EP 35 Stuart Mangrum

Episode 35 with Stuart Mangrum is out now! He has worn many hats over the years, currently known as the host of the Burning Man Live podcast. Start has been a member of the Cacophany society for many years and first hit the playa in 1993. His first year at Black Rock City he was roped into doing the playa’s first newspaper, the Black Rock Gazette which he was the editor of for a few years. In 1995 he started what is arguably the first real themecamp (Tiki camp) that was designed in advance and implemented on playa. He argues that the previous “Christmas camp” was impromptu and kind of mean. After the crazy year of 1996 he pulled back from being part of the event organization and in 1997 while still going joined a part of BRC that was at the time called the “Neigh-bar-hood”. In 2012-13 Larry Harvey needed help with the theme and invited Stuart in to help build a new educational department called the Burning Man Philosophical Center. Together with Caveat Magister they wrote many articles about the nature of Burning Man over the years. Together with others at the Burning Man Philosophical Center he started the Burning Man Live podcast in 2020 which has had 125 episodes aries to date. Please give the show a listen and find out all about the man behind one of my favorite podcasts (I have listened to them all).

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Transcript

Before we start, I would like to ask your help to do two things. First, tell a friend or two who you think might like the show. And second, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The more reviews the show gets, the more likely it will even appear in search results. Thank you. And now on to the show. 

They make the trek out to Burning Man for a week and a day. After a lot of work, oh, there's a lot of play. Party party drama, drama, drama. b****, b****, b****. Year after year, they come back to scratch that itch. They all say their lives have been changed. After many years, lives have been rearranged. That changes what this show is all about. You'll see the impact. of burning up and out. So sit back, relax, and cancel all your plans. These are the stories about the shadow of the man. 

Hello and welcome to the Shadow of the Man Show. I am your host, Andy. Oh ho ho, Merry... What the fudge? Oh, it's that Andy. Today our guest is Stewart Mangram. Hi, Stuart.

Hey, everybody. Hi.

All right.

What was with the ho ho ho there, Andy? You found Santa. Is it

Is it Christmas already?

It's Christmas already cuz we're recording. God, what is today? November 23rd. Uh, but yeah, this is going to be my end of the year, their December 15th uh show coming out. So, yeah, as as close to Christmas as possible. But

well then, ho ho. Oh,

well, it's funny because I actually just watched the um the Santaon documentary. I was like I was streaming it. Uh I loved it. It was amazing. I think everyone should go out and see it. I think by the time this comes out, I think the Isn't there are they playing it in San Francisco on the December?

I heard there was going to be a San Francisco showing. Yeah, I watched it, too.

Well, there's one I think in December, but then I think there's one in like February, early February. I think it's like the official premiieres or or something.

Yeah.

Well, that's great. I'm sure John Law will be very happy.

It's very much the John Law show, isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Have you you've seen they take it?

I have. And yeah, but of course Chris Radcliffe in his final performance steals the show as he was uh he was want to do. So overall good effort. It was uh little triggering to see myself back then.

You know, we all have mixed feelings about the monster that we created back then.

Yeah. Well, the the the one kind of I don't know like kind of the odd thing was like at the end when they they go to the the current like Santa Con, they're like they're in Time Square in New York City and

and I'm just like it it's like some giant like boozefest like street party and you can kind of see on their faces they're like uh what what kind of monster have we created here? You know, like like it just that's doesn't seem like it's it's the same vibe.

Um, absolutely not. No, it's No, it's funny. You know, they liken it to Burning Man in the sense that, you know, events that keep going on and on really ought to stop. Uh, and you know, there's there's a little bit of of interesting parallel in there for sure. But the way I look at it,

back about a dozen years ago when uh the Cacophony book came out, Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, which is a fabulous book. Uh John Law, Kevin Evans, the late Carrie Galbrath, put together a really terrific, you know, coffee table book on Burning Man. Excuse me.

See, there I go. I'm getting them mixed up again because one of the reviewers said, and I love this. He said, uh, the relationship between Cacophony and Burning Man, Burning Man was the child that devoured its parent.

That's crazy.

And if that's true, Santa is the child that stole its parents car and wrecked it, empty the parents bank account, took a s*** on their parents' carpet and burned the house down.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. So, what came first for you? Cacophony or your trip out to the Black Rockck?

