Campfire: A City Building Podcast

#14 Mars College: Building Temporary Desert Cities

Episode Notes

Nestled in the California Desert, Mars College can be thought of as a pop up city. It rises from the sand, disassembles, and then comes back. This week, Jackson sat down with Gene and Freeman from Mars College. They chat first about the mission behind and the logistics of constructing a city from scratch each cohort before diving into daily life. When you’re so remote, communal living is a big part of life, so the three talk about shared responsibilities and the food situation at Mars. Finally, they talk about the college side of the group— how people learn from one another.

 

Topics Covered: 

Campfire is brought to you by Cabin - a network of coliving neighborhoods for nature-loving creators and remote workers. You can learn more at the following links:

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Episode Links:

Mars College’s website 

Gene on Twitter

Cabin’s website

 

Episode Credit:

Hosted by @JacksonSteger

Sound Engineering by @Prodcolin

Videos and Clips by @McdonnellCallum 

Produced by @PhilippeIze

Distribution by @Alisonclaire and @PhilippeIze

 

 

Episode Transcription

Transcript: Mars College

[00:00:00] Jackson Steger: Hi everyone. This is Jackson Steger and you're listening to Season 2 of Campfire. Let's get it. This season of Campfire seeks to understand how to build new cities. Each week we are joined by experts and practitioners from different startup cities who will share the stories and lessons they have learned from experimenting with radical new models of living.

[00:00:24] Cabin is building its own network city, which you can learn more about by visiting www.creatorcabins.com or by following us on Twitter @creatorcabins. Today's guests are Freeman and Gene from Mars College, and Mars College is a three-month program in the middle of the Sonoran Desert where residents create a temporary city. When the program starts, they build their own shelters self-organized into educational programs that include everything from AI generation to fire spinning and set up their own grid, only to then take it all down at the conclusion of the semester, disappearing without a trace. This part residential community, part R&D lab, is dedicated to cultivating a new low-cost, high-tech lifestyle.

[00:01:12] We thought that it would be a good fit for the podcast to underscore that not every city concept needs to be bound to a forever timescale. Each version of Mars College vanishes as fast as it appears in the desert, swept away by the sands of time. Residents learn how to make that time count, how to experiment with modular structures, and how to create sustainable living in harsh conditions, and we mean harsh. To learn more about the program and join for the 2023 experience, you can visit www.mars.college. Onto the episode. Hope you enjoy.

[00:01:48] Gene, Freeman, thank you both for coming to Campfire. I'm so excited to have you both on. This is our second attempt at recording after a few technical difficulties, so thanks for your patience.

[00:01:58] Gene: Yup. Thanks for having us.

[00:02:00] Jackson Steger: So, Freeman, I'd love to start with you. In 10 to 30 words, if you were explaining it to my grandma, how would you describe Mars College?


 

[00:02:09] Gene: This is the hardest question out of all of them.


 

[00:02:11] Freeman: Okay. So, you know, one thing is looking at the Burning Man experience as being an example of how to live in an open desert environment and still have a good time. So, I feel that it's one part Burning Man, we’re in the desert, which also makes it inexpensive and stark. We very much need to do everything ourself. And then we have fast internet, and then this sort of question of what to do, we have time, we're not paying rent, how to use time and internet in the desert in this pop-up city that we make. So, it's some combination of that.

[00:02:50] Jackson Steger: Awesome. And Gene, Freeman uses the phrase ‘pop-up city’, what are the different components to that? What does it mean to be a pop-up city? What are the different pieces?

[00:03:00] Gene: What does it mean to be a pop-up city…It's a pop-up city in the sense that all of the components of the city are things that we bring in. Freeman works a lot with pallet racks, and so that tends to be the base of the communal structures that we build. We also bring out trailers and vans. And so, everything is very modular and can be configured very quickly and flexibly and reconfigured until we're able to put it out somewhere where there's basically nothing else, just an open land. And I have some activity there over some amount of time, we do it over a couple of months, and then we're able to bring everything back and leave nothing there. Yeah, that's kind of our flow.

