TOM: 

There is no manual for creating something like Burning Man, just like there’s no manual to follow for creating a multicultural society that is an amalgam of people who have a whole bunch of diverse interests, right? 

All of them have very different experiences in the same place, and all of them think that they co-create the thing that exists. And all of them are right. 

The only thing that knits these disparate elements together isn’t a shared set of experiences, or perspectives, or priorities. What knits them together is a shared sense of ethics and values. 

And so it’s the stories that we tell each other about that experience that we’re co-creating, that creates the the lattice on which the event, and which our larger society, lasts.

STUART: 

To be clear, Burning Man was never meant to be about changing the world. But try telling that to the people who are changing the world. People who are taking what they’ve learned at Burning Man out past the trash fence, and dealing with global problems like climate change. 

My guest today is one of those people. Working on climate, public health, clean energy, and other good stuff, he’s had over 30 years working for sustainable futures. He is a founder of Burners Without Borders, and Black Rock Solar, and more recently, the founder of a company called EcoSafi, bringing clean cooking tech to the people of Kenya, and keeping many, many, many tons of carbon out of the atmosphere every day. Mr. Tom Price.

 

So, Tom Price. We have not spoken in a while. God, you were on the show back in its infancy, back when it was just a tiny toddler in a onesie. And I think we saw each other out at the not-burn. 

Gosh, how did we get caught up? Hey, wait, I know. Let’s talk about the weather because the weather has been pretty brutal. I just read a stat that this hurricane season, which technically is not over yet, was like one of the worst ever, $100 billion of damage between the two, and Helene had the biggest death toll since Katrina. What’s going on here and what can we do?

TOM: 

Climate bats last.

And, unlike many things in life, you can ignore it, but it won’t ignore you. 

That’s part of the reason why I keep going to the desert is because I believe it is a place where we learn to practice how to manage the changes that are coming and that are unavoidable. Not to put too fine a point on it, our climate and environment is going to change significantly. It’s going to impact our culture and society.

And the thing that we are going to have is not going to be the institutions that currently exist or the social frameworks that currently exist. The things we’re going to have are going to be the communities that we create. That is what is going to get us through the disruption that is coming. 

And so part of the value that I get from going to the desert every year is reconnecting with the community of people who, even if they don’t understand it overtly, understand that the community that you choose to create is the thing that is going to be most resilient in your life, and we’re going to need that resilience.

And so it’s good to go to the desert and practice getting along with people that you don’t know otherwise, who come from a different background and perspective, but who have something in common, and that is shared values and shared stories. And it’s one of the things I want to talk about today, is the stories that we tell each other, and why they’re so important.

STUART: 

Well, right now, the story of what Burning Man is, and what it could be, is very much top of mind for a lot of people. You know, the weather, shit, we’re not immune from that. We’ve always been subject to being an outdoor event, which is increasingly weird for a lot of people who spent their lives indoors. We’ve always been subject to that. But you know, the hurricanes last season came through, and touched down. 

So, yeah, Larry Harvey used to say that we were in some ways kind of an intentional refugee camp. That we were preparing for the end of the world.Bbut he meant it. It sounds like you’re saying the same thing. So does that come from just the nature of the experience out there? Does it come from the principles? What do you think makes a Burning Man event or space such a good place to forge new community?

TOM: 

I’ve said for many years, ever since Katrina, that Burning Man is like boot camp for disaster relief because you have to learn how to create the way to provide your own shelter and food and community structure just to survive. In spite of the fact that so many of us now have the good fortune to be able to bring trailers and RVs, that protection against the weather only lasts until you open the front door.

What we get to go and do there, is practice how to survive in a changing environment. And so much of a part of that is the way that we find and work with each other to make the best of what is sometimes a really shitty situation.

STUART: 

Shared struggle.

TOM: 

Yes.

STUART: 

Real communities do not emerge from coffee klatches. They emerge from real cover.

TOM: 

Rebecca Solnit wrote a fantastic book that she interviewed us for after Hurricane Katrina called ‘A Paradise Built in Hell.’ It’s a story about, it’s a collection of stories about, the communities that arise after disasters. Most people don’t know this, I didn’t know this, but after the fires in San Francisco, after the earthquake in 1906, the longest lasting and the last community soup kitchen was in Dolores Park in the Mission. And actually the Army Corps of Engineers had to come in and forcibly break it up. And they wanted to break it up because it was a place where the rich and the poor alike were being equally served without regard to what their background and status was. 

I often tell this anecdote about Burning Man, where I was sitting around a campfire listening to a conversation taking place, and there was two people chatting. Well, one of them was a co-founder of Google, and the other was a short order cook from Santa Cruz. And if you didn’t know, it wouldn’t matter, because in that place, the signifiers that you have of your wealth or your status or the position you have in society, they don’t matter. What matters is who you are and how you’re being in that moment. And that immediacy, and that radical inclusion, is what makes the event so special. And that’s what always comes out in the stories that we tell each other about that event. 

