Burning Man. 

So, speaking of that conversion to solar, Marcus, I understand you were a big driving force behind that. Tell us about what that all entailed to take a camp of what, you guys are, like, over 100 people, right?

MARCUS: 

93 people this year. Yeah. And toss it back to David a little bit with some of the history of solar initiatives at Bao, because really, I just came in the last two years, in our most recent chapter. So I’m happy to pick up, but this camp has a deep history, of sustainability and of solar initiatives. 

And as I know, you know, a lot of camps have tried solar in the past. And in fact, that is one of the challenges. If a camp has had bad experiences with being an early adopter with prior generations of technology, it could be hard to pick it back up again. So I don’t know, David, do you want to maybe share a little bit on solar and where it started with Bao?

DAVID: 

Well, we started the camp in 2014. It was Bao Chicka Wow Wow and Titanic’s End. The Titanic’s End had a first version of their art car, which we all put together. And, then we started building out yurts, and keep the yurts cool, we started building out solar, little units and kits to keep it cool.

STUART: 

It’s like solar and a little evaporative cooler?

DAVID: 

Yeah, like a little battery…

MARCUS: 

The bucket coolers. Do you remember? I think those are like ubiquitous. Everybody has tried to make ‘em. Everyone has failed to make ‘em. They usually don’t last longer than a year or two.

STUART: 

But the principle is sound. I mean, you drive around in, say around in Tucson, Arizona, everyone’s got one of those on their roof. Nobody, nobody’s dumb enough to have an air conditioner, right?

MARCUS: 

Exactly.

DAVID: 

Yeah, that’s that’s exactly what happened. We just wanted to tinker around with solar, and keep ourselves cool in the yurts. I think what ended up happening was, it almost was too early. The wattage on the solar wasn’t that high. The batteries didn’t store that much. The evap coolers were kind of broken after years of use.

So, after 2016, we moved into Camp of the Rising Buns. We essentially split off a portion of the camp into part of the village, to just run solar and figure out more solar stuff to power the core infrastructure. We worked with third parties that would bring in and try to build out a solar solution. We’ve done some rentals, and it wasn’t until we went to Net-Zero; 360, they did a whole workshop in 2022.

STUART: 

Oh yeah. That’s a volunteer group around sustainable solutions for Burning Man.

DAVID: 

Yeah. It was awesome. It was hosted at 360. We actually built a handful of, they called them Icarus. It was a solar shade…

STUART: 

Alright.

DAVID: 

…with the goal of Burners Without Borders trying to figure out how do we get Burning Man to net zero by 2030? And that was what sparked sort of like, oh, we need to get more sustainable.” We were using a lot of fuel and generators and all of that.

MARCUS: 

Yeah. And David sent me pictures from this workshop. He was sending me photos of this solar shade structure that was all built out of two-by-sixes and two-by-fours and just looked it was so overbuilt, in a way that I think, a lot of times, Burners tend to do; overengineer and under-refine. Things are really rustic. You know, they serve the purpose, but I think there can then be a challenge in its execution if it’s really not designed for a streamlined, rapid deployment. 

And after David sent me these pictures, something just kind of clicked with me. My prior career is in event production touring, so I’ve lived on a tour bus. I’ve set up shows day in, day out, with crew that is local, not trained in your equipment. Stuff just gets thrown around, beat up. It’s got to go back in the truck and put together the next day. 

In thinking about some of those staging systems that we used in that world, the context is nearly the same. We have crew people that aren’t experienced in the tech. Everything needs to be intuitive. The equipment needs to be robust. It needs to be able to go up quickly and come down quickly, and not leave any pieces behind. And so I took some of those concepts from the Icarus wood shade structure, but borrowed the piping, scaffolding, and clamping technologies used in event production and touring, that can be bought in bulk, and kind of combined those worlds. With those very few components, designed a very basic shade structure system that can go up, create a canopy using the solar panels as shade, and come down quickly.

We built our first version of that last year. And it all packed into a cargo trailer. And so we had this cargo trailer, I think it was like a 12ft trailer, that had 18 or 20 panels, solar panels, 120-watt panels. We had 30 kilowatt hours of battery, and it really took the cargo trailer limit of 3,000 pounds to the limit, and deployed it for our core infrastructure.

We were able to power our kitchen, core camp lighting, our DJ setup. But then, you know, learned a lot from that experience as well; that we were reliant on someone needing to pull the trailer, that we were limited by what could be put in that trailer.

Our system this year, we decided to refine it into more of a smaller modular size, going back to event production and touring. Everything packs into road cases. The batteries, the inverters, clamps, everything is in these modular road cases that can just be tossed into the truck that we rent for everything else.

STUART: 

Sweet. I was really worried about packing and unpacking 3,000 pounds worth of gear out of a cargo trailer that was to be towed. That’s logistically complex. I’m taking notes here. So, what’s your new setup? How many watts does it put up, and what’s the footprint size?

MARCUS: 

So now we have bricks of 15 kilowatt hours of batteries. And for our camp, we had seven of those this year. We brought 85 solar panels with us this year, and we had it spread across three different solar arrays. 