Uh, well, interestingly, they were one and the same. I had been interested in the Cacophony Society for a while, and the first event I attended was this Burning Man thing. thing. Um, so I did not I mean Burning Man really didn't have much of its own identity back then. This is 1993. It was just a cacophony event.

Mhm.

U publicized in the rough draft newsletter. And uh I went out there actually I was Tom Sawyer as we say into working uh my first year.

Not painting offense but um I was persuaded that it might be fun to publish a daily newspaper in the middle of nowhere. Um and Uh yeah, thanks. Thanks, Danger Ranger. Thanks, Michael. Um because he was right, it was a lot of fun and I got immediately hooked on it. U just the idea was kind of audacious because I'd seen pictures of the place. There's like there's nothing. There's not even a damn rock out here, right?

Well, how many people were there in 93? What? Like a couple hundred?

I think I think according to the website, it's like 700. I don't know if anybody was really counting, but

yeah.

Yeah, it was it was still fairly small. You know, it was small enough that you could pretty much know me most of the people over the course of the long weekend. That's what it was. It was a long weekend. It was

Labor Day weekend. I think we went out on

Friday, you know, Thursday, Friday, and came back on Monday.

And did they burn them in Sunday night then too? Or

they did?

Yes. There was no temple.

There were no street signs, street lights,

events,

no trash, no organization really to speak of. Um,

I mean, how could you shame?

No shade.

No, I said no shame.

Oh. Oh, yeah. Probably a little shade either.

There was very little shade. Uh, and no lights at night. That's the thing. People ask me, "What's the biggest difference, Steuart?" "Hey, Grandpa, what was Burning Man like when you first started going?" I said, "Well, when it got dark, it just got dark and stayed dark because the only light we had was either fires,

car headlights, or that one guy with the obnoxious forehead flashlight, you know, shining it in interface. Yeah.

Yeah.

And probably not many generators even, right?

No. And the few that were were hated, you know, and sabotaged because it was very quiet at night. It's quiet and dark at night. People

had like air conditioners and their little flimsy tents.

No, there was one uh the the we published the newspaper in a cargo trailer, a windowless cargo trailer with no air conditioning. So that meant we could only work at night um and distributed it during the day. That was towed behind the bus of a guy named Andy Pector. So, that was when I went that was the first RV that I saw, the only real RV. Um, there were a couple other buses out there. Actually, come to think of it, Robert Burke had his bus, a brush with color and a few people who had who had buses, but u I don't recall any RVs, only a few generators and uh lots of quiet.

Yeah. So, no lights, no generator. There's no RVs, no pumping base, uh, no ebikes, no I mean, I'm sure people had like some bikes at least, you know, maybe

there were some bikes. Yes,

but it also probably that spread

unicycles.

Yeah, but also wasn't probably that spread out either, right? I mean, you could probably walk from one side to the other like fairly quickly.

Yeah, absolutely. We had I think in 95 94 we brought our first theme camp. We brought uh Tiki Camp and we camped actually in the bar because the bar was attached to our uh old VW micro bus that we slept in. We decided that was a little bit too intimate. So we decided to make a a home for ourselves in the suburb, my wife Paisley Hayes and I. So we actually pitched a tent that was probably about 50 60 yards away and that seemed like that was in another country. and we commuted, you know, to our to our jobs at the bar. Um, but it was far enough away that we did not see the person who stole the entire tent and everything in it.

What

I was, I think, the first first victim of a uh of a serious

serious uh crime out there. Yeah. Somebody just pulled the pegs, threw it in the back of a truck, and took off with it

with all our stuff inside.

And uh

because I remember like because my first year was 96 and Yeah. I remember like Definitely like like on burn night and I mean there would be like these guys driving around in box trucks just looking at

oh the hippies are high now go get their stuff.

I mean now

but but no they they I

it was so unexpected that I thought for for like an hour I walked around looking in the back of all my friends trucks and under their cars and stuff. I'm like come on come on guys. Where is it? Where is it?

Yeah. I thought just pull like a prank on you or something.

But no it was gone. And uh that year. Also, someone stole a porta potty.

So, I like to imagine in my fantasy world that they just drove out into the wilderness and created a little homestead with uh with my tent and one of our rented portaotties.

Well, I mean, I'm like I'm honored that you you'd think so highly of my things that you would prefer to take mine to make a homestead.

Yeah.

