COYOTE: 

Stay out of your own way. And also be ready to pivot. It’s not going to go according to plan. It never does. You’re problem solving most of the time. To me, one of my favorite parts is you’re always having to pivot and think on the fly and MacGyver stuff together. And that’s just part of the experience. And, a lot of people are so plan oriented that it’s hard for them to let go of their plan. But a lot of times, Burning Man is going to knock you off script, and that’s the time to improvise. And that’s one of the magic parts of it. I think.

STUART: 

Hey everybody, it is Burning Man LIVE. I am Stuart Mangrum, and, looking out my window, people everywhere are starting to come out of their torpor, out of their lethargy and start thinking about, “Hey, what are we doing at Burning Man this year?” Right? 

All of those folks who are plotting their course out to the Black Rock Desert for the Black Rock City event, are starting to kind of think about how they’re going to put their camps together. 

Now, this is the time of year where here at Burning Man LIVE we like to offer what we call some pro tips, not because we’re really smart, but because we’ve been doing this long enough to have made pretty much every mistake you can possibly imagine.

A couple of seasons ago we had an episode called Pro Tips; it turned into the most downloaded episode of all time for us. People just loved it. Episode 57 if you want to check it out — affectionately known around here as the “socks” episode because well, because socks. If you know, you know. If you don’t know, check it out.

Anyway, this time around, since we’ve already done socks, I thought we’d go into death and dismemberment instead. Yes, I’m talking serious back-of-the-ticket issues. Do you ever read the back of your ticket, folks? It used to just say, I think you could die here. Now, it’s a little more lawyerly. It says, “I acknowledge and fully understand that as a participant, I will be engaging in activities that involve risk of serious injury, including permanent disability and death.”

As in, you could die here or get seriously fucked up. I just want to say in advance, thank you in advance for not dying at Burning Man because come on, it’s just really inconsiderate to the rest of us. Same thing with getting maimed. I mean, it just sucks the fun out of everyone else’s Burn, right?

So in this episode, we’re going to talk about living to Burn another day, coming home in one piece, injury free. 

Hey, maybe you are a rock star. You don’t need this information, but I’m going to guess that somebody in your camp might need this information. So why don’t you listen for them, make them listen to it, you know, put the earbuds in them on the way to the desert. So they can figure out how to stay safe as they’re heading out. 

My guest is an expert at not getting killed at Burning Man. He has 28 successful years of not dying, but skating on the edge of that. He is the Black Rock City Superintendent. He is the author of the book Built to Burn: Tales of the Desert Carnies of Black Rock City, and, wait for it, Burning Man Project’s first certified OSHA instructor. And for my and for my international listeners who are going, “What’s it OSHA?” that is a part of the federal government in the United States of America. It’s the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which covers things like workplace safety. And as we’re going to get into this, for at least one week of the year, Black Rock City is definitely a workplace. 

Anyway, welcome Tony Coyote Perez. What’s up, Tony? Thanks for joining us.

COYOTE: 

Greetings!

STUART: 

Hello.

COYOTE: 

Well, you know, when I actually got onto the safety team, that was to the great hilarity of the guys who I used to work with in the past. They couldn’t believe that they had appointed me to be in charge of anything to do with safety because we were running on the edge back then quite a lot. And so, we were having to ripshot a lot of things together and in a most unsafe manner. But, we actually pulled it off and with surprisingly few injuries. 

A couple of years ago, we had a burn barrel, just this thing that happened, where we started talking about near-death experiences. We called it the “I Should Be Dead” series and everybody had ‘I should be dead’ stories, and it went into the wee hours with a plastic bottle of whiskey being passed around…

STUART: 

That’s like the Nine Lives Club. I think about sometimes if I were a cat — and I’m a big cat lover — how many lives would I have left?

COYOTE: 

Yeah, right. Well we see close calls all the time out there, you know. 

STUART: 

Yeah. Which is why I want to start with, I know you put together an OSHA for everyone kind of a course for all of our theme camp builders, all of our staff members, and I think it’s a really important piece of learning that’s going to be coming out on HIVE here — which is Burning Man’s co-learning environment — but talk about the three pillars of safety. 

And the first one is: the culture of safety 

That seems unlikely to me coming out of what I know but isn’t DPW, it’s that a culture of, isn’t the famous meme “Safety Third”?

COYOTE: 

Yeah, well, we got it up to “Safety Second and a Half.” We’ve actually ratcheted up a little bit, because we really had to start to take a more professional line on things. And ‘a culture of safety,’ when I say that, it’s really about a mindset because I think many people that are listening to this podcast will have heard at least someone say along the way, “Well, that’s just the way, that’s the Burning Man way, you know, we got to do it this way because that’s how we do it at Burning Man. And Burning Man is an unsafe place. We’re just all of the on, on the edges out here anyway. 

