January 23, 2020 • 37 mins
When Marian Goodell first pulled up to Burning Man in 1995, two men in the desert-- one with a machine gun, and another wrapped in a white sheet holding a plastic flamingo, told her to drive straight toward a mountain peak for 15 miles, then turn right and drive another two. But the experimental community that welcomed her that day, changed her life. As a founding member of Black Rock City, LLC, and Burning Man's first CEO, Marian oversees an operating budget of $45 million, while protecting the Burner culture and helping it thrive across continents. Hear how she discovered Burning Man through a friend's photograph, why founders of Black Rock City LLC were nervous at first about publishing 10 guiding principles, and how a community built on radical inclusion, radical self-reliance and gifting (among other things) has spread across the world.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic production I Heart Radio.
You pulled off the road to a little, tiny silver
trailer and there was someone standing there with a machine
gun slung over his back. Guns were actually allowed at
burning Man. And the other guy was wrapped in a
white sheet holding a plastic pink flamingo. You couldn't see
(00:24):
black Rock City because you actually needed to drive fifteen
miles towards a mountain peak. You're like, I drive how far?
And then turn right two miles and then the little
city appeared in front of you. It felt like you're
on another planet. I am Bob Pittman, and welcome to
(00:48):
Math and Magic Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing, where
we explore that special mix of analytics and creativity that's
the foundation of so many great business, marketing and cultural successes.
To day. We're going to the frontiers with a real pioneer,
the CEO of Burning Man, Maryan Goodell. She came from
(01:14):
a background that may surprise you thinking about burning Man.
Republican Irish Catholic Conservative. Her sister's godfather was the late
Supreme Court Justice Scalia, and her dad was a big
fan of Ann Rand. She moved around a lot as
a kid, but finished high school in a small town
in Ohio where her graduating class only had a hundred
and eighty students in it. She was the only one
(01:35):
in her graduating class to go to all women's college.
She was there in the formative years of Burning Man
and can tell us how this culture developed and can
discuss its impact on the greater world. She has an
open mind, a big heart, and an unlimited imagination. And
she's a friend. Marian. Welcome, Thank you, Bob. It's great
to be here. So we're going to get started with
(01:56):
you in sixty seconds. Ready. Do you prefer desert or ocean?
Ocean early rise or night owl? Night owl coffee or
tea Tea San Francisco or Black Rock City Tie Ohio
or Nevada, Ohio? Catchup? Or mustard mustard pizza or Tacos
(02:16):
tacos chocolate or vanilla chocolate. Cats are dogs? Cats? Smartest
person you know, Bob Pittman. Oh yeah right, we'll give
you a pass on that one. First job Kmart doing
what check out cashier? Favorite book when I was a child,
Paddle to the Sea, Last vacation. I don't know what
(02:37):
that is. Secret talent I make a really really mean
pumpkin pie. First concert I saw a journey? Is there
a food you will never eat? I can't stand turnips?
In Cilantro? Title of your memoir? What would it be? Oh,
look where I woke up and found myself? Who would
(02:58):
play you in a movie? A Nut Benning? One place
you'd like to visit that you haven't been? Mvali. What
did you want to be a growing up? I wanted
to be a teacher. What topic can you talk about forever? Cats?
If you have one superpower? What would it be to
see the future? Okay, let's start with a little Burning Man.
(03:18):
I went for the first time in two thousand and four,
and there were still plenty of people in the world
who had never heard of Burning Man Man. Of those
who did know what, the culture seemed very fringe, a
little crazy. So today, let's fast forward. There's almost universal
recognition of the culture, and it seems much more part
of the mainstream. What happened in those fifteen years, culture
(03:39):
in the world certainly changed. Media got ahold of Burning Man.
People are looking for ways to connect, and Burning Man
really strips everything away and gives people an opportunity to connect,
you know, that's the thing that changed. Burning Man was
Wired magazine and the tech community. That culture was building
tools and to keep being inspired aired. Burning Man was
(04:01):
an environment that was innovative and gave them the opportunity
to think in a really broadway. And then it's been
a second generation of that. We've watched cycles of the
popularity Burnie Man. It sort of slipped back and we
became quiet again, and then there was a resurgence for
the same reasons. For the few people who are listening
who don't know this, would you give us the quick
origin story, Well, Bernie Man started on a beach in
(04:24):
San Francisco in Larry Harvey and his friend Jerry James
built about an eight foot tall wooden man and burned
it on the summer solstice. It was just an evening
thing until when too many people showed up on the
beach and then they moved it to the Black Rock
Desert over Labor Day weekend and that's where it stayed
and originally was about three days and now it is
(04:47):
eight nights in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. So
how did they find this location outside of girl Lac.
There are a number of people that point to Larry,
but he credits miss p and John on Law and
some others as having been to the area for different
artistic reasons. And so when the law enforcement showed up
in and they took the Burning Man away, they actually
(05:10):
didn't burn it on the beach. In the different groups
and friends got together and said, listen, there's this thing
called the Black Rock Desert, and they went and did
a scouting trip up there. They put the Man in
the back of a rider truck and they drove it
up there on a Friday afternoon. That's how the town
of Girl Act kind of got on the map. Was
this funky, little cute, quirky town is now the home
to the Burning Man. As we were searching you for
(05:32):
this episode, I read that Larry, the late Larry Harvey,
the founder of Burning Man, just wrote the Ten Principles
in two thousand and four. I was actually surprised. I
never realized it had been that long before he committed them.
The writing and the ten are will you give them
to us? I can give them to you. They are
leaving no trace. Radical self reliance, radical inclusion, de commodification,
(05:55):
communal effort, civic responsibility, participation, gifting, radical self expression and immediacy.
So had those been talked about before or did that
just sort of pop into Larry's head? And two, the
story of the Ten Principles is really one of my
favorite stories because people do think that we started with
(06:17):
this sort of dictum of ideas and that we went
about sort of putting them in place, and it was
just the opposite. The activities and the culture and the
community and the engagement that was happening at Burning Man
was happening very organically. And one of the things that Larry,
as a philosopher and a writer and have great thinker,
really would do with the other organizers is think about, well,
(06:40):
what had gone right this year and what went wrong?
For instance, gifting. People had barter bars, and he said,
this is not about bartering, because bartering was transactional. We
started talking internally about gifting and putting gifting forward. In
early two thousands, as the regional network of leaders were
starting to grow, we realized they really were asking for
(07:02):
reminders about why they weren't allowed to sell anything at
their events. Why did we not sell burgers, why did
we not sell water? And so we went through an
internal process of sort of asking ourselves reminding ourselves, well,
why has this worked, and how do we tell the
rest of the world. I had an email list of
these various leaders from around the world, and I asked
(07:23):
Larry to watch the conversations and what the questions were,
and I would periodically beg him to answer a question
that we were thinking through. And he finally got tired
of answering these questions and he said, I'm going to
write something, and he went away for vacation in Maze
Laan and he came back with these nine points. These
were these principles, and he presented them to the group
(07:45):
of us and we kind of chuckled because it brilliantly
brought together the things we've all been thinking about, what
we really had talked about separately but not as a group.
And then we teased him. We said there's nine. Why
they're nine? And he looked at us stunned, and we said,
shouldn't there be ten? And he went home and he
came back and he said, well, actually there was one
more that he'd been thinking about, and the last one
(08:07):
was immediacy and that was his favorite. And so we
ended up with ten principles that were really a reflection
of what we were doing, and they were descriptive but
not prescriptive. Any pushback when Larry came out with these
ten was there an element of burning? Then this is
oh my god, not those ten Well, so we were
really afraid of them for that reason. We didn't want
(08:29):
them to be seen as ten commandments or ten rules.