And that’s really important in the moment that we’re having right now. If you’ll allow me just a little bit. There is no manual for creating something like Burning Man, just like there’s no manual to follow for creating a multicultural society that is an amalgam of people who have a whole bunch of diverse interests, right? The folks that run Death Guild, the twinks at Comfort & Joy, the circus roustabouts at DPW, all of them have very different experiences in the same place, and all of them think that they co-create the thing that exists. And all of them are right, just like the tech bros in California and the guys on Wall Street and the farmers in Iowa all think they’re the ones that create America. 

The only thing that knits these disparate elements together isn’t a shared set of experiences, or perspectives, or priorities. What knits them together is a shared sense of ethics and values. And so it’s the stories that we tell each other about that experience that we’re co-creating, that creates the the lattice on which the event, and which our larger society, lasts.

Larry said something once to the Wall Street Journal really stuck with me. He said, “Burning Man, the organization, we create the barest minimum infrastructure required for that thing called culture to spontaneously emerge. We create the streets, and the neighborhoods, and tell the theme camps where to go. But the society, it creates itself and the society creates itself through the stories that it tells itself about itself.”

How many times have you heard someone say ‘this one time at Burning Man’? It’s such a cliche, but it’s so true, because when we do that, when we tell those stories about being at the event, we create that common space that connects the folks at Death Guild and DPW, and the artists, and the people who have the tiny little teahouse. Between those very disparate experiences, we create the larger whole. 

Storytelling, I think, is foundational to Burning Man because it creates the space that allows us to have a common space.

STUART: 

Yeah, the stories that we tell, that’s a great cue for you to tell a story that I’m sure some of our listeners have heard before, and a lot of them haven’t. Tell us a little bit about Hurricane Katrina, and the origins of what we now look at as Burners Without Borders. 

TOM: 

Sure. 

I’ve been attending Burning Man continually since 1997, and I volunteered on, I think, my second day as a Ranger, actually. I’ve always been curious about how things work, and I eventually had a bunch of different roles. For a while I was Burning Man’s lobbyist. Um. 

And then I helped create something called the XRT, the External Relations Team. Back then, around 2005, Burning Man was still very much under threat by local political leaders who didn’t really understand the event. And so we created this group called the XRT, whose purpose was to bring outside grownups, if you will, to the event. And we would drive them around and we would say, “Look, there’s the hospital. There’s the community infrastructure. There’s the health and safety. Those are the Rangers. You can see now that in this city that seems really weird, there’s actually all the pieces that you have.”

While we were giving that tour to the head of law enforcement for the Bureau of Land Management, they mentioned that there was a hurricane that was about to hit New Orleans. And back then we didn’t have Starlink, and communication with the outside world was incredibly difficult. But as the word started to filter in and filter through the community, people immediately, spontaneously wanted to do something.

And so a couple of us, myself and Steven Raspa, we found out that there was a guy who’d gone out to the gate by himself with an empty water jug that he’d put red duct tape on, the shape of a red cross, and he was just collecting cash for the Red Cross. And we’re like, all right, let’s organize this. So we sort, of helped organize that. 

We raised $42,000 in 24 hours just from people leaving. And Raspa was carrying around huge buckets of cash, trying to put them in safe places. We organized people to make donations of food. We collected nine tons of food in about 24 hours as well. We turned Media Mecca into a place where people could come and learn what we could tell about what was going on.

But the immediate spontaneous reaction was to want to do something. The community self-organized to want to do something and be helpful. And it was very clear there was a ton of momentum around that. 

And so less than a week later, I found myself in the town of Biloxi, Mississippi, where some people who had been on the temple crew had gone, and they had just heard that there was something bad that had happened. And they went there to see if they could help. 

Biloxi, Mississippi, was covered in 30 feet of water and had 120 mile an hour winds for 12 hours. Everything with a quarter mile of the ocean was scraped all the way down to the foundation. So it was incredibly devastated. 

They happened to have a little bulldozer and a 60-foot geodesic dome still covered in playa dust. And they found a Buddhist temple, bulldozed off the debris, and set up this dome. 

Trucks were coming from all over America. From everywhere. Random stuff was just being sent. And a truck pulled up a couple of hours later and said, “Are you a relief distribution center?” 

And we said, “Yeah, we are.” 

So we took their stuff and organized it and sort of giving it away. And within a few days we were the largest distribution center in that part of the town of Biloxi, Mississippi. 

Volunteers started pouring in from all over the country. Word got around that there was this kind of random group of people who were at the Buddhist temple who were really… kind of had their game together. Because people coming just from the playa, we already know how to provide shelter for ourselves, how to organize a group kitchen, how to get stuff done. We already know that you don’t need a specialized skill set to be someone who can build something or take something apart or clean something up. And so everybody was welcome. 