And so, I thought I’d open with a quick story that happened to me when I very first got, uh, promoted, as you could say, to the safety team. We were starting to experience a lot of workman’s comp claims, and we also wanted to bring an OSHA instructor out. We were starting to get a lot of recognition nationwide and worldwide as a first class event. And we were also being recognized as a pretty hardcore construction site that was going on during the building of Burning Man. And so we were capturing the attention of people like insurance companies and so on that were saying, “So do you guys got any safety programs out there? And, we’re going to have to start seeing some OSHA cards.”

And so we actually brought an OSHA Instructor out years ago, and he was a fish out of water. He came out going, “what the hell’s going on out here?” He was in Gerlach and a lot of guys were trying to keep him awake. He’s doing a very dry OSHA class. And I think the only time that anybody perked up is when he started getting into the subject of spontaneous combustion.

STUART: 

Oh, okay. Look, I just perked up. Hmm, spontaneous combustion.

COYOTE: 

That’s when people said, “Wait. How does this happen? How can I make this happen?”

So he left out of there going, “What the hell was that?” And so we went back to the think tank and said, well, actually, we need somebody within our ranks that knows our ways and knows how things work out in the desert to be able to fashion an OSHA class that addresses the specific and very unique hazards and consequences that we have out at Black Rock Desert trying to set up a city in the middle of nowhere in super harsh conditions.

And so I went and did the training and became an ocean trainer. I’ve been a trainer for about eight years now. I’ve handed in over 500 cards. And it’s working. People are changing their culture of safety. 

So the class that I have is called Culture of Safety because I realized quickly the people who weren’t really going to retain information like “a handrail has to be 42 inches high.” That’s not something that somebody’s going to remember. What they are going to remember is that if you’re having a meltdown, get the hell off the ladder, or if you see somebody acting in a really irresponsible way it’s up to everyone to watch out for each other’s back, and to actually change the way you think.

One of the things that I’ve really noticed in Burning Man in general is that there tends to be a hero factor that comes when it’s Build Week. Everybody’s coming out. They’ve just traveled across the country. They have huge plans. They’ve changed their plans. 

One of the most common conversations that happens in camps is what they’re going to do next year and how they’re going to improve their camps. And so they work on it all winter long. And they collaborate and they come up with greater ideas, bigger art pieces, they really have grandiose ideas. So when they hit the playa, a lot of times they’re exhausted. They’ve been running for a long time. They’ve just driven in from, I don’t know, across the country; they’re on a high stress thing. That’s where the injuries tend to happen, where somebody says, “I’m fine, I’m fine.” But you’ve been up for two days. You should sleep before you start putting stuff together.” “No, I’m fine, I’m fine. This is the Burning Man way.” 

We really had a serious problem with that in the Department of Public Works, where people were just doing the hero factor, or they’ve been up all night partying. “Well, I gotta get out and start swinging a hammer on a ten foot ladder.” So we wanted to start changing the way you think about it, where it’s not, you’re not wimping out if you sleep! You know, it’s okay to…

STUART: 

Really?

COYOTE: 

Yeah. It’s okay to take your time when you get there, you know.

STUART: 

I heard that Coyote, he went out and spent all day in the hot sun hammer and T stakes after being up on acid for several days. I read that in a book somewhere.

COYOTE: 

Yeah. And how did that work out? I almost died. “I should be dead.”

STUART: 

Well, you didn’t know you were going into a survival situation. That’s the thing. It’s like people don’t really, you know, they’re thinking about the task in front of them. They’re not thinking about the larger picture of human versus the environment, or human versus human stupidity. 

I don’t have any background on workplace safety, but I did have a background in wilderness survival, thanks to my former employee, the United States Air Force. And when you go through survival school, they teach you the number one thing, more important than gear or anything is a survival attitude, right? is to go into it knowing that you’re going to get out of it with a confidence about that. Going into it with the attitude that you’re going to come out of it on the other side, is an act of will, and it’s similar to having a culture of safety, honestly. I want to keep doing this. I’m not here to flame out, live fast and die young. I want to be here for the long run. I want to come back with all my fingers.

COYOTE: 

Well, we started noticing as we got older and as our team started maturing… You know, the first five years or so of the Department of Public Works, it was just really a wing and a prayer, and that was our way. You know, we laughed at paperwork. The first time somebody actually handed us some sort of a release of liability type thing, we went what’s liability? Gee. That’s not what we’re out here for. 

But then as we started to really make careers of this and really make it our ways of life, we decided, well, actually, we should probably start thinking about maybe putting some seatbelts in the trucks or something. You know, becoming involved in our own rescue. I think that my grandfather used to say that to me all the time. He was a scoutmaster. He said, become involved in your own rescue. You know, help yourself, help others, help you. When I say ‘culture of safety, “that’s what I’m talking about. 

We have a work ranch. A lot of people don’t realize that there’s quite a facility that supports the construction and deconstruction of Black Rock City, and it’s 200 acre ranch; it’s about 12 miles north of the site. That ranch has a lot of year round staff that maintains it and works it. That’s where a lot of the construction happens. A lot of things get stored out there. So it’s essentially a construction facility. And so it has to have all the safety procedures in place that you would have in a factory, for that matter. When that was developing, Burning Man was still on a pretty tight budget, and we had just purchased the ranch. And so it was pretty secluded. And so it really had this mentality of making do.