We changed our setup from being a shade structure built off of a trailer, to connecting between the two shipping containers that we have. So we spread a canopy across the two shipping containers in a 20 by 20 footprint that was then about 30 panels there. Then, our second setup was a grid for our tents and for individual campers. We wanted to offer power for evap coolers, for individual shiftpods, and also for our communal shade structure, a cooling tent that we had a 10,000 BTU evap cooler. And then our third grid was another 36 solar panels, a three-phase inverter to be able to charge mutant vehicles and e-bikes. So we created the first public EV and mutant vehicle charging station at Burning Man.

STUART: 

This sounds like, yeah, it sounds like a terrific setup. As a medium-sized camp, I’ve never run a camp of 100+ people. It sounds like a great setup for them. You know, we’re at that realm where, like, really, like one 3000-watt generator probably gets most everything done for us. But, you know, I can replace one of those for 1500 bucks. So I know a lot of camps in that medium size are looking at just like, man, I could buy another $1,500 generator, or I could spend fra-fra-fra-fra-fra-thousand dollars on a solar system. But prices, I know prices on panels have come down a lot in the last year; is that right?

MARCUS:

Panels and batteries come down drastically, drastically. It was like a 40% drop in battery prices this year, which is wild. 

DAVID: 

One thing to think about, though, is for your camp, you know, sustainability doesn’t have to be a destination. It’s part of a journey. And so, with that generator, you could just get a battery bank next to it, and while you’re charging your battery bank, and using your generator, then at night, turn off the generator and just use a battery bank and go hybrid.

That’s the path most people are going to take. You know, budget constraints and capacity constraints because eventually the generators are going to die out. It doesn’t last that long. And so it’s kind of like replacing piece by piece, and that’ll get you to where you want to go.

And what’s awesome is what we’re seeing a proliferation off-playa, too, is using those battery banks wherever you go. Whether it’s charging your phone, charging devices, it’s nice to have just an extra battery bank around. I think that’s where we’re going to see more of that movement, too. Storage. 

MARCUS: 

Yeah, and that was also another part of why we wanted to make these modular road case boxes, because then you, you know, off-season, you can just roll them into your house and plug it in, to a hook up to your house. So there’s places, you can use this stuff, year-round, and then do a quick disconnect, and then bring it out to playa for a week. 

Gas isn’t easy, though, right? I think it’s kind of funny. There’s like rose-colored glasses with generators for some reason at Burning Man; it’s like people think that’s the easy, cheap solution when: 

• Those are engines that have a ton of moving parts
• You have to clean out the filters 
• You keep them maintained
• They tend to break down 
• You have to deal with the logistics of fuel, storing fuel, bringing it in 

And if you’re one of the medium to larger size camps, you’re running your generator yeah, 24/7. And you’re reliant on your daily delivery of fuel. That’s a big deal. 

Something that we learned and had the privilege of last year with the rain, was actually being one of the few camps that had our music going and had no issues with our power because we were all on solar. So generators aren’t the easy answer either. 

And with the batteries that are on the market now, the tech has come a long way. Batteries now come with 15 to 20-year warranties. It’s bananas. You can store them without any maintenance. We store ours at 50%, and come back the next year if we haven’t used them and they’re still at 50%. The prices have really come down and that stuff is really designed to last, and in ways that generators aren’t.

We want to make commercial technology accessible. We noticed a gap in the market. There’s a lot of the small consumer/prosumer like BLUETTI, Jackery, sort of camping-sized, what they call portable power stations, battery brick with a small inverter.

STUART: 

And then there’s the city-sized power.

MARCUS: 

And then there’s the city-sized!

STUART: 

And then, in between, I know what you mean.

MARCUS: 

Yeah. So then there’s the shipping container full of batteries. There’s the tow behind battery banks that you can rent. There’s nothing in between. But if you take the tech that’s used for in-home battery and inverters, and put them in a box, and make them easy to push around, that’s essentially what we created and what we’re trying to share with other camps.

STUART: 

I do like the idea of stepping up to a battery bank as a next step. I know that on the organizational side, our power vendor switched to batteries this year, and it made a huge difference for noise, for gas consumption, for all that stuff. I’m a huge fan.

Hey, David, I want to know more about you. What was your path to get where you are, man?

DAVID: 

My first time on the playa was 2012. My first time, me and my wife went, and we loved it. It was incredible in so many ways to be showered with gifts, knowing that people spent ten thousands of hours building this place for us. It’s amazing, and we were hooked. And our love language is food. I grew up around food my whole life. My family has a restaurant called the Golden Dragon out in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, that had a 40-year run.

And so we thought, okay, how can we do food well? We said, all right, let’s go to the best camp that does it. And that second year we camped with the French Quarter. We kind of learned how a huge village operates, and also that we were doing these, like, underground dinners for artists where they got a ticket, they could come, they could sit in an art car, they can eat. We cooked like six-course dinners, it was crazy. My wife made, like, frozen key lime pie. We did a spit roast boar. It was gnarly. It also was like a ton of work. And so we’re like, we’re gonna do our own camp. And we thought of the thing that is the easiest to make out on the playa, and that was bao.

