⚗️ alembic

Search

SearchSearch

436 - Behind the Scenes at Burning Man

Feb 17, 2015, 71 min read

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Marian Goodell & John Gilmore

[NOTE: All quotations are by Marian Goodell.]

“I don’t think Burning Man is the solution. I think that we are a really powerful gravitational force, and mixed with other cultures and other groups, that’s what’s powerful.”

“The biggest problem I think Burning Man has is translating what people think is Burning Man into what really is Burning Man.”

“I want people to see Burning Man as really a state of mind in their heart.”

Burning Man Website

Previous Episode

435 - The Neuroscience of Music

Next Episode

437 - Integrating Sexuality & Spirituality

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic

00:00:22 ►

Salon.

00:00:23 ►

Now, if you’re an old burner but have

00:00:26 ►

been out of the loop lately, you may be surprised to hear our speaker today being introduced

00:00:30 ►

as the CEO of Burning Man, but we’ll always know her as Maid Marian. I never had the pleasure

00:00:37 ►

of meeting her myself, but I can attest to the fact that at the burn, in the back of

00:00:42 ►

our minds, even though we knew that the elusive larry harvey

00:00:45 ►

was in the camp and had a handle on things somewhere we also knew that maid marion was out

00:00:51 ►

and about keeping her eye on us revelers making sure that we were all safe as her spirit hovered

00:00:57 ►

over the city i guess that’s a little dramatic however the new ceo title comes from the fact that the Burning Man organization has now transposed into a non-profit, and it needed a CEO.

00:01:11 ►

In a moment, you’re going to hear the really interesting story of how, of all the original founders of the Burning Man LLC, it was Maid Marian who was elected CEO.

00:01:21 ►

Now, during this conversation, you’ll also hear John Gilmore mention the fact that you have

00:01:26 ►

to have enough juice to make it to a burn. In other words, it not only isn’t easy to get to

00:01:32 ►

Burning Man, in fact, to do it properly takes a year-long commitment. You have to work to get

00:01:37 ►

there, which is one of the reasons that I haven’t made the last few burns. You know, just getting

00:01:43 ►

everything ready takes a lot of work.

00:01:45 ►

As you know, the mantra on the playa is leave no trace. That means that everything, as in everything

00:01:52 ►

that you bring to Black Rock City, must return home with you. And that includes your gray water

00:01:57 ►

and peanut shells. Water that’s been used for cleaning or showers can’t simply be poured on

00:02:02 ►

the ground. You’ve got to have a way to take it back home with you.

00:02:09 ►

Three things that should not be missed during a life on planet Earth are an orgasm, a psychedelic experience, and a week at Burning Man.

00:02:13 ►

Hopefully, you’ll get to experience all of them more than once

00:02:16 ►

because, well, they all have the potential of becoming life-changing experiences.

00:02:21 ►

So now let’s join Christopher Pezza on the playa at Burning Man

00:02:24 ►

as he introduces John Gilmore and Marion Goodell

00:02:27 ►

for their open-ended discussion about some of the issues that festival organizers

00:02:32 ►

everywhere have to cope with in order to pull off a great experience

00:02:36 ►

for their participants.

00:02:38 ►

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Palenque Norte Speaker Series. I’m Pezz.

00:02:44 ►

I’ll be your host for the week.

00:02:48 ►

So this next talk is really special.

00:02:52 ►

I’d like to welcome Marion Goodell of Burning Man.

00:02:55 ►

Marion is the CEO of the Burning Man Project.

00:03:04 ►

And today, Marion will be interviewed by John Gilmore,

00:03:07 ►

who is a technologist and entrepreneur who has been speaking.

00:03:11 ►

So we’ll just get right started.

00:03:13 ►

Thank you both so much.

00:03:15 ►

Hi.

00:03:16 ►

Hi, John.

00:03:18 ►

Thank you for having me here.

00:03:20 ►

Oh, it’s wonderful to have you here.

00:03:22 ►

So you have a really long history with the Burning Man organization

00:03:26 ►

and with Burning Man before it was even organized.

00:03:30 ►

Can you give us sort of a 10,000-foot level overview of your history?

00:03:37 ►

A short version.

00:03:42 ►

Well, I’ve been in this role for about a year.

00:03:45 ►

I’ve been part of the organizing group for 18 years

00:03:48 ►

and attended as a participant for the first two years,

00:03:52 ►

which were 95 and 96.

00:03:53 ►

This is my 20th Burning Man.

00:03:58 ►

Anybody else in the 20-year range?

00:04:00 ►

No? Yeah.

00:04:01 ►

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:04:04 ►

More than 20. We’re all class of yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. More than 20.

00:04:06 ►

We’re all class of 20.

00:04:08 ►

Class of 95, as we say.

00:04:10 ►

Yeah, that was my first burn.

00:04:12 ►

I dated Larry Harvey and found it impossible not to help.

00:04:18 ►

And the areas that I helped build were communications and the business and administration and technology.

00:04:26 ►

Those all fell under me over time.

00:04:28 ►

Legal, government relations.

00:04:30 ►

And I ran the DPW for about eight years in between.

00:04:32 ►

I just gave that up two years ago.

00:04:34 ►

So one of the things I know from other contexts

00:04:39 ►

is that it’s a very different experience to attend a festival versus to create a festival.

00:04:48 ►

And it sounds like you’ve gotten to experience both sides of that.

00:04:53 ►

I mean, you’ve gotten to attend it in the beginning and now to put it on.

00:05:02 ►

Can you still experience festivals

00:05:05 ►

with kind of that innocent mindset?

00:05:10 ►

Not much.

00:05:11 ►

I mean, not your own, of course.

00:05:13 ►

Not even other festivals.

00:05:14 ►

I find myself looking around, giving feedback,

00:05:17 ►

or not feedback, but I absorb what I’m looking at.

00:05:19 ►

I look at the way that they bring people in on the gate.

00:05:23 ►

I look at the way that they do their credentialing. I look at the way that the toilets people in on the gate. I look at the way that they do their credentialing.

00:05:26 ►

I look at the way that the toilets, how often they clean the toilets.

00:05:30 ►

I’ve been to Glastonbury recently, which, of course, is huge,

00:05:32 ►

and it’s the biggest one of its type in the world.

00:05:35 ►

And I actually was very impressed.

00:05:37 ►

We look at the way they socialize people,

00:05:39 ►

since what we do here culturally is really very successful.

00:05:44 ►

So I’m always making observations, and I can’t help it.

00:05:48 ►

I have a particular passion for festivals.

00:05:52 ►

I really feel like the culture and the way festival culture

00:05:57 ►

encourages people to look out for each other,

00:05:59 ►

really across the board, except for some that I’ve not been to

00:06:04 ►

but I hear about in the U.K. that are really just drunken music.

00:06:08 ►

Most of the festivals I’ve been to or that I’m interested in

00:06:10 ►

are the ones like ours that really encourage community building

00:06:17 ►

and sharing of knowledge and evolving who we are

00:06:22 ►

and really taking time to be with each other.

00:06:26 ►

A day may come where that’s what we’ll need

00:06:30 ►

is the festival culture.

00:06:31 ►

If the governments go sideways,

00:06:34 ►

we’ll be trusting each other through this connection,

00:06:37 ►

not any government entity.

00:06:41 ►

Globally, this is my feeling.

00:06:43 ►

So I look at all the festivals.

00:06:44 ►

I observe them for that particular purpose.

00:06:49 ►

I’m part of a network, as we all are.

00:06:52 ►

But, yeah, bringing people together and looking out for them in any kind of way is very exciting

00:06:59 ►

and empowering.

00:07:00 ►

So I feel a duty to be a festival producer, as I am right now.

00:07:04 ►

We don’t call Burning Man a festival.

00:07:06 ►

If anybody says Marion called it a festival, we don’t.

00:07:10 ►

But I fit in that genre.

00:07:14 ►

So Burning Man as sort of a cultural phenomenon

00:07:18 ►

has definitely impacted the mass culture, right?

00:07:23 ►

In what ways do you see

00:07:25 ►

you or the organizing group

00:07:29 ►

or the Burning Man culture has been successful

00:07:32 ►

in transmitting ideas out into the bigger culture

00:07:35 ►

and in what ways do you think

00:07:37 ►

we fell down at that and there’s more

00:07:41 ►

that we need to do to get some of our core concepts

00:07:44 ►

out into the universe.

00:07:46 ►

Well, that’s really the intention now of the Burning Man Project,

00:07:50 ►

the nonprofit that we just started a couple of years ago.

00:07:55 ►

The event naturally seems to inspire people to take what we’ve experienced here

00:08:01 ►

and either reproduce it or else find others that are adapted to it and engage with it.

00:08:07 ►

We’ve been nurturing, the organization’s been nurturing

00:08:10 ►

what we call the regional network.

00:08:12 ►

At this point, it has about 230 people around the world

00:08:15 ►

in 150 locations.