Well, not long after, somebody came from a heavy equipment company and said, “We’ve heard you guys kind of have your act together. We tried to give this to the Red Cross. They only give out blankets and coffee. They don’t really do this. Could you use some heavy equipment to help clean up?” 

We said, “Yeah, sure.” 

They handed us a catalog and we circled a few things, and a few days later, a quarter million dollars of heavy machinery pulled up, and they handed us the keys and said, “Let us know when you’re done.” So we had a bulldozers, we had excavators, we had all kinds of equipment. And again, volunteers just kept pouring in. 

We were the only people in the entire hurricane zone from Pascagoula, Alabama, to New Orleans, Louisiana, who were doing demolition and debris removal work for free. That mattered because if you wanted to get one of those infamous FEMA trailers, you had to have a box 12 by 12 by 36 on your lot, immediately adjacent to hook ups where they would give it to you. And there were little old ladies, I remember seeing one living under a tarp in her front yard, trying to take her house apart by hand so she could get a FEMA trailer. And contractors were charging people $50 or $60,000. 

We would go to someone, or they would come to us, and they would say, “Can you help me?” We’d go to their house and say, “Do you want this house removed?”

Yes. 

“Is it yours?” 

Yes. 

“Do you want anything out of it, anything special?” 

And they would often say, “I want my son’s military records. I want my mother’s china.”

And we would peel the house apart with heavy equipment, climb inside, extract the things that they wanted, and then clean it completely to the ground. And for a group of people who are immersed in the Leave No Trace culture, we got it down to like perfectly graded earth, no debris, everything off the sidewalk, space for their FEMA trailer. We’d saved the things that they wanted. And we were doing that 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, month after month. 

Everybody, all the other volunteers had t-shirts, and we didn’t have t-shirts. We’re like, right, what are we going to call ourselves? Um. And as a joke, I said, Burners Without Borders. And people thought that was hilarious. We made t-shirts. Danger Ranger actually made t-shirts and overnighted them to us. Suddenly we had t -shirts. Now we were a credible organization.  

So many people from all over our community were wanting to help. I got a phone call one day from a guy and he said, “Hey, I want to give you a donation to support what you’re doing.”

And I said, “That’s great. You can send it to my Paypal.” 

And he said, “I want to send you $50,000.” 

I said, “Just to be clear, not only can I not give you a tax deduction, I can’t even give you a receipt.” 

He said, “As long as DPW is involved, that’s good enough for me,” and wired me 50 grand the next day. 

STUART: 

Wow. 

TOM: 

We’d been talking, Marian and Larry and I, for a long time about, how do we take these values from the event out into the world in a real way so people understand it? And Burning Man got on board and was pretty supportive. And the idea was pretty simple: People at the event instinctively want to help. When you tell people, “I want to do this,” they don’t say, “You can’t do it because of that,” they say, “That’s a great idea and here’s how I can help.” 

And by being so inclusive, right… Red Cross, you could only do certain kinds of volunteering. All these groups, you could only do certain kinds of voluntary. Burners Without Borders, anybody was welcome, everybody could help. And so it quickly grew, and over the course of nine months, we did $3 million of debris and demolition work for free. We gave away countless tons of supplies. We cleaned up, I don’t even know how many people’s homes.

And, we eventually left Biloxi and moved the small town of Pearlington, Mississippi, which had been where Katrina made landfall, and was cut off by the storm for six weeks. They were in really bad shape, and we were there for quite a while. Every single day we were just immersed in the wreckage of people’s lives. 

One day, Richard Scott, who was the head of heavy equipment for DPW, he couldn’t take the destruction anymore. And so he took some of the pieces of debris together, and he got a nail gun and he made a piece of art. And we were looked at it. We had this campfire that we kept going 24 hours a day. He looked at it for a while and then he burned it.

And then the next weekend, a couple of us did that. We made art out of the debris, looked at it, and then we burned it. We thought that was pretty cool. 

And then on the last night we were there, we were going to have a big party. The locals had heard about what we were doing; we were very concerned that they would be upset about it. But what happened was really magical. A whole bunch of these self-described Cajun hillbillies came around during that week and they said, “I think I understand what you’re doing.” And they went back and they found pieces of their houses, pieces of their lives, that had been destroyed. There were just broken on their front lawn. And they took those and all of them made art, many of them, for the first time in their lives. And then they brought it over on Saturday night, and we had these pieces of art, and they lit it on fire, and then it was destroyed. And more than one of them said to me, “I get what you people do now,” because what they had done is they’d had agency. They had a choice, where they could decide to take what was broken in their life, put it together in a new way, appreciate it, and then let it go.