So the first thing we did was actually published in
for the regional network. We put them out on an
email list. They were so well received that we actually
put them in a paper newsletter. We actually used to
send a newsletter out every year. People began to discuss them,
and we knew we were onto something if we told
the story about them being descriptive and not prescriptive. So
(08:52):
it's something to think about and reflect and embody, but
they're not commanded, there's no police. It grew on everybody
and then they started imagining, well, how can I participate
and what does this mean for me? So more of
a prism than commandments, right, And we really haven't gotten
pushback from the ten principles ever. Ever. I still remember
(09:13):
burning Man being referred to as an experiment and temporary community.
Just that still used today and is it still relevant
at that time. That's what we called it. It was
an experiment in temporary community. What was a temporary community
on the desert floor is not a temporary community anymore.
It's really a global, active, engaged community year round. It's
(09:33):
year round. I want to come back and discuss how
these principles and this view can be used in general
society today and even in business. But first I want
to dig into you. At the top, I mentioned your
family that was definitely business focused and conservative. I think
your dad was sort of an old style industrialist. Your
mom was from New Orleans, and you've described her as loving.
(09:55):
You were born in the early sixties, grew up in
the sixties and seventies. Can you paint a little picture
of that time. My uncle was a protester, arrested in
d C and went to Woodstock, so I absolutely remember
the energy around the summer of love, the coming of age.
He was a big pot smoker. He lived in a commune.
(10:15):
My dad's brother, my dad's brother exactly. That's why I
remember it. My father was conservative, We had Sunday breakfast together,
we went to church, and when I would visit my
uncle at Yale, there was psychedelic colors on the wall,
and there was a big mattress where everybody's hanging out
smoking pot although they weren't allowed around us obviously, and
(10:36):
my mother pressed flowers. My uncle had an influence on her. Also.
All of my uncles, though some have married, never had children,
so I had sort of freestyle relatives, but a conservative
father at least. I think my mother was a little
bit more of a hippie. For did your dad reject
that or was he open minded? He was pretty open minded.
My uncle was sort of like the black sheep of
(10:58):
the family, but loved the family's Catholic very embracing even
of the differences. We were talking about the ten principles
of burning man. Did your family have their version of
the ten principles? We certainly did. I was reminded recently
by one of my sisters that my father was very
into manners. If you caught your sister having bad manners
at the table, if you had your elbows on the table,
(11:20):
if you talked with your mouthful and you called your
sister on it, you could get five cents or ten cents.
My father was a capitalist with the rules at the
dinner table. You were the oldest of four sisters, and
your dad was a businessman, So did that preordain you
to be a leader? I don't think I was certain
I would be a leader really until I came out
(11:42):
of Goucher. My senior year at Goucher, I ran for
student buddy treasurer and one that gave me the bug
for what was possible with leadership, how to bring your
ideas to the service. Right after college, I moved to
Boston and worked in advertising and knew that I was
on a search to find where I could be a leader.
(12:03):
Burning man didn't really exist, and it wasn't a job
I applied for. You go to this all women's college
in Baltimore. Why there and why were you so different
from the other kids leaving school? Well, my mother went
to Wellesley and her sister went to Wellsley, and my
father's sister went to Wellesley, and I'm the oldest of
four women, So I don't remember actually even considering a
(12:26):
co ed school. It was such an important storyline in
my family, and certainly nobody in Brian, Ohio went to
a woman's college. Wellesley, Sweetbriar, Goucher. They were the schools
that I considered. Goucher College was just a really great
place to flourish. It was like having sisters. I grew
up with sisters, and I had more sisters. When you
(12:47):
started college, what did you intend to be when you
left college? What did you intend to be? I just
knew that the idea of getting married and having children
as being the days for the next five to ten
years was not the phase that I was looking for.
I was actually really looking for college to give me
some tools to be on a journey. I was a
(13:10):
year into Goucher, and I realized that if I struggled
too hard to find exactly what I wanted, I would
miss the opportunity of being in college. So I sought
out creative writing in English. I loved to read, I
loved to write. As it has turned out, those were foundational.
(13:31):
Being a good communicator was often why I was hired
with burning Man, and really with other employment. I had
to go to Boston briefly, then San Francisco. What was
the allure of San franz And why better than the
East Coast? You know? One winter, I got tired of
digging my car out of the snow in Boston, and
I went to visit a friend who was living in
(13:53):
the hate. The lifestyle of living in California was so
much more about finding yourself off and then it wasn't
who you are as to where you worked and where
you went to college, which I found was very much
true in Boston. I knew it was a place where
I could really explore who I am. So you worked
(14:13):
in sales and pr out there and then you quit
and went to the San Francisco Academy of Art where
you got your m f A. What took you on
that path, because that's not sales and pr I did
really well in the sales end of things. I was
selling a product actually back to the government. It was
information based and it was on CD ROM and I
loved the work. But I got a really great bonus
(14:35):
check one day and I realized I didn't even know
what to do with the money, and I didn't feel
super inspired. I had as having physical experiences I didn't
quite understand, and I went to a doctor who told
me she thought I was depressed. I was like, I'm
not depressed. I'm doing great. And when I really reflected
on it, I realized I wasn't inspired. At that time,
all my sisters were in graduate school and I was
(14:58):
like the Black Sheep. Not in graduate school, and I
loved photography. I love storytelling, and pulled the plug on
the great job and went back for Masters in Fine
Art with emphasis and photography none. So that's where I
saw photos of Burning Man. Well, that's what I was
going to get into. I read that it was another
student's photo. Then Chincho on the Burning Man path. It
(15:20):
was such a funny story. We were in a color
class looking at these gorgeous pictures of a sunset of
this large piece of artwork. I remember asking and whispering
about the location, and the teacher shushing me and another
guy and telling us that this was not about the subject,
it was the quality of the photos. And afterwards we
kind of chased her out of the room, and she
(15:42):
was insistent that you needed to know the right phone number,
and she just couldn't remember it. Sort of on and on,
and it took me another year to chase it down.
I was struck by the desert and the art. Just
one art piece. There wasn't the hundreds of art pieces.
There was just the man and look so solitary and
gorgeous and beautiful. And I wanted to go both to
(16:04):
the event, but I also wanted to go to the desert.
You went the birding Man for the first time in
you show up and it is what it's mind boggling.
You pulled off onto the road to a little, tiny
silver trailer and there was someone standing there with a
machine gun slung over his back, and it was a
real machine gun, but that was also his personas with
(16:26):
real bullets, I suppose, because they were all into guns.
In those days. Guns were actually allowed at burning Man.
They would go off into a shooting range in the afternoon,
shooting stuffed animals tied to trees, and the other guy
was wrapped in a white sheet holding a plastic pink flamingo.
You couldn't see black Rock City because you actually needed
to drive fifteen miles towards a mountain peak. The best
(16:49):
part of it really was you couldn't see where you
were going. You're like, I drive how far? And then
turn right two miles and then the little city appeared
in front of you. And so that part is gone
because for safety we're closer to the land. But the
idea that you would drive and drive and drive kind
of timidly without any roads, without any fences, and then
(17:10):
this little village of people would appear. Was pretty otherworldly.
It felt like you're on another planet. You met the
organizers and ninety six and NT seven you quit your job,
used your savings and dovan You, Larry Harvey, and four
others founded the organization that later became black Rock City LLC,
burning Man's managing organization. You were originally the head of
(17:32):
business and communications, and you took Burning Man into the Internet.
You started the newsletter Jack Rabbit Speaks, which is still
with us today. Tell me a little bit about how
you made that job, because this is like a real
big life change for you. I had a job I
really liked for a small firm that made sales software.
(17:53):
I was with a really small team doing the internetwork
to programmers to designers. I was a person doing the
writing and the editing. I've sort of created a project
management position for myself. It was super fun. It was
the very beginning of those kinds of things. But I'd
gone to Burning Man and came back from Burning Man,
and when I started the relationship with Larry and began
(18:15):
to build the Jack Rabbit Speaks, I was running it
through the servers at work because the Internet was strong
at work, until one day one of the programmers said
to me, I know what you're doing. You're doing this
thing and it's going out to fifteen thousand people through
our servers, and you can't do that anymore. And I
remember thinking, Okay, I need to figure out whether what
(18:35):
I'm doing on the side is affecting what I'm doing
for my work. And then I started coming to work later.
I would be at the office till ten working on
Burning Man on the side, and so I would come
in a little later, and my boss said, no, your
work hours aren't working, and I was put on report things.
She gave me a pink slip. She said, your hours
need to change. I thought about what that would mean.
(18:57):
That meant not doing burning Men, and so I had
to that change and make burning Man the priority and
live off my savings and leave my job and make
it work. Just hold on a second, because we've got
so much more to talk about. We'll be back after
a quick break. Welcome back to math and Magic. We're
here with Mary and Goodell. I want to hit burning
(19:20):
Man as a giant tribe concept. Usually, if I hear
some of my dumber man go oh great, and we
have this instant bond, What is this giant tribe about,
and what is that instant acceptance of fellow burners. Originally,
it very much meant it was a shared experience of
being in the desert, that you had gone through the
(19:40):
trials and tribulations of the weather, of building a camp,
of getting there. The experience has gone beyond that now
because there are many people around the world that feel
like they've experienced burning Man at the Israel, burn at
South Africa, in Japan and Argentina. And so that thread
now is that we know we've been through an environment
(20:01):
that is supportive of decommodification, that we're encouraging leave no trace,
that there's no trash cans, that communal effort and radical
self reliance are all in play. So the feeling of
burning Man is affiliating yourself with a way of life,
a perspective, a kindness towards others, of generosity that comes
(20:22):
from a burning Man experience, not just in Black Ruxity,
but in other places of the world. And you can
look at the person a little more safely, comfortably trusting
because you've had a similar shared experience. To talk about
how it's so broad outside of burning Man, I think
we define ourselves my liberal, my conservative? What's got a job?
(20:42):
Where do I live? But a burning Man? You have
all these people of all ages, radically different economic backgrounds,
political views. How can it be so broad? And society
in general today seems to be getting more and more
polarized and segmented. That's the beauty of going Burning Man
and being in a Burning Man environment. The organization in
(21:03):
particular makes it very clear that we don't want to
talk about politics, and we don't want people to feel
divided by their religion who they are. The goal is
really to bring people together and connect and collaborate and
do things greater than ourselves. People are often surprised. In fact,
they're most surprised when conservatives are at Burning Man. It's
(21:24):
really quite rewarding to see people of different political backgrounds
finding that they have something magical and common, like building
an art car together or taking adventure on the playa.
They may not even realize what their politics are, and
at this day and age, we need more bridges. We
need more bridges to understand each other. How does burning
(21:45):
then minimize that polarization among the burners because in the
outside world, the very people that are there would be polarized.
But inside burning Man is it because everybody wears clothes
that don't identify them as a job or what they
do is where they came from. What structurally helps that well.
I think there's a lot of different parts of what
(22:06):
burning Man is that sets us up for that. The
way in which we're asking for communal effort and civic responsibility,
that we're also balancing it with radical self reliance and
radical self expression. The intention is not about the individual
and the individual's beliefs, but it's more about what we're
(22:28):
bringing to it together under those conditions. Your radicalized opinions
on things matter towards the dialogue about being there in present,
but don't really matter related to the output. So, for instance,
the best way to express really different opinions would be
through art. You can also express it through a theme camp.
(22:49):
Our purpose is to bring people together. Our purpose is
to create opportunity for people to learn from each other
and to collaborate on large endeavors. So we are definitely
behind the scenes learning from activities and responses. We do
sort of tweak how we manage the camps, of how
(23:10):
we manage our communications, of how we set the expectations
for the community. It's not anarchy. We're all doing it together.
I love walking the playa with people for the first time.
The light shows on all these mutant vehicles going around,
and you can see their eyes wide open. I think
it challenges their view of what they know and what
they believe and what's possible. For anybody in the creative
(23:32):
side of the business, it's a great way to open
your mind creatively, to go, Wow, who are these people,
Where do they get that idea? How did they come
up with that, how did they execute it? How did
they get the money? Yeah, the engineer exactly, the conservative
engineer came and looked at Brittingman, and that's all he
wanted to do, Bob. He wanted to go to the
base of the big structures and figure out how did
they do it. The politics didn't matter, and in fact,
(23:54):
he was really worried that he would see things that
he didn't want to see. He didn't even see anything
that he was a rate of. He only saw the
imagination in an ingenuity that really sparked his imagination. The
first time I went, it was all fire, hula hoops
on fire. They were tossing and dancing with fire and
now it's all electric wires. What was that transition and
(24:15):
was that the law that we had to get rid
of fire or was it just an evolution. We saw
glow sticks for a while. The glow sticks went away
and that moved on to e L wire and I
think that that's more accessible for people. I think working
with fire is more of an art form. It does
take some work and some lessons. With safety. We do
have a little less burning of things in general, and
(24:36):
that's really logistics and safety. It takes a lot of
work to create a safe perimeter and so we are
seeing fewer large pieces being burned. Talk a little bit
about the regional burns. How did that come about and
how do they compare to burning men in Black Rock City. Well,
I've been to very few of them. Actually, I've been
to the one in New Zealand, which at the time
(24:57):
had about four people. I found it ist, is magical.
It had all the qualities of making eye contact with
someone and smiling. It had serendipity, actually had a pond,
so it wasn't a desert. They had performance. There was
a group in bathing suits and bathing caps that were
marching down to the Pond with great fanfare. The regional
events are I think very important for people to have
(25:19):
access to the experience of the culture. We can't really
have more than eighty thousand people in black Rock City.
The Burners that have been to black Rock City and
they go to Africa burn and have been going to
black Rock City for a while say it reminds them
of the old days, smaller, more intimate, but the energy
is the same. It's very creative and very self expressive.
(25:40):
So in Burning Man was profitable for the first time.
What was the business decisions that put Burning Man into
the black well? The first one was to raise the
ticket prices over the ticket prices Originally they were twenty
five dollars, and then at the gate I think they
might have been forty, and then I think the gate
price was sixty five. That was a really important year
(26:03):
between because as you heard, that's when I left my job,
and I wasn't the only one. The workload for the
six of us was such that we really couldn't do
other work, and that was when it was more important
to have not just twenty dollars left at the end
of the year to pay Larry's bills, but the rest
of us. It needed to help us survive. The only
(26:24):
way to do it is increase the population and to
raise the ticket prices. This is a big transformation of Marion.
What lessons does this have for others? What does it
say about a life mission. One of the things I
think it was important for me was taking the things
that I had done up to that point, and I
merged them into that opportunity. So through my twenties, which is,
(26:46):
you know, a time when people are always trying to
figure out what they want to do. I was on
a journey, but I kind of wasn't afraid. I worked
as a bank teller, I worked in advertising, I actually
worked in a law firm. And when Bernie Man came
along in my early to mid thirties, those are the
things I took on. I took on supporting the legal
I knew banking and finance, the communications work for me.
(27:08):
The transformation is listening to what it is you're able
to do or what you want to do when it
comes in front of you. Knowing enough about yourself, ye
say yes instead of no. I took on the internet
and the website for Burning Man, but before that I
didn't know it existed. What was the web four years
(27:29):
before that? Not much? Not much. When you went for
the first time in n there were four thousand atten
days when I went for the first time. Nine years
later it was up to thirty thousand. Today it's eighty thousand.
When I went in two thousand and four, many people
said it's over, it's ruined. It's so commercial now. And
every year I hear people say that, what's that about?
(27:51):
What are they really saying? You know, it's such a
cherished experience for so many people. They are afraid that
it's going to deteriorate when more people come. They're protecting it.
But it does keep getting better and more imagination and
creativity does come to it. I think two thousand eleven
was the first year that burning Men sold out in advance.
(28:13):
Since then, the man has gotten so strong that you've
had to use lotteries and other techniques to allocate tickets.
What was that tipping point? That was the government They
started feeling uncomfortable about our growth and their capacity to
manage and observe our growth in a way that made
them feel like it was being done safely. That was
(28:35):
the endgame on that. You know, in the long run.
It was for the best. It is better for people
to come prepared and to think of it far enough
in advance. The numbers of people that were deciding to
come at the last minute, they were definitely in the thousands.
Now that we're at eighty thousand people, we don't even
want eight thousand people deciding at the last minute. But
the government was the initial halt. How do you deal
(28:57):
with the government. This is public and I know there's
some people in government who think it's great and some
people think it's not so great. Kind a minute to
talk about that the government is the hardest work for sure.
Really it's educating the government. We see changes certainly in politics,
but we don't see quite the same changes at the
(29:18):
same rate in the administrative side. But when we do,
it is really a journey to educate them that the
community is one that's very peaceable, very organized, and as
a very deliberate cultural intention. That's the work that I'm
still the most involved in technology communications, Those are delegated
(29:39):
to other people at this point, but I'm very involved
in the day to day and week to week strategy
around government relations. Frankly, it's very important that we have
good relations with everybody from the local Native Americans to
Reno City councilman, to the governor, state elected officials, and
then the federal government BLM Department the Interior. And that's
(30:01):
a lot of people with differing priorities. You know, burning
man on the surface of an administrator in the government
looks like it's just a big party in the desert.
To have the conversation about at being a global culture
and frankly changing tourism in northern Nevada, that takes more time.
Two thousand eleven was also the you and Larry and
the other founders began the steps to turn the LLC
(30:23):
into a nonprofit. I remember spending some time with you
and Larry and some of the others during that time,
and it appeared you were collecting thoughts from everybody you
touched and sort of getting these different opinions and information
to help you make the move. What did you want
to accomplish with that move from an LLC to a nonprofit. Well,
the future of the entities and the culture we're not
(30:45):
going to flourish under the framework of a limited liability corporation.
The structure doesn't allow it to go on beyond the
lives of the owners, though we were functioning more as
a sea corps and we weren't taking any share as
we really needed the structure that could then go beyond
the individuals, and so that was really the driving force
(31:07):
behind it. We were collecting data because it's really somewhat
unheard of that you take an LLC and turn it
into a nonprofit. The way in which it changed the
decision making processes was very important to me. I certainly,
as you know, came from a fairly capitalist background. We
would make the decisions and we would act on them.
(31:28):
The nonprofit structure brought an element of public oversight, and
so I was kind of resistant in the beginning because
I just didn't want to take away our autonomy. So
we spent a lot of time asking, and ultimately we
found out we could run a nonprofit profitably. All of
this is built on protecting that culture. I've never seen
(31:49):
an organization so obsessive about the culture. What advice would
you give for other executives on managing a product or
a company culture that you've learned from Burning I don't
think that it's easy to translate Burning Man into being
a product, But what I can say that's been successful
for us is our intention in the journey of where
(32:11):
we were going, has a cultural path, looking at what
the end game is as it applies to what the
culture is, and actually understanding in the case of a product,
it would be the customer and in the case of us,
it's just our community and the culture. If I was
advising a product, understand not what your market is, but
what your culture is and what your output is, and
whether there's a culture around that output, and how to
(32:33):
mobilize that culture in that community to get something done,
something that's productive. Larry Harvey, founder cultural guru as well
as the philosopher, passed away in two thousand and eighteen,
actually a young age seventy. I know it was very
hard for you personally, but as an organization, how is
Burning Man coped with this loss? Well, the first thing
(32:54):
we did was grieve. We spent most of doing that.
That was actually in the form of a number of
celebrations when you have a loss like that so quickly.
My goal was to allow all of the opportunities for
the organization, in the community and the friends to gather
(33:16):
around a conversation around Larry and to celebrate him and
to talk about him. And tell stories, and by the
end of I think that the retelling of the stories
really sort of sealed in a lot of our minds
how important and powerful the story is of who he
is and what he brought to Burning Man. The theme
(33:36):
for the event this year was metamorphosis. That really describes
the next layer of the process, which was not to
forget him, not to over reference him, but to look
to the future and recognize that we need to set
the culture up, in the organization up so that it
goes on beyond us. That's my personal lesson. I better
get to work, because there's things that I intend to
leave behind better than I found it in the Burning
(33:58):
Man culture. That was a wake up call. I've always
been impressed by your calm, even in the most trying situations.
How did you get that calm? Is that learned or
is that hereditary? On the one hand, I would say
it would be from my parents, but both of them
are known for their strong personalities. I really don't know
where I got it from, but I do know that
(34:19):
when I got the call that Larry had had a
stroke and I was in France, I knew that I
had to be the one that was gonna be calm
and was going to be focused. I knew that everything
was about to change. He was the yang to my yang.
Often he would have strong opinions about things, and I
would be the one to sort of calm him down
(34:39):
and point in a particular direction. Burning Man actually taught
me to be strong in the face of a storm.
You've seen a lot of this enlightened community at scale.
This podcast is for marketers and entrepreneurs. What lessons have
you learned from looking at that enlightened community at scale
(35:01):
that might be abstible to help them? We need to
be more playful. We need to be innovative. We need
to allow more big ideas to the surface, and we
need to help others manifest them giving people the opportunity
to think differently, to be themselves if you could, what
advice would you give yourself in when you first heard
about Burning Man for the first time. When I first
(35:22):
went to Burning Man, I was afraid. I was fascinated,
but I was afraid to play. And I remember observing.
Once I got through that, I thought, I'm never gonna
be an observer again. I want to be a participant,
and I want to pick something up and I want
to play and I want to learn. So as we
wrap up, we always give a shout out to the
person who's the most analytical person, you know that math
(35:43):
part of the equation, and to the person who's the
showman of the showwoman, who's just the magician had to
pick two people who would be your favorite for the mathematician.
Paul Romer's article the Nobel Prize winning Economist about Burning
Man really gave me some insight about Burning Man around
culture and economy. So, magician, I probably can guess who
(36:04):
you're gonna say, Well, it would have been Larry Harvey.
I figured that I had to ask the question. Mary,
and you have been entrusted with a very special culture.
It's come a long way since the summer solstice of nineteen.
I'm certain you and your teammates will continue that evolution.
And thanks for joining us. Thank you very much, Bob,
it was great to be here. Here are a few
(36:27):
things I picked up in my conversation with Marian. One,
when looking at culture, be descriptive, not proscriptive. It's how
Larry Harvey first came up with the ten principles that
drove Burning Man's success and continued growth to communal efforts
can transcend our differences At burning Man, Marian says a
common goal and community spirit can forge unexpected relationships. Three.
(36:51):
Be a participant, not an observer. After Marian first experienced
Burning Man, she volunteered to help it succeed. This is
a part of the burning Man culture for everyone involved.
Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode.
Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a
production of I Heart Radio. This show is hosted by
(37:13):
Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and
wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. Nikkiatore
for pulling research bill plaques, and Michael Asar for their
recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch, and of course Gayle Raoul,
Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone who helped bring this
show to your ears. Until next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic production I Heart Radio.
You pulled off the road to a little, tiny silver
trailer and there was someone standing there with a machine
gun slung over his back. Guns were actually allowed at
burning Man. And the other guy was wrapped in a
white sheet holding a plastic pink flamingo. You couldn't see
(00:24):
black Rock City because you actually needed to drive fifteen
miles towards a mountain peak. You're like, I drive how far?
And then turn right two miles and then the little
city appeared in front of you. It felt like you're
on another planet. I am Bob Pittman, and welcome to
(00:48):
Math and Magic Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing, where
we explore that special mix of analytics and creativity that's
the foundation of so many great business, marketing and cultural successes.
To day. We're going to the frontiers with a real pioneer,
the CEO of Burning Man, Maryan Goodell. She came from
(01:14):
a background that may surprise you thinking about burning Man.
Republican Irish Catholic Conservative. Her sister's godfather was the late
Supreme Court Justice Scalia, and her dad was a big
fan of Ann Rand. She moved around a lot as
a kid, but finished high school in a small town
in Ohio where her graduating class only had a hundred
and eighty students in it. She was the only one
(01:35):
in her graduating class to go to all women's college.
She was there in the formative years of Burning Man
and can tell us how this culture developed and can
discuss its impact on the greater world. She has an
open mind, a big heart, and an unlimited imagination. And
she's a friend. Marian. Welcome, Thank you, Bob. It's great
to be here. So we're going to get started with
(01:56):
you in sixty seconds. Ready. Do you prefer desert or ocean?
Ocean early rise or night owl? Night owl coffee or
tea Tea San Francisco or Black Rock City Tie Ohio
or Nevada, Ohio? Catchup? Or mustard mustard pizza or Tacos
(02:16):
tacos chocolate or vanilla chocolate. Cats are dogs? Cats? Smartest
person you know, Bob Pittman. Oh yeah right, we'll give
you a pass on that one. First job Kmart doing
what check out cashier? Favorite book when I was a child,
Paddle to the Sea, Last vacation. I don't know what
(02:37):
that is. Secret talent I make a really really mean
pumpkin pie. First concert I saw a journey? Is there
a food you will never eat? I can't stand turnips?
In Cilantro? Title of your memoir? What would it be? Oh,
look where I woke up and found myself? Who would
(02:58):
play you in a movie? A Nut Benning? One place
you'd like to visit that you haven't been? Mvali. What
did you want to be a growing up? I wanted
to be a teacher. What topic can you talk about forever? Cats?
If you have one superpower? What would it be to
see the future? Okay, let's start with a little Burning Man.
(03:18):
I went for the first time in two thousand and four,
and there were still plenty of people in the world
who had never heard of Burning Man Man. Of those
who did know what, the culture seemed very fringe, a
little crazy. So today, let's fast forward. There's almost universal
recognition of the culture, and it seems much more part
of the mainstream. What happened in those fifteen years, culture
(03:39):
in the world certainly changed. Media got ahold of Burning Man.
People are looking for ways to connect, and Burning Man
really strips everything away and gives people an opportunity to connect,
you know, that's the thing that changed. Burning Man was
Wired magazine and the tech community. That culture was building
tools and to keep being inspired aired. Burning Man was
(04:01):
an environment that was innovative and gave them the opportunity
to think in a really broadway. And then it's been
a second generation of that. We've watched cycles of the
popularity Burnie Man. It sort of slipped back and we
became quiet again, and then there was a resurgence for
the same reasons. For the few people who are listening
who don't know this, would you give us the quick
origin story, Well, Bernie Man started on a beach in
(04:24):
San Francisco in Larry Harvey and his friend Jerry James
built about an eight foot tall wooden man and burned
it on the summer solstice. It was just an evening
thing until when too many people showed up on the
beach and then they moved it to the Black Rock
Desert over Labor Day weekend and that's where it stayed
and originally was about three days and now it is
(04:47):
eight nights in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. So
how did they find this location outside of girl Lac.
There are a number of people that point to Larry,
but he credits miss p and John on Law and
some others as having been to the area for different
artistic reasons. And so when the law enforcement showed up
in and they took the Burning Man away, they actually
(05:10):
didn't burn it on the beach. In the different groups
and friends got together and said, listen, there's this thing
called the Black Rock Desert, and they went and did
a scouting trip up there. They put the Man in
the back of a rider truck and they drove it
up there on a Friday afternoon. That's how the town
of Girl Act kind of got on the map. Was
this funky, little cute, quirky town is now the home
to the Burning Man. As we were searching you for
(05:32):
this episode, I read that Larry, the late Larry Harvey,
the founder of Burning Man, just wrote the Ten Principles
in two thousand and four. I was actually surprised. I
never realized it had been that long before he committed them.
The writing and the ten are will you give them
to us? I can give them to you. They are
leaving no trace. Radical self reliance, radical inclusion, de commodification,
(05:55):
communal effort, civic responsibility, participation, gifting, radical self expression and immediacy.
So had those been talked about before or did that
just sort of pop into Larry's head? And two, the
story of the Ten Principles is really one of my
favorite stories because people do think that we started with
(06:17):
this sort of dictum of ideas and that we went
about sort of putting them in place, and it was
just the opposite. The activities and the culture and the
community and the engagement that was happening at Burning Man
was happening very organically. And one of the things that Larry,
as a philosopher and a writer and have great thinker,
really would do with the other organizers is think about, well,
(06:40):
what had gone right this year and what went wrong?
For instance, gifting. People had barter bars, and he said,
this is not about bartering, because bartering was transactional. We
started talking internally about gifting and putting gifting forward. In
early two thousands, as the regional network of leaders were
starting to grow, we realized they really were asking for
(07:02):
reminders about why they weren't allowed to sell anything at
their events. Why did we not sell burgers, why did
we not sell water? And so we went through an
internal process of sort of asking ourselves reminding ourselves, well,
why has this worked, and how do we tell the
rest of the world. I had an email list of
these various leaders from around the world, and I asked
(07:23):
Larry to watch the conversations and what the questions were,
and I would periodically beg him to answer a question
that we were thinking through. And he finally got tired
of answering these questions and he said, I'm going to
write something, and he went away for vacation in Maze
Laan and he came back with these nine points. These
were these principles, and he presented them to the group
(07:45):
of us and we kind of chuckled because it brilliantly
brought together the things we've all been thinking about, what
we really had talked about separately but not as a group.
And then we teased him. We said there's nine. Why
they're nine? And he looked at us stunned, and we said,
shouldn't there be ten? And he went home and he
came back and he said, well, actually there was one
more that he'd been thinking about, and the last one
(08:07):
was immediacy and that was his favorite. And so we
ended up with ten principles that were really a reflection
of what we were doing, and they were descriptive but
not prescriptive. Any pushback when Larry came out with these
ten was there an element of burning? Then this is
oh my god, not those ten Well, so we were
really afraid of them for that reason. We didn't want
(08:29):
them to be seen as ten commandments or ten rules.
So the first thing we did was actually published in
for the regional network. We put them out on an
email list. They were so well received that we actually
put them in a paper newsletter. We actually used to
send a newsletter out every year. People began to discuss them,
and we knew we were onto something if we told
the story about them being descriptive and not prescriptive. So
(08:52):
it's something to think about and reflect and embody, but
they're not commanded, there's no police. It grew on everybody
and then they started imagining, well, how can I participate
and what does this mean for me? So more of
a prism than commandments, right, And we really haven't gotten
pushback from the ten principles ever. Ever. I still remember
(09:13):
burning Man being referred to as an experiment and temporary community.
Just that still used today and is it still relevant
at that time. That's what we called it. It was
an experiment in temporary community. What was a temporary community
on the desert floor is not a temporary community anymore.
It's really a global, active, engaged community year round. It's
(09:33):
year round. I want to come back and discuss how
these principles and this view can be used in general
society today and even in business. But first I want
to dig into you. At the top, I mentioned your
family that was definitely business focused and conservative. I think
your dad was sort of an old style industrialist. Your
mom was from New Orleans, and you've described her as loving.
(09:55):
You were born in the early sixties, grew up in
the sixties and seventies. Can you paint a little picture
of that time. My uncle was a protester, arrested in
d C and went to Woodstock, so I absolutely remember
the energy around the summer of love, the coming of age.
He was a big pot smoker. He lived in a commune.
(10:15):
My dad's brother, my dad's brother exactly. That's why I
remember it. My father was conservative, We had Sunday breakfast together,
we went to church, and when I would visit my
uncle at Yale, there was psychedelic colors on the wall,
and there was a big mattress where everybody's hanging out
smoking pot although they weren't allowed around us obviously, and
(10:36):
my mother pressed flowers. My uncle had an influence on her. Also.
All of my uncles, though some have married, never had children,
so I had sort of freestyle relatives, but a conservative
father at least. I think my mother was a little
bit more of a hippie. For did your dad reject
that or was he open minded? He was pretty open minded.
My uncle was sort of like the black sheep of
(10:58):
the family, but loved the family's Catholic very embracing even
of the differences. We were talking about the ten principles
of burning man. Did your family have their version of
the ten principles? We certainly did. I was reminded recently
by one of my sisters that my father was very
into manners. If you caught your sister having bad manners
at the table, if you had your elbows on the table,
(11:20):
if you talked with your mouthful and you called your
sister on it, you could get five cents or ten cents.
My father was a capitalist with the rules at the
dinner table. You were the oldest of four sisters, and
your dad was a businessman, So did that preordain you
to be a leader? I don't think I was certain
I would be a leader really until I came out
(11:42):
of Goucher. My senior year at Goucher, I ran for
student buddy treasurer and one that gave me the bug
for what was possible with leadership, how to bring your
ideas to the service. Right after college, I moved to
Boston and worked in advertising and knew that I was
on a search to find where I could be a leader.
(12:03):
Burning man didn't really exist, and it wasn't a job
I applied for. You go to this all women's college
in Baltimore. Why there and why were you so different
from the other kids leaving school? Well, my mother went
to Wellesley and her sister went to Wellsley, and my
father's sister went to Wellesley, and I'm the oldest of
four women, So I don't remember actually even considering a
(12:26):
co ed school. It was such an important storyline in
my family, and certainly nobody in Brian, Ohio went to
a woman's college. Wellesley, Sweetbriar, Goucher. They were the schools
that I considered. Goucher College was just a really great
place to flourish. It was like having sisters. I grew
up with sisters, and I had more sisters. When you
(12:47):
started college, what did you intend to be when you
left college? What did you intend to be? I just
knew that the idea of getting married and having children
as being the days for the next five to ten
years was not the phase that I was looking for.
I was actually really looking for college to give me
some tools to be on a journey. I was a
(13:10):
year into Goucher, and I realized that if I struggled
too hard to find exactly what I wanted, I would
miss the opportunity of being in college. So I sought
out creative writing in English. I loved to read, I
loved to write. As it has turned out, those were foundational.
(13:31):
Being a good communicator was often why I was hired
with burning Man, and really with other employment. I had
to go to Boston briefly, then San Francisco. What was
the allure of San franz And why better than the
East Coast? You know? One winter, I got tired of
digging my car out of the snow in Boston, and
I went to visit a friend who was living in
(13:53):
the hate. The lifestyle of living in California was so
much more about finding yourself off and then it wasn't
who you are as to where you worked and where
you went to college, which I found was very much
true in Boston. I knew it was a place where
I could really explore who I am. So you worked
(14:13):
in sales and pr out there and then you quit
and went to the San Francisco Academy of Art where
you got your m f A. What took you on
that path, because that's not sales and pr I did
really well in the sales end of things. I was
selling a product actually back to the government. It was
information based and it was on CD ROM and I
loved the work. But I got a really great bonus
(14:35):
check one day and I realized I didn't even know
what to do with the money, and I didn't feel
super inspired. I had as having physical experiences I didn't
quite understand, and I went to a doctor who told
me she thought I was depressed. I was like, I'm
not depressed. I'm doing great. And when I really reflected
on it, I realized I wasn't inspired. At that time,
all my sisters were in graduate school and I was
(14:58):
like the Black Sheep. Not in graduate school, and I
loved photography. I love storytelling, and pulled the plug on
the great job and went back for Masters in Fine
Art with emphasis and photography none. So that's where I
saw photos of Burning Man. Well, that's what I was
going to get into. I read that it was another
student's photo. Then Chincho on the Burning Man path. It
(15:20):
was such a funny story. We were in a color
class looking at these gorgeous pictures of a sunset of
this large piece of artwork. I remember asking and whispering
about the location, and the teacher shushing me and another
guy and telling us that this was not about the subject,
it was the quality of the photos. And afterwards we
kind of chased her out of the room, and she
(15:42):
was insistent that you needed to know the right phone number,
and she just couldn't remember it. Sort of on and on,
and it took me another year to chase it down.
I was struck by the desert and the art. Just
one art piece. There wasn't the hundreds of art pieces.
There was just the man and look so solitary and
gorgeous and beautiful. And I wanted to go both to
(16:04):
the event, but I also wanted to go to the desert.
You went the birding Man for the first time in
you show up and it is what it's mind boggling.
You pulled off onto the road to a little, tiny
silver trailer and there was someone standing there with a
machine gun slung over his back, and it was a
real machine gun, but that was also his personas with
(16:26):
real bullets, I suppose, because they were all into guns.
In those days. Guns were actually allowed at burning Man.
They would go off into a shooting range in the afternoon,
shooting stuffed animals tied to trees, and the other guy
was wrapped in a white sheet holding a plastic pink flamingo.
You couldn't see black Rock City because you actually needed
to drive fifteen miles towards a mountain peak. The best
(16:49):
part of it really was you couldn't see where you
were going. You're like, I drive how far? And then
turn right two miles and then the little city appeared
in front of you. And so that part is gone
because for safety we're closer to the land. But the
idea that you would drive and drive and drive kind
of timidly without any roads, without any fences, and then
(17:10):
this little village of people would appear. Was pretty otherworldly.
It felt like you're on another planet. You met the
organizers and ninety six and NT seven you quit your job,
used your savings and dovan You, Larry Harvey, and four
others founded the organization that later became black Rock City LLC,
burning Man's managing organization. You were originally the head of
(17:32):
business and communications, and you took Burning Man into the Internet.
You started the newsletter Jack Rabbit Speaks, which is still
with us today. Tell me a little bit about how
you made that job, because this is like a real
big life change for you. I had a job I
really liked for a small firm that made sales software.
(17:53):
I was with a really small team doing the internetwork
to programmers to designers. I was a person doing the
writing and the editing. I've sort of created a project
management position for myself. It was super fun. It was
the very beginning of those kinds of things. But I'd
gone to Burning Man and came back from Burning Man,
and when I started the relationship with Larry and began
(18:15):
to build the Jack Rabbit Speaks, I was running it
through the servers at work because the Internet was strong
at work, until one day one of the programmers said
to me, I know what you're doing. You're doing this
thing and it's going out to fifteen thousand people through
our servers, and you can't do that anymore. And I
remember thinking, Okay, I need to figure out whether what
(18:35):
I'm doing on the side is affecting what I'm doing
for my work. And then I started coming to work later.
I would be at the office till ten working on
Burning Man on the side, and so I would come
in a little later, and my boss said, no, your
work hours aren't working, and I was put on report things.
She gave me a pink slip. She said, your hours
need to change. I thought about what that would mean.
(18:57):
That meant not doing burning Men, and so I had
to that change and make burning Man the priority and
live off my savings and leave my job and make
it work. Just hold on a second, because we've got
so much more to talk about. We'll be back after
a quick break. Welcome back to math and Magic. We're
here with Mary and Goodell. I want to hit burning
(19:20):
Man as a giant tribe concept. Usually, if I hear
some of my dumber man go oh great, and we
have this instant bond, What is this giant tribe about,
and what is that instant acceptance of fellow burners. Originally,
it very much meant it was a shared experience of
being in the desert, that you had gone through the
(19:40):
trials and tribulations of the weather, of building a camp,
of getting there. The experience has gone beyond that now
because there are many people around the world that feel
like they've experienced burning Man at the Israel, burn at
South Africa, in Japan and Argentina. And so that thread
now is that we know we've been through an environment
(20:01):
that is supportive of decommodification, that we're encouraging leave no trace,
that there's no trash cans, that communal effort and radical
self reliance are all in play. So the feeling of
burning Man is affiliating yourself with a way of life,
a perspective, a kindness towards others, of generosity that comes
(20:22):
from a burning Man experience, not just in Black Ruxity,
but in other places of the world. And you can
look at the person a little more safely, comfortably trusting
because you've had a similar shared experience. To talk about
how it's so broad outside of burning Man, I think
we define ourselves my liberal, my conservative? What's got a job?
(20:42):
Where do I live? But a burning Man? You have
all these people of all ages, radically different economic backgrounds,
political views. How can it be so broad? And society
in general today seems to be getting more and more
polarized and segmented. That's the beauty of going Burning Man
and being in a Burning Man environment. The organization in
(21:03):
particular makes it very clear that we don't want to
talk about politics, and we don't want people to feel
divided by their religion who they are. The goal is
really to bring people together and connect and collaborate and
do things greater than ourselves. People are often surprised. In fact,
they're most surprised when conservatives are at Burning Man. It's
(21:24):
really quite rewarding to see people of different political backgrounds
finding that they have something magical and common, like building
an art car together or taking adventure on the playa.
They may not even realize what their politics are, and
at this day and age, we need more bridges. We
need more bridges to understand each other. How does burning
(21:45):
then minimize that polarization among the burners because in the
outside world, the very people that are there would be polarized.
But inside burning Man is it because everybody wears clothes
that don't identify them as a job or what they
do is where they came from. What structurally helps that well.
I think there's a lot of different parts of what
(22:06):
burning Man is that sets us up for that. The
way in which we're asking for communal effort and civic responsibility,
that we're also balancing it with radical self reliance and
radical self expression. The intention is not about the individual
and the individual's beliefs, but it's more about what we're
(22:28):
bringing to it together under those conditions. Your radicalized opinions
on things matter towards the dialogue about being there in present,
but don't really matter related to the output. So, for instance,
the best way to express really different opinions would be
through art. You can also express it through a theme camp.
(22:49):
Our purpose is to bring people together. Our purpose is
to create opportunity for people to learn from each other
and to collaborate on large endeavors. So we are definitely
behind the scenes learning from activities and responses. We do
sort of tweak how we manage the camps, of how
(23:10):
we manage our communications, of how we set the expectations
for the community. It's not anarchy. We're all doing it together.
I love walking the playa with people for the first time.
The light shows on all these mutant vehicles going around,
and you can see their eyes wide open. I think
it challenges their view of what they know and what
they believe and what's possible. For anybody in the creative
(23:32):
side of the business, it's a great way to open
your mind creatively, to go, Wow, who are these people,
Where do they get that idea? How did they come
up with that, how did they execute it? How did
they get the money? Yeah, the engineer exactly, the conservative
engineer came and looked at Brittingman, and that's all he
wanted to do, Bob. He wanted to go to the
base of the big structures and figure out how did
they do it. The politics didn't matter, and in fact,
(23:54):
he was really worried that he would see things that
he didn't want to see. He didn't even see anything
that he was a rate of. He only saw the
imagination in an ingenuity that really sparked his imagination. The
first time I went, it was all fire, hula hoops
on fire. They were tossing and dancing with fire and
now it's all electric wires. What was that transition and
(24:15):
was that the law that we had to get rid
of fire or was it just an evolution. We saw
glow sticks for a while. The glow sticks went away
and that moved on to e L wire and I
think that that's more accessible for people. I think working
with fire is more of an art form. It does
take some work and some lessons. With safety. We do
have a little less burning of things in general, and
(24:36):
that's really logistics and safety. It takes a lot of
work to create a safe perimeter and so we are
seeing fewer large pieces being burned. Talk a little bit
about the regional burns. How did that come about and
how do they compare to burning men in Black Rock City. Well,
I've been to very few of them. Actually, I've been
to the one in New Zealand, which at the time
(24:57):
had about four people. I found it ist, is magical.
It had all the qualities of making eye contact with
someone and smiling. It had serendipity, actually had a pond,
so it wasn't a desert. They had performance. There was
a group in bathing suits and bathing caps that were
marching down to the Pond with great fanfare. The regional
events are I think very important for people to have
(25:19):
access to the experience of the culture. We can't really
have more than eighty thousand people in black Rock City.
The Burners that have been to black Rock City and
they go to Africa burn and have been going to
black Rock City for a while say it reminds them
of the old days, smaller, more intimate, but the energy
is the same. It's very creative and very self expressive.
(25:40):
So in Burning Man was profitable for the first time.
What was the business decisions that put Burning Man into
the black well? The first one was to raise the
ticket prices over the ticket prices Originally they were twenty
five dollars, and then at the gate I think they
might have been forty, and then I think the gate
price was sixty five. That was a really important year
(26:03):
between because as you heard, that's when I left my job,
and I wasn't the only one. The workload for the
six of us was such that we really couldn't do
other work, and that was when it was more important
to have not just twenty dollars left at the end
of the year to pay Larry's bills, but the rest
of us. It needed to help us survive. The only
(26:24):
way to do it is increase the population and to
raise the ticket prices. This is a big transformation of Marion.
What lessons does this have for others? What does it
say about a life mission. One of the things I
think it was important for me was taking the things
that I had done up to that point, and I
merged them into that opportunity. So through my twenties, which is,
(26:46):
you know, a time when people are always trying to
figure out what they want to do. I was on
a journey, but I kind of wasn't afraid. I worked
as a bank teller, I worked in advertising, I actually
worked in a law firm. And when Bernie Man came
along in my early to mid thirties, those are the
things I took on. I took on supporting the legal
I knew banking and finance, the communications work for me.
(27:08):
The transformation is listening to what it is you're able
to do or what you want to do when it
comes in front of you. Knowing enough about yourself, ye
say yes instead of no. I took on the internet
and the website for Burning Man, but before that I
didn't know it existed. What was the web four years
(27:29):
before that? Not much? Not much. When you went for
the first time in n there were four thousand atten
days when I went for the first time. Nine years
later it was up to thirty thousand. Today it's eighty thousand.
When I went in two thousand and four, many people
said it's over, it's ruined. It's so commercial now. And
every year I hear people say that, what's that about?
(27:51):
What are they really saying? You know, it's such a
cherished experience for so many people. They are afraid that
it's going to deteriorate when more people come. They're protecting it.
But it does keep getting better and more imagination and
creativity does come to it. I think two thousand eleven
was the first year that burning Men sold out in advance.
(28:13):
Since then, the man has gotten so strong that you've
had to use lotteries and other techniques to allocate tickets.
What was that tipping point? That was the government They
started feeling uncomfortable about our growth and their capacity to
manage and observe our growth in a way that made
them feel like it was being done safely. That was
(28:35):
the endgame on that. You know, in the long run.
It was for the best. It is better for people
to come prepared and to think of it far enough
in advance. The numbers of people that were deciding to
come at the last minute, they were definitely in the thousands.
Now that we're at eighty thousand people, we don't even
want eight thousand people deciding at the last minute. But
the government was the initial halt. How do you deal
(28:57):
with the government. This is public and I know there's
some people in government who think it's great and some
people think it's not so great. Kind a minute to
talk about that the government is the hardest work for sure.
Really it's educating the government. We see changes certainly in politics,
but we don't see quite the same changes at the
(29:18):
same rate in the administrative side. But when we do,
it is really a journey to educate them that the
community is one that's very peaceable, very organized, and as
a very deliberate cultural intention. That's the work that I'm
still the most involved in technology communications, Those are delegated
(29:39):
to other people at this point, but I'm very involved
in the day to day and week to week strategy
around government relations. Frankly, it's very important that we have
good relations with everybody from the local Native Americans to
Reno City councilman, to the governor, state elected officials, and
then the federal government BLM Department the Interior. And that's
(30:01):
a lot of people with differing priorities. You know, burning
man on the surface of an administrator in the government
looks like it's just a big party in the desert.
To have the conversation about at being a global culture
and frankly changing tourism in northern Nevada, that takes more time.
Two thousand eleven was also the you and Larry and
the other founders began the steps to turn the LLC
(30:23):
into a nonprofit. I remember spending some time with you
and Larry and some of the others during that time,
and it appeared you were collecting thoughts from everybody you
touched and sort of getting these different opinions and information
to help you make the move. What did you want
to accomplish with that move from an LLC to a nonprofit. Well,
the future of the entities and the culture we're not
(30:45):
going to flourish under the framework of a limited liability corporation.
The structure doesn't allow it to go on beyond the
lives of the owners, though we were functioning more as
a sea corps and we weren't taking any share as
we really needed the structure that could then go beyond
the individuals, and so that was really the driving force
(31:07):
behind it. We were collecting data because it's really somewhat
unheard of that you take an LLC and turn it
into a nonprofit. The way in which it changed the
decision making processes was very important to me. I certainly,
as you know, came from a fairly capitalist background. We
would make the decisions and we would act on them.
(31:28):
The nonprofit structure brought an element of public oversight, and
so I was kind of resistant in the beginning because
I just didn't want to take away our autonomy. So
we spent a lot of time asking, and ultimately we
found out we could run a nonprofit profitably. All of
this is built on protecting that culture. I've never seen
(31:49):
an organization so obsessive about the culture. What advice would
you give for other executives on managing a product or
a company culture that you've learned from Burning I don't
think that it's easy to translate Burning Man into being
a product, But what I can say that's been successful
for us is our intention in the journey of where
(32:11):
we were going, has a cultural path, looking at what
the end game is as it applies to what the
culture is, and actually understanding in the case of a product,
it would be the customer and in the case of us,
it's just our community and the culture. If I was
advising a product, understand not what your market is, but
what your culture is and what your output is, and
whether there's a culture around that output, and how to
(32:33):
mobilize that culture in that community to get something done,
something that's productive. Larry Harvey, founder cultural guru as well
as the philosopher, passed away in two thousand and eighteen,
actually a young age seventy. I know it was very
hard for you personally, but as an organization, how is
Burning Man coped with this loss? Well, the first thing
(32:54):
we did was grieve. We spent most of doing that.
That was actually in the form of a number of
celebrations when you have a loss like that so quickly.
My goal was to allow all of the opportunities for
the organization, in the community and the friends to gather
(33:16):
around a conversation around Larry and to celebrate him and
to talk about him. And tell stories, and by the
end of I think that the retelling of the stories
really sort of sealed in a lot of our minds
how important and powerful the story is of who he
is and what he brought to Burning Man. The theme
(33:36):
for the event this year was metamorphosis. That really describes
the next layer of the process, which was not to
forget him, not to over reference him, but to look
to the future and recognize that we need to set
the culture up, in the organization up so that it
goes on beyond us. That's my personal lesson. I better
get to work, because there's things that I intend to
leave behind better than I found it in the Burning
(33:58):
Man culture. That was a wake up call. I've always
been impressed by your calm, even in the most trying situations.
How did you get that calm? Is that learned or
is that hereditary? On the one hand, I would say
it would be from my parents, but both of them
are known for their strong personalities. I really don't know
where I got it from, but I do know that
(34:19):
when I got the call that Larry had had a
stroke and I was in France, I knew that I
had to be the one that was gonna be calm
and was going to be focused. I knew that everything
was about to change. He was the yang to my yang.
Often he would have strong opinions about things, and I
would be the one to sort of calm him down
(34:39):
and point in a particular direction. Burning Man actually taught
me to be strong in the face of a storm.
You've seen a lot of this enlightened community at scale.
This podcast is for marketers and entrepreneurs. What lessons have
you learned from looking at that enlightened community at scale
(35:01):
that might be abstible to help them? We need to
be more playful. We need to be innovative. We need
to allow more big ideas to the surface, and we
need to help others manifest them giving people the opportunity
to think differently, to be themselves if you could, what
advice would you give yourself in when you first heard
about Burning Man for the first time. When I first
(35:22):
went to Burning Man, I was afraid. I was fascinated,
but I was afraid to play. And I remember observing.
Once I got through that, I thought, I'm never gonna
be an observer again. I want to be a participant,
and I want to pick something up and I want
to play and I want to learn. So as we
wrap up, we always give a shout out to the
person who's the most analytical person, you know that math
(35:43):
part of the equation, and to the person who's the
showman of the showwoman, who's just the magician had to
pick two people who would be your favorite for the mathematician.
Paul Romer's article the Nobel Prize winning Economist about Burning
Man really gave me some insight about Burning Man around
culture and economy. So, magician, I probably can guess who
(36:04):
you're gonna say, Well, it would have been Larry Harvey.
I figured that I had to ask the question. Mary,
and you have been entrusted with a very special culture.
It's come a long way since the summer solstice of nineteen.
I'm certain you and your teammates will continue that evolution.
And thanks for joining us. Thank you very much, Bob,
it was great to be here. Here are a few
(36:27):
things I picked up in my conversation with Marian. One,
when looking at culture, be descriptive, not proscriptive. It's how
Larry Harvey first came up with the ten principles that
drove Burning Man's success and continued growth to communal efforts
can transcend our differences At burning Man, Marian says a
common goal and community spirit can forge unexpected relationships. Three.
(36:51):
Be a participant, not an observer. After Marian first experienced
Burning Man, she volunteered to help it succeed. This is
a part of the burning Man culture for everyone involved.
Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode.
Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a
production of I Heart Radio. This show is hosted by
(37:13):
Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and
wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. Nikkiatore
for pulling research bill plaques, and Michael Asar for their
recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch, and of course Gayle Raoul,
Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone who helped bring this
show to your ears. Until next time,
Host
Bob Pittman
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