I remember going and seeing these guys that were working the six foot ladders, trying to work on eight foot containers, standing on the top of their ladders and doing these ninja moves to step on to the top of the containers, and I walked up and said, “Man, you need to get some ten foot ladders there so that you can be a little more comfortable.” He said, “Well, we don’t have any ten foot ladders. We just have to make do with these six footers.” And it never occurred to them to maybe report to somebody else who was in a management position that they needed ten foot ladders, and when they did so, the guy said, “Oh, you don’t have a ten foot ladder? I didn’t know that.” And the next day they had ten foot ladders and they were going “Actually, this safety thing is kinda cool!” It changed their mindset; it’s what we’re after when I say “culture of safety.”

STUART: 

I was just translating that example to theme camp builds that I’ve been involved in. It’s like, oh, we can’t buy another ten foot ladder, but you know what? I bet that camp next door has probably got one. That’s the time to start knocking on doors and trading favors. Between us all we’ve got everything and then some.

COYOTE: 

Yeah. When people say ‘the playa provides,’ I say bullshit. It’s not the playa that’s providing. It’s the community. It’s our neighbors, a wonderful resource.

STUART: 

The principle of Radical Self-reliance, I think, is really radically misunderstood sometimes. To me, it’s really the basis of Gifting because if you got all your own shit, you’re not expecting somebody else to provide you with that shit, you probably got a little extra.  That’s where playa magic, to me, comes from. It’s like, you know, the one thing that you brought too much of and didn’t need is the one thing that the same thing that somebody else didn’t bring and desperately needs. It all evens out.

COYOTE: 

Yeah. My wife had an apothecary wagon out there a couple of years ago, and lo and behold, there was a camp across the street that was Mr. Tool Guy. I can’t remember the name of the camp, but he had brought every tool known to man. And it was astounding the tools that he had brought. And it’s going, wow, this guy’s just. And he was just handing, he was giving screwdrivers away. “I’ve got 20 screwdrivers, here have a…” It’s a Black Rock City thing, you know, just awesome.

STUART: 

Did I ever tell you about the piano tuner guy? 

COYOTE: 

No.

STUART: 

We kept bringing the same ratty, stand up piano out year after year, and it was stored outdoors in the off season; it got so bent out of shape. We just put up a cardboard sign that said “piano tuner wanted.” All these piano tuners showed up. And the first couple came by and they’re just like, “I can’t do anything with it.” Then this guy shows up. He’s got a whole suitcase of piano tools. He stripped that piano. He took it down to the baseboards and built it back up again! You never know what people are going to pack. 

So, culture of safety. Is there anything else you want to say about that?

COYOTE: 

One of the things that I bring up in my class for years is: it’s an embarrassing thing to screw up. And sometimes when stuff happens, we call that ‘near-misses.’ And it’s human nature to try and sort of sweep that sort of activity under the carpet and say, “Geez, I hope nobody finds out.” And then the people around you, they don’t want to snitch on you. And so we have a situation where, if something isn’t looked into, it just repeats itself. And so near misses, we consider them a gift, a way to find out something that’s a shortcoming in the camp that could be potentially dangerous. And so it’s it’s, another part of the culture of safety is to open up a line of communication where you feel in a safe space to be able to talk about problems with the camp.

STUART: 

Yeah. You can only dodge so many bullets.

So the second of the three pillars of safety in your OSHA training, Tony, is situational awareness. What does that mean?

COYOTE: 

In a world of everybody locked into their phones when they’re walking through crosswalks in downtown San Francisco, maybe some situational awareness would go far.

STUART: 

I’m just constantly amazed at how many people don’t realize until they’re in Black Rock City that it is a wilderness camping trip and that they’re outdoors, and that there’s, I don’t know, weather; things come out of the sky: water, dust.

COYOTE: 

The last time we were camping together, we were trying to decide whether we should use socks or plastic bags to walk around in the mud.

STUART: 

Socks again! Team sock. Team bag. 

COYOTE: 

One of the things that comes to mind is that, we were in the middle of the whiteout, which happens every year. That’s everybody’s Burning Man stories: “Well, I was in a white out.” And for those who are listening that don’t know what a white out is, it’s a dust storm so bad that you really, at times, actually cannot see the hand before you face. It’s a reality. Certainly not any, of anything beyond the perimeters of your camp. And so when white outs happen, everything sort of locks down and the veterans head out; they’re fairly used to it and pretty much know what to do. 

We did have a lost kitten come into our camp, and I could tell it was her very first time, not only in a whiteout, but it seemed to be one of her first times to be that far out of her comfort zone in general. She had not planned for this. She had come to Burning Man for all of the other reasons she had seen the flashing lights and the good times in the parties and the fun stuff to do. But she did not have the wilderness trip part of the event planned into her excursion to Black Rock City. She had prepared everything to have a good time, but nothing to prepare herself for the harsh conditions. And so she didn’t have anything that would, not even a pair of goggles. And, she was in a panic state. 

