# Practice Safe Hex - Burning Man Hexayurt Safety Checklist! > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [294]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2015-08-22 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vnepKBjulg. Text: automatic captions, mostly corrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Operational safety rules for hexayurts in a temporary city, transferable to camps. - Career works it belongs to: - Hexayurt (2002): A public-domain disaster shelter made from whole 4x8 building panels with one diagonal cut. - First hexayurt built (2003): The first Hexayurt prototype, built at Burning Man from cardboard panels. - Camp Danger hinge (2010): Community-designed folding Hexayurt held together by tape hinges. (suggested by machine) - Laziness, Impatience and Hubris (2011): Talk at c-base, Berlin: Larry Wall's three virtues of a programmer applied to building, by a hackitect. (suggested by machine) - Hexacloak (2023): A hooded cloak from standard 60-inch cloth with no manufacturing step: drape, tie, twist a double loop.... (suggested by machine) - Hexacoat (2023): A hooded coat cut from woobie blanket fabric, made to order by a Chinese wholesale factory for about £25. (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it. - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction. - hexayurt builds: Hexayurt variants, many designed and built by the community. - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans. - Topics: Hexayurt shelter design & project — tape, hexayurt, roof (60%); Burning Man shelter building (20%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Burning Man (3 here; 90 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.58 (1.00 is the top), number 52 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [36] [The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware housing for the world (2002)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/36.md): same career work: Hexayurt - [374] [The Hexayurt Project 2007 Intro Video (2007)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/374.md): same career work: Hexayurt - On the same works, just before: [711] [Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md); [310] [Engineers Without Borders Sheffield Plywood Hexayurt How To (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/310.md); [303] [How To Sell Ideas from (from Ethereum DEVCON Berlin) (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/303.md) - On the same works, just after: [287] [test edit (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/287.md); [288] [test (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/288.md); [289] [test (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/289.md) ## Reading it Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it. Cite as: Practice Safe Hex - Burning Man Hexayurt Safety Checklist!, video, 2015-08-22, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vnepKBjulg; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [294], https://guptaoption.com/texts/294.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vnepKBjulg&t=0s) hi everybody I'm Vinay Gupta the inventor of the hexayurts and I'm here to talk to you about practicing safe hex at Burning Man this year there are basically Five Points that will make your hexayurt experience better and safer and less inconvenient for the people around you than if you don't do them uh we built the first hexayurt at Burning Man in 2003 and it's roughly doubled in numbers every year since so by now we're getting really a ton of hexayurts and it's putting a bit strain on the ecosystem so the first thing is don't do hexayurt construction work on the paa um the materials that we're working with almost always generate moop when they're being cut and the moop is almost exactly plia cowed so unless you want to spend your time moving with tweezers you really don't want to be cutting that material on the plier if you have to do emergency touch-up work of some kind consider doing something like taping a plastic bag on the outside of the hexayurt and doing the cutting on the inside so at least the moop is contained but even then it's unlikely you're going to get all of it so basically try and avoid construction work on the P all costs [0:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vnepKBjulg&t=58s) second thing is that there's an enormous moot problem with hexayurt it's just blowing off the top of roof rocks as people hit the highway largely on the way out although it may be happening on the way in as well and we just don't see the mo because it's at home rather than on the plier to prevent this sandwich your hexayurt between two sheets of plywood and then strap it down very securely so that the panels don't vibrate in the wind between the two sheets of PL I don't think there's a lighter easier way of doing secure transport than that it's going to put a bunch of additional weight on your roof rack because plywood is heavy but the alternative is you risk having your hexayurt blow away which is an enormous amount of moop and also it costs you a hexayurt which is an expensive thing so try and protect them in transit both for yourself and for other people um third [1:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vnepKBjulg&t=101s) thing is actually making sure your hexayurt doesn't blow away on the pla itself so first practice very deep Stakes because hexayurts are larger than tense they pick up a lot of wind make sure the stakes are candy caned or have the ends protected with a tennis ball or a bottle and then tie the hexayurt down tightly to the P using these so that there's good friction between the hexayurt and the ground and it doesn't slip on its tarp um you want to consider ratchet drps or the Rope Halo I think tape anchors were a good idea at the time but at this point most people are using folding hexayurts and the tape anchor has no special Advantage if the hexayurt is folding it's really something that's a better idea for fixed hexayurts and I think those have had their day pretty much [2:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vnepKBjulg&t=143s) um last thing is this um so far we've been incredibly lucky with fire at burning man there hasn't been fire nothing has caught fire and that includes a hexayurt but they are buildings and particularly when I see uh conglomerations of you know five or six hexayurts in a kind of honeycomb Matrix you do wonder if something catches fire or people going to be able to make their way out in time so I want to ask you to really think about fire safety as being a critical thing for hexayurt ards every hex should have a smoke detector installed at the Apex and the roof smoke detectors are cheap they're what $15 maybe less um you know attach it to the roof leave it there forget about it if there's ever a problem you're going to be the first to know because the smoke will rise to the Apex it'll wake you up this is really simple it's really important and I'd consider it kind of a personal favor if you did that because I really don't want to see somebody get hurt in a hexayurt and smoke detectors are the best way I can think of stucking that happening second [3:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vnepKBjulg&t=200s) thing that I'd like you to do in terms of uh is make sure that you've got fire exits if you've only got one door on a hexayurt and God forbid it does catch fire near the door way you're going to have a hard time getting out so please make sure that you've got two possible exits on the way out even if one of them is lightly taped shut with something like duct tape you can always punch it out in an emergency and go uh if you don't have the panels cut so that there's an entry way even if it's taped over you're not going to be able to get out easily through a wall because this stuff is tougher than it looks so please please please please please smoke detectors fire exits um that's it for me I hope you have a fantastic burn and um yeah join you take care --- End of [294] Practice Safe Hex - Burning Man Hexayurt Safety Checklist!. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [287](https://guptaoption.com/texts/287.md) test edit (2016); the most closely related, [36](https://guptaoption.com/texts/36.md) The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware housing for the world (2002); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.