[00:03:41] Jackson Steger: Thank you. Yeah, I want to double-click on that ‘leave nothing there’ piece for a second. But in our first attempt at recording before, there were some technical challenges, we talked about this idea of ‘leaving no trace’, which I have noticed is common among backpacking communities that I’ve been a part of. And I love this idea of vanishing as without any like impact or harm to the planet, but I'm curious, Freeman, on the just the material side, what are some of the ways in which you build the city that make it easy to both prop up but then also to take down what sort of – I imagine it's not concrete, what are the kinds of materials you might use.

[00:04:21] Freeman: As Gene mentioned, we're really into pallet racks, and so we really build most of the communal structures with pallet racks. I'll say that the one other sort of guiding philosophy is to really try to cut as little as possible. As much as we can, we try to do all of our platforms in some increment of 4 feet, so that we can use standard 4 ft. x 8 ft. sheets of plywood. As much as possible we use standard 2 x 4. And so, as much as we can build this thing and not cut, then it's really great, because then, you know, we’d take it all apart, it's an ongoing asset. And as soon as we start cutting, and then it feels like a really minor thing. There's just a little corner that's in our way, and we could just cut it off. But a full sheet of plywood is a really great resource. A sheet of plywood that has the corner cut off now needs to go into the pile of less great plywood, and that there is like lots of different variations on what a less great piece of plywood is, and it just really complicates our world. And so, as much as possible, trying to not cut and use standard components is really the way to go.

[00:05:36] And pallet racks are built for bolting stuff onto them. They have bolt holes every 2 inches going up the entire length of them. And so, then we're really able to use standard hardware to mount stuff onto them and make stuff.

[00:05:52] And one thing I'll say about the ‘leave no trace’ ethic is that it's both nice from this sort of eco perspective of looking at how we can get 30, 40 people living on the land and the land gets better, that we don't necessarily have to have a negative impact on the land that we're on. So, I feel like that's a big part of the ‘leave no trace’.

[00:06:17] The other part of it that I think is also very valuable is sort of the iterative nature of it, that we don't build it and then spend the rest of our lives trying to tack things on to what we did the first year before we knew what we were doing, that we get to build it, we get three months, so we get to live in it and really experience the things that we did well and the things that we'd like to improve on, and then we get to break it down and design our next one. And I really love that sort of iterative nature of these structures, the sort of pop-up campus that we do, is that we're not constantly just fixing the first thing that we did.

[00:07:00] Jackson Steger: Yeah. To that point of being iterative, Gene, what are some lessons in either the modulation of the structures themselves or maybe the layout of the broader campus and how you interface with like more communal spaces versus more private spaces, what are some things you've learned over the years that work well in that interaction?

[00:07:20] Gene: Yeah. So, being able to do this iteratively, as Freeman says, we get to try things over, and we had a different layout each time. Usually, Freeman will have an urban layout, like a design plan that we start with. And as we build, there's some flexibility, so we might get to try different things. Both the layout, the design, kind of changes each year. And the first year, we had almost two separate camps, one for the communal spaces and one for where people were living. And we found that was good, but then we wanted to try to make something a little more cohesive. One of our big challenges out there is wind. And so, we wanted to make a structure that was much more self-contained. And so, we experimented on putting trailers all around the communal areas. And then we found that had some weaknesses too because it created kind of tension between the commercial spaces, so to speak, and the residential spaces. Like if someone wanted to use the communal spaces at night, that could create noise for people living around there. And so, then we react to that. Because it's a little unchartered for us having a bunch of people out there living together where we have maximal flexibility in how we structure things, we get to have a lot of opportunities to learn from our mistakes.

[00:08:38] Jackson Steger: Awesome. I want to go a little bit deeper into some of these communal pieces, specifically, at least to start, the shared utilities. So, I’m curious how some of the most basic things work, like water access and energy access. Like how does water work at the college?