We’re very used to handling somebody who, in a meltdown situation, we know how to do that. We’re actually trained in those areas. And, she was actually using her hair as a dust mask.

STUART: 

Oh, wow. 

COYOTE: 

And she was upset because she’d lost her friends, which, I think was really upsetting her the most because she’d lost her guides, her friends, and she was in a world of strangers and didn’t know what to do, and she was coming into a stranger’s camp. She wasn’t even sure to be comfortable to go into someone else’s camp.

STUART: 

Oh, wow. 

COYOTE: 

We were bringing her in and saying, “Come on in and sit down on this couch. Here’s a dust mask. Here’s some goggles and this is your camp for the next 3 or 4 hours. You’re not going anywhere. And this is box wine!”

STUART: 

You’re doing an essential service. I mean, yeah, people just don’t know how to react, and that’s terrifying, right? First time you can’t see shit. You can’t find your friends. You can’t breathe. You don’t know where your camp is. You don’t know who’s who’s who or what’s what.

COYOTE: 

So what do you do? Very, very much terrified. And, I also said that we’ve been through this, I’m in my 25th, 26th year. I’ve been through countless white outs, and all you have to do is sit tight, and eventually it subsides. And then you’ll reunite you with your friends and go back to Burning Man. This calmed her down. 

What struck me is that she really had not been informed of any of this stuff before she came out to the desert. We have a survival guide that we issue with tickets, but I think that you’re not that ready to pick up a manual and read it as much as you’re ready just to grab bling, put it on, and put your blinky stuff on and go out to the desert. So, that’s one of the things that we’re always working on is: you need to think about it. Burning Man takes a little practice.

STUART: 

Yeah. And that survival guide is kind of important, people. If you haven’t… That’s why we call it Survival Guide and not just like a Nice To Know Guide. It really does date back to those early, early days out there on playa when the back of the ticket was very poignant. 

So, white out, shelter in place.

How about high winds? I mean, this is something that people seem to be in denial about all the time, right, until they get to the white out. And that creates some serious safety problems. I’m talking about the flying sheet of plywood that can decapitate someone. So if the winds start coming up while you’re in the middle of or strike, what should you do?

COYOTE: 

Well, you would have been wise to bring straps and rope and things to tie it down; wise to bring stakes that you can stake things down. And also, know the signs of when the winds are going to pick up. The playa has hints and ways to let you know that these things are going to happen. Rely on the expertise of your neighbors. There’s a lot of experts all around you. There’s people, I marvel at some of these camps that are in their 20th year out there, and they’re just good Burners. Listen to your neighbors. The pro tips are all around you. 

Again, back to situational awareness. It’s just being on top of it, just looking beyond your windshield, looking beyond your camp, just being more immersed in the world that you now find yourself in, and be aware of your situations and aware of everything around you. It’s a muscle to be aware of your surroundings. It’s something that you have to visit a lot. 

I got that from being 25, 30 years on construction sites where if you’re not aware of your surroundings, you’re going to walk into a saw, or you’re going to walk into a drop zone and get your head crushed. It’s just a practice. 

And especially these days, we really have kind of tunneled into devices and screens. When you’re sitting at a restaurant, I’ll see a table of people at a restaurant, none of them are talking; they’re all on their phones. Maybe they’re talking to each other on the phones, I don’t know, but they’re not up and looking around. Burning Man is the best place to start practicing that.

STUART: 

Well, that’s true in the restaurant you’re probably not going to have a flying sheet of plywood guillotine somebody’s head off. But, yeah, I mean, weather is one thing, but honestly, for Build Week — and for newcomers, that’s the week before the gate opens when everybody’s putting up their art projects, their themed camps, their mutant vehicles, all that stuff is happening — it’s a gigantic construction site, and we don’t really treat it that way, right? I’m surprised nobody has put a big banner outside to say you have to wear a hardhat and steel toed shoes the whole time you’re inside here until the gate opens.

COYOTE: 

Well, that’s where the culture of safety comes in, where we all have to watch each other. You know, you’re wearing a flowing scarf while you’re running a chop saw, maybe you should go over, tap on the shoulder between cuts and say, “maybe you shouldn’t do that.”

STUART: 

Oh. Isadora Duncan comes to mind. 

COYOTE: 

And definitely the elements are very key. Not only is it a construction site, it’s an outdoor construction site. And, the wind changes everything, especially the shade structures. Every year we see shade structures rolling down the playa that had very insufficient stakes holding it down. Like I said, it takes some practice to learn the tricks of Burning Man. We all know that parachutes don’t work anymore. They came and went.

STUART: 

Okay, but we had to try them multiple times to be convinced. 

So hopefully these lessons don’t come with lots of trips to the medical facilities. But, just so you know, the most common injuries that happen at Burning Man. I think the first one is still heat exhaustion, right? People don’t hydrate enough, and they get overheated.