I think about that as a metaphor for what happens at Burning Man. We go there, all the parts of life are there but scrambled up. And people put their life together in a new way, express it, and then let it go. And then you do it again. 

And that was the genesis of Burners Without Borders.

STUART: 

And flash forward 20 years and it looks like some of that same self-organizing spirit is going on. When I read some of the reports from Hurricane Helene, particularly as they head up into the Carolinas, I saw some familiar names in there.

TOM: 

Yeah. That’s the power of the idea of both Burning Man and Burners Without Borders. You don’t need specialized skill to participate. Everyone’s an artist. Everyone’s an activist. Everyone has agency. Because Burning Man, if it is anything, Burning Man is a permission engine. It is a vehicle that gives people agency in their life to do something different than what they’re doing right now and in so doing, find themselves in that. 

And if we look forward to what’s likely coming — politically, socially, with our climate — training people in that practice of giving themselves agency and then acting on it is going to be critical to our eventual survival and success.

STUART: 

So tell us a little bit about how you got involved in being a climate activist, action-oriented person in the climate world. I know when the Burning Man theme was the Green Man, you were a project manager for the Green Man Pavilion. Tell us a little bit about that.

TOM: 

In 2007. Yeah. After Hurricane Katrina, I was hired to be the first Environmental Manager for Burning Man for the 2007 event, which was The Green Man. And as part of that, we organized putting solar on the Man Base Pavilion. So the Man was solar powered. 

Afterwards, I thought, hold on a second. If we take the same principles of taking our values out into the community, and of a gift economy, could we apply the gift economy to the real world? And that became the genesis of creating Black Rock Solar.

STUART:

Right.

TOM: 

The idea was, let’s apply the gift economy and the ethos of Leave No Trace out in the world. And so Black Rock Solar eventually built 124 solar projects, six megawatts of solar for schools and hospitals and medical clinics, and charities all over Nevada, putting that gift economy ethos to work. 

You know, at The Green Man, we created this pavilion of emerging energy technologies that were going to change the world. They had to not have any branding.

STUART: 

That’s challenging. What if you had an electric car?

TOM: 

Electric car, for example. So, Elon Musk brought a wind test version of the very first Tesla Roadster, um, and we had to sand the logo off of it, and then put it under the pavilion that had solar panels on the top. We did that to show off electric cars. What was great about it was it was actually a car made of wood. It wasn’t a real car, but no one knew that. People were trying to get into it all week long, trying to break into it.

But it was a great example of how can we blur the line between the outside world and the inside world. And there’s no right or wrong answer. Burning Man is a noncommercial event. You’re not supposed to buy or sell anything there. It is a gift economy. The gift can be, though, the exchange not just of a necklace or some other thing, but also of information.

And so what we’re trying to do, what Larry was trying to do is, how do we blur that line so that the values of the event can come in to the outside world, and so that people can learn about the outside world in some way at the event, but in a culturally appropriate way. 

If Burning Man is the event that you go to, and it lasts for a week and that’s it, personally, I’m not interested in going, because there’s plenty of great parties you can go to that are a lot less pain in the ass to experience. What’s interesting is, a place that is built around a set of shared ideas and values that blurs the line between the experience and the rest of your life. 

And so many of us – we’ve now kind of obliterated the line between being at the event and not being at the event. I’m sure it’s the case for you. My friends, they’re Burners all year long, every day. It’s just a part of their ethos. And that, I think, is the big success. And that again comes back to the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about what the event means, and why it exists in the first place.

STUART: 

Well, speaking of taking it out into the world and blurring the lines, I’d like to know a little bit more about the business that you are operating in Kenya? Ecosafi?

TOM: 

Yeah. I’ve been working full time on climate change now for more than 20 years, always trying to find the biggest lever I could get my hands on that other people weren’t working on.

I used to be a reporter and I got an assignment in 2003 to go to a country called Tuvalu, which is the first country in the world that will cease to exist because of climate change. The whole place is only about six feet out of the water. It really radicalized me. So I’ve been working on climate ever since. 

Working on Burners Without Borders really educated me to the impact that I could potentially have in the world. Creating Black Rock Solar was a real, practical application of that. And then what I’m doing now, I see in a way as an extension of that. 

It’s a gift economy, I guess, for the kitchen. We designed and engineered this stove. The stove was actually designed by engineers who started out working on a Burning Man art project with Jim Mason at the Shipyard!

STUART: 

Of course. It’s basically it’s a tabletop pellet stove, that can take the place of, I suppose, wood fire, open fire, was the primary source of cooking heat before that?

TOM: 

Yeah. So two and a half billion people around the world basically light a campfire in their kitchen every day to cook their food, the biggest source of CO2 emissions per household in the developing world. If you’ve ever been around a smoky campfire, you know what it’s like. 