00:08:18 ►

I think we’ve got almost all the continents at this point.

00:08:22 ►

And we’re here to nurture the interest.

00:08:28 ►

I think as individuals, what’s interesting for us is that we all have,

00:08:36 ►

when you’re first new to Burning Man,

00:08:38 ►

sometimes you really get off on the experience of the constant stimulus

00:08:43 ►

and engagement and the celebration and the party.

00:08:46 ►

And people get confused into what all the layers are

00:08:49 ►

that actually are the inspiring portion,

00:08:52 ►

and they come home and they might think that it’s just having a party and hanging out.

00:08:57 ►

But that there are the layers in which we’re architecting this,

00:09:01 ►

they include living together, they include consciousness towards each other,

00:09:05 ►

they include the logos. I mean, the 10 principles are just a starting point.

00:09:10 ►

So I think the ways in which we could improve on that, all of us, would be to really take a

00:09:17 ►

deeper look at what it is that we all get from this experience here. And it’s funny, I keep assuming that,

00:09:29 ►

and I find it, I get disappointed,

00:09:30 ►

but I think we can all change this.

00:09:32 ►

One of the things that happens at Burning Man

00:09:34 ►

is you’re unafraid.

00:09:35 ►

You look at people in the eye,

00:09:36 ►

you smile at them a lot more often than you normally would.

00:09:40 ►

And I think that’s a really easy starting point

00:09:41 ►

out in the world.

00:09:43 ►

And also being really kind to each other.

00:09:47 ►

Like here, there’s no point in being bitter at your neighbor.

00:09:49 ►

Sometimes people are, but you might as well,

00:09:51 ►

if they’re camped next to you, you’re going to have to figure that shit out.

00:09:55 ►

And when we were in San Francisco,

00:09:58 ►

I heard an argument someone had recently about something,

00:10:00 ►

and there was cursing, and there was mean emails.

00:10:02 ►

And I thought, that’s so not like Burning Man.

00:10:05 ►

And I really wish people would take those moments that they have

00:10:08 ►

where they’re here in the middle of the street or they’re having a noise complaint

00:10:11 ►

or they’re unhappy with the behavior of someone.

00:10:14 ►

And here you take a deep breath and you step back

00:10:18 ►

and you re-approach it.

00:10:20 ►

And those are really simple things. I don’t think we need ten principles out in the world

00:10:23 ►

to just sort of incorporate what we get here and what we can project out. And that’s really simple things. I don’t think we need ten principles out in the world to just sort of incorporate what we get here

00:10:26 ►

and what we can project out.

00:10:28 ►

And that’s a starting point.

00:10:29 ►

I think that’ll go a long way.

00:10:31 ►

And then after that, we can create more momentum.

00:10:34 ►

We can look at Burning Man as being its own cultural meme

00:10:39 ►

that we can blend with others.

00:10:41 ►

I don’t think Burning Man is the solution.

00:10:44 ►

I think that we’re a really powerful gravitational force.

00:10:48 ►

And mixed with other cultures and other groups, that’s what’s powerful.

00:10:53 ►

So I just think, you know, you asked me what we’re missing and what we’re doing well.

00:10:58 ►

I think we’re doing well just actually creating the conversation about Burning Man.

00:11:02 ►

That’s been huge.

00:11:03 ►

And the population and the tickets

00:11:05 ►

and the way the regionals are growing,

00:11:07 ►

we’re doing that part right.

00:11:08 ►

Right.

00:11:09 ►

But in San Francisco, it’s still a very nimby environment

00:11:12 ►

where people are like,

00:11:14 ►

oh, I support you, but don’t do that on my street.

00:11:19 ►

It hasn’t made it back into that part of the culture,

00:11:22 ►

even in the nearby cities.

00:11:24 ►

Agreed.

00:11:25 ►

Well, and I think there’s some weird irony

00:11:27 ►

behind the fact that we’re born out of San Francisco,

00:11:30 ►

and San Francisco is such an evolved city,

00:11:34 ►

but it’s got a lot of attitude in that regard.

00:11:37 ►

And so burners in Chicago, at times,

00:11:40 ►

I see them treating each other better

00:11:41 ►

than burners in San Francisco or in Berlin.

00:11:44 ►

The further away we seem to get from

00:11:46 ►

San Francisco, the more

00:11:47 ►

intent a burner might have because

00:11:52 ►

they’re not in such a, so to speak,

00:11:55 ►

target-rich environment where the burners are sort of

00:11:57 ►

blasé about what’s really valuable about the experience.

00:12:01 ►

And so in El Paso, Texas, for instance, there’s 25

00:12:03 ►

burners initially there

00:12:05 ►

and they’re they’re like this you know and they’re looking out for others they’re actually

00:12:10 ►

actively in san francisco it’s sort of like whatever so um there are these incredible

00:12:18 ►

logistical challenges to putting on this event in the middle of the fucking desert.

00:12:26 ►

Yes.

00:12:32 ►

How, you know, what do you see as a medium to long-term path of how do you deal with being at the wrong end of 100 miles of two-lane road

00:12:38 ►

and, you know, how do you make a cultural environment

00:12:41 ►

that encapsulates this culture, you know, that doesn’t cause,

00:12:48 ►

I mean, because one of the issues here is you have to work to get here. It keeps away

00:12:53 ►

the people who don’t have enough juice to really want to participate. You know, so how

00:12:58 ►

do you make a culture that is more inclusive and less forbidding and still has all the attributes you really want in it?

00:13:08 ►

That’s sort of a complex question, I guess.

00:13:11 ►

Well, we do have limits here.

00:13:14 ►

We’re not sure what the limit is, but yeah.

00:13:18 ►

But the traffic, you know,

00:13:20 ►

is the most limiting factor right now.

00:13:24 ►

That’s why we started the car passes,

00:13:26 ►

to sort of start counting cars.

00:13:28 ►

I mean, it was not well received initially,

00:13:32 ►

but we had to do something to make everybody

00:13:33 ►

sort of conscious of how we get here.

00:13:35 ►

And we’ve doubled the number of people flying in,

00:13:38 ►

and we’ve doubled the number of people on the Berner Express,

00:13:40 ►

so that’s good news.

00:13:42 ►

So we’re constantly in a dialogue with ourselves

00:13:45 ►

about the capacity of the location the roads are definitely it um the thing that i think is really

00:13:54 ►

worth thinking through and you have to have had these experiences to really understand it but

00:13:59 ►

this is um a powerful place it’s to be here for eight days or more is incredible.

00:14:06 ►

In fact, in my book, to be here about three days or more is great.

00:14:11 ►

Anything shorter than that is kind of short.

00:14:14 ►

Unless you’ve been here before.

00:14:16 ►

If you’ve done it before and you come in for two days, I feel like you’re fine.

00:14:18 ►

But if you’re a newbie and you come in for two days, I think you’re selling it short.

00:14:23 ►

What’s the point? Seriously.

00:14:25 ►

You’re not even acclimatizing.

00:14:27 ►

You’re still getting dehydrated.

00:14:30 ►

There’s no point.

00:14:32 ►

When we look at regional events around the world,

00:14:34 ►

we really encourage the ones that are three days or more.

00:14:37 ►

We really encourage that.

00:14:38 ►

It takes enough time to come into a culture,

00:14:40 ►

look around and realize how you’re supposed to act

00:14:42 ►

and what you’re supposed to do.

00:14:43 ►

Start doing it and do it enough so that when you leave, your habits are formed, the way that you

00:14:49 ►

leave no trace and take care of your trash and the way that you live in immediacy and self-reliance.

00:14:56 ►

But things like Burners Without Borders, I was in Katrina. Burners Without Borders was born

00:15:01 ►

out of Katrina. And we didn’t know this was going to happen.

00:15:06 ►

The organization didn’t know.

00:15:07 ►

But when Burners left here, who was here on site when Katrina hit?

00:15:13 ►

Right, so we were all here on site.

00:15:16 ►

I would say there was 50,000 or so people here, maybe 49.

00:15:21 ►

And everybody heard right away that there was a hurricane hitting New Orleans.

00:15:24 ►

And so by the time everybody left, people were money there to meet media mecca they were leaving donations

00:15:29 ►

and some folks from the dpw a gentleman who had a crane went down to biloxi because his

00:15:39 ►

girlfriend’s father had helped build a buddhist temple that they had taken time to raise money for

00:15:46 ►

for several years and it had just been finished like 11 days previous.

00:15:51 ►

And so it was one spot with one crane and another burner went down and sent us, said

00:15:56 ►

we’re down here.

00:15:57 ►

And so we created Katrina at BurningMan.com and anybody, don’t make me cry.

00:16:04 ►

It was self-organized.

00:16:08 ►

The organization didn’t organize it.

00:16:10 ►

What we did is we had an email address,

00:16:12 ►

and burners could find the other burners,

00:16:14 ►

and they did it without any formal leadership,

00:16:17 ►

and the leaders showed up.

00:16:18 ►

The people with the heavy equipment became the leaders,

00:16:21 ►

and the group met each morning,

00:16:23 ►

and at one point they maxed out around 80.

00:16:25 ►

But they had 80 people come and go at different times.

00:16:28 ►

And the camp typically had 25 to 40 people.

00:16:31 ►

And they used Burning Man values.

00:16:33 ►

They used the values of leadership.

00:16:38 ►

They did not do deep into consensus

00:16:42 ►

because they were in the middle of a war zone, so to speak, in a disaster

00:16:46 ►

area. And

00:16:47 ►

we got emails saying

00:16:50 ►

this is Burning Man.

00:16:52 ►

And they had people joining the group

00:16:54 ►

who had never been to Burning Man,

00:16:56 ►

who then subsequently went to Burning Man.

00:16:58 ►

And they didn’t put ten principles up on the

00:17:00 ►

wall. They just used what you would use

00:17:02 ►

to get a theme camp going.

00:17:04 ►

They made sure to take care of everybody. They orientated everybody. And every day, the group went out

00:17:08 ►

and took away detritus from the poorest people in this small town outside of Biloxi. After

00:17:14 ►

they were at the temple, they moved to this tiny town.

00:17:18 ►

And on Saturday evenings, they took the day off, and they took the detritus, and they made art.

00:17:25 ►

And they taught the people in this little town how to make art.

00:17:28 ►

And they used drills, and they used headboards, and they had frames from picture frames and things that would turn when they heated up.

00:17:38 ►

And so they worked hard.

00:17:40 ►

They did community service.

00:17:42 ►

They engaged in their own camp.

00:17:41 ►

They did community service.

00:17:44 ►

They engaged in their own camp.

00:17:47 ►

They taught others, and then they celebrated by burning things, and they invited the town on Saturday nights, and they’d have a potluck.

00:17:52 ►

Nobody told them to do this.

00:17:54 ►

Nobody had a list.

00:17:55 ►

We just did it as we would do it if we were here.

00:17:59 ►

And that’s what gets me choked up about how can we make this happen here?

00:18:04 ►

That’s what gets me choked up about how can we make this happen here?

00:18:08 ►

We can find those opportunities outside of Black Rock City and generate those experiences and invite other people into them.

00:18:12 ►

That one lasted for five months.

00:18:15 ►

And it had one Burning Man staff member there that after a while he said,

00:18:19 ►

I’m willing to stay five months if you’ll kick me a couple of grand

00:18:21 ►

so that I can help take care of everything here.

00:18:24 ►

And we did.

00:18:25 ►

And so I feel like that’s a great starting point.

00:18:28 ►

Burners Without Borders type work

00:18:30 ►

is different

00:18:32 ►

from going out and celebrating

00:18:33 ►

but it is real community work

00:18:36 ►

where you can actually by doing

00:18:38 ►

help people

00:18:39 ►

see what it is that we

00:18:42 ►

are and who we are.

00:18:44 ►

Sorry that was long but that was one of my favorites.

00:18:53 ►

There’s a film called Burn on the Bayou.

00:18:55 ►

You can sometimes find it,

00:18:57 ►

but Burn on the Bayou tells the story.

00:19:00 ►

Yeah, I also knew people from the Rainbow Gathering

00:19:03 ►

who had the same reaction,

00:19:05 ►

who picked up their mobile, we can set up how to live and make food and be sanitary and do whatever in any environment,

00:19:16 ►

and they brought it to New Orleans and they fed people and they helped to clean up. So yeah, it’s great to see the sort of quote-unquote alternative cultures

00:19:29 ►

applying those skills to show

00:19:32 ►

the mass culture what can be done.

00:19:35 ►

Yeah, the biggest problem I think Burning Man has

00:19:37 ►

is translating to what people think is Burning Man

00:19:40 ►

into what really is Burning Man.

00:19:42 ►

If you’ve ever tried to tell someone you’ve been to Burning Man

00:19:44 ►

and they say drugs and nudity

00:19:47 ►

usually is what everybody says.

00:19:49 ►

And that’s the biggest job we all have

00:19:52 ►

is the storytelling around

00:19:53 ►

what really the experience is like.

00:19:54 ►

I mean, all your questions are touching on

00:19:57 ►

how do we tell a story?

00:19:58 ►

How do we do it?

00:19:59 ►

How do we be?

00:20:01 ►

So what does Burning Man want to be

00:20:03 ►

for the next 20 years? years? What’s the vision?

00:20:09 ►

Well, I think personally, I think the opportunities right now are fabulous. I think the vision

00:20:15 ►

is sort of a hundred year plan at the moment. Yeah. And we’re 26 years or 27 years into it what the organization is doing

00:20:29 ►

is trying to

00:20:31 ►

we’re leveling up a couple of things

00:20:34 ►

this is what we’re doing internally

00:20:36 ►

one is we’re trying to improve our storytelling

00:20:38 ►

when people say what’s the Burning Man project

00:20:40 ►

Black Rock City and Burning Man is one thing

00:20:44 ►

in fact it’s hard enough to describe.

00:20:46 ►

But if we’re going to keep trying to generate the culture,

00:20:48 ►

we have to internally decide how we’re going to talk about it.

00:20:52 ►

The other thing that we’re doing is

00:20:54 ►

we’re trying to network all of you together to each other in a way

00:20:57 ►

that’s not Facebook.

00:21:02 ►

And it used to be…

00:21:04 ►

What was before Facebook?

00:21:06 ►

MySpace.

00:21:07 ►

MySpace. And then there was the one, Tribe.

00:21:10 ►

Yeah.

00:21:11 ►

Yeah. We have organizations that come to us all the time, organizations that were founded

00:21:17 ►

and started by burners. Some of them are burner-based. Some are based on other commercial endeavors.

00:21:23 ►

And people want to find each other.

00:21:25 ►

People want to find the Burning Man businesses.

00:21:27 ►

People want to find the burners.

00:21:28 ►

People want to find the nonprofits started by burners.

00:21:31 ►

It’s a complicated story,

00:21:33 ►

but what we’re trying to do is be the network node

00:21:36 ►

for that connectivity and facilitate it.

00:21:40 ►

And that’s not easy.

00:21:43 ►

We don’t really imagine ourselves being a data-hungry government entity.

00:21:50 ►

We’d more like to be a pass-through facilitation machine, so to speak.

00:21:57 ►

Right.

00:21:58 ►

But, you know, as part of that process,

00:22:00 ►

you’ve introduced this whole burner profile thing

00:22:02 ►

where it’s like your Facebook login for Burning Man. man yeah i know you have strong feelings on that john

00:22:09 ►

well but you know how has that helped has that actually improved communication among burners

00:22:18 ►

or is it just not it’s not yet we haven’t actually started the next level of work which is connecting

00:22:23 ►

everybody together.

00:22:27 ►

You know, ideally, the purpose would be,

00:22:30 ►

if you’re part of a theme camp…

00:22:34 ►

So think about it in many different layers.

00:22:37 ►

The most simple challenge is coming to Burning Man.

00:22:41 ►

And at some point, we’d like to be able to facilitate old-timers, mid-term timers, newbies,

00:22:45 ►

whatever you want to call all of us.

00:22:46 ►

We have different levels of experience at Burning Man.

00:22:50 ►

And at some point, we’re going to have to filter people in

00:22:53 ►

by how they participate.

00:22:55 ►

We already do that.

00:22:56 ►

We sell 15,000 tickets directly to theme camps

00:22:59 ►

in their own pre-sale.

00:23:01 ►

We sell special tickets to staff members. You have to be a staff member to have

00:23:06 ►

a specially purchased ticket. We sell 30, maybe 39 plus six, something like that. I don’t know,

00:23:13 ►

40 some thousand without any filter. That number has to change because it gets really crazy to

00:23:24 ►

have art projects and theme camps that are units.

00:23:27 ►

If you can imagine this camp that’s done this beautiful work here,

00:23:30 ►

if they had to go into a lottery system like we had in 2012

00:23:33 ►

and they couldn’t get the guy that knows how to do the rigging to come,

00:23:36 ►

now what do you do?

00:23:37 ►

They’ve got no tent.

00:23:38 ►

We’ve got John Gilmore and a bunch of great people here, but no tent.

00:23:41 ►

So the organization really intends to help all of the most dedicated

00:23:47 ►

aspects of what we do here get here. And I use very broad words because there are different

00:23:53 ►

ways to look at that. There’s volunteers and there’s theme camps and there’s art projects

00:23:56 ►

and there’s a lot of other areas. And we think that one of the ways to do that is going to

00:24:02 ►

be for people to opt in their engagement. So if I want to say that I’ve that one of the ways to do that is going to be for people to opt in their engagement.

00:24:05 ►

So if I want to say that I’ve been part of this camp and I was part of the DBW,

00:24:10 ►

that along the way will give me some sort of credit for my participation.

00:24:16 ►

How that maps out then to ticket purchases, we’re trying to do this as we go.

00:24:21 ►

We’re trying to take advice from people.

00:24:23 ►

We are not turning this on overnight.

00:24:26 ►

I personally like geography as a criteria.

00:24:28 ►

I favor anybody from overseas who emails me and says that they’ve already bought their RV

00:24:34 ►

and they already have their flights and they need to get to Burning Man,

00:24:38 ►

and I try to figure out how to get them there.

00:24:40 ►

I prefer Miami, Florida over San Francisco at this point.

00:24:49 ►

Hey, you’re one of my favorite people even Bram, well, I went to Miami

00:24:52 ►

Bram is a perfect example

00:24:54 ►

I went to Miami two days after our lottery went nuts in 2012

00:24:57 ►

I’d never been to Miami before

00:25:00 ►

He created this lovely evening for me and another girl, Megan

00:25:03 ►

To meet 100 burners in Miami We were were like holy shit there’s 100 people here

00:25:07 ►

turns out there were more

00:25:08 ►

but that’s just the 100 that showed up

00:25:10 ►

and they came so close to my face

00:25:13 ►

and they told me how they’d had art projects previously

00:25:16 ►

they were ready to cross the country

00:25:18 ►

and I realized how badly I wanted more people

00:25:21 ►

again the further away we get from the epicenter

00:25:24 ►

I love San Francisco. I love

00:25:25 ►

the West Coast. But if we’re going to

00:25:27 ►

change the world and we’re going to affect people,

00:25:29 ►

I want people from Des Moines.

00:25:32 ►

I want people from Miami.

00:25:33 ►

I want people from South America

00:25:35 ►

and not just the San Francisco network.

00:25:38 ►

Sorry, I lost my train of thought, but

00:25:39 ►

Bram has changed

00:25:42 ►

the way I was looking at geography.

00:25:44 ►

Thank you, Bram.

00:25:47 ►

Yeah, I had a similar issue.

00:25:48 ►

I was going to the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin,

00:25:52 ►

and they had the same kind of problem

00:25:56 ►

where they maxed out the capacity

00:25:58 ►

of where they were holding the thing,

00:25:59 ►

and they said, well, you know, it’s first come, first served, right?

00:26:03 ►

You show up, you buy your ticket at the door,

00:26:05 ►

and when the tickets are gone, they’re gone.

00:26:08 ►

And I’m like, I’m flying in from San Francisco

00:26:10 ►

to spend a week in a foreign country,

00:26:12 ►

and I don’t know if I’ll get a ticket or not.

00:26:15 ►

I mean, this is insane.

00:26:17 ►

And they had to do things about that,

00:26:19 ►

and Burning Man has had to do things about it,

00:26:21 ►

and of course I’m sure they’re still in flux.

00:26:24 ►

Yeah, it really is hard

00:26:27 ►

because actually, whether you believe it or not,

00:26:30 ►

there’s more staff members in the Burning Man organization

00:26:32 ►

that would rather not be holding people’s data

00:26:34 ►

than want to hold people’s data.

00:26:37 ►

We don’t really want to find ourselves with great intention

00:26:40 ►

and then end up being sort of the enemy at all.

00:26:44 ►

And thank God we are friends with you because you do give us feedback along the way, which

00:26:47 ►

has been great, actually.

00:26:50 ►

John Gilmore gave us some feedback on our ticket, you and the EFF, both, yeah.

00:26:56 ►

And we modified it.

00:26:57 ►

Yes, thank you.

00:26:59 ►

It’s nice to have conversations.

00:27:01 ►

Yeah, that’s what we’re here for.

00:27:02 ►

And that’s why the Brunner profile, I’m very cautious about answering the questions because I don’t have all the

00:27:07 ►

answers.

00:27:08 ►

I just know that when someone in Austin,

00:27:11 ►

Texas,

00:27:11 ►

okay,

00:27:12 ►

or Miami has also done an art project or done a theme camp at,

00:27:17 ►

in Texas for maybe five years,

00:27:18 ►

and they’ve contributed to the Texas contingent for burning man,

00:27:21 ►

and they want to come to black rock city for the first time.

00:27:24 ►

I assure as hell want to help them get here.

00:27:27 ►

But without us figuring how to manage either the data

00:27:30 ►

because the relationships are too big for us to manage in our own heads,

00:27:33 ►

I don’t know how else we’re going to do it.

00:27:36 ►

Maybe we need to grow the Bay Area regional that’s not Burning Man, right,

00:27:41 ►

and let that crowd go to that,

00:27:44 ►

and that will leave more room here for the rest of

00:27:46 ►

the world. There you go. That’s one way to do it. Are you a Texas person? Is that why you were going

00:27:51 ►

like this? Yeah. Austin. See, Austin Flipside. And Austin Flipside was the first large event outside

00:27:59 ►

of Black Rock City. 2,500 people. Now it’s been going up. And again, perfect example. You’ve got

00:28:04 ►

tons of people that actually,

00:28:06 ►

if I go visit Austin, I say, have you been to Burning Man?

00:28:08 ►

And they say yes. And you’re like, oh, when did you go?

00:28:10 ►

And they said, oh, I’ve been to Flipside. I haven’t been to Black Rock City.

00:28:14 ►

And I want people to see Burning Man as really a state of mind in their heart.

00:28:18 ►

You can be at Burning Man in New Zealand, and you can be at Burning Man in Miami,

00:28:21 ►

and you can be in Austin, Texas.

00:28:24 ►

But I also want to give

00:28:25 ►

people a chance to plug into this epicenter because you know this is like zzz. And you

00:28:31 ►

want to take it back with you. And then we can replicate it even better. We can cross

00:28:35 ►

pollinate. And that’s the burner profile. Hopefully. With John’s guidance. Thank you.

00:28:50 ►

Let’s talk about the finances of Burning Man.

00:28:53 ►

It’s become a big organization,

00:28:57 ►

and it employs a whole bunch of staff. It’s, what, millions of dollars going in and out every year?

00:29:04 ►

And now it’s all going through a nonprofit, too. So there’s supposedly, you

00:29:10 ►

know, much more transparency in nonprofits than in for-profits. How is that working out?

00:29:16 ►

Well, we’ll see. I think it’s working out great. I mean, it’s intense.

00:29:28 ►

I helped start the first LLC.

00:29:30 ►

We started the first LLC in 1997.

00:29:35 ►

We chose to start an LLC because it was easy and it was fast and it was nimble and we could make our own decisions.

00:29:37 ►

At the time, it was Harley and Larry and Will and Crimson and myself and Michael Michael.

00:29:44 ►

And we needed to be paid.

00:29:45 ►

We were the only staff members initially.

00:29:48 ►

And in order to be paid

00:29:50 ►

and run your organization,

00:29:51 ►

you have to have other disinterested board members

00:29:54 ►

for a non-profit.

00:29:55 ►

And so we were just like,

00:29:57 ►

this is the way we’re going to do it

00:29:58 ►

and we’re going to take it as far as we could go.

00:30:00 ►

And none of us thought we’d get to this point.

00:30:03 ►

And it’s been great.

00:30:05 ►

It’s been fabulous having an LLC.

00:30:08 ►

However, along the way,

00:30:09 ►

we were treating it with principles like the nonprofit

00:30:11 ►

and then the culture itself really is more for the public good.

00:30:16 ►

And it’s been challenging to take the LLC

00:30:18 ►

and make it a subsidiary of the new nonprofit

00:30:20 ►

and then also we’ve taken the Black Rock Arts Foundation

00:30:22 ►

and made a subsidiary of the nonprofit.

00:30:24 ►

So now I have an ecosystem,

00:30:26 ►

a financial ecosystem.

00:30:27 ►

An arts nonprofit and an LLC

00:30:30 ►

all feeding into this major

00:30:31 ►

nonprofit. And at the end of this

00:30:34 ►

year, it will be our first tax

00:30:35 ►

year where Burning Man

00:30:37 ►

Project has access

00:30:39 ►

to and transparency for about

00:30:41 ►

$30 million.

00:30:43 ►

And that will be interesting.

00:30:46 ►

It’s not going to be like the chart of accounts are revealed,

00:30:49 ►

but certainly the salaries of everybody over $100,000 gets revealed,

00:30:54 ►

and it makes us all a little nervous.

00:30:56 ►

Right.

00:30:57 ►

Yeah, right.

00:30:58 ►

Yeah.

00:30:59 ►

We’re going to be open to criticism.

00:31:01 ►

Everybody’s going to have something to say about what our salaries are.

00:31:04 ►

Well, you’ve been open to criticism for decades, though.

00:31:09 ►

Well, it’s hard.

00:31:09 ►

It gets a little personal.

00:31:11 ►

That’s my only personal concern is how can you really explain to someone what you’re doing.

00:31:16 ►

We do have almost 80 employees.

00:31:20 ►

We have an office in San Francisco.

00:31:21 ►

We have 25,000 square feet.

00:31:23 ►

We have property we own here in Nevada.

00:31:25 ►

And sometimes when people kind of find it hard to believe,

00:31:28 ►

and isn’t that a little excessive,

00:31:30 ►

and what is that money spent on, and who are the employees?

00:31:33 ►

What roles do they have?

00:31:38 ►

It’ll be challenging.

00:31:39 ►

The nonprofit, I think, will open up new questions.

00:31:41 ►

But, I mean, we’re here to do what we need to do.

00:31:44 ►

I’m happy that we’re taking this path.

00:31:47 ►

Also, the LLC members have given up money in the process, right?

00:31:53 ►

Because you guys, as a matter of law,

00:31:57 ►

physically owned Burning Man, the event, the cash flow, all of that,

00:32:01 ►

and you donated it to the nonprofit, right?

00:32:05 ►

So the nonprofit, you know, that all now flows through the nonprofit,

00:32:08 ►

and that has public accounting.

00:32:10 ►

But that was kind of your retirement, right?

00:32:13 ►

How are you – I guess you’re not retiring, so.

00:32:17 ►

No, I’m still quite here.

00:32:22 ►

So I guess how – was that part of the transition from the LLC?

00:32:28 ►

Was how do we deal with the financial impact on the six LLC members?

00:32:33 ►

Or what were the sticking points in making that transformation?

00:32:38 ►

Well, that’s why it took us quite a few years to sort of map that out.

00:32:43 ►

Of the six of us, we each have a different role going into the future.

00:32:47 ►

We had to negotiate with the nonprofit

00:32:51 ►

to make sure that we had some ongoing things taken care of,

00:32:57 ►

none of which can be guaranteed to any of us

00:32:59 ►

because it’s a nonprofit,

00:33:00 ►

but things of which we all have a three-year contract right now

00:33:04 ►

for employment,

00:33:05 ►

which is renewable within the non-profit, can non-renew anybody’s contract.

00:33:12 ►

And yeah, the others, I’m 51.

00:33:16 ►

The rest, Harley is 51, and then the rest of them are in their 60s.

00:33:20 ►

Michael Michael, I believe, he might be 69 at this point.

00:33:24 ►

So they’re all retirement

00:33:26 ►

age, but nobody really wants to stop doing this. Yeah, I know. So we had to internally,

00:33:33 ►

the nonprofit also changed the way in which we negotiated with each other our roles. We

00:33:38 ►

now have more of, that’s how the CEO role came up. If you Googled Marion and CEO right

00:33:43 ►

now, you wouldn’t find much on the Internet because we didn’t really release it.

00:33:47 ►

We just sort of started talking about it kind of like this.

00:33:50 ►

Part of what happened was the change in going from an LLC to a nonprofit.

00:33:55 ►

The six LLC members made most of our decisions in a sort of a consensus fashion, most of them.

00:34:00 ►

But money, hiring, high-risk government relations, we did it all together.

00:34:04 ►

Rarely did we divide it up.

00:34:06 ►

But the nonprofit structure and $30 million and 80 employees,

00:34:10 ►

it’s more complex with the subsidiaries.

00:34:14 ►

And the rest of them decided that they didn’t want to do it.

00:34:18 ►

And I got it.

00:34:20 ►

Yeah, six people in line and five of them backed away.

00:34:23 ►

Yeah, pretty much.

00:34:23 ►

That’s almost exactly how it went.

00:34:25 ►

We had a facilitator one day with six of us

00:34:28 ►

about the future. He said,

00:34:29 ►

you guys have quite an ambitious list of things you’d like to do.

00:34:32 ►

Have you thought about how to get this done?

00:34:35 ►

He said, we’ll take a break

00:34:36 ►

for lunch now.

00:34:38 ►

He came over to me and he said, I think that you’re up next.

00:34:42 ►

That’s kind of the way it went down.

00:34:48 ►

I feel like I was in training for it so i feel like what i need to do now is act like the role that i believe i was meant to do

00:34:54 ►

which is to after 15 years of being with the organization 18 years but 15 years of it being

00:34:59 ►

a really solid company organization um i’m i’m going to help go through the phase that we’re going to go

00:35:08 ►

through now.

00:35:08 ►

We’re more visible.

00:35:11 ►

We’re making it real.

00:35:12 ►

We’re not a for-profit.

00:35:14 ►

We have a lot of responsibility to the public.

00:35:19 ►

And it’s quite a mindset change.

00:35:23 ►

And then my co-founders

00:35:25 ►

they report to me

00:35:27 ►

which is weird

00:35:28 ►

so we don’t talk about it like that

00:35:31 ►

and they’re my advisors

00:35:33 ►

so I’m here by the grace of their faith

00:35:37 ►

so we’re going through all these things

00:35:40 ►

in order to try and transition ourselves

00:35:42 ►

from an ownership-based collective almost

00:35:45 ►

to a non-profit.

00:35:49 ►

Well, and you also have had to deal with succession, like with half of the members or more being

00:35:58 ►

at retirement age, you know, who’s going to step up and keep the thing going?

00:36:02 ►

Right. who’s going to step up and keep the thing going? Do you have a process now for people who want to be on that career path

00:36:10 ►

to be able to try it out and take bits of responsibility

00:36:13 ►

and figure out are they up for the job and can they do it?

00:36:16 ►

Yes, we do.

00:36:18 ►

The guy running the event right now is a guy named Charlie Dolman.

00:36:20 ►

We brought him in two years ago.

00:36:22 ►

He’s British.

00:36:22 ►

He was part of a group running something called the Secret Garden Party. That was him in two years ago. He’s British. He was being part of a group running something

00:36:25 ►

called the Secret Garden Party.

00:36:27 ►

That was the first move we made. Harley

00:36:29 ►

was running the event and I

00:36:31 ►

was doing the setup with the DPW.

00:36:34 ►

Because of Charlie, we’ve now been able to

00:36:35 ►

offload that.

00:36:37 ►

We’ve got a woman who is the managing director

00:36:39 ►

for the non-profit.

00:36:42 ►

It’s kind of scary. I mean, this is our thing.

00:36:44 ►

You know? It’s like talking about It’s kind of scary. I mean, this is our thing. It’s like,

00:36:46 ►

talking about it

00:36:47 ►

gets kind of intense.

00:36:49 ►

If you talk about

00:36:50 ►

succession plan,

00:36:52 ►

it’s one thing

00:36:53 ►

if you own a company

00:36:55 ►

and you’re going to sell it

00:36:56 ►

and that’s your succession.

00:36:58 ►

And that’s not

00:36:59 ►

the way it’s going to work with us.

00:37:03 ►

So,

00:37:04 ►

it’s very interesting now

00:37:05 ►

because some of the founders are very invested

00:37:07 ►

in certain projects and certain aspects,

00:37:09 ►

and so I encourage the staff to get their advice.

00:37:13 ►

They might not have the decision-making responsibility,

00:37:15 ►

but get the advice of others.

00:37:17 ►

We’re doing it very Burning Man-like.

00:37:21 ►

But yeah, internally, absolutely.

00:37:23 ►

I personally love giving people more responsibility,

00:37:26 ►

and I love to communicate the options and have them pick it up.

00:37:31 ►

And so that’s what we’re doing across the board,

00:37:33 ►

making more openings for leadership.

00:37:37 ►

I know in my own last company, I was one of three co-founders,

00:37:42 ►

and we got it to maybe 20 or 25 people before we had to

00:37:46 ►

hire in middle management and things like this and what we learned was even when they i mean it

00:37:53 ►

was a weird company right we we wrote software gave it away and made money on support and

00:37:59 ►

when we would bring in experienced managers from other companies, they would come in with the proprietary mindset,

00:38:07 ►

like we have to lock this all up, we can’t give it away.

00:38:10 ►

Even the ones who got it in the interviews

00:38:12 ►

and really wanted to be part of it,

00:38:14 ►

all their reflexes were to do the wrong thing.

00:38:17 ►

And so we had to kind of micromanage them for six or eight months.

00:38:21 ►

Absolutely.

00:38:22 ►

So that we gave them the responsibility,

00:38:25 ►

but we reserved the right to say,

00:38:27 ►

well, actually, no, let’s do it this way,

00:38:30 ►

until they absorbed the culture, right,

00:38:33 ►

and that they’d start making the same sort of decisions

00:38:35 ►

that we had made in the culture.

00:38:38 ►

That’s a great example of what we’ve had to do

00:38:40 ►

in our organization.

00:38:41 ►

So we’ve been able to hire

00:38:42 ►

some really, really interesting people.

00:38:44 ►

In the past, we would take volunteers that would work so hard, we would hire them to

00:38:49 ►

do things, and then people would sort of move along. And then we started creating job descriptions.

00:38:52 ►

That was a number of years ago. And a lot of that would sort of entry level or just

00:38:58 ►

above entry level. Now we’ve actually had to hire at higher levels, and that’s been

00:39:01 ►

fascinating. And the hardest part of that has been,

00:39:08 ►

despite what people think about how we create rules at Burning Man,

00:39:11 ►

we actually prefer not to create rules until they’re really necessary.

00:39:14 ►

So you get someone from the outside that comes in,

00:39:18 ►

and they’re all excited about how you do administration and culture in companies,

00:39:19 ►

and they’re like, well, we’re going to do this,

00:39:20 ►

and we’re going to set our meetings like this,

00:39:22 ►

and we’re going to do our action items like this. And we are, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it to a point.

00:39:30 ►

Like we like to see ahead.

00:39:32 ►

We like to solve problems before we see them.

00:39:34 ►

But it’s really, if you’re from an outside and you’re all like,

00:39:37 ►

this is how we’re going to do it and I’ve been doing this for so long,

00:39:41 ►

we’re usually in a mode of trying to explain why we haven’t gone there yet,

00:39:45 ►

that we really prefer to have our human nature, organizational theory, and, you know, group

00:39:52 ►

dynamics come to the surface and engage people, whether it’s here or in our office, than just

00:39:57 ►

start doing things in ways that look like they’re more functional for other cultures,

00:40:02 ►

exactly like what you’re saying. And it’s acculturating those leaders.

00:40:07 ►

Yeah, you want the expertise,

00:40:09 ►

but at the same time,

00:40:11 ►

you don’t want the cultural baggage that they came in with.

00:40:14 ►

You want your own cultural baggage.

00:40:18 ►

Right.

00:40:19 ►

Do people in the audience have questions for Marian?

00:40:24 ►

Is there any advantage to purchasing

00:40:27 ►

your own giant piece of property?

00:40:30 ►

And I’m sure you’ve thought of it.

00:40:32 ►

Yes.

00:40:32 ►

And is it possible?

00:40:39 ►

Well, we’ve gone through this before.

00:40:42 ►

This question comes up pretty annually.

00:40:44 ►

The answer is pretty stable in that the federal government is, in this case,

00:40:52 ►

for this land, mandated for public use.

00:40:55 ►

And we get to engage, fortunately, with administrators who have to fill that mandate.

00:41:02 ►

When we go to private land, which we did in 1997, we were on private land,

00:41:06 ►

Washoe County over the

00:41:07 ►

Wallapai Flat.

00:41:09 ►

Those are elected officials. Those are county commissioners.

00:41:12 ►

Those are sheriffs that are

00:41:14 ►

elected. And your

00:41:16 ►

relationship can change when

00:41:18 ►

the elected officials change.

00:41:20 ►

And we just had that with

00:41:22 ►

Pershing County. If anybody saw that

00:41:24 ►

we had sued Pershing

00:41:25 ►

County last August. For trying to zone you out of existence. For trying to zone us out

00:41:30 ►

of existence. So people that we had been working well with for seven years, we had a written

00:41:36 ►

agreement on how we were going to pay them an annual fee. New elected officials. And

00:41:42 ►

we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars responding and doing that suit.

00:41:46 ►

We had a bunch of volunteer attorneys, but our time for the volunteer attorneys and another

00:41:52 ►

attorney that wasn’t volunteer and travel time and work, et cetera, was I think we believe

00:41:57 ►

it was $250,000 because there was a turnover in an election in Pershing County.

00:42:03 ►

So that’s the way it is on private land.

00:42:02 ►

Because there was a turnover in an election in Pershing County.

00:42:04 ►

So that’s the way it is on private land.

00:42:11 ►

Now, that being said, Fly Hot Springs is a piece of land that’s nearby that we have had the event on once.

00:42:15 ►

And we imagine that we could be doing smaller events

00:42:19 ►

that are easier to fulfill requirements, county requirements for.

00:42:24 ►

You guys have no idea how hard we work

00:42:27 ►

so that there aren’t trash cans here.

00:42:29 ►

Like the dumpsters are brought up every time.

00:42:32 ►

We go, yeah, thank you.

00:42:34 ►

Every time we go to these cooperator meetings,

00:42:36 ►

there’s something, there’s a new person

00:42:38 ►

from the health department there,

00:42:39 ►

and the guy raises his hand, says,

00:42:40 ►

I’d like to see this many cubic dumpsters there,

00:42:42 ►

and we just fall off over our chairs

00:42:44 ►

and we have to convince them. And that’s cubic dumpsters there. And we just fall off of our chairs and we have to convince them.

00:42:46 ►

And that’s what a county does. And we have two regional events

00:42:49 ►

that basically nearly got shut down because

00:42:51 ►

county officials in Arizona for 800 people

00:42:55 ►

wanted dumpsters. 800 people can definitely take away

00:42:58 ►

their own trash. Easy peasy.

00:43:00 ►

So that’s why, and they were on private land.

00:43:03 ►

The sheriff is the one who got mad and

00:43:05 ►

also refused to let them have children 10 days before the event. Private land. Public

00:43:12 ►

officials are held to a different standard by the public than a government administrator

00:43:18 ►

who’s mandated to allow us to recreate.

00:43:22 ►

What’s Burning Man’s plan for the future of sustainability? Because obviously there’s a lot

00:43:26 ►

of, there’s an enormous amount of individual responsibility from participants, you know, for

00:43:31 ►

what we choose to bring in, how we select the items that we bring in, where they come from. But as

00:43:37 ►

Burning Man as a whole organization, because it’s, you know, there’s a lot of waste that’s

00:43:41 ►

created. There’s a lot of fumes and a lot of carbon that’s released from the burning.

00:43:46 ►

Are you under any criticism for that?

00:43:48 ►

And also, is there a plan for the future with a lot more awareness coming in

00:43:53 ►

about our practices and how they affect the environment?

00:44:00 ►

We get feedback, yeah.

00:44:02 ►

It’s not the number one feedback we get.

00:44:05 ►

I don’t know how to answer that really accurately

00:44:08 ►

except that it’s a constant dialogue internally.

00:44:12 ►

It’s a difficult conversation for us to have.

00:44:14 ►

People have to drive and fly here from all over the world.

00:44:17 ►

We’re definitely burning a bunch of stuff.

00:44:21 ►

I like to lean into the fact that

00:44:23 ►

the work that we do with Leave No Trace,

00:44:26 ►

like psychologically and philosophically,

00:44:28 ►

is huge.

00:44:30 ►

And that when you leave Burning Man

00:44:31 ►

and you had to take your cardboard,

00:44:35 ►

you know, I used to take my cardboard cereal

00:44:37 ►

and leave it back in the Bay Area

00:44:38 ►

and I would bring the wax bag, you know.

00:44:41 ►

And then when I got home, I could never,

00:44:43 ►

I used to smoke, I could never, ever in my

00:44:45 ►

life, and still to this day, can’t put a cigarette butt out on the ground. If I’m with someone who

00:44:48 ►

does it in San Francisco, I pick up their cigarette butt. That’s leave no trace. There was nothing

00:44:53 ►

else that did that. Nobody was going to put me in trouble. It’s a habit. I see someone’s zip tie. I

00:44:57 ►

was walking through a camp yesterday. I saw a zip tie on the ground. I picked up the zip tie.

00:45:01 ►

They were all looking at me. They were kind of embarrassed. It’s a natural response. That, to me, is what I think is the best

00:45:06 ►

that we have to offer in that regard.

00:45:08 ►

And then to encourage all of you guys

00:45:10 ►

that have a strong opinion on that

00:45:12 ►

to actually do the educating of each other

00:45:14 ►

and us in return.

00:45:16 ►

I didn’t…

00:45:17 ►

You know, when we started really turning this

00:45:19 ►

into a large festival or an event,

00:45:22 ►

I think the sustainability conversation

00:45:25 ►

wasn’t as prominent as it is now.

00:45:28 ►

And maybe we would have done some

00:45:29 ►

things differently.

00:45:32 ►

We’re in a mode at the moment

00:45:33 ►

and we’re definitely actively

00:45:35 ►

taking into consideration each time we

00:45:37 ►

purchase wood, where’s the wood from.

00:45:40 ►

The purchasing people do look at that.

00:45:43 ►

We try to

00:45:43 ►

look at sustainability for people means different things.

00:45:47 ►

We prefer to buy in Reno, for instance.

00:45:49 ►

We don’t truck our wood over the mountains.

00:45:51 ►

We try to buy everything we can in Reno to help the community here.

00:45:55 ►

But sometimes we need non-chemically treated wood,

00:45:57 ►

so then it gets shipped from Canada into Reno.

00:46:00 ►

So there is a conversation going on.

00:46:02 ►

We don’t talk about it a lot, but I can honestly tell you

00:46:04 ►

we’ve talked about composting toilets and experimenting with those.

00:46:09 ►

So we take feedback.

00:46:11 ►

When people have a good idea to help us, we’re absolutely taking it in.

00:46:18 ►

Hi, Annie.

00:46:19 ►

Hi, Marion.

00:46:20 ►

Thank you for all your work over all these years.

00:46:22 ►

Thank you for your support.

00:46:24 ►

I have a question about data.

00:46:28 ►

I’m a former Burning Man volunteer,

00:46:31 ►

and I had a difference of opinion, disagreement,

00:46:35 ►

with a Burning Man volunteer crew that I was a part of.

00:46:41 ►

And so I appealed to the Burning Man HR department

00:46:45 ►

as was done

00:46:46 ►

and they told me that they were making decisions about me

00:46:51 ►

based on a file of information about me

00:46:54 ►

that I was not permitted to see

00:46:56 ►

and other people have had a similar experience

00:47:04 ►

because I’ve heard from them.

00:47:07 ►

And, you know, businesses and nonprofits are not legally obliged to release information about their volunteers.

00:47:17 ►

But because we’re talking about Burning Man, I’m curious as to whether Burning Man is prepared to take another level of transparency

00:47:29 ►

and release information to volunteer burners that they collect about those volunteers

00:47:37 ►

that could be cited in a disagreement such as this.

00:47:44 ►

I’ve never had that question asked exactly like that.

00:47:48 ►

I think it’s an interesting conversation

00:47:50 ►

and it’s a really interesting question.

00:47:53 ►

As I was listening to you,

00:47:54 ►

I started imagining what ways in which that would be possible.

00:47:59 ►

It’s hard enough to get people

00:48:01 ►

to even get both sides of the story these days.

00:48:07 ►

But I can start imagining whether that would be possible and how.

00:48:13 ►

It’s difficult, but I can see how your experience would really have been quite painful

00:48:18 ►

not to really understand what is it, what’s the scope of what’s there?

00:48:27 ►

And then depend on someone else

00:48:28 ►

to moderate and mediate the reality

00:48:31 ►

and what’s real and what isn’t real.

00:48:34 ►

I know a little bit about your situation

00:48:37 ►

and I think it’s okay

00:48:42 ►

to keep asking those questions of us.

00:48:44 ►

I ask them too when those things come up

00:48:47 ►

and people make it difficult for someone else

00:48:49 ►

to continue their volunteer tenure.

00:48:51 ►

One of my biggest questions is,

00:48:53 ►

have you gotten all sides of the story?

00:48:54 ►

Do you trust what those are?

00:48:57 ►

What dialogue have you given to the individual?

00:49:00 ►

And whether or not,

00:49:02 ►

I’m not really talking about your situation,

00:49:03 ►

I’m really talking about it as a whole, particularly very active, very engaged, very visible volunteers.

00:49:13 ►

I have a follow-up question to my campmate in Reverbia. Obviously Burning Man has a huge

00:49:19 ►

carbon footprint, and I was wondering if you have any plans to abstract the best things

00:49:26 ►

of Burning Man that are separate from all the energy use and supply some sort of support

00:49:32 ►

structure that it would help communities adopt the best principles of Burning Man in a more

00:49:39 ►

green or earth-friendly manner.

00:49:44 ►

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking.

00:49:48 ►

I mean, it sort of sounds like Burning Man in a box kind of thing,

00:49:50 ►

like a container full of values.

00:49:53 ►

I don’t know.

00:49:53 ►

I mean, is there a way to take what we’re learning from Burning Man

00:49:57 ►

and abstract it from all the fuel that’s burned to get here and other events?

00:50:03 ►

And, like, you said something similar when you said,

00:50:08 ►

well, if all the governments fail,

00:50:09 ►

then we’re going to have to rely on each other.

00:50:11 ►

So if communities evolve that had burner values,

00:50:17 ►

then they would be in a better position to do that.

00:50:21 ►

I guess what…

00:50:27 ►

Apocalyptic? Well, I’ll tell you then then that’s part of what the bringing man i mean you asked you started asking about the fuel i mean i think you’ve got a

00:50:31 ►

there’s a couple different answers i’ll just give the short one which is we’re constantly asked by

00:50:36 ►

leaders of art projects and by people that are part of theme camps often sometimes just small

00:50:42 ►

ones like 50 people. Questions about volunteerism

00:50:46 ►

and about leadership

00:50:47 ►

and burnout and how to create

00:50:49 ►

community. There’s

00:50:51 ►

way more questions, but those are just the ones

00:50:54 ►

that are easy for me at the moment.

00:50:56 ►

And like I talked about Burners Without Borders,

00:50:58 ►

all of what we’re doing is applicable elsewhere.

00:51:01 ►

We didn’t have the

00:51:02 ►

time or the bandwidth to actually be engaging

00:51:04 ►

in that conversation

00:51:05 ►

until now which was that’s why we started

00:51:06 ►

the Burning Man project. It used to just

00:51:08 ►

the cycle and the 35 of us during the event

00:51:10 ►

the more people needed

00:51:12 ►

what you’re asking for the more we were

00:51:14 ►

you know parsing that off

00:51:16 ►

and we have an education program we’re really

00:51:18 ►

into developing at the moment which would be

00:51:20 ►

free you know videos

00:51:22 ►

about

00:51:23 ►

things that are being already talked about

00:51:28 ►

or things content will create,

00:51:31 ►

and pointing people towards books,

00:51:33 ►

pointing people towards other groups that have done things successfully.

00:51:36 ►

Again, Austin being a good example,

00:51:38 ►

when we had other regionals that wanted to know how to create an LLC,

00:51:41 ►

how to run an event,

00:51:41 ►

we kept pointing them to the people in Austin.

00:51:44 ►

And that’s part of the network. Network people together, create an information, how to run an event. We kept pointing them to the people in Austin. And that’s part of the network.

00:51:45 ►

Network people together, create an information,

00:51:48 ►

an education system.

00:51:51 ►

We’re in our infancy.

00:51:52 ►

That’s why it’s a 100-year plan.

00:51:55 ►

We’re about to run out of time, aren’t we?

00:51:56 ►

Yeah, do we have two more questions?

00:52:00 ►

So there was a great deal of discussion about culture

00:52:02 ►

and Burning Man’s development of their culture

00:52:06 ►

and also how it proliferates around the world and the connection and network that you’re building amongst people.

00:52:12 ►

My question is a little bit about how that’s extending into personal problems and issues that the communities are facing,

00:52:18 ►

such as the events that happened in Utah and recently in our own culture in Austin,

00:52:26 ►

in Utah and recently in our own culture in Austin, how people are dealing with and tackling their own deals with suicide and personal issues with each other and very innately ingrained

00:52:32 ►

in the culture.

00:52:33 ►

And as this proliferation is moving forward in your 100-year plan, how do you see Burning

00:52:39 ►

Man being a part of that or what are your thoughts on that?

00:52:42 ►

Yeah, the areas that regionals are having

00:52:45 ►

trouble with, one is sexual assault actually

00:52:48 ►

that’s one of the biggest problems and then

00:52:49 ►

related to it is not

00:52:51 ►

that sexual assault is a problem but what

00:52:53 ►

does a small community do when they

00:52:55 ►

have a sexual predator or they’re

00:52:57 ►

not sure and it’s about asking all the questions

00:53:00 ►

too. I’ve seen enough of those

00:53:01 ►

situations where either person can

00:53:04 ►

point to the other and you need to get all

00:53:05 ►

the stories straight. And removing

00:53:07 ►

somebody from the community or not having them

00:53:09 ►

part of it without really going

00:53:11 ►

through the right process is

00:53:13 ►

painful and sometimes fucked up.

00:53:16 ►

And our organization helps

00:53:17 ►

the regionals actually moderate

00:53:20 ►

particularly around their leadership.

00:53:21 ►

But we’re also helping the regionals

00:53:24 ►

get together once a year

00:53:25 ►

it’s called the Global Leadership Conference

00:53:27 ►

and there’s about 300 of them

00:53:29 ►

not just the identified leaders

00:53:31 ►

but they can also invite other leaders

00:53:33 ►

and we’re helping them have the conversation with each other

00:53:35 ►

because I don’t actually know all the answers

00:53:38 ►

to that and again just like the woman

00:53:39 ►

asking me about sustainability

00:53:41 ►

some of what you all are doing in the world we’re learning from

00:53:43 ►

and we’d rather you tell us what you think.

00:53:46 ►

So in the case of the suicide as the

00:53:47 ►

other one,

00:53:49 ►

there is, by some

00:53:52 ►

people perceive that there are,

00:53:54 ►

there’s a little bit more suicide than they’d like

00:53:56 ►

to see from the burner, creative types.

00:53:58 ►

And that’s a conversation

00:54:00 ►

that people should have about

00:54:01 ►

what it looks like and what the solution

00:54:04 ►

is.

00:54:09 ►

And again, if you’re going to be radically inclusive,

00:54:12 ►

where do you draw the line on that for other things?

00:54:15 ►

And I’m here to help facilitate those conversations.

00:54:16 ►

I don’t have all the answers.

00:54:18 ►

Last question.

00:54:20 ►

Here we go.

00:54:23 ►

My question is about the size.

00:54:25 ►

Your nails are beautiful, by the way.

00:54:26 ►

Thank you very much.

00:54:28 ►

For Barbie camp.

00:54:29 ►

Barbie death camp?

00:54:30 ►

Yeah, Barbie death camp.

00:54:31 ►

That’s where I got them.

00:54:32 ►

Everybody can go there.

00:54:33 ►

Beautiful blue.

00:54:34 ►

Thank you.

00:54:38 ►

The plan for the next 20 years is beautiful, but the ticketing system changes, so a little bit spooky.

00:54:42 ►

Now, do you think that the number of allowed participants

00:54:46 ►

will increase in the future, or

00:54:47 ►

will it be capped at this current number?

00:54:50 ►

We’re trying to increase the number.

00:54:55 ►

We have a

00:54:56 ►

five-year permit for 70,000,

00:54:58 ►

and we are,

00:54:59 ►

I think we’re at the third year,

00:55:02 ►

so we have 2015 and 2016

00:55:03 ►

before we can grow, but we’re in the third year. So we have 2015 and 2016 before we can grow.

00:55:07 ►

But we’re in the process of trying to figure out how we can modify that permit.

00:55:09 ►

Modifying it, again, costs money and time and consultants

00:55:12 ►

and everything else.

00:55:16 ►

Yeah.

00:55:17 ►

I mean, we’ve got to solve the traffic problem first.

00:55:22 ►

And you guys have to decide what’s tolerable to be in line for.

00:55:26 ►

Four hours seems to be, three to four hours seems to be tolerable. After that, people

00:55:30 ►

get really pretty pissy. So I think we could have 100,000 people and still be culturally

00:55:37 ►

really rich. I mean, I was at Glastonbury. There’s 200,000 people there and it’s fun.

00:55:41 ►

It’s not Burning Man, but it’s fun.

00:55:46 ►

We can’t do that on this site. We’ll never have 200,000 people on this

00:55:48 ►

site ever, ever, ever, ever. But what’s the

00:55:50 ►

difference between 70 and

00:55:51 ►

100,000? I don’t know.

00:55:53 ►

But we want to grow. We really

00:55:56 ►

do.

00:55:57 ►

I have one quick question for you guys.

00:56:02 ►

Did you have a question, Pez?

00:56:06 ►

It’s kind of a funny one.

00:56:07 ►

I’ve heard this rumor rocking around that next

00:56:09 ►

year’s theme is breakfast.

00:56:12 ►

That’s funny.

00:56:13 ►

And I wanted

00:56:14 ►

you to comment. Larry Harvey comes up with

00:56:17 ►

the theme, not me. I do

00:56:19 ►

know what he’s thinking about.

00:56:21 ►

We used to tell him not to talk about it

00:56:23 ►

while we’re still producing the event,

00:56:25 ►

and he does it anyway.

00:56:27 ►

So I overheard it, and it sounds kind of cool.

00:56:29 ►

It is definitely not breakfast.

00:56:33 ►

Thanks.

00:56:33 ►

Thanks, you, everybody, for being here.

00:56:42 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

00:56:44 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

00:56:49 ►

And if you are curious to know what the 2015 theme actually is,

00:56:54 ►

then I suggest that you surf on over to BurningMan.org,

00:56:58 ►

which has been beautifully remodeled, I should add.

00:57:01 ►

And once you’re there, I’m sure that you’re going to learn

00:57:04 ►

all kinds of interesting new things about the event, and you’re going to love the possibilities raised by this

00:57:09 ►

year’s theme, I think. It has the potential to be Larry Harvey’s best theme yet. I was also pleased

00:57:16 ►

to hear Marian say that she too believes that the worldwide festival vibe is one of the best hopes

00:57:21 ►

for our species to make it through this century. If you watched the video interview that I gave

00:57:26 ►

and is titled Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate,

00:57:29 ►

you may remember that the last thing that I said in the interview was,

00:57:33 ►

I personally believe that the worldwide dance community

00:57:36 ►

is the single greatest hope for our species.

00:57:39 ►

And I still believe that.

00:57:41 ►

If you’ve ever been to Burning Man or any of the other great festivals,

00:57:44 ►

you already know this yourself.

00:57:46 ►

And if you’re part of that scene, well, thank you.

00:57:49 ►

You’re dancing for us all.

00:57:52 ►

In the early part of their conversation, Marion talked about the 2012 ticket fiasco.

00:57:58 ►

And I have to admit that it brought back my only bad memories about Burning Man.

00:58:03 ►

And actually, it’s about not getting to Burning Man.

00:58:07 ►

As early as September of 2011,

00:58:10 ►

a few of us got together to organize a theme camp

00:58:12 ►

to host the Planque Norte lectures for the 2012 burn.

00:58:16 ►

A week before the ticket lottery,

00:58:18 ►

one of our guys even went to Thailand

00:58:20 ►

to order the construction of several domes

00:58:23 ►

that we planned to use for the event.

00:58:25 ►

And most of our finances for the camp were already worked out, and we were all really

00:58:29 ►

excited about going to the 2012 burn. Then came the day of the lottery, and out of our 60 or so

00:58:35 ►

people, only four got a ticket. And even though the Burning Man organization more or less worked

00:58:41 ►

things out over the next several months, by the time that they did so, our group had already disbanded. Fortunately, Bruce Dahmer, Tom Riddell, and Christopher Pezza

00:58:50 ►

didn’t give up. They joined Camp Soft Landing, and there they hosted the Planque Norte lectures that

00:58:56 ►

year. Now, I have to own up to being one of the discouraged ones. Having invested a lot of time

00:59:03 ►

leading up to the lottery and seeing almost

00:59:05 ►

everyone in our camp decide to skip the burn that year, I did the same thing. And in case you’re

00:59:11 ►

wondering, yes, I was really, really pissed off at the way the ticket sales were handled.

00:59:16 ►

Fortunately, Bruce and Tom and Pez are better men than me and were willing to let the Burning Man

00:59:21 ►

organization work out their latest growing pains. And now that I’ve grown up a bit more since then, I see how childish I was at the time.

00:59:30 ►

So, Maid Marian, I apologize to you and everyone in your organization for being such a jerk.

00:59:36 ►

Hopefully, I’ll make it back to the playa again one day where I can apologize in person.

00:59:41 ►

As you may have guessed, my experience at the Burns that I did attend

00:59:44 ►

are now among the

00:59:46 ►

most cherished memories of my life. So I hope that all of our fellow slaughters have the opportunity

00:59:51 ►

to walk on the playa at Black Rock City themselves one day. At least once in your life, you owe it to

00:59:57 ►

yourself to stretch way beyond your normal limits and figure out a way to get to a burn. As you may have noticed, I’m recording this podcast on February 17, 2015.

01:00:09 ►

Tomorrow, tickets go on sale for the 2015 burn,

01:00:13 ►

which takes place from August 30 through September 7.

01:00:16 ►

Now the next thing that you should do when you get to the end of this podcast

01:00:20 ►

is go to the web and surf on over to the Burning Man site,

01:00:23 ►

which you will find at www.burningman.org.

01:00:28 ►

And even if you aren’t going to the burn this year,

01:00:31 ►

I highly recommend that you check out their newly designed website

01:00:34 ►

where you can learn about upcoming Burning Man events

01:00:37 ►

in Austin, Los Angeles, South Africa, and Israel,

01:00:41 ►

in addition to the main event at Black Rock City.

01:00:44 ►

I’ve already begun hearing from fellow salonners who tell me that they are thinking about going

01:00:48 ►

to the burn this year.

01:00:50 ►

Unfortunately, thinking isn’t going to get you there.

01:00:53 ►

Doing is what’s required.

01:00:55 ►

And the very first thing that you need to do is to get your ticket.

01:00:58 ►

Do it now.

01:00:59 ►

Don’t wait.

01:01:00 ►

It’s been my experience that once you have your ticket, the spirit of the event takes

01:01:04 ►

over.

01:01:04 ►

It’s been my experience that once you have your ticket, the spirit of the event takes over.

01:01:12 ►

And from then on until you roll onto the playa in August, most of your thoughts and free times are going to have a Burning Man flavor.

01:01:17 ►

It’s a new way of life that you’re going to experience in the playa, and I know what I’m talking about.

01:01:26 ►

When I first arrived at Black Rock City in August of 2002 for my first burn, I had just completed 60 years of being called Larry.

01:01:32 ►

By the time that I left the playa a week later, I had changed my name to Lorenzo,

01:01:35 ►

and my life has been a grand adventure ever since.

01:01:45 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be careful out there my friends!

Graph View

Backlinks