That was also when when I first discovered the uh the endless capacity for gifting and generosity. Um because you know we looked around at that night it was like well we're going to sleep you know suddenly all of the gear appeared. We were immediately provisioned with a whole another setup of tents and bags and ground mats and everything. So

that kind of brings me to uh one of my first questions I have for you. Uh so what exactly was the first theme camp at Burning Man? Because I've heard different people say different things now. You know because I've I've heard you say like your tiki camp was the first camp. heard other people say Christmas camp. There was this Christmas camp, right? Uh and then uh I was actually interviewing Harley and she w was she was like, "Oh yeah, when I went in I think it was 91 or something." And she's like, "Yeah, we did this kind of desert kind of herm kind of thing." And she was like, "Yeah, we were the first theme camp." And I was like, "Huh." I mean, but I think maybe it's it's it what people would like look back in time and describe as a camp, you know, like I'm sure they didn't like call it that at the time, right?

Yeah. I actually did some research on this, Andy. Um, because, you know, like I said, I think Tiki Camp was the first real theme camp as we think of them today because,

okay,

everything before that had been sort of like an art installation, you know, a conceptual art project.

It was the place where you could actually go and sit in the shade and you'd want to stay for more than 5 minutes.

Whereas Christmas camp was just oxious uh Christmas camp blasted bad Christmas music 24/7. They had a a horny, leerous Santa played by Peter Dodie. Um it was they had warm like rancid eggnog. It was terrible. So it was a it was a prank really. And uh as I started talking to people who'd been there before me, who'd started going out in as far back as 1990, in the beginning kind of all of the camps were theme camps and that they were all part of a cacophony of event and they were all sort of sube events. Uh in the first year out there, 1990, I think the one that probably wins was uh uh Sebastian Hyde and Kevin Evans decided that they would spend the whole weekend as modern primitives. So they smeared themselves with mud. They made up their own fake language. They uh made uh coins. They made specy out of uh out of ply mud. And uh but there there were others. Miss Vivian, Vivian Perry uh didn't have a theme camp, but she had a theme. Her theme was luxury. And she managed to bring out a lot of ridiculously uh uh luxurious lifestyle items, including like she she was the first one to come up with this idea that if I have three copies of the same outfit, then I will always look like I just got there. So, she would be dressed in, you know, in velvet and lace and all this stuff.

Yeah. Yeah, I heard that.

So, there were a lot there there were a lot of there were a lot of camps like that that were all just trying to provide an experience for people uh which is you know really at the heart of the cacophony ethos right is create an experience for people.

Yeah cuz I mean in the beginning like it was just like in 1990 it was what like 80 or so people that just kind of caravanned up there together and they just kind of camped in a like little horseshoe and they set up the man like 100 ft away or whatever right you know and and yeah and everyone just kind of I mean it wasn't so organized it's like oh There was no like we said no generators or anything you know but like no one's filling out like a a form you know describing it's like describing interactivity like what talk to me that's your interactivity right like

um yeah I remember reading the description of the event and it was uh you know bread baking baked bread it's like that does not sound exciting I'm sorry

make like a little like out of plyamud like a bread oven or something

oh yeah yeah yeah that was that was that actually happened 1990 there was bread baking uh there was modern primitives and there was a man I'm not sure what else.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. So 1993 your first year and so you got roped into doing the newspaper. What was the newspaper called originally? Like

it was the Black Rockck Gazette.

Oh.

And uh Michael Michael had published one issue in 1992. He brought out a old Mac and uh and a laser printer and a desktop coffee machine. All this equipment that was in his office in Oakland. Uh Michael and John Law and Chris Radcliffe owned a business called Central Sign Services. Um which was also a front for the Billboard Liberation Front, but that's another whole another rabbit hole. So he brought out he basically brought out a bunch of office equipment and did a one sheet and uh he said really you know you could have fun with this Stuart because at the time I was publishing uh a Zen myself called Twisted Times and it was getting pretty deep into the into page design and layout, you know, uh using PageMaker 1.0 and I was like, "Yeah, that sounds like fun." So that and it was fun, but that kind of roped me into doing writing uh for Burning Man beyond that uh that newspaper, right? The newspaper was a great fun for You know, it was great fun for a few days, but then by by this time I struck up a friendship with Larry Harvey and he was like, you know, we we have this newsletter that we put out. We like