[00:08:55] Freeman: Mars is this 20-acres in the open desert, but it's a mile away from Bombay Beach, which is a small, cute little town that is on the grid, and we have a compound there that has water. And so, we move water out in the back of my pick-up truck basically. I have a big IBC tank, and so, we take the big IBC tank out and fill up freshwater tanks in vans and RVs, and we have some other tanks. And then we also have a big filter back at the place in town, and so then we'll also fill up a bunch of 5-gallon drinking water jugs, and we'll bring them out and put them in a variety of communal areas, so that it's easy for people to get drinking water. And then we just have a routine of that, you know, that every week, a couple times, we'll need to go in and fill up the IBC tank, take that out and fill up people's tanks, and also do water runs with the drinking water jugs, and it has hassles in trying to coordinate people, but it's not difficult beyond just for being a chore.

[00:10:07] Jackson Steger: Sure. And then, you have internet, you have these unicycles that somehow get power. How does power work? I assume you harness the sun, but also you mentioned wind being an issue, maybe you harness the wind, how does power work at the spot?

[00:10:21] Gene: So far, we haven't harnessed the wind. I think, as far as I'm aware, wind power doesn't work very well at a small scale, like you really have to have big wind turbines; whereas, solar power is very scalable from a small degree to a large degree, and we have a ton of sun. And the sun is much more reliable because some days there's just no wind at all, but there's very few days where we don't have a lot of sun. So, for the most part we rely on the solar power that we set up out there to power most of the lights, the internet equipment, to give some power to the trailers and basic appliances, and usually that's sufficient. We also have a stash of generators when something is wrong with the solar. If we have a very cloudy day, or we overdrew it, we do have ways of reaching back into the tap. We can get some power from town by filling up some battery packs. There's a bunch of things we've done, but probably the solar power is the heart of it. Yeah.

[00:11:15] And then, as far as other utilities, we do internet out there. So, we have an internet connection in town, and we've basically become something like of a pop-up ISP, and we beam the internet over these ubiquity devices that can send point to point over a fairly short distance and receive it on the other side of Mars, where we then set up access points there. That's kind of been the general set-up.

[00:11:41] Jackson Steger: That's awesome. I'm curious, well just in this sort of like helping each other out in the same vein of shooting internet over these distances, in our first go, we talked about how people are coming together at Mars in this harsh environment in the desert with no amenities, and you commented that if they can do it here, they can do it anywhere. And whether it's Mars College or Mars, the planet, in any of these harsh environments, it's important, I think, that residents work together towards common goals. And so, for our audience, you could outline how responsibilities at the city are split. There's this fire, water, air, earth framework on your website. Maybe you can lean on that in your answers a little bit.

[00:12:24] Gene: Yeah, sure. Yeah, so we've done this a couple of times, and I think the outlook has been a little different each year. The first year, arguably the first two years, we didn't really do very much to assign roles, or it was very much like there's the little bit of a gift economy kind of spirit, where what ends up happening is that a relatively small number of people shouldered most of the burden. And that works but it of course lacks certain things that we'd like to see. You know, we really want people to get active and get invested and try to contribute.

[00:12:57] The second year, we came up with this earth, water, wind, fire idea where most of the chores, that when you really zoom out, there's actually almost very little that needs to be done after the build. Most of them are like these chores are related to water, power, internet maintenance and waste, and things like that. But there's still these chores, and so, we still didn't want to go giving jobs or anything like that. And so, we thought we can come up with this house concept where there's earth, water, wind, fire, and most of the work can be associated with one of those. And then groups of people, they are almost like the sorting hat, they belong to one of those houses and then it's a group responsibility, and then they're responsible together for figuring out how that works. And usually when you have a smaller group, people will figure out a way to distribute that relatively fairly.

[00:13:46] And so, that ended up working reasonably well, and we'll see how much we carry over that concept, but we are getting a little better at kind of organization, but we still don't know what's perfect.

[00:13:58] Jackson Steger: What about on the food side, how does food work at Mars College? Do you grow any crops? And if yes, what kind of crops work best for that timeframe? You could take that answer anywhere you want.