STUART: 

Now, when you say easy, though, let’s dig into “easy” because there’s certainly a lot of gear involved. How many steamer baskets do you have, and how many woks of boiling water?

DAVID: 

Yeah. The first year we did 2000, we did it through these little butane-like hot pots, and we brought them up in coolers with dry ice. We had this ten by ten carport, with a stripper pole in the middle, that was like the “chicka wow wow.” And you would like, dance and do these things, and you get a bao. And then we had Titanic’s End, the iceberg car, and we would go on the art car out in deep playa, and we would do pop-up bao. We were just all about delighting people with this warm, fluffy, delicious food offering. 

What was great about it is we got to gift finally. The first two years, I really didn’t do that much of the gifting per se directly because we would cook it, that someone else would eat it. I wouldn’t see it. But to give someone a bao directly, and get such praises over and over and over and over again is really a wonderful feeling. And, that feeling is kind of what fuels our community. We try to make everything in the camp as easy as possible so that we can put more time into our gifting. Year by year we tried to tweak the infrastructure to scale up our bao giving. 

2022 is probably peak bao with, you know, 8000 bao. We had to leave the coolers and dry ice to chest freezers, so we brought up four chest freezers full of bao. But that was also the year we’re like, “Oh, chest freezers are great. We’re reducing dry ice. If we can get this on solar, we’ll save money on dry ice, we’ll save money on gas.” And you know, 2023 was a realization of that, too, helping alleviate costs on our go-to infrastructure, that then we could use for more bao, or in our case… In 2019, we started the night market, the Far East night market. I’m not sure if you heard of that.

STUART: 

In Black Rock City?

DAVID: 

Yeah, yeah. So on Wednesday night, we’re usually in the 3:00 sector. We bring between 10 to 15 camps on our plot. And it’s this whole night market of food and drinks and like, hanging out.

STUART: 

What night is this? Did you say Wednesday? 

DAVID: 

Yeah. Yeah. And we did…so this is our fourth, fourth year doing it. And we fed, I think, 2500 people easily. We had “Oh Hell Naan” doing lamb chops and chicken tikka. We had the Lavender Hand Wash Station. We had the pizza people. We had boba. We had ramen sausages. Yeah, it was awesome. So. And what’s cool is we powered all of them, and we didn’t have to run generators to different spots. We had plenty of ice because we had an ice machine that was powered by the sun. And we were able to run this without a generator in sight. You could hear everything. It was awesome. 

To answer your question, we think a lot about abundance. Bao, I don’t know if you know what bao means. We talked about it as the food, but there’s also a homonym for feeling full.

STUART: 

“What’s your bao?”

DAVID: 

What’s your bao? What’s your bao?

STUART:

It means “I ate until I’m full,” right?

DAVID:

Yeah, “I ate until I’m full.” And so we believe in abundance and being able to offer that abundance to everyone and everyone around us. But also starts with us being full ourselves. So, we try to do a lot of things around that theme. So we’re pretty inclusive in the camp. Everyone that comes in knows someone. We’re pretty inclusive in terms of if they haven’t been before, we’ll help them out, or if they’re curious. We’ve had a number of camps that are born and incubated at Bao Chicka Wow Wow, that’s spun off, and now are doing other things, so we can continue to grow and bring more people to Burning Man. Because that’s the game right there: Bring more people to Burning Man.

STUART: 

I hear you. And inspire more camps to step up. You know, I think getting new people in there to help learn the experience is great, but I’m really interested right now in providing the sophomore-year experience to more people. Somewhere around the middle of the week, you start overhearing those conversations that begin with “Next year…” Those are the sophomores, right? And so how do we create more ways, more tools for them? I think right now, maybe it’s a little bit opaque how you actually start a camp. So, I think we can make that more transparent, but I understand you guys are taking an open-source approach to this power tech in camp. Is that right?

DAVID: 

Yeah. Well, a lot of it is through Next Level. But thank you to Burners Without Borders and Icarus because they sort of incepted the idea that solar shade and shade is powered by solar. And what Marcus has put together, anyone can build it. And we’re, but we’re also trying to help them if they don’t know how to. So we’re creating an open source, available for plans, and how they can do it themselves. We’re also trying to do a service, kind of like OSS. That’s the ideal. You know, maybe we get there, but if not, then we’ll just do these one-offs.

STUART: 

That’s the beloved and dreaded Outside Services group that takes care of gray water and all that sort of stuff on playa, right? 

DAVID: 

More than that. They do everything. 

STUART:

We love them. 

DAVID: 

Huge shout out to OSS. 

Our experiment with that was with the Temple Builders Guild. I don’t know if Mark, Next Level, you want to talk about that, but that was the idea that we think we can do this for more people.

MARCUS: 

Yeah. So the Temple Builders Guild approached us two or three weeks before they were getting out to playa, this past year. And they said, “Listen, we would love to power our camp and workshop with solar. We want to start on the smaller side this year.” And so they brought a couple people together, trying to think, “Okay, well, we have two weeks. What off-the-shelf thing can we buy?” 