So this stove, it’s 98% cleaner than firewood and charcoal. The stove costs people nothing. We give it to them at no cost, and then we sell them fuel to use in it made out of agricultural waste, and that costs half of what they were spending before. So it’s a lot cleaner, it’s easy to get, and it costs them less. And if we want to make an impact on climate change, you’ve got to make it affordable, and accessible for people.

But I really blur the line between, um like I said, my daily life and what I do for a living and and what I do on vacation. I see them as extensions of each other, which is how do we create something that is as inclusive as possible, and that gives people what they need and that meets them where they are?

It’s very rewarding work. I live in Berkeley and I commute to Kenya.

STUART: 

I think that’s absolutely fascinating. I’m curious about the business though, too, because I am woefully ignorant about carbon mitigation, offsets, credits, all that stuff. You participate in a credit market too, don’t you? 

TOM: 

Yeah, we do. 

STUART: 

How does that work?

TOM: 

The simple way of putting it is: You’ve heard about CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 is one piece carbon in two parts oxygen, and a ton of that is what’s called a carbon credit. A ton of avoided carbon in the atmosphere. We’ve put about 100 billion tons of carbon, I can’t remember the exact number, in the sky that we need to put back in the ground. So how do we clean up the Superfund site in the sky? 

And the answer is: Take people with money and connect them with people that are doing stuff. So every one of our customers prevents about two or three tons of CO2 emissions per household per year.

STUART: 

Wow.

TOM: 

We measure that carefully. There’s formulas and international processes to do it. We then say, okay, we’ve created this much avoided carbon, find someone to buy it. We then take that money to buy more stoves so we can create more climate impact. 

And if you just think about it like this, we create a way so that, because the climate affects all of us, making an impact anywhere benefits everywhere. So if you can stop burning a rainforest in Brazil, or if you can close a smokestack in Iowa, both of those have equal impact for all of us long term. And so carbon finance just connects people with money, with people that are doing stuff, in a way to do something good. 

A blatant analogy, again, was what we were doing in Katrina after the Gulf Coast, right? That guy who called me, that Hollywood movie producer who called me, he couldn’t get on a plane and come down to Biloxi. What he could do was spend some money. And in return we could do stuff with it. And so that’s what carbon finance does. It helps make an impact, oftentimes for people that need it the most and can afford the impact the least.

STUART: 

So the Burning Man theme for 2025, in some ways it harkens back to the Hope & Fear theme. It’s about the future. I look back on Hope & Fear and it was fairly playful. You know, I look at the future today, and it’s pretty grim. So many people are having a really hard time, I guess dealing with our kind of dystopian present, imagining a more hopeful future.

Now, in your LinkedIn profile, you call yourself a practical idealist and a relentless cheerleader. I just want to know how do you, how do you stay positive in the face of so much doom and gloom?

TOM: 

The Greek Stoics were really smart in developing this philosophy of Stoicism, this idea that you basically have the ability to control only one thing, and that is not what happens to you or what you do. The only thing you can control is how you react to it. 

How many times have you encountered someone on the playa where some small thing has happened to them, and because they’re all cracked out and dehydrated and busted, they have a total meltdown.

STUART: 

Complete meltdown.

TOM: 

And they get a divorce on the spot and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? 

STUART: 

Yeah.

TOM: 

And what they really need is not to get a divorce. What they really need is to sit in the shade and have a glass of water. So they can make better choices. 

So I’m not a Pollyanna. I think my wife will tell you that I probably spend too much time staring into the dark side. But, um, the thing that we can control is how we react to things. In so many parts of our lives, choosing to believe that something better is possible, that act of believing something better is possible, is what creates the possibility for it to exist. 

And so, we’ve been going out to the stupid desert and having miserable weather and horrible experiences and throwing ourselves up against that wall over and over, in part because we know, or believe, that, even though we’re in a really shitty place and it’s a terrible experience and so forth, that something better and magical might happen. And believing that it does is what creates the reality that it does.

STUART: 

Probably the most cosmic words and all of the Ten Principles which I keep going back to again and again are “We make the world real through actions that open the heart.” 

TOM:

Ohh, yeah.

STUART: 

The world really is a product of our consensus hallucination, right? So are we going to…

TOM: 

How many times, Stuart, have you been out there and some unbelievably unexplainable coincidence just happens. I remember Andie and I were walking across the playa, and we were talking about, my God, it was so beautiful. I wish there were a poem that could capture this moment. And as we said that out loud, some guy walking past us just began reciting that poem. He recited the like three or four stanzas and then finished and just kept going.

That kind of magical synchronicity of the perfect moment coming together – it only happens in a place where you all set aside… I’m going to set aside my cynicism and my doubt and my fear, and be open on some level to something better happening; and then it does because that’s what wants to happen.

STUART: 

Yeah. And be in a yes, a yes state of mind. Yeah. You mentioned that earlier. It’s like everywhere else you come up with a crazy idea, all your friends will immediately jump in and shoot it down. Friends here are different. 