COYOTE: 

Heat exhaustion, they succumb to the elements. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. They’re just not in the practice of drinking water or they’re not in practice of hydrating. And also, quite frankly, they’re on vacation mode in their mind. They’ve left their job sites, you know, they took the time off of work, and the first thing they did was party, and nothing dehydrates you like more than partying. And, believe me, if you read the first scene of the book I wrote, that was my downfall. You know, I’d been up for two days on artificial stimulants. And I came out there, and we didn’t even bring water. That’s how I first came to Burning Man.

STUART: 

Water’s for babies! So heat exhaustion, I think, is still number one, last time I checked. We should get the emergency services people on. 

Strains and sprains. Wrench a lot of joints, right?

COYOTE: 

Like I said, they’ve been sitting in the driver’s seat for, I don’t know, 24 hours. People don’t really stretch out or do any of this sort of thing before they just jump up and start off-loading a truck!

And a lot of times people that are building stuff, they do have office jobs and jobs that don’t require a lot of physical activity. Then they get out to Black Rock City, and they want to work. Hard work is a sexy thing. Everybody wants to have their hands in, they don’t want to be the loafer. And so the strains and — back strains is one of the highest injury things we have out there. 

And, the other ones are cuts and bruises.  

There’s another very common one. We actually call it stake bite.

STUART: 

I think they technically call it a soft tissue injury, but, yeah. Stake bite. How do we avoid that? 

COYOTE: 

Situational awareness.

STUART: 

Don’t step on rebar.

COYOTE: 

Yeah, and put a tennis ball on the top of it or a way to mark it.

STUART: 

I love that. Or a plastic bottle or something. Or a stuffed animal. Something, please.

COYOTE: 

And stake bites usually happen at night when you can’t see.

STUART: 

Tent guylines are just accidents waiting to happen, too. I’ve seen so many people trip over those, get tangled up in them, whatever. You just put a little flag, put a little like, you know, bright orange flag on your tent guylines.

COYOTE: 

Little things. Those are pro tips. 

STUART: 

So, one way to avoid stake bites and other picturesque injuries is to wear your PPE, which is, TLA (three letter acronym) for what, Tony?

COYOTE: 

Personal protective equipment!

STUART: 

So, you’re saying I should wear shoes?

COYOTE: 

Absolutely. It’s a construction site. I wear my steel toe steel shank boots right on up until the event. Then maybe I’ll put my flip flops on. Or if it’s a mud storm, I’ll wear socks.

So. Yeah, it’s socks.

STUART: 

Socks over bags or bags over socks? No, I don’t want to get into that. 

COYOTE: 

Sock bag sock!

I wear the construction boots for not just for reasons of being on a construction site, but for reasons of the desert itself, which is extremely alkaline, which is something that people don’t realize. And, my wife, who I had mentioned earlier, is an herbalist. She brings a lot of very acidic things like vinegar and things like that to treat your skin and your feet, your hands, which balances out the alkaline nature.

But if you go barefoot for a long time, which people have on the playa. I love to be barefoot. Your feet feel great on the playa, but extended it starts to really do some terrible damage to your skin. Your feet crack. And so I’m usually shod when I’m out there.

STUART:

I’m a fan of being shod. And only lately have I come around to realizing that gloves are kind of important, too, that your hands can get pretty fucked up.

COYOTE: 

Sure. Sunblock, lip balm, eye protection, sunglasses, respirators, goggles, earplugs, things like that. It’s all in the survival guide.

STUART: 

What about pants, though. 

COYOTE: 

Pants?

STUART: 

What about pants, Tony? Let’s talk about pants. 

COYOTE: 

I wear them. They seem to be optional!

STUART: 

But we know at least one horrifying story of a construction site accident.

COYOTE: 

Would you like to tell it?

STUART: 

I wouldn’t like to tell it, but I think we probably should, just as a cautionary tale. 

Once upon a time, kiddies, there was a fellow who wore steel toed boots, who wore gloves, who was being very safe. But his lack of pants resulted in a tragic meeting of his penis piercing and a speed laser on one of his boots. And he ripped out his Prince Albert and had to be rushed to Reno for hours of reconstructive surgery.

So I’m just saying, you know, when in doubt, pants are okay, right? Even short pants, even hot hot pants. Just something.

COYOTE: 

It’s where I carry tools, I need pants. I suppose I could wear the tool belt without the pants…

STUART: 

You heard it here first: Tony carries his tools in his hot pants. 

Okay. Hard hats, you know, never a terrible idea.

COYOTE: 

Well, that’s been an ongoing struggle on our site, so I think I won the battle with hard hats. And one of the ways we did it is we provided them. It’s just a good thing to have. As a matter of fact, I wore a cowboy hat up there for years. I still wear a cowboy hat out there, but the hard hat is actually cooler. It sits up off of your hat. It has a breeze that blows through it, and so hard hats are actually more comfortable than my cowboy hat. So I just wear my hard hat all the time.

STUART: 

Right. It’s got that webbing that elevates it off of it. I love it, I love it, and it’s also a great canvas for all my stickers.