And it kind of hurt me a little bit to see… I didn’t want to see a missed opportunity. I saw this as like, “Oh, well, I have this system that I have refined that I can put together in two weeks, and I can make it feel off-the-shelf for them, because that is the constraint that they are.” And it’s a similar constraint that a lot of camps are, right? You don’t get all your dues until, sometimes until you’re already on playa. 

So, having already figured out this system, having already started to build it for our camp, I offered to build them a system. Wonderfully, they accepted and built them a, it was an 18-panel solar shade structure, completely self-standing with one battery unit, so it was 15-kilowatt hours of battery and a 6000-watt inverter. What’s great about that system is that it could scale as they grew. 

Of course, immediately they hit the playa and they’re like, “Oh yeah, we want more. We’re trying to power three coffee machines in the morning, a rice cooker, and a microwave at the same time!” I think it did get them about three or four times further than a consumer off-the-shelf product would have taken them, even for that same price. 

I’m excited to put these kits together for other groups in other camps and to show people how to build this for themselves, too. 

When you went to ask about your camp, you’re like, “I’m looking at the bottom line.” And that’s right. So if we are looking at the bottom line, and we’re trying to be sustainable but be cost-effective as well, building a kit or putting together a few of these parts is the efficient way to go, than going with some of the more consumer-grade pieces that are out there. So the Temple Builders did this year, both the workshop and their camp, was fully powered by our solar shade system, and we were thrilled to see that.

STUART: 

Is there a URL we can stick in the show notes for anyone who wants to take a look at your designs? 

MARCUS: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

Everybody, check out our show notes if you want to follow up on some of these design ideas and plans.

DAVID: 

Yeah, and feel free to reach out to us too via email or through our camp. We’re happy to help and talk to any of you that are interested in getting off of gas or, you know, doing hybrid approaches.

STUART: 

Okay, great. Thank you. 

Let’s talk about food some more.

DAVID: 

Yeah, let’s talk about food. I love food.

STUART: 

Over many, many years of cooking, I’ve developed a few cheats and a few workarounds. I’m sure you have, taking your bao operation from a hot plate under a garage carport shelter, to what it is now. Any tips for streamlining, running a better operation, having less crap left over at the end, all those things that we worry about when we have on-playa kitchens?

DAVID:

I think about this all the time, and I’m so happy for the question. And we’re happy to do tours. We did a few tours over the last few years for other kitchens to come through, and how our camp is laid out. By no means do we have a perfect, but it works for us, and, you know, we continue to iterate. 

If we talk about what we did this year in our kitchen, we try to do a few things. One, allow people that do want to prepare their own food to prepare it. And ideally, they did it on the induction stove, or through the microwave, all powered by solar. And we also wanted to reduce going to get ice. So we got an ice machine. We made 500 pounds of ice a day, all on solar. So we saved a bunch on solar. And then we ran this evap cooler, a huge evap cooler, that was also powered on solar.

We did go through double the amount of water we thought we would need, but that will be a problem we’ll tackle next year. But what is awesome is all the leftover water that the ice machine needed to filter through just went straight into the evap cooler. So there’s things like that where you can marry the two. 

In terms of food, people could bring their own. We have two camp meals that we provide for the camp, where we all get together and hang out. But we also encourage people, if they’re cooking their own, to bring double. And that way they can host another group at the camp, and be like, “Hey, you want to have dinner with us?” and allow people to take on and off, on meal planning.

The other thing that my wife does is a meal plan where all of the food is prepared in advance in microwavable pouches or frozen, and then that way, people can just take it. They use it as their ice in their cooler, and then they heat it in the microwave. And the only thing that’s MOOP is just the plastic that came in. And usually, we do double portions in that. That way, people can share it, or they’re hungry and, you know, share with another person or they double up. 

So we think about that, too. Preparing as much as you can before the playa, allowing prep, minimal, on playa. And then try to, you know, any of the waste – we have compost that we bring to compost camp. We have a burn bin to burn all of our compostables. We have lots of chopsticks, as you can imagine. So not a lot of plastic utensils or anything, but, you know, chopsticks burn, and burn those.

MARCUS: 

We also this year, it was kind of a happy mistake. But usually for build week, we will bring disposable chopsticks, and paper plates, and paper bowls. And somehow, like, we couldn’t find that bin, and we thought it had been left behind. So then we just asked that everyone use their own reusable containers for all of build week. And then of course, into the rest of the week everyone just brings their reusable camp plate and spoon. But that reduced the amount of trash. I think we went down like 10 or 12 bags of trash by not having any of those paper plates or paper bowls. So, relying on and insisting that campers bring a reusable bowl or utensil is critical.

DAVID:

In 2022, we had 43 bags of trash, heavy-duty contractor grade. In 2023, we brought that down to 25. And then this year, we had 12.

STUART: 

Yay! All right.

DAVID: 

Yeah. We also did not burn a single gallon of fuel. We had generators. We had the gas. We didn’t need them. We were completely on solar and batteries. And we had more than enough that we were able to charge mutant vehicles, e-bikes, personal devices. 