[00:14:11] Freeman: We don't really grow food. We've experimented with hydroponics and a few things. There's a story that would be really great if we could, that we were driving for this year of can we compost our waste and use our gray water and then grow plants. It would be amazing if the output of 40 people living in the desert was that at the end of it we just had 20 little fruit trees in a hundred gallon grow bags that was what we essentially leave behind and that we can move them to the compound. So, that was the dream.

[00:14:44] It's really been something that we have been thinking a lot about. I've been reading a lot about Black Martin Arts College, this liberal arts college that's really famous, and their whole thing was ‘it's unstructured, but we eat all our meals together.’ And so, we've been trying to do group meals. This past year, early on, we had group meals, there was a lot of really great energy. The build week, I had really great energy. Everybody's really excited to be there. Everybody's really putting their best foot forward, and we were building, and there were group meals almost every night, and it was really fantastic for the month, and we were composting, and we were living the dream. But then the compost started having flies, the kitchen was a little bit messy. The flies were in the kitchen. Some people were, it looks like the same people are cooking, and other people are like. And so, then we had this kind of predictable kitchen drama, and we just backed all the way off. Basically, all the trailers have their own little kitchens in them, the van people mostly have little camp stoves, and we just went all the way back to you just need to take care of your own food, cook on your own. It's like we still had some communal cooking spots, but we shifted back from being a communal thing.

[00:16:00] And to be honest, I don't know exactly what the right answer is still. It’s still something that we're really interested in. The nice thing is that the fallback situation, where everybody cooks their own food and has their own little mini kitchen, and so it's like our worst case is manageable, but it's a little less social, and there's a bunch of positive things that come from eating together. But yeah, coordinating the group kitchen is something that we haven't cracked yet.

[00:16:30] Jackson Steger: So, we've talked a lot about the Mars pieces of this, the being in the desert, the setting up the infrastructure, and all of the things that go into that, I want to talk now about the college side of Mars College and the academic life that one might encounter. And reading again from your website, academic life revolves around self-organized study groups. There are no full-time educators. So, I have a two-part question, and Gene, maybe I'll start with you. What are the advantages of having everyone being both a teacher and a student and how generally does curricula wind up being designed?

[00:17:07] Gene: Yeah, for one, you don't have to have a staff of educators. So, it's just very practical. We tend to really want people who have something to share. And in practice, different people are able to lead on different kind of academic fronts more than others, but we really encourage this almost unconference style self-organization because we find that everyone there is coming with something that interests them that other people don't know and that it can probably be quite relevant to what we do. So, it just would work that way, even if we didn't set out for it to be like so. And it's also one of these things we've had a little bit of an arc, where in the beginning we didn't really have much of an idea of what it should be other than things that are very broadly aligned with the overall premise of what we're doing – living sustainably in the desert, trying to use technology to your advantage. And so, those things are sufficiently broad that a lot of people can bring different things into it.

[00:18:08] And then, over time, there were certain clusters of things that became interesting and developed on their own and had champions to lead them through. So, for my part, I spend most of my time thinking about AI and even there drilling in kind of creative AI, broadly speaking, using AI in some kind of a creative context, not necessarily solving industrial problem. And so, they've developed some culture around that. Some of the people who come are interested in that, and so, we developed a study group around that. We've also had, over the last two years especially, a growing interest in DAOs and Web3 and all of these concepts floating around the crypto space that are becoming, I would say, through things like Cabin DAO and City DAO and other ventures out there that are interested in applying these technologies to physical places. Their interest in that also percolated a little bit. And we have started. This past year we had the ‘How to DAO’ workshop that one of our members led on a week-to-week basis, and it was like very practice-based, very philosophical. We didn't rely on it for anything mission critical, but we hope that kind of grows.