COYOTE: 

Yes! And people really equate safety equipment with life saving, but it’s not necessarily life saving, it’s just injury saving. We have a shade crew out there that does a lot of hammering, and they’re all hammering up on eight foot ladders. Now, dropping a hammer from eight feet isn’t going to kill you, but do you really need 14 stitches in your head, sitting in the med tent bleeding all over the place? Do you really need that? So we finally convinced everybody: just wear the hardhat, you know? 

For years, I have a very recognizable work truck and the work truck, they would just see my work truck and you could see them, you know, nonchalantly just walking over to the trailer to get something and, oh, yeah, my hard hat. 

STUART: 

“Tony’s looking.”

COYOTE: 

Well, my name was Coyote for years. Then I became an OSHA instructor, so I became “OSHA, Tony” which very quickly, like in the first half hour became, “Oh Shit Tony.” And I didn’t care if I was the one that they were saying. Yeah, I gotta get the hard hat. Here’s Tony, but as a result, their deaths and injuries went down because of hammer hammering all day and the sun, your hand gets sweaty and that hammer is going to fly out and come ringing down.

STUART: 

I’m all for fewer brain injuries.

COYOTE: 

They are a crack operation. Watching the shade group work is pretty amazing.

STUART: 

They really are amazing.

COYOTE: 

They’re up before everyone else. They just, man, they just they I don’t know how many miles square miles of shade that they put up.

STUART: 

They hammer it out. 

So what about power tools? I’ve had some interesting experiences in my camp with people who have never wielded any sort of a power tool, and even a cordless driver can be potentially dangerous in their hands.

COYOTE: 

Well, the operative word is power. These things, they’re no joke. The power tool injuries happen super fast where one minute you have a finger, the next minute you don’t have a finger… just that quick. 

And, I think the biggest issue with power tools is that they’re cool. They’re big, they’re noisy, and they do amazing things. But you really need to have some knowhow. 

As I said earlier in this podcast, we have a ranch and there’s a lot of volunteerism that happens out there. Well, you’ll have a team that comes out. “Can we use your ranch because we want to put a lot of kiosks for the airport?” for instance. And so a lot of people want to put their hand up. “I want to go out to the middle of nowhere ranch and work on some kiosks and stay in a tent and hang out by a burn barrel at night and tell stories. That sounds fantastic.”

And so they go out there and we say, “So, do you know how to use a skill saw?”

“Sure, I know how to do that.” They lie to you, and you see them using the skill saw and they don’t obviously the first time they ever had one in their hands. The skill saw is an extremely dangerous instrument.

Again, we rely on the people who know to say, “Oh, hold on, hold on. This is how you do it. Let the blade do the cutting. You know, you don’t have to push it.” You know, all these different tips and things and how to properly run a tool. Even an impact driver can be a serious injury in the med tent if you don’t know what you’re doing.

And it takes power tools to build Black Rock City. They’re everywhere. I’ve actually rolled up on art installations where I saw all of them standing in a circle with all these brand new power tools, and they got the owner’s manual, and they’re all reading the owner’s manual, and I’m going, “That’s not a good sign.”

So usually what we’ll do is, you know, I’ll take my time. I never have too much of a schedule that I can’t stop and help somebody else along the way. Which, really, gets back to the thing of: everybody seems to be in such a hurry to build Black Rock City, but you don’t need to be. You can take your time. When you first get there. You can just take a breather and be present on the playa and enjoy the starry night for a moment before you… even go visit the Man before you even start building your camp, just get into the pace of it. You don’t have to be in a rush. You really don’t. 

STUART: 

So that’s a good segue into the third pillar of safety, which is self-care. What do you want to say about that? 

COYOTE:

Self-care. Well, you know, you put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put it on your family. Self-care is a huge part of it, especially in this type of environment, and especially when you’re out of your routine; you’re not eating the same foods, you’re not sleeping at the same times, and you’re definitely partying more than you do. Not everybody goes out to Burning Man to party or do all these things, but, it happens, and it’s happening all around you, and it affects you.

And so it is important to be able to sleep and to be able to eat sensibly, and to remind yourself that this is a marathon. Burning Man isn’t just a couple of nights for people, some… Our crews are out there for 12 weeks, and some of the theme camps are out there for at least 2 or 3 weeks and they have to pace themselves out a little bit. 

One of the hardest parts of Black Rock City is trying to figure out the best times to sleep because there’s always something going on at any given moment. You’re going to miss out on some of it. But the self-care is more important because if you just try and do this, you know, power on through for 3 or 4 days you’re not going to have as good a time because you’re going to feel like crap. You got to take care of the body that you’re running around in. And then you just generally will have a better time. 

It’s an interesting thing. My wife and I have twin boys, and they just turned 16, and they’ve been to every Burning Man since they were four months old. And, when my wife and I were single and dating around, we had a very different type of Burning Man experience than when we became parents. And it was kind of a shocker to now be a parent and still be in Black Rock City, but we found out that you could have as good a time and and as a result, I was actually having a better time in a lot of ways because I felt healthier, because I was keeping more of a schedule and actually finding time to sleep and taking care of young children.