One of my favorite stories this year. There’s a guy I know, Casey, we used to work out at NIMBY on art cars out in Oakland.

STUART: 

That would be the NIMBY maker space out in Oakland.

DAVID: 

Yeah!

STUART: 

Shout out to Snook.

DAVID: 

Love you, Snook. Yes, that’s where we built Titanic’s End. That’s also where we met Air Pusher and a bunch of other art cars. But Casey has an art car called Double Thyme, ‘thyme’ like the spice, and he totally needed a jump, because it’s an e-battery art car. And it just so happens he found out that our camp exists because our steamer, how we steam like hundreds of bao every 20 minutes, broke, and we had to go to the welders camp to weld it. They told them about our camp. So Casey comes over, and we just literally got it done. It’s working, and we’re able to just roll over our batteries, jump his art car, ate some bao, hung out, reminisced because I haven’t seen him in like a few years. And I just loved that it was such a ‘playa moment’ of everyone kind of contributes to everyone’s burn in some way. And it just so happens one bad thing kind of led to a good thing, which led to another good thing, which then led to an amazing experience because that’s exactly what we built it for. It was awesome. It was such a cool moment this year. And that was because of the power of the sun.

STUART: 

“Buddy, got a jump for an art car?”

MARCUS: 

Yeah. It has been really exciting to offer that as another gift, the ability to charge, whether e-bikes or art cars. I think there’s a lot of people that, as hard as it is to build an art car, sometimes just building, that’s plenty of a project. And then to figure out how to charge an e-art car is a whole other thing. So, I think what we are excited about is to keep that as a public resource, and as much as other art cars can give us a heads up, so we can kind of schedule the in and out. But yeah, you know, if they’re mutant vehicle builders to be, or those that already have an electric art car that are thinking about how to charge it, please reach out and plan that into your next burn.

STUART: 

Well, that’s great. We definitely want to see more mutant vehicles cut the gas line. But, hey, do us a favor. Don’t use up that e-bike guy. You know that one guy I’m talking about?

DAVID: 

What guy? What guy?

STUART: 

One who says he has to go 25 miles an hour everywhere he goes.

MARCUS: 

The one guy!

STUART: 

Yeah. I’m sorry. There’s not just one of those guys! Anyway.

DAVID: 

Oh, that. Yeah.

STUART: 

Just because people have no self-control.

DAVID: 

E-bikes are kind of controversial, right? And also, what’s the rush? There’s so much rushing. If you just slow down a little bit.

STUART: 

It’s a rush just walking the playa. If you’ve never been out there when it’s not Burning Man happening, I strongly recommend it. Go on a night with no moon and you will see the sky like you’ve never seen it before in your life. And you can drive really fast, maybe with a brick on the accelerator and sitting on top of the car and all that stuff.

DAVID: 

I will do that. I think that’s awesome. But one thing I thought: the e-bike helped us a lot. We do on-demand bao. 

STUART: 

What? Wait a minute!

DAVID: 

Yes we do on-demand bao. We actually bring bao to wedding ceremonies. We did the Placement meetup. We’ve brought it to the DMV. One of our favorite things to do is give out about 1500 bao before the gates open. We go and drive up to different art installations while the lights are still on, and feed the crew. It’s like our favorite thing to do. And those e-bikes helped us bring those 1500 bao out before the Gates open.

STUART: 

What!?! Come on. You can only fit like a half a dozen bao on any bike.

DAVID: 

No, no. So we have these backpacks. Each of the backpacks fits 80 bao. Each one has 12 racks. And so four of us would load out full, like, 400 bao at a time and just go and drop them at all of these different places, and feed the people. We did the drop to Temple Guild, and then they showed us around the Temple. And shout out to RAT.

STUART: 

That’s the Renewables for Artists Team, yes, more our favorite people.

DAVID: 

They did an incredible job there powering the Temple. They’re awesome.

MARCUS: 

Yeah, Ken and Matt over there who headed up their electrical system just did an incredible job. They reached out to us for some of our learnings from our prior year in particular in like, data capture, there’s some open-source technology called Home Assistant. You can loop in a bunch of power plugs that share data over Wi-Fi. And that’s how we did a lot of our data collection. And I showed them how to do that. And they like, took it to the next level, seriously. They had sensors everywhere. They were measuring everything. And they realized that they were using 1/6th as much power as they had calculated that they would. And Matt’s dashboard with gauges and meters that’s the most beautiful dashboard. And Matt designed this thing so he could quickly share and show people what they were consuming. Yeah, we took a bunch of bao while they were still putting things together, We made their day, and they made ours.

STUART: 

I’m kind of playing the devil’s advocate here. I like an e-bike as much as the next guy.

DAVID: 

So, not all e-bikes are bad!

MARCUS: 

It’s a reality that campers want them. And for our camp, it was the reality that that load, they’re going to come and plug it into our camp grid anyway. So we needed to be ready for it. So we actually asked, everyone who is going to bring an e-bike to let us know and to pay a little extra to contribute to the grid and to make them know.