[00:19:12] Jackson Steger: Yeah, I love the emergent nature of that. And Freeman, I'm curious, Gene just said nothing that the curricula have consisted of so far has necessarily been mission critical. But let's imagine for a second that Mars College was the status quo of how so many people had to live because of maybe some sort of apocryphal situation, let's say you had to prescribe maybe three courses. Actually, I want this answer for each of you. Imagine your own kids had to go through some kind of training for building something like Mars College, and you had three courses or three topics to educate themselves in, what topics might those be? And yeah, feel free to pick any.

[00:19:58] Freeman: One way Gene and I have been talking about the activities at Mars is we talked about layer one activities as this physical layer just supporting the body, where it's like bringing the water in, arranging power, bringing in internet, and there's a number taking care of trash. There's a bunch of things that you just have to do in order to support the community, the physical community, and keep it healthy.  And so, I feel like doing something, being able to have some skill at the physical layer, is important.

[00:20:33] And then we talked about this layer two thing, where Gene was just talking about it’s Crypto, it’s AI, it's teasing the internet for fun and profit. It’s exploring innovation, and also potentially with some hope of being able to pull money from the internet at some point I'd say is a big part of things. And so, I'm really into the idea that if you're doing something on the tech layer, some activity, it's programming, it's design.

[00:20:59] And then there's this third layer that we talked about of like we have time. So, we're not paying rent, we're not in the rat race, and having some endeavor, which is a little bit more sort of joy-oriented. It's yoga, or music, or dance, that having some activity, something that you're really pushing that is really not necessarily practical in a money or food sense inspires joy.

[00:21:29] Jackson Steger: Gene, anything to add to these curricula you would prescribe?

[00:21:33] Gene: Yeah, that's exactly right. The original premise of your question, what would you have to do if there's some apocalyptic event, Bombay Beach, or the area around Bombay Beach, it's like bare desert. So, it almost looks like, it almost basically is that premise. And so we, for creative AI stuff, I very much stress that it's something that you do after you have some roof over your head, protection from the elements, and your basic needs met, and usually early on we really focus a lot on the building and setting up all of the sort of camp services and getting people comfortable and happy and healthy.

[00:22:09] And then you have layer two. It's somewhere between this purely joy-oriented and purely safety-oriented. It's things that appeal to us intellectually but are also practical. Some will give you skills you’re going to have to work online, maybe things that you can use to sustain this lifestyle for as long as possible, which isn't a lot and which is a lot less than you would need if you were doing this from New York or San Francisco because, as Freeman said, there's no rent, we live a pretty basic, and it's not an inflated sort of financially lifestyle. So, you just need the bare minimum to do that.

[00:22:42] And then, the thing I would add, the third layer, is we have the electric unicycling culture, very much something pushed by Freeman and adopted by many of us. We ride those a lot for fun.

[00:22:52] Jackson Steger: Love that. Love the layer 1, 2, 3 framework. Just for listeners, I'll give you a quick, very fast readout of some of the other kinds of study groups listed on Mars College's website. We have bots, bouldering, ceramics, live coating, fire spinning, 3D rendering, yoga, meditation, telepresence, and VR drones, as well as electric unicycling. So, there's more there I didn't read, but those ones jumped out at me.

[00:23:18] Freeman: I’ll jump in a little bit with the unicycle thing because I feel like it's actually really just relevant. It's both incredibly fun. But also just for other people in sort of Cabin DAO kind of world, you're spending a lot of time dealing with distances that are a little bit bigger than walking from one room of your house to the other room, or like from one office to another office. It's like you get 10 acres, 20 acres, 50 acres. That's the joy of this whole sort of movement of work remote, is that if we're not in the city, we get to start talking about acreage when we start talking about laying out these little alternatives. But that when you do that, it's fantastic, but you also start having a lot of scenarios, where, you know, where you are is about 300, 400 meters from where you want to go, plus another 300 meters to the kitchen, to the bathroom, that like these are all non-trivial walks if you're doing that all the time, and we're really into it. But the unicycle really changes the geography of a place in this really kind of fundamental way that it shrinks things together and makes it possible to occupy 20 acres or 40 acres of space in a way that's really difficult to do if everybody's walking everywhere.