It’s a hard one to deal with because there’s so much going on. It’s such an attractive place, and there’s so many things happening all around you at all hours. But you need to find time just to chill out. I say, bring back the siestas. Siestas is the way to go. That hot part of the afternoon, I see people swinging around in hammocks, and hydrating and eating good food.

Cat naps and healthy snacks.

STUART: 

Cat naps are sexy for sure. You know, another thing that I… There are a couple of things I want to say about the one of them is that when we get into it, you know, and it can be cumulative, right? As you roll and you roll and you roll, and you work and you play and you work and you play, you can sometimes not have the self-awareness of where you are. It’s kind of like, we need to maybe look out for each other. “Look for signs of stupid,” as we used to say in our camp. Right?

COYOTE: 

Yeah. “Check for signs of stupid,” and “eat a pickle and take a nap.” That was the other one.

STUART: 

Sometimes you have to give a friend that advice. And as a friend, you have to be open to it, right? As soon as you start, like having a baby fit about it, it’s like, “Oh, I’m fine, I can do this. I gotta do this. The camp’s not going to build itself. It’s not going to strike itself. Aaaaahhhhh!” You’re doomed. That is the time to have a pickle and a nap. Get your electrolytes up, get a few winks because it’s all going to be there when you wake up.

COYOTE: 

Stuart, do you know what a ski shot is, I’m sure. Do you know what the ski shot is?

STUART: 

Oh, it’s like a ski, a snow ski with a bunch of shot glasses glued to it.

COYOTE: 

Yeah. And everybody has to cooperate, they all have to cooperate and drink the shot at the same time. It’s a lot of fun. I think it was Abby, she had a ski shot, at her bar. And every now and again, she’d set up the ski shot and then say, “Okay, let’s go and do a ski shot again!” And she’d fill all the shot glasses with water. And so everybody’s bracing themselves for another shot of tequila. And then we’d all do the ski shot and go, “Hey, that was water.” And you’re going, “You know what? Actually, that was pretty good. Can I have some more of that, please?” It was just her way of reminding people who are in the depths of having a good time with ski shots and drinking with their friends that that is the time for drinking water. But you forget to do that, you know. And so it’s up to the people around you that, “Hey, hey drink some water. Hey, you, drink some water.”

“Oh yeah. Yeah, I probably should do that.”

STUART: 

Adams Ale, I think, is one name for water. Let’s call it that. And not quitter juice!

COYOTE: 

Yeah, there is the culture of safety. You got to change the narrative around it. It’s not wimping out!

STUART: 

Quitter Juice is now Adams Ale!

COYOTE: 

Quitter juice. 

STUART: 

But it does stress kind of stress of relationships, right? You don’t want to be that guy. Tell somebody that they’re, you know, that they’re out of their head. Yeah. but you got it right. You can’t just walk past. Yeah. If you see somebody who’s in danger of hurting themselves or others, you got to say something, right?

COYOTE: 

Well, that was the big quote that we had. I can’t remember where I got it, but it’s the actions that you walked past are the actions you condone. You have to become involved. but not, you know, we all have to, we make our own choices in life and take responsibility for our own actions. But at the same time, sometimes you gotta step in and say, you know, it’s heavy. It’s down for a little bit. I believe that we’ve had to drag people out of the sun a few times that were passed out on the couch. “Somebody want to drag them into the shade maybe?”

STUART: 

Oh, but you know, the other side of that, it’s having a certain humility of knowing that you don’t necessarily know yourself that well under those conditions of stress, right?

COYOTE: 

Well, Burning Man is a self-searching place. You find your limits for sure.

STUART: 

It’s a self-service cult. You have to wash your own brain.

COYOTE: 

You have to wash your own brain. I love that one.

STUART: 

Yeah. Thank you. Shout out to Dusty, who I believe coined that. But no, you know, if because of the nature of the timeline of the event, we find ourselves working with terrible hangover strike. Let’s talk about “No Friends Monday” on strike day because there’s just such a strong draw to go out and make the most of your last night and to do all the things and to drink all the drinks and take all the drugs, and then you are a walking disaster the next day trying to strike. 

COYOTE: 

Absolutely. After the event it’s always a very, very interesting time. The spell is broken. I notice it because everybody, they all put their pants back on!

And I’m actually going, you know, “Put your pants on. It’s time to go home.” And, it’s really a difficult time for many for that very reason is that they’re completely washed out. We see a lot of meltdowns happening. And one of the largest causes of those meltdowns is that there’s people that have been abandoned. They’ll say “There was 100 people in this camp. There are five of us trying to take it down, and everybody’s just gone.”

It breaks our heart to see that. It’s happening less and less where we’re getting ahead of the game, and people are getting the message that they have to have an exit plan, and a certain amount of people need to be ready to take care of that part of the Burning Man experience of getting your asses off the playa in a responsible way and leaving no trace.