STUART: 

And maybe take a little quick test on driving rules. I mean, the problem is not e-bikes. The problem is assholes driving too fast and any type of a motorized vehicle, right? You think we would have learned that lesson, oh, back in ‘96.

DAVID: 

Absolutely. That’s super important. 

What’s interesting, that was another way for us to educate the campers about power. Most people, they just buy the thing, and they’re ready to go, but they don’t have a way to charge it. They’re like, “Oh.” There’s this ah-ha moment. And so we actually did away with air conditioners. We don’t have them. All of it is evap coolers. And we’ve set up a communal charging area where people have to say, “All right, what are you bringing? What’s the wattage? How much you’re going to pull?” and give them their own personal estimate of how much they’re going to pull from the camp grid. And so I think it’s really important to use some of these things which are needs, because people are, you know, they’re self-indulgent and they need to figure out their own stuff. But if you give them a reason of what’s going on, to get what they need, and educate them along the way, then you’re most likely to have them buy-in in the sustainability. And it’s like, “Oh, maybe you all can only bring one or two bins. It’s not four. All right, slow it down. What can you share with the rest of the camp?” Things like that.

STUART: 

Hey, tell me about the art car.

DAVID: 

Yeah, which one? We got… We have a few. There’s one called Stardust. And Stardust, I don’t know if you’ve seen it; it looks like a Mars Rover going around.

STUART: 

No, no.

DAVID: 

It’s awesome.

STUART: 

I’ve just seen the big one, that’s glacier white.

DAVID:

Yes. Okay, so Titanic’s End. Shout out to Titanic’s End crew. They’re like brothers and sisters of ours. We’ve camped together all the way up and through 2022. Started in 2014. The first art car for Titanic’s End was an ice cream truck. And, the idea was to go chase around ships with an iceberg. That was it. We’re like, there’s a lot of ships out here. So the goal is to go troll the ships. 

And then during the day, allow people inside the ice cream truck, because it’s super cold. And, you know, while you’re in there, you met the penguin. The penguin can tell your future, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff. I think I had like 10,000 LEDs, if I’m correct on the first build. And that lasted about two years. It was a ton of work. 

And then during the pandemic, our community gathered throughout that time. We actually brought our dome and re-set it up and gathered in there, and it was awesome. “Titanic’s End II: Bring Back the Iceberg” was born. And 2022, was the first time we debuted it and put together. I think it has hundreds of thousands of LEDs. It’s meticulously built to be able to weather insane conditions. The first one was kind of a death trap, not going to lie. People getting off the vehicle is like terrifying. This one has perfect staircases and multiple ways of in and out. 

So, you know, Titanic’s End camped with us in 2022. Then we split off in 2023. Turns out with the mutant vehicle that size, you need fuel, and Hell Station is all the way on the other side. And getting right into deep playa, you kind of need to be in that 9:00, 10:00 area to get right there. So yeah, Bao Chicka Wow Wow, I like 3:00. I like the East side, you know. Shout out to our Placers: Whatsit, Bratty Cat, thank you. You guys are awesome.

STUART: 

Oh you 3:00 people. Yeah, I know what you’re like. 

DAVID: 

Yeah. You know, 3:00’s great. I love 3:00.

MARCUS: 

3:00 is chill.

DAVID: 

Yeah. So Titanic’s End is over on the other side. And I think they just wrapped up another great year. And that crew over there is one of the hardest groups out there. They are totally still on the track of ‘more is more’ and Bao Chicka Wow Wow is kind of moved back into ‘less is more.’

STUART: 

Plenty is plenty.

DAVID: 

Plenty is plenty.

MARCUS: 

We’re still connected. This past year, they debuted their second art car mothership, which is like their front-of-house car. It’s a giant, like UFO on its side.

STUART: 

Oh, I saw it. I saw it this year. Beautiful.

MARCUS: 

It’s absolutely stunning. It is so well-engineered. And as they were designing it and building it, it’s built off of electric motors. I think it’s like a mining vehicle, like a mine-sweeping vehicle. 

STUART: 

Yeah. Some kind of utility vehicle. Yeah.

MARCUS: 

But it’s electric. And they have a generator at their camp. But they’re like, well, we would like to come over to our side. So I said, well, I would love to be able to charge the car off of solar, using our solar power system. And they absolutely jumped at that. We’re super stoked, as a way for them to start to learn more about integrating solar as part of their production. It’s a massive car with a massive battery. It takes three phases of power for charging, so then that was also a way for us to learn, how do we charge an industrial battery that size off solar? And so we built all that capability into our charging station. We can charge anything. 

As EVs become more common, the more modern or contemporary EV cars and trucks can be your power bank. You can use them as your battery, as your camp battery. And then you can charge into it if you had some solar panels, or off of a generator. The battery is the most expensive part of these systems, but if somebody has, in your camp, has an EV, you’re bringing around a 60 to 150 kilowatt-hour battery. You have it there. And so you can charge it and you can pull a charge from it. So I see that also as one of the steps to getting more camps to rely less on generators.