TOM: 

They don’t say no. They say, “Yeah, here’s how I’m going to help you make it, and make it better.”

STUART: 

So, yeah, the future. The future. The future.

TOM: 

What is the future?

STUART: 

It has been hard, hard to think about. All through the pandemic and all that stuff, the world kind of shrank down to a dot for so many of us. And I think people are still trying to figure out what the future looks like. So put on your Futurist hat. What do you think the Burning Man world looks like next year, ten years from now?

What’s a path forward, you think, for the community?

TOM:

Well, let’s say the quiet part out loud. We’re in a difficult moment as a community. We have been in difficult moments before. I remember when the Sheriff showed up in ‘97 and started impounding all the receipts, and Larry and Marian were begging people to give them money, um, so they could, you know, get gas money to get home sort of thing.

I mean, that was a really bad, bad time.

STUART: 

That was an existential crisis. I remember the year before that when everything got burned and all the volunteers quit.

TOM: 

Right. We’ve been through that so many times. And it seems like every year it was like, my God, we’ve grown so much now, it’s too many people, now it’s jumped the shark, now we’ve got sponsors of whatever. And then we went through the crisis of, oh my gosh, you can’t get a ticket if you want one. And what does that mean for our community? 

And what we did is we reset and focused on: Okay, who matters? How do we make sure that people that are low income can come, that the artists can come, that theme camps can come? And we worked through that crisis. 

And right now we’re in a different one, which is for the first time ever, we didn’t sell all the tickets we expected to, and that’s caused a shortfall. And there’s a lot of conversations going on about, oh, you should have just managed that. Well, if you’ve been managing something that’s been growing forever, it’s reasonable to assume that it would continue to do that. Therefore, you wouldn’t plan for the downside risk possibility, or whatever.

STUART: 

Just a year ago, I remember one of our board members saying that we had a unique business position. We have infinite demand.

TOM: 

Infinite demand?

STUART: 

Yeah, well, infinity has its limits, we’re starting to see. But there’s also a generational shift going on, and like a change in the ideas of what you do with your spare time, or outside of the house. There’s a lot going on in the world. So how do we go in the right direction?

TOM: 

If you look at the census, it’s very clear that very consistent over the last ten or 15 years, that every year 40% of the people that come to the event haven’t been there before. So there’s a lot of churn. There, I think, is an infinite supply of people who want to come to the event. But it has to be made accessible, obviously. 

The Ten Principles are this remarkable thing that, a good thing to return to in moments of crisis, where the easy solution for Burning Man, I’ll be like, Well, let’s just make Burning Man sponsored by, you know, Google or whatever.

STUART: 

Woohoo! Home Depot

TOM: 

Yeah, Home Depot. It’d be fantastic.

STUART: 

Yeah. Or Bic lighters I thought, too. 

TOM: 

Bic lighters. United Site Services, all our U-Haul I think could be a great sponsor. 

STUART: 

A good beer partner would be great.

TOM: 

PBR.

STUART: 

South By Southwest makes pretty much all of their profit, I believe, from their Heineken deal.

TOM: 

Trader Joe’s. Come on, step up, guys. 

So if we’re not going to do that – um — we’re not going to do that — we need to reset and remind ourselves what makes the experience worth having in the first place. 

Now, I have some strong opinions about this. I was riding through the city this year and I remember seeing theme camp after theme camp after theme camp where, there were people who put a lot of work into, to get a theme camp spot. To get the tickets that come with it, you have to say, I’m going to have this certain amount of public interaction.

And there was so much great public interaction, but not enough people to take advantage of it. The city was almost had too many entertainment options. But so many people had had to commit to doing that, rather than being able to go and enjoy other stuff. We almost had an embarrassment of choices.

And people were doing that because tickets had recently not become available. It’s hard to get, now the only way to guarantee getting them was to be a theme camp with some public interaction. 

So maybe there’s a reset opportunity available. If it’s not so hard to get, maybe then people can come impulsively, and then they can contribute impulsively. Maybe we don’t have to have that many theme camps. Maybe we can allow the city to fill itself a little bit more organically.

I personally think that kind of magic where you don’t know what you’re going to come across, right? 

STUART: 

Yeah.

TOM:

Right now the city is zoned so there’s kind of entertainment districts, and then there’s residential districts, and I really liked it when they were a little haphazard. My friends and I have been doing our part to contribute to that. For 20 years we have been self-installing a piece of art on the playa, that we haven’t bothered the ARTery with, where we issue parking permits for the open playa as a meta-commentary. So people and they take a number and they wait in line and then they watch the number change. Then we call a number. We make sure they never align.