[00:24:41] Jackson Steger: I’m glad we got the unicycle tangent. If you go to www.mars.college, just for the listener, you can see pictures of whole squads riding up on these electric unicycles, which I should add, they look like mountain unicycles, like these are thick gravel tires capable of navigating the type of terrain you might see there. So definitely check that out.

[00:25:06] As we approach close, and maybe it is related to going to www.mars.college, one last two-part question. So, first part is, if listeners are interested in learning more and finding out about the next Mars College cohort, where should they go? And then the second piece, which is a bit more fun, is there is this blog post you all have from late 2021 called The Mars Survival Guide, and I'm curious, for both of you, what are maybe three essential items on your personal Mars Survival Guides. And Freeman, I imagine a unicycle is on you. So, you can add a fourth on top of that.

[00:25:39] Gene: Yeah. If you go to Burning Man, you really have to bring everything with you, but we're actually close enough to civilization that it's not that you could always get something that you forgot. It's really the most critical things are just the willing spirit because, for most people, it's a little counterintuitive that you would want to go somewhere to start as a baseline. It takes a little bit of setting kind of an intention to live in this kind of a lifestyle of recognizing its benefits. And so, those are the most critical things. But yeah, from a material standpoint, then the electric unicycle. I would second everything that Freeman said. It really changes the way you look at distances, and we're just like lords of the lamb. We can go everywhere, and it's not just Mars, but there's endless space and nature and incredible places to visit that are really difficult to get to basically any other way. Like even by a bicycle, it’s not a lot of the terrain is not so easy to cover. And so, that's one.

[00:26:34] And otherwise, most of the things we do communally. Oh yeah. There's a couple of things. So, we have a mailing list. And from the very outside, the best place to start is just with a mailing list. And we haven't actually sent all that many emails out. We're going to use it a little more. The blog is also a place where we announce a lot of stuff. And then we just invite people to actually, in this early stage we invite people to, we have an application page, and the application is really, for now, more of an almost like an inquiry form. It's just a place where if people are interested in this, they could reach out to us, and then we'll often set up a call just to introduce ourselves and learn more about people and give them a chance to ask some questions because it can be hard to convey everything that people would want to know just through the website, that’s sucking through a straw a little bit if you haven't been there or you don't know the culture as well. So, that's how we usually structure the communication. And then as people get into our world, we have a discord that we get people into, and then that's where you start to know a little bit more about what's happening inside the community.

[00:27:42] Freeman: Yeah, I think Gene's point of us not being so remote is really valid. I'd say that, in addition to having the internet, we run on Amazon, and you're out in the middle of the desert, but Amazon works, and you're able to manifest the things that you need. The unicycle is key. The one thing that we really encountered this year was that the sort of dust mask and goggles. We get wind, that's no joke, and it's something that Gene actually talks about sometimes of it's not clear that without the wind that the experience would be better. There is something about the wind which it's this like communal experience in adverse circumstance. It's very bonding in a way when we have really strong weather, but it is a time where the goggles, it's not just for looks, it really helps, and there's a whole bunch of the sort of cyberpunk fashion aesthetic starts to kick in when you're living in the desert, and you need eye protection, and you need a dust mask, and you need a way to get around, and you need a light, and you need some gear. And yeah, I feel if you go in to your desert nomad, cyberpunk, cosplay kind of fantasy, that it'll work out.

[00:28:57] Gene: It's bonding and then also it builds camaraderie because we have to take care of these things together. And also, it builds anti-fragility. People want to learn how to resist the elements because, like I said, if you can do it there, you can do it anywhere.

[00:29:13] Jackson Steger: I appreciate that a few other less tangible things on this survival guide include common sense, an open mind, a sense of humor, and a positive attitude. Both of you have all of those things. I would add, for myself personally, I skew a bit pale, so I would bring sunscreen, a hat, and sunglasses. But thank you all for coming to Campfire. For Cabin listeners, I highly recommend you check out Mars College, and I really appreciate everything that you shared with us today.

[00:29:43] Freeman: Thanks.