On that note, we bought a 1950s gas pump with, like, a rotary dial. Shout out to Fernando and our team, who is a brilliant engineer tinkerer. He tore it open, pulled out all the guts, put in a stepper motor and a microcontroller and a little power meter. And then we fed a plug to the end of the gas pump. And so you could plug in your e-bike to the tip of the gas pump. And then the dials would turn and show you the watt-hours that you were consuming on this 1950s gas pump.

STUART: 

That’s amazing.

MARCUS: 

So yeah, you know, we like a little cyberpunk.

STUART: 

They used to make interesting noises when you put dinosaur juice into your Model T.

So what’s up for this year? You’re just going for plentiful plentitude? Kind of dialing it into where it is? Not doing anything bigger, crazier? You’re just going to keep the crazy?

MARCUS:

We’re bringing on another art car. Someone else in our camp; it will be out of our camp. Yeah. So that one’s – it’s being made, actively, on an electric base as well.

STUART: 

So it’s still a secret?

MARCUS: 

I think so.

STUART: 

Okay. Alright. Shhh.

MARCUS: 

You know, these days it’s like, you don’t know if it’s actually going to… Is it going to hit the schedule? These are projects of passion, right? But not necessarily of schedule.

STUART: 

That’s part of the beauty of Burning Man scheduling. The more you say it, the more you have to do it. 

DAVID: 

That is Burning Man!

MARCUS: 

So that’s there. And then that will be a full week being charged off of our solar grid. And then we are going to do some aesthetic upgrades to our solar gas station to make it feel a little bit more retro-futuristic. We’ll probably combine the habitat power and our core infrastructure into one grid. 

And then also just roll out more of these kits to other camps. I’ve already had some other camps reach out. 

STUART: 

Yeah. I think there’s a lot of middle room there for smaller camps. 

So David, what do you see coming up here? Not just this year, but give me a three or five years ahead into the future. 

DAVID:

Crystal ball? 

STUART: 

How are we doing on this whole sustainability plot? Do you think we’re going to get there?

DAVID: 

Yeah. I mean, the theme next year’s what, something about the future right?

STUART: 

It is.

DAVID: 

Tomorrow today. Future.

STUART: 

I understand… I heard it was Tomorrow Today, is the theme, yes.

DAVID: 

Tomorrow Today. I think we’re kind of living that in a lot of ways. For us, it’s not just about sustainability and energy, it’s sustainability and culture. When I look at the reason for that sophomore group to create a theme camp, a lot of it is like how they want to create their own community or support their community. It turns out, though, that being skilled in one thing doesn’t necessarily translate into other things when you’re dealing with people in the desert. So I’m hoping like, our experience now can help bring in new blood, or take off some of the load on some of the crusty Burners, and know that more people here is a good thing, and more inclusion is a good thing. 

One thing I did experience this year that I thought was awesome like, everyone that was there wanted to be there. The rain shook people out. The heat shook people out. And this year, everyone that was there did a really good job. I think next year we’ll have more people back. 

And I’d like at least for Bao to continue on our trajectory of no fuel. I’d like to be able to give our neighbors’ camps power through HUBS, or through our public meeting vehicle charging station. I’d love to be working with other camps and setting up charging stations of their own, on other parts of the playa. I like the idea of… there’s so many bike repair shops. Well, we should have centralized power or microgrids. Centralized power in my mind right now is Hell Station. That’s where you go for gas. Why not have microgrids where people can charge their personal phones, do the things, all across the playa? And that’s not just BLAST and one green alternative zone, but across the entire playa. And when we talk about EVs coming up, and then being able to offer that battery bank to their camp, 70% of Burning Man’s carbon footprint is from transportation, just people getting there. So, if we’re encouraging a world by 2030 where the majority of things are powered by the sun or batteries, we’re not burning fossil fuels, that’s a huge added advantage of getting us to our goals. 

For us, food is a big piece. We continue to incubate food camps. So, if you’re a chef or aspiring chef, we’d love to bring you in, whether at our night market or in our camp ourselves. And we’re really stoked with Oh, Hell Naan; in their sophomore year this past year, they’ll probably come back next year. They brought amazing Pakistani/Indian food. We had like 600 lamb chops that were roasted over charcoal. 

STUART: 

Messy, messy, but delicious.

DAVID: 

I’ve never had such delicious lamb chops.

MARCUS: 

Oh, those bones were picked clean!

STUART: 

Yeah, I’m sure. Not a composting problem, the charcoal, charcoal, charcoal.

DAVID: 

Yeah. We composted that. Yeah. I’d love to see just more camps offering food, and bringing people together however they want. We’d love to be a resource for that as well as on the sustainability side. 

One thing I have been thinking about that I haven’t really got a solution is we’re finding my peers having more kids and family, and some people are interested in bringing their kids. We have dropped off bao at Kidsville. 

STUART:

You should have an activity for the Black Rock Explorers, which is like our scouting troop. 

DAVID: 

I didn’t even know that. 

STUART: 

Show them how the dumplings get made.

DAVID:  

Oh, that’d be cool.

STUART: 

Yeah, they’d love it.

DAVID: 

Interesting. There’s so many things about the playa I didn’t even know happen. It’s great.

STUART: 

It’s true. It’s so many things to so many people. And that’s why I keep going, honestly, because I don’t know what all the things are to all the people.

Why do you keep going, David Hua?

DAVID:

Wow. Why? It changes from year to year. But I think in general, I love the community. I love the gifting, I love the art. The principles have carried on to the default world. Some of my best relationships with, you know, friends and close the closest I felt of people on the playa that are now real-world relationships. I just finished my 11th birthday. Next year will be 12. I love that we can be, we can thrive out there. I don’t worry about surviving, right? They say the first year bring a cup. You’re like, oh, yeah, because I need to take care of myself. Then you bring a pitcher because you’re, like, filling up your friends. I feel like Bao Chicka Wow Wow has a well, and that well is abundant for anybody and everybody to quench their thirst.

I love the creativeness of the art. And really, with the solar we had, Fnnch has been our resident artist a couple of years. Marcus, too. He made solar art for the first time, and his arch was completely powered by solar, inspired from what we were doing. And I’d love to see more art incorporating solar, not just like this thing off in the distance, as a battery bank. 

Why? What an incredible sense of freedom out there. And to be able to tinker and, you know, pull on curiosity. Bao has been a bit more of like a canvas for other people to paint what they want to do. But the core of it, it’s just we give out food, and we give out bao, and, we love doing that. It’s just waterfalls of appreciation for something as simple as, you know, something of sustenance for them. And I love visiting other camps and sharing in that. And then the night market as being a big piece of that, too.

STUART: 

Marcus De Paula, Next Level: Why keep going? What does Burning Man have to offer the world, or you personally?

MARCUS: 

Yeah. Because of the number of years this camp has been around, and the number of years that we’ve been going, we now are the mentors. And we have the opportunity and the gift to show others how it can be done, and to inspire how they can thrive. That has been some of the most rewarding moments when people come and visit our camp, and they’re like, “This is incredible. I want to do this, in my camp, we’re going to do this next year. I’d never thought to do it this way.” To really step into that role and continue to inspire, to continue to provide tools to other camps, so they can skip some of those really hard first years of hard learnings. They’re still going to have their challenges, but I hope they’re new ones, that they don’t have to repeat some of our mistakes, and they can grow, and step ahead. That’s how I really felt with the Temple Builders Guild in their camp, and how they took our solar, our data collection architecture, and ran with it into an execution that was far and beyond like anything I had ever conceived. That was incredible. 

I really love teaching and inspiring and then seeing what people do with it. And that’s why I go, just this incredible knowledge share.

DAVID: 

I also want to add to that. I wouldn’t really be here with Next Level if it wasn’t for Burning Man. We probably would never have crossed paths. Stuart, you too. What an amazing event that brings such people together where you can mix it up in such a way. This year, we had people from seven countries in our camp, which provided such an amazing viewpoint of different cultures and how they see things and what’s going on, but still experiencing the dust together. 

There’s not many places like that, that could do that. Serendipitously, here we are. And we’re going to do this thing together, and whether it’s one moment for a few minutes, or whether it’s for years, both possibilities are there.

MARCUS: 

Yeah, it’s definitely like accelerated relationship development. When you’re cooking with people, sharing food, living with them, building showers with them.

STUART: 

Yeah, it’s funny because building showers actually creates more closeness than taking showers together!

MARCUS: 

Yeah, it does. Yeah, it’s these shared experiences that you really grow close to people, and you can see so much of who they are, and the beautiful characters, those characters shine through. You get to see aspects of people that you wouldn’t see otherwise.

DAVID: 

I think especially around food, there’s this shared table. Everyone has a seat. Common ground. There’s no hierarchy. I think that’s a pretty good thing about what we do there, too.

STUART: 

Yeah, well, I don’t make promises lightly, but I promise I’m going to come and look for you guys around on the 3 o’clock side; follow my nose for the smell of delicious steaming baozi.

I want to see this giant steamer rig you’ve got. I’m kind of a kitchen, playa kitchen geek, too, so I’ll make you a stop on my “playa homes tour.” 

Thank you so much, guys. My guests have been David Hua, Chairman Bao, 

DAVID: 

Thank you so much.

STUART:

and Marcus de Paula, Next Level

MARCUS: 

Thank you. Thank you.

STUART: 

of Camp Bao Chicka Wow Wow. I got it right that time, right? 

DAVID: 

You got it.

STUART: 

Bao Chicka Wow Wow.

Bao Chicka Wow Wow.

All right. Thanks, guys.

That’s it for this episode of Burning Man LIVE, which is and shall continue to be a production of the nonprofit Burning Man Project, made possible in large part by donations by friendly folks like you, who sidle on over to donate.burningman.org and drop us a little bit of the cool green. 

Thanks to everyone who made this one possible, and big appreciations to the Burning Man LIVE production team: Vav-Michael-Vav, kbot, Actiongirl, Allie, and DJ Toil. 

And as always, thanks, Larry.

 

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