Eventually they get to the front. They fill out a piece of paperwork, double sided. And if they pass, then we stamp it with Harley Dubois’ signature, which we borrowed from her, and then issue a parking permit for them to park their bike on the open playa. Generally, it’s about that point where they realize they wasted 30 or 40, or sometimes an hour getting permission that they don’t need. 

The whole piece is a meta-commentary on people surrendering autonomy in a place that gives them great autonomy.

STUART: 

Oh, come on. It’s just fuckery! “The Office” is pure fuckery all the way down. And I know a thing or two about that sort of thing.

TOM: 

Well, the point is is that those those moments of unplanned magic that are organized in advance are part of what makes the event so special. 

STUART: 

Yeah. 

TOM: 

And so, going forward, making tickets more accessible, and making them more accessible earlier in the year and allowing people to plan – I know a lot of people who personally gave up attending the event because they couldn’t get permit for their art car, or they couldn’t get theme camp placement for enough people, so they were like, well, we can’t guarantee tickets, so we can’t make the commitment to go.

And if people now know that maybe you can get a ticket as late as July, maybe in Aug, maybe you can even get it at the Gate. I think the people will come back. But we have to just remind ourselves, and them, that this is an event that they are co-creating and that they are absolutely vital to making happen.

There is no differentiation between “The Org” and the community. People create it because people always look for opposition and definition in any community culture; that’s endemic to it. But, um, the Burning Man Project, from my perspective, does kind of the bare minimum needed to create the event and then try to help share that experience out in the world, because I think sharing it out in the world is an incredible force for good 

When people encounter… I was in New York or London, I saw an exhibit of Burning Man art, and I was watching other people interact with it and their minds were just completely shattered by what they were encountering. I know that some of those people were inspired and would eventually swim upstream and find their way to a Regional, or to the event in Nevada. But it is a powerful force for good in the world that we have accidentally co-created. An incredibly powerful thing that has transformed hundreds of thousands of lives and will continue to. But it, like everything else in that desert, is fragile and vulnerable and needs to be protected. 

If you just turn it around for a moment and say, well, what if it wasn’t there? What if that wasn’t an option? What if we couldn’t go back? I know I would be among an enormous number of people who would be absolutely heartbroken. I’d do almost anything to be able to go back there every year. 

You don’t know what you have until it’s gone. That’s the same about our planet. That’s the same about our society. That same about our politics. Life is a participation sport. You got to show up. And that does not mean snarky comments on Reddit. You can’t just sit on the sidelines and complain. You got to help make it the thing you want it to be. 

STUART: 

Yeah, the snark has deep roots, deep roots and… probably too deep.

TOM: 

Yeah. It goes pretty deep and it’s an important and healthy part of the ecosystem, but let’s step back for just a minute. The only reason people get to be snarky, and be Fuckos, and create those kind of things is because the thing exists in the first place. 

STUART: 

True. 

TOM: 

And somebodies are putting in the work to make that happen.

And we all have to accept responsibility for this extraordinary, unbelievable, fantastic gift that we give each other and ourselves, and take responsibility for ensuring that it survives and thrives and spreads in the world. It is an unequivocal force for good. It makes people’s lives better.

STUART: 

Do you still tell people to go? If you had an extra ticket in your hand right now, who would you want to bring to Burning Man? Who should probably have the experience?

TOM:

Well, several years ago I stopped trying to get people to come. And I just sort of step back and let it happen. Yeah. And I often find myself with an extra ticket and not surprisingly, the playa provides, including providing people that need to go. And every year it seems like I’m like, “I got this ticket, what am I going to do with it?” And then the right moment, the right person shows up. The playa is always about opening yourself up to the moment and being ready for it when it comes. That person that wants to go, needs to go, will show up. I guarantee it.

STUART: 

I’m definitely taking that extra ticket with me because there’ll be some kid standing out on a street corner in Gerlach, holding up his index finger, and waiting for a miracle.

TOM: 

Yeah. Some of the best moments I’ve ever had have been miracleing people tickets, or giving people a ride that I didn’t know, and just having these random conversations. It’s like when you jump on an art car and you find yourself out at the trash fence at three in the morning talking to someone you would never otherwise meet. 

Yeah, sometimes you’ve got to walk home from the trust fence because the art car broke down and, you know, whatever. But what happens is not the focus on the suffering of that moment. What happens is the magic of that story. And then you leave and then you go tell people that story: This one time at Burning Man. And it changes your life and theirs through the telling.

We need to keep telling the stories of the experience that we create out there in all the places we can, because it really is a tool for good in the world, and it improves people’s lives in ways that last. And we need more things like that, not less.

STUART: 

I think we got time for one more story. You want to tell us a “One time at Burning Man” story?

TOM: 

One time… Let me see. I’m trying to think of a story that I can tell that would be appropriate. Okay, so… 

Many years ago my campmates and I volunteered collectively for a 4 to 8 a.m. shift at the Greeter Station on Thursday. And we all showed up after sufficiently lubricating ourselves. We were all dressed, uh, as Santa Claus. That was very early days, in SantaCon days. 

