CHIP: 

These values, the 10 Principles, they really take us back to the roots and the soul of what has made Burning Man what it is. I like when I’m talking to people to say like, “What’s your favorite principle? What’s your least favorite?” It leads to pretty interesting conversations. It means different things to different people. And sometimes, the principles are at odds with each other. That’s fine, too. That’s part of the beautiful juxtaposition of life. The biggest value of the principles is they’re meant to be an initiation. 

STUART: 

Hey, everybody, it is Burning Man Live! I’m Stuart Mangrum, and my guest today is kind of a big deal, kind of a famous guy around the Burning Man world. He is a rather celebrated author, speaker, leadership maven, if I can use that word, hospitality entrepreneur, and one of the founding Board members of Burning Man Project, and I just got to say, a serial contributor to the cause, to the organization, to the culture, Chip Conley. Hello, Chip. Thanks for joining me.

CHIP: 

Thanks, Stuart. I’ve always wanted to be a maven, so…

STUART: 

Yeah, you know, funny story, Brian Doherty and his book about Burning Man, after he interviewed me, this is years ago, he wrote that I was Burning Man’s marketing maven, and I had never seen the word before. And I was like, is that a good word or a bad word?

CHIP: 

You know, it’s a funny word, actually. It’s a word that Malcolm Gladwell, I think popularized the word maven in thinking about people who are connectors.

STUART: 

Yeah. I want to talk to you about the past, the present, the future, all of it. But let’s start – Can you remember a moment when you realized that Burning Man was going to be kind of a big thing in your life?

CHIP: 

It was before I ever got there. So I had a company called Joie de Vivre, a boutique hotel company, for 24 years, and our head of marketing was someone I really admired who is a few years younger than me. He was a creative artist, but just a brilliant marketing guy, and he would go to Burning Man every year, and this is in the mid 1990s. So finally one day I just sat down with him and had lunch and I said like, “Tell me more about this.” He was describing it and he sort of said, like, “This is the way the world would be if artists ruled the world.” 

And I was like, “Oh, that sounds interesting.” 

And so it was in the later 90s that I had my first experience there. And I had had a relationship end not well, not by my choice. So in many ways, I can relate to Larry Harvey in the mythology of the early days of Burning Man. You know I came there, I came from a with a point of view which was: I am ready to let go of something. And so the Temple burn was perfect for me. And I felt at home there very quickly, and even before I got there.

STUART: 

A lot of change over those intervening years. 

CHIP: 

Yes. 

STUART: 

What are your favorite and least favorite ways that you have watched this thing change?

CHIP: 

Well, it’s a funny thing. I have two hats here. I’m going to wear the hat as a participant, as opposed to as a Board member, which I did for ten years. The Board member piece, that’s like the Org and all the complications. I love the Org, and I love how the Org has evolved with time. So, none of this is to speak in any way against that. But I’m gonna speak as a participant. 

What I loved about Burning Man in the early days is the immediacy of it, and the fact that there was no wi-fi out there, and there was no… You just, you had no schedule. You weren’t having people say to you, “Oh, let’s meet for lunch on Wednesday,” or something. It’s like, “no!”

STUART: 

Yeah, you didn’t even know what day it was, probably.

CHIP: 

Yeah. Yeah. I think just the immediacy, and the otherworldliness of it, the fact it felt very detached from my normal life, that was something that I feel like has gotten lost. So ah, starting with the thing that feels like unfortunate with wi-fi, with… Yeah. And, you know, so I think that I think the immediacy of the 10 Principles, the one that I really appreciate the most is that one because I feel like it’s so missing in modern culture.

I’ll never forget my first time at Burning Man. I had a Walkman back in those days, I had a Walkman, and I was on my bike and I had like Priscilla Queen of the Desert, something flowing behind me. Some like wrapping of something that’s a…

STUART: 

A train of some sort. Yes.

CHIP: 

Yeah, a train of some sort. And I was going through the desert and then all of a sudden somebody next to me shows up riding bike and we just slithered like two snakes. And he also had a train behind him, sort of flowing into the desert. And for about a half an hour, with me listening to Moby and him listening to whatever he was listening to, we flowed through the desert together, and at some point he just waved at me and moved on. And that kind of intimacy and immediacy and serendipity is what I love about Burning Man. I feel like that’s been lost a little bit with people literally getting too wrapped up in, “Did I get my Instagram shot?”

STUART: 

Yeah.

And I also think the thing that people who are just possessed by the event in the desert really miss, is how influential Burning Man is in the culture around the globe, and with all of the affiliated events, and all of the communities that exist around the globe. That to me has been a real inspiring part of how Burning Man has grown into what it is, in the sense that there are little communities – I’ve done in Spain and in Taiwan and in Israel and in South Africa. I have gone to burns, some of them big, that are affiliated. And I just love that, that it’s a global community.

STUART: 

You talked about other Burning Man events around the world, and I’m curious about that because you are something of an expert on festivals, if I can use that term broadly.

CHIP: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

You started the Fest 300 site and you’ve been involved in, what is it, Everfest?

CHIP: 

Yeah, it’s Fest 300 went over to Everfest, and then it all came crashing down at some point, but yes. 

What I was curious about Stuart, was in a world in which the more digital we get, the more ritual we seem to need. It was like this interesting thing that we have a lot of URLs in the world that, now IRLs, In Real Life experiences, are what people prize.

So I went around the world to understand the appeal of festivals and pilgrimages. And some of them are religious pilgrimages. I went to Maha Kumbh Mela, which is actually happening again this February. Maha Kumbh Mela is the largest gathering of humans in the world. It’s in India at the Ganges River every 12 years. It’s 100 million people.

STUART: 

Wow! 

CHIP: 

It’s a devotional Hindu festival. And has been compared to Burning Man quite a bit. So if anybody wants to go do a search, an AI search for “What’s the comparison of Maha Kumbh Mela and Burning Man?” It’s very interesting. So yeah, that was wild. 

I went to El Colacho in Spain, which is a weird ritual in which this little village of 400 people, once a year, takes all of the babies and they put them on mattresses, and this devil character, who gets drunk over the course of the day, jumps over these mattresses, and everybody else tries jumping over the mattresses with all these babies screaming. It’s just weird as hell. And perfectly demented enough for someone like me to find it really fascinating because it’s a festival, pagan Catholic festival, that’s been going on for 400 years.

And I went to, you know, the Harbin Ice and Snow Festival in China, and Thaipusam in Malaysia, and all kinds of Balinese festivals, and Day of the Dead in San Miguel de Allende. It was for me the opportunity to really try to understand the phenomena of gatherings, and of feeling a sense of belonging in person.

Most of my attention to this was paid in 2012, 2013. And then, you know, out of the blue, I got asked by the Airbnb founders to take their little tech startup and help take it mainstream. So I didn’t have as much time to devote to Fest 300 after that.

STUART: 

But in that study of events and ritual events and festivals around the world, did you come away with a different appreciation of Burning Man, or some notion of where it fit in that larger tradition?

CHIP: 

Yeah, I mean, you know, what I really was most impressed by is how Burning Man got to where it is without Larry Harvey or the other five founders sitting there and saying, “Well, here’s what they’ve been doing for 2,000 years at the Ganges River,” or “This is what is done for 400 years in Spain.” So I was really impressed that Burning Man had taken, I think, some of the core things that make a festival beautiful, like the idea of isolation, something that’s remote. I think the idea of a pilgrimage is important. And so yes, there are beautiful festivals and there’s music festivals in all kinds of places that are accessible and easy to get to. But sometimes it’s the festival that’s a little harder to get to. 

For example, I love the Telluride Film Festival, because it takes over the whole town of Telluride, a tiny little town in a box canyon. And I like it so much more than, say, the Sundance Film Festival or the Toronto Film Festival, because there’s this immersion. There’s the sense that you’re in an immersed place. The Toronto Film Festival is happening in a big city, and you go to the film and then you maybe go to a cafe, and then there’s some speaking things going on around town, but you’re not in the crucible. And I think this idea of being in a crucible where it feels like there’s an isolation…

Now there are occasionally festivals that integrate deeply into the community. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest is a remarkable festival because the whole town of New Orleans basically opens their doors and people are having barbecues on their front lawns, and when you’re walking to and from the concert venues, you’re able to just sort of hang out with people in town. That’s beautiful as well.

STUART: 

Las Fallas in Valencia.

CHIP: 

Oh, Las Fallas in Valencia; same thing, I totally agree. In fact, what I thought, the three countries in the world that I think have the most dedication to the festivals are India, Spain, and surprisingly, Japan.

STUART: 

Yeah, they have that one where they haul the giant wooden penis through the streets.

CHIP: 

Yes. Japan has some weird festivals too. Very, very much so. Yes.

STUART: 

Let’s talk about values. You mentioned the 10 Principles offhand. And even though I would argue that they are not actually values, they are actions, they do imply some values. And I know that values have been super important in your work, in your businesses, and in your coaching. 

CHIP: 

Yeah. 

STUART: 

So, what is your experience of the 10 Principles and how do you think that they really play out in the culture? How important is that list of behaviors?

CHIP: 

Well, I’ve also been lucky enough to have conversations with lots of people in the Burning Man org around this topic, and helped lead leadership retreats on it in the Burning Man org, so it’s a very important topic. These values, the 10 Principles… First of all, I think it’s something that every new person – maybe to become a citizen of Black Rock City, you actually have to do a little, I don’t know, a citizen quiz or something like that to understand the values. Maybe there should be something like that. You know, maybe first timers, like virgins, have to take a test before they come. 

I think they’re really important because I think they really take us back to the roots and the soul of what has made Burning Man what it is. I like when I’m talking to people to say like, “What’s your favorite principle? What’s your least favorite?” I’m just really curious about that. It leads to pretty interesting conversations.

But I also think that people define them slightly differently, that the evolution of one of the principles could mean that it means different things to different people. 

And sometimes the principles are at odds with each other. That’s fine, too. That’s part of the beautiful juxtaposition of life. 

The biggest value of the principles is they’re meant to be an initiation. And that’s why I think there is some value in figuring out how virgins understand them, how can they be literate about them, as a new citizen in the country needs to be literate about the history of the country. Because I actually think they can influence behaviors. And I think influencing behaviors is really what you want values to do.

STUART: 

Yeah, we’ve… I’ve considered that. I’ve had days when I woke up thinking, gosh, I wish we just had a quiz, um, a citizenship test before we get in. But then I also look at it from another angle, and think that some of them can only be learned by doing. Like, gifting is so hard for someone who has grown up in our Western society, right? The idea of a gift that’s not reciprocal is just nonsense. I always challenge people. It’s just like, “Okay, if I don’t give you a Christmas present for two years in a row, am I going to stay on your list?” Right?

CHIP: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

Once you’ve learned how to receive a gift, I think you’re more able to give one. I look at people. It’s like, you know, people who are scrambling through their newbie checklist and like, “I have to get gifts to give away to people!” I tell them, “Just relax. The gift will make it self apparent.” 

CHIP: 

Yeah, I think the gift can be purely emotional. I mean, it doesn’t. Again, when people start getting really wrapped up in like, what are the physical things I have to be giving away? They’re like sometimes missing the point, which is the ephemeral nature of a gift, not the premeditated nature of it.

STUART: 

That one is learned through experience. I think Leaving No Trace is best learned through shaming. “Hey, you pick that up!” I don’t know.

CHIP: 

Yes. And you know, Burning Man has done a job of, like, helping people who say, like, left their camp? It has a lot of MOOP. Yeah, yeah. With a lot of us, sadly.

STUART: 

Yes. But people are overall are so good at it. It’s unbelievable really how good people are at picking up after themselves when a city of 70,000 can bugger out, leaving so little behind? Even in a bad move year, like with a bad weather year, it’s still kind of a miracle, right?

CHIP: 

Yeah it is. 

I think though that then the question becomes… Again I’m a big believer in questions, that’s sort of what MEA, the Modern Elder Academy, is all about is, how do you help people to craft questions that open up options in their life, and open up new ways of looking at things?

So the question I might ask someone who’s a long time Burner is: Which of the principles have you integrated into your default life, default world life, the most? And I think that’s a really good question. It really says, “Okay, this is not about just what happens out there in the desert, but it’s what do we bring back? And how do we integrate gifting and the spirit of generosity into our day-to-day living?”

STUART: 

Yeah.

CHIP: 

That’s when Burning Man, to me, has the greatest influence.

You know, Dacher Keltner is a UC Berkeley Professor, started the Greater Good Science Center. He’s on our faculty at MEA since the very start when we first opened. He wrote a book last year called Awe, A W E, a Beautiful Book and studied the common pathways of experiencing awe, around the world. And number three on the list was nature, which a lot of people would have thought that was number two.

But number two and number one on the list sort of relate to what you’re talking about. Number one on the list is moral beauty. Witnessing compassion and kindness and courage and resilience and equanimity, and all the best humans have to offer. And I just think that’s part of the experience of Burning Man, is to feel that sense of awe, of the moral beauty of people gifting or people just being emotional, people being able to open up and let go of something that they really needed to let go of.

And then number two on the list is collective effervescence, which is very much what you feel at Burning Man. That’s when your sense of ego separation starts to dissolve, and your sense of communal joy emerges. Collective effervescence – when people tell me “What’s Burning Man like?” I just say like, “Hey, there’s a guy Emile Durkheim. He’s a French sociologist. He studied religious pilgrimages 120 years ago. He coined the term collective effervescence. It’s as if he went to Burning Man.” Because that is what Burning Man is, is that sense of communal joy, collective effervescence, that is palpable when you’re there, but really hard to describe to others.

STUART: 

Yeah. I’m a big fan of Dacher Keltner’s work, too. We’ve got to get him out to Burning Man. I understand he’s never been. 

CHIP: 

He’s never been. I think he’s ready. He might be ready to just, like, say “Okay, whatever!”

STUART: 

Because reading through his work on awe, I see so many commonalities into the Burning Man experience. It’s kind of, uh, well, it’s just kind of miraculous, isn’t it, when somebody has been to Burning Man without going to Burning Man?

CHIP: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

Some people change it more than it changes them. 

Let’s talk about the modern elders. What is this? Why does it matter? What are the overlaps, you think, between that work you’re doing and Burning Man community and values?

CHIP: 

When I was asked by the founders of Airbnb 12 years ago to join this little tech startup, as a long time boutique hotelier and clueless about what they were doing, quite frankly, pretty quickly they started calling me the modern elder. I didn’t like that a lot, but I was 52 and the average age was 26. And, ah, but then they said, Stuart, something that I appreciate. They said, “Chip, a modern elder is someone who is as curious as they are wise.” And that really spoke to me, the alchemy of curiosity and wisdom. There’s a lot of modern elders in the Burning Man world, that’s for sure. 

What I think is true about modern elders, is that modern elders know that intergenerational collaboration is essential. A traditional elder knew that as well. The traditional elder may be the wisdom keeper, and they just dispense wisdom. But I think a modern elder is someone who is seeking wisdom as much as they’re dispensing it, and they realize they’re going to learn as much from younger people. And I did. At Airbnb, I was mentoring over 100 people over the seven and a half years I was there, but I was learning as much from them as they were from me.

So I decided to create the Modern Elder Academy, MEA, as the world’s first midlife wisdom school, with the first campus being in here in Baja, on the beach in Pescadero, next to Todo Santos, an hour north of Cabo, and then the second location being a 2600 acre regenerative horse ranch outside of Santa Fe. 

And the intent was to create a midlife wisdom school dedicated to helping people reframe their relationship with aging, because Becca Levy at Yale has shown that when you shift your mindset on aging in midlife from a negative to a positive, you gain seven and a half years of additional life. So that, in addition to helping people navigate transitions, cultivate purpose, and own wisdom, own their own wisdom; really understand that they have some wisdom inside of them, and how they want to share that. Because wisdom is not taught, it’s shared. It’s a social good. It’s a common good in society. And so how do we create that kind of wisdom sharing? knowing that, frankly, for a lot of us, I’m 64 now, a lot of us are going to learn as much from someone who’s 36 as we will, giving them some wisdom as well.

STUART: 

In your book Emotional Equations there’s one that stood out for me. It’s that “wisdom is the square root of experience.” Now, I understand the relationship between those two things, but can you explain the maths because I don’t know if I, if I took that course?

CHIP: 

Yeah. That’s funny. You took… that’s the advanced one. That’s, uh, that’s the last chapter. Let’s explain emotional equations for a second before I go to that one. 

In my late 40s when I was really struggling with a variety of things in my life, with my emotions, I felt very emotionally lacking in fluency. So I started using equations like “despair equals suffering minus meaning,” or, “disappointment equals expectations minus reality.” And I started to try to understand emotions based upon their ingredients, like a recipe. So, yeah, the last one in the book, the most complicated one is, “wisdom equals the square root of experience.”

That really speaks to this idea that, our painful life lessons are the raw material for our future wisdom. If you can take your life experiences and get to the root of them, that’s what a square root is. You know, the, the square root of something is really the essence and the distillation of what’s most important from that experience. That gives you the wisdom. 

Yeah, so wisdom is the square root of experience. And I think that’s true. I think the difference between knowledge and wisdom., and I do deeply believe we’re moving into the wisdom era after having spent the last 500 years in the knowledge era, and especially in the last 50 to 60 years. The term ‘knowledge worker’ was coined by Peter Drucker in 1959 before any, most anybody had seen computers.

And today, all of the world’s knowledge is on my damn ‘magic stone’ in my pocket as Kevin Kelly calls it. You know, the iPhone. And between ChatGPT and Google, I have all the knowledge of the world and so does everybody else. So what really becomes valuable is wisdom. And wisdom is often based upon life experience, which doesn’t necessarily mean older people are wiser than younger people, but older people have more raw material.

The question is, do they? You know, there are a lot of 70-year-olds who are not nearly as wise as a 30 year old, and that’s because the seventy-year-old keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. They have not made sense. They have not metabolized their life experiences in a way that is as valuable.

And also, lastly, wisdom is a social good. As I said before, being smart or savvy can be a selfish thing, but if you if you’ve got wisdom, it’s meant to be shared and and and that’s I think we’re in an era right now where we better be sharing some wisdom, because, you know, we have a lot of vexing problems to solve in this world.

STUART: 

So you notice anything about the Burning Man that you’re around the participants? I mean, it seems like possibly the experiences that we have out there could be some kind of a crucible for leading to emotional intelligence, if not emotional wisdom. Do you see any kind of pattern emerge from your friends from out in the desert?

CHIP: 

I don’t have an equation. But I would say, what’s very clear, what I really appreciate about Burning Man, and also MEA, is: you don’t know anybody’s last name; You don’t know their LinkedIn profile; you don’t know their wealth status. You know what they’ve gone through because you’re actually we and may we call it speaking from the third vault.

The first vault is the facts of your life, mostly the brain. The second vault is the stories in your life usually from your heart. The third vault is in the gut, and it is the essence of who you are in this moment, unfiltered. And, expressed. 

And to be at Burning Man or at MEA and to get to know people from the inside out, to me, that is that means getting another from inside out is the opposite of what we normally do. We normally get to know people from the outside in — not just visually, but based upon stereotypes about who they look like, what they do, etc. What’s beautiful about Burning Man is, is we are less fixated on trying to judge who you are based upon how you show up.

I think there’s more of a curiosity. And I think they, you know, the world could use some curiosity and less judgment, there’s no doubt about that. And I think that that’s one of the beautiful things I see both at Burning Man, but also at my.

STUART: 

Well, that notion of Burning Man being a kind of an emotional crucible. I think that that resonates a little bit with the work that I know that you’ve done around, Abraham Maslow. I’m a big fan of your book, peak. When I first saw that, I was like, God, that took me back to my first exposure to Maslow was in actually an Air Force survival school. But I see that operating out on the playa, too. I mean, do you agree with that?

CHIP: 

Yeah. I mean, I wrote a blog post about 11 years.

STUART: 

I have to go back and read that.

CHIP: 

But yeah, And it’s been popular. It’s been very popular over all these years. It’s a, it’s basically a, it’s a perspective of how this higher the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs apply to being at the event.

But it’s instead of, and people get very fixated with sometimes with Maslow, like, oh, it’s all about self-actualization. Well, at the end of the day, Maslow later in his life and I have his diaries for the last ten years of his life, which is really, you know, very lucky. His family gave them to me when I was writing the book.

STUART:
Wow.

CHIP: 

And long story short is, he spent the last ten years of his life talking about self-transcendence. So because sometimes people get fixated and say, like, “Maslow’s all about the Western culture and all about, you know, being all you can be human potential movement.” The truth is that later in his life, it was very much instead focus about how do you transcend yourself.

He would have loved Burning Man because he had he had five levels. The hierarchy of needs. But then he went to seven and then eight. So what we know that Maslow’s hierarchy needs is there’s physiological needs, safety needs, social belonging needs, esteem needs, and then self-actualization. Those are the five levels. 

But above self-actualization was aesthetics and beauty, and then there was self-transcendence. And I’m forgetting another one that’s in there. But I love that: aesthetics and beauty. 

My God, that that is absolutely… So when people sometimes say to me like, “What’s it like there?” I say “Well, there’s like two component parts that I think are really interesting, this idea of art as the center of culture, and ephemeral art in particular, really interesting. And then there’s this other spiritual side to Burning Man that sometimes people take very seriously.” And it’s like there’s a almost a dogma attached to it. And other people, it’s, they sort of get a little bit the ethos of it. But, the temple to me is are like the ultimate component part of that.

The fact that there’s a piece to Maslow saying aesthetics and beauty, art and self-transcendence, which to me is spirituality. That’s really.

STUART: 

Recognition of something larger than yourself in the world. And let’s not forget survival, because as some of us know firsthand, when a windstorm comes up and blows your tent away, you are knocked all the way back down to the base of the pyramid.

CHIP: 

You are. And, you know, it’s beautiful.

STUART: 

You experience the full elevator ride, up, up, up and down at Burning Man. 

CHIP: 

It’s beautiful.

STUART:

I tell people sometimes if you don’t have the full range of human emotion, you probably didn’t really go to Burning Man.

CHIP: 

Oh. I can’t wait for you to read my blog post.

STUART: 

Looking forward to it. 

So yeah, the big question that I just keep asking, particularly in these troubling times, is: why does it even matter? Other than the direct experience for a few people, what impact can Burning Man have in the larger world? Why? Why should we keep doing this, Chip?

CHIP: 

It has none. Okay. Let’s just go there. No, um…

STUART: 

Thank you. My guest today was Chip Conley…

CHIP: 

Well, you know what? You’re a philosopher, so like, I love this question because it can have none if you want it to have none. It doesn’t have a meaning in the outside world, but it has the moment of hedonistic pleasure and the sense of immediacy around whatever you’re experiencing at the event. And that’s all it has. That can be one person. 

On the other extreme, there can be some people who take their experience, and they absolutely go back and try to change the communities they live in. 

Or, it has the transformative effect on how they see their lives and how they’re going to live them moving forward.

Or, and has a global effect on helping to have a language across the globe around the 10 Principles.

So, I don’t have an opinion on this, really. I think its, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But it’s not just the beholder, it’s what you do with it moving forward. So I think that’s the piece of it.

Is it contained in the desert and then you sort of go back into society and it’s just the default world? For some that may be their experience. And then there’s the exact opposite extreme too. 

I think the most important thing for Burning Man to do and Burners to do is to not take themselves so fucking seriously. And I think that’s the most important thing for Burning Man to do, which really gets to not the nihilism of it all in terms of like, “Oh, nothing matters.” It’s more like “Everything’s humorous.” You move from ‘nothing matters’ to ‘everything’s humorous.’ 

And I really think for those who are struggling with the world as it is now, and whether Burning Man has any effect at all, then to move from your sense of nihilism to a sense of humor, because quite frankly, having a sense of humor about things, it may be the last sense you have in your lifetime. All your other senses, your hearing and your sight and everything else, gets worse every time. But your sense of humor can last to your very last day.

STUART: 

That’s a very good answer to what was kind of a trick question. I’ve spent many years of my life intentionally not telling people what Burning Man means so that they can tell me what you told me. It means whatever it means to you. That’s the beauty of it, right? Is that that diversity of experience and that direct personal experience of something, which if I told you what it was, you wouldn’t have that.

I’m also really glad you brought up sense of humor, because I’ve always considered that not the 11th principle, but I would say the zero-ith principle. (Is that an ordinal?) It’s the hub around which all the other principles are spokes, because if you lose sight of that then what’s. Yeah point.

Right.

CHIP: 

Yeah. And that’s where I loved… So Larry was both of those. Larry was you know, when I got to spend time with him, especially one-on-one, he could both be the serious… impact. But then, he could also be just completely wry. And his sense of humor about how it didn’t really matter…

STUART: 

Yeah. A lot of people don’t realize Larry Harvey had a ridiculous sense of humor. That’s actually how we bonded. We got thrown out of meetings. We got asked to not be so boisterous in meetings because we’d just keep cracking jokes. 

CHIP: 

I really appreciated his, the alchemy. I think as we get older, we become alchemists. We learn how to be an introvert and an extrovert, masculine and feminine, curious and wise, gravitas, depth and levity, humor, um, yin yang. That’s one of the things we’re supposed to do as we get older. And as Burning Man gets older it needs to be able to weave that as well in its community because there will always be the serious ones, and then there’ll always be the humorous ones. And how do you take both, and try to take the best of both?

STUART:

You used the word nihilism. I look at that lack of explanation or that lack of meaning as being more of a Zen koan, right? 

CHIP: 

Yeah. 

STUART: 

…which is: You figure it out. 

And if you treat it as a kind of a joke, as a cosmic joke, so much the better.

CHIP: 

Especially when it’s that bad. So, the people I admire the most know exactly what the room needs at that particular moment. Does it need depth or does it need levity? And that’s, you know, a critical, in my opinion, critical sign of whether someone’s wise.

STUART: 

So what else do we talk about?

CHIP: 

I just want to say to the founders, thank you. They came to my office in 2009. I had been to Burning Man that year, and I had, it was when social media was starting to get big and I had posted my photos from Burning Man that year, and that was another break up year. I’ve been Burning Man many times, but not always having had a breakup, but I posted these photos and people in my company, some people were like worried about me. And so the head of HR of my company came to me and said, “We want you to take your Burning Man pictures down from your personal Facebook.” 

And I was like, “Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? What!?!” 

And it was when companies were getting very much into that, like, “Okay, what… How is social media being used and is it going to affect it?” 

And I was like, “Hey, I’m not wearing any of the Joie de Vivre logo,” the name of the company, “and I’m not doing anything terrible. I mean, I’m not naked. Yes. I’m wearing a tutu with no shirt on, like, yeah, and I’m dancing.” 

“Oh, but everybody thinks Burning Man’s full of drugs!”

I’m like, “You know what…” 

So long story short, I said to the head of HR, “I’m not going to do it.” And I said at an event that night, when she asked me, I was speaking at an event, and there were a bunch of media people in the event, and so a bunch of media people came up afterwards and did interviews. And next thing I knew, I was like, in Oprah’s magazine, or in her online magazine. I was on… There was a bunch of press that came out soon after that. 

And it was within a week after that that the that the six founders of Burning Man, the six founding members, came to me. All six of them came to my office, and I had no idea why the came to my office. I thought it related to the photos. And the photos had gotten their attention for sure, because it had gotten a lot of national press. But they said, “You know what? We want to take our for profit Burning Man and turn it into a nonprofit, and you’re the first person we’re asking to join us, the six of us, on this Board we’re going to create to help Burning Man move from a for profit to a nonprofit.”

What an honor to be asked. And as someone who is active in the Burning Man community and had done Burning Man fundraisers at a couple of my hotels, and had gone a lot, but there are definitely a lot of other people who are way, way, way more Burner than me. But what I got from them was that there was something about who I was that they felt this Board needed. And, yeah, my tenure’s there, and moving us from a for profit to a nonprofit, buying Fly Ranch, being actively involved in a variety of other ways. It was, you know, some of the best years of my life, truly. So I just want to say thank you to for the honor, um, to be asked really early in their process of setting up the Board.

STUART: 

Well, I want to thank you for that service. I know it was really pivotal and really super important to the development of the organization. 

And part of me kind of wishes you were still there on that Board. If you were to put on your nonprofit Board member hat for just a moment, what sort of challenges and opportunities do you see going forward, for Burning Man project?

CHIP: 

One of the biggest challenges with any organization size or any cultural institution that has the influence that Burning Man has, is it is a magnifying mirror for the challenges of society. And so the whole question about people having concierge camps, you know, and the billionaires coming, and all of that. I mean, it is a representation of a society that has an enormous inequality, much more so than when Burning Man started in the 1980s, or when Burning Man first went out to Black Rock City. So we have a much more severe problem with inequality, wealth inequality and income inequality. That’s, to me, one of the more vexing challenges that doesn’t have a simple solution, but it deserves multiple solutions. What are the different things we can do here? 

And it was something that we worked on when I was on the Board for sure as well. 

I know the influences that lead some people to say, like, “Let’s make it simple for some people to bring them out to Burning Man.” I understand that. 

And at the same time, I really, deeply believe the people who just show up, fly in, show up for two days or a day and a half, maybe don’t even have a place to sleep, and they just raggedly go back to their plane and fly home, that’s pathetic. That’s not… I feel badly for them. Yeah.

STUART:

Let’s talk a little bit more about Fly Ranch, because you were one of the main instigators and donors behind that purchase.

CHIP: 

Yeah. I love the evolution of Burning Man to Fly Ranch. It is really interesting as a future path for the Burning Man community and convenings.

You know, Fly is not meant to be a place… Yes, there are donor events that happen there. There are things that happen there during the event. But there’s all kinds of things that happen year round there, especially with the Reno community, in terms of just going out and tending to the land and having campouts that are focused on certain topics. 

What I really think that the opportunity is for Fly Ranch is the idea that there would be smaller convenings there that are rough and tumble. They’re meant to be camp outs and not big RV’s necessarily, and not sound camps, anything like that. They’re really meant to be places where people can convene and talk about things and try to make change in the world. 

I just think funky convenings are the opportunity there, small ones that are not so big that they mess up the land because the land there is really the opposite of Black Rock City.

I think of the landscape of Black Rock Desert being rather harsh, and there’s very little life, and it feels very male, whereas Fly Ranch feels very female. There’s an abundance. It’s wet. And there’s a primordial element to it because, rather than feeling very stark, it feels very abundant. And there’s, it’s actually a major migratory spot for birds and wild horses. It’s life. 

STUART: 

Yeah. We’ve had Dr Lisa Beers, Scirpus, on the program before talking about life out there.

CHIP: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

She was the land fellow.

CHIP: 

Exactly.

STUART: 

And I hear you. I mean, there have been a lot of successful small gatherings there that don’t get a lot of press, but you know, within the Burners Without Borders community, within the renewable energy community, within the LAGI community.

CHIP: 

The Land Art community, we did the Land Art thing out there. So, there’s real opportunities. 

I think the question that Burning Man has to struggle with on this one is: If you’re not in the know, or if you’re not based in Reno, how do you tap into that? I do think having some creativity about giving people the option to be out there on that land would be helpful.

STUART: 

Well, I ask you, because I know that you’ve also been a Board member for the Esalen Institute, which in my mind, Fly had a little bit of a potential, not to be a four season version of that, but maybe, I don’t know, two and a half season version of Esalen. But I know there are tons of development challenges, and all of that, so I respect that we’re limited in the numbers that we can put on the property. But gosh, it is just so beautiful. I just personally, I’d love to share it with more people without wrecking it.

CHIP: 

Yeah, it’s a treasure and I think it’s beautiful that we have it in our back pocket in case there were ever a time, for some reason, that the Black Rock Desert wasn’t available to us.

STUART: 

Yeah. 

So, you going this year?

CHIP: 

I might. I haven’t been the last three or four years and I’ve been, haven’t been post COVID and at for because it’s been so I, I have stage three cancer and been dealing with you know two years of treatment and so that’s been one reason. And then I’m really actively involved in opening up the new MEA campus.

So I have my hands full, but I actually think I’m ready again.

STUART: 

Yeah. Well, I’m glad that you’re feeling healthy enough to go, and that your successful venture with MEA is getting more successful. I can’t wait to see that campus as well. 

CHIP: 

Thank you. 

STUART: 

Anything else you want to leave us with before we part?

CHIP: 

No, I’m just a big fan of what you’re doing, Stuart. Thank you for your influence. With Larry’s passing, your role became that much more,

STUART: 

Well, thank you. Thank you, Chip Conley. 

All right. 

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

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

And as always, thanks, Larry.

 

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