But there’s still people that really struggle with it, and 99% of the time it’s because the rest of the campmates ditched them. And so I think if there’s any pro tip, it’s to really have a good, solid understanding with your campmates before you even leave for Burning Man, that you have to have people committed to stay and help take it down afterwards, party or no. You have to leave enough gas in the tank to get that, get the camp down and out of there.

We’ve all been down that road or it just, you know, hangovers are no joke. I’ve had hangovers where I thought I was going to end up in the emergency room because it’s just feeling so terrible.

STUART: 

I am out of neurotransmitters. Where did they all go? 

COYOTE: 

Oh my God! But the reality is, you gotta get out of there. Most people have got it in Black Rock City. But still, when it’s like Thursday and Friday after the event, we’ll see abandoned cars, a trailer that’s sitting there, an RV with flat tires, you know, just, hard luck stories.

STUART: 

And worse too, you know, people trying to drive home still half conscious.

COYOTE: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

We see people who don’t secure their loads, whose crap falls on the side of the road. I’ve seen accidents, I’ve seen an RV accident on the Donner Pass.

COYOTE: 

And On the diner. And it’s. Yeah, it’s. No, no, no, no.

STUART: 

It’s not over until you get home, right? If you don’t save some gas, some juice, for that last stretch, you’re really putting yourself at risk and the rest of us at risk.

COYOTE: 

That’s true. And on another level, I’ve seen it destroy friendships, which is a real heartbreak, too; where people just, they never speak to each other again. And sometimes for good reason. “You left me high and dry out there, dude, you know, what did you think? I had to do it all myself. And meanwhile, you’re on Instagram, posting pictures of you in a hot tub at the Peppermill in Reno.”

STUART: 

Ouch. That sounds personal, Tony. 

Moving the Burn from Sunday night to Saturday night was probably a good move in that direction, when I think about it. Get it out of your system on Saturday, people. Let yourself have a warm campy Sunday. go to the Temple Burn, get some sleep, so that you can satisfy all of your responsibilities to yourselves, to the community, to your campmates, on Monday — and keep your friends. No Friends Monday, it’s just a tragedy. It shouldn’t be that way.

COYOTE:

Yeah, but I think that most people got it. When you consider the larger picture, we have a population of 80,000 in thousands of camps, and most everybody gets it. But there’s still those problem camps. A lot of people, when it’s their first year, it takes them a couple of years to really learn to pace yourself through the thing, to turn Burning Man into a marathon instead of a race.

STUART: 

Yeah. Remember when it was four days?

COYOTE: 

Yes. I do! 

STUART: 

Then it was a sprint. You know what I miss about that is like nothing ever got finished and that was that actually sent a good message. It was all a work in progress. 

COYOTE: 

Who was the one that had the installation way out there, the camera obscura. That was Chris DeMonterey. 

STUART: 

Chris DeMonterey. 

COYOTE: 

And he had at the event had already been over for a while. And he had, he didn’t realize it at all. He was just still building his thing out there. And we had to say, “Well you gotta take it down now.” And he said, “But I’m not done building it.”

“Well, now you have to take it down.”

STUART: 

It was great when it was operational. That was a fantastic camera obscura.

COYOTE: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

Crawl inside the dark room and see the world projected inside.

COYOTE: 

What an invention, Da Vinci invention, isn’t it?

STUART: 

I think so. 

So any last words for our campers as they prepare themselves for this next season ahead of us, Tony?

COYOTE: 

Stay out of your own way. And also be ready to pivot. It’s not going to go according to plan. It never does. You’re problem solving most of the time.

And to me, that’s one of my favorite parts is you’re always having to pivot and think on the fly and MacGyver stuff together. And that’s just part of the experience. A lot of people are so plan oriented that it really is. It’s hard for them to let go of their plan. But a lot of times, Burning Man is going to knock you off script, and that’s the time to improvise. And that’s one of the magic parts of it. I think.

STUART: 

I may have quoted the great philosopher Mike Tyson on this program before, but I feel compelled to say it again: “Everyone’s got a plan till they get punched in the face.”

God knows the playa has some punches up its sleeve. 

COYOTE: 

Punch it. 

STUART: 

It’s such a pleasure to have you on the program again, Tony. Let’s do this more often. 

COYOTE: 

Thanks, Stuart. 

STUART: 

You’re a good friend and a fountain of wisdom for our crews out there. Thank you so much.

COYOTE: 

Well, thank you for the kind words.

COYOTE: 

You’re not going anywhere for the next 3 or 4 hours. And this is boxed wine. It’s ████ wine, and… It’s how you… 

STUART: 

Burning Man Project does not endorse any particular brand of wine!

Brand preferences of guests are strictly their own and not endorsed by Burning Man Project. 

COYOTE: 

Haha. I didn’t mean to mention that!

STUART: 

You have been listening to Burning Man LIVE. It is the one and only authorized podcast of the Philosophical Center of Burning Man Project, made possible by lots of gifts of love from lovely people, occasional gifts of money at donate.burningman.org. Thanks to everyone who put this show together. Thanks, Larry. See you next time. 

MONOLINK: 

Thank you so much, guys. I hope you have a wonderful Burn.

 

---

more