In Stuart Brand’s recent biography, autobiography, there’s a picture of Stuart Brand with his pants around his ankles bent over the hood of his car, and Santa Claus is spanking him. We were responsible for that. 

We worked that shift, and as people would pull up to the Greeter Station, we would tell them that we were the valet parkers, and we would ask them to step out of the vehicle for a moment, and then another Santa would jump in the car and take off, and then drive around out there by the DPW Depot, just sorta going through the glove compartment looking for things. Um. It was behavior that was completely inappropriate. And was not… It was shameful, shameful behavior. 

STUART: 

Shame, shame, shame.

TOM: 

And we course corrected. But as Harley says, oftentimes at Burning Man, it takes about three years for any change to really take place. You’ve got to have the bad experience, try something new, and then you have a better outcome. And now Santas no longer work at the Greeter Station! And there’s no more valet parking! And that’s a good thing. Um. 

STUART: 

Well… And a lot of people went home with a story. Something unexpected happened to them. That’s my take on Burning Man. If I knew what was going to happen, why would I even go? It’s all about opening that random door.

TOM: 

Yeah… The doors, the doors that we open there, we don’t know what’s on the other side. 

I talked about Burning Man being a permission engine, and it is. It gives people agency in their lives. Sometimes that permission is too much, and some people don’t know how to handle it. And sometimes we give ourselves too much. Part of the lesson of Burning Man is learning what is too much. You know, is this too much? Yeah, we probably should walk that back a little bit. Building those muscles inside yourself to both have agency, and also have responsibility for them, that is what makes a viable, sustainable community, one where the people that live in it understand both their ability to make it better and also their responsibility to ensure that it’s better.

STUART: 

That sounds a lot like citizenship.

TOM: 

It does sound like citizenship, doesn’t it? Yeah. Maybe it’s a civic value almost?

STUART: 

Maybe add a principle. No, wait. We have that one.

TOM: 

We got that one. Yeah.

STUART: 

Yeah. We got that one covered.

TOM:

It is remarkable how resilient the Ten Principles are as a code of ethics for a incredibly diverse group of people to operate. It’s like an OS for society.

STUART: 

Yeah. 

TOM: 

I just made that up.

STUART: 

I love it. 

All right. Anything else we should talk about? This has been great. I really enjoyed this.

TOM: 

Me too. Let me think. Is there any… I don’t know. 

Look, the Burning Man community is in a particular moment which is not ideal right now. We will muddle our way through it because we always have, because there’s infinite amounts of resource and good will. 

The only thing I want to leave with is: If you have been to the event, and you know what that experience is like, imagine that that opportunity no longer existed. Because it will be impossible to ever recreate again. It will never, ever, ever exist again, nothing like it. The Regional events are fantastic, but there is something about that desert that is so special. Center that in your heart and hold space for being a part of, not just creating the event, but also preserving its ability to be. It really does benefit us all in so many ways.

I know that one day it will end, but until then… I want to be there for that last moment, for that last explosion, for when it all burns to the ground. I want to be there, I just don’t want it to happen right away.

STUART: 

Uncertainty. 

TOM: 

The uncertainty principle is a principle of physics!

STUART: 

Uncertainty is my gospel.

TOM:

Hopefully that was useful. And I hopefully didn’t put my thumb too hard on the scale that the stories that we tell are the vital sinews that connects the community that we’re a part of, and that, therefore, we should continue to engage in storytelling activities. I think they are important.

STUART: 

You are preaching the gospel of this program.

TOM: 

Preaching the good word to the people! Amen. 

STUART: 

Amen. 

Ah, I should have told the story about Reverend Billy, so many stories, “That one time at Burning Man…” Anyway.

STUART: 

Well, thank you, Tom Price, for everything you do. But especially thank you for being midwife to this beautiful thing called Burners Without Borders. The work is super important. It never seems to go away. In fact, with the weather changing the way it is, it seems to be more and more important every day.

TOM: 

You know, it’ll be 20 years next year. It’s just insane. 20. I can’t…

This happens to me about once a year where something will happen somewhere in the world and some group of people will come together from the Burning Man community to do something about it. And that is the social framework that they use as the permission structure to come together. It is so moving and rewarding to see, because it was a very intentional thought experiment. It was like very intentionally, we are going to create this social structure that will allow people to operate outside the event as though they were at the event. And here we are 20 years later.

So y’all keep doing good things. You’re doing great work. Get out the good word. 

STUART: 

Thank you, Tom Price.

TOM: 

Thank you, Stuart. Good to catch up. 

STUART: 

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 everybody who put this episode together. You know who you are. 

Thanks, Larry. 

I’m Stuart Mangrum. See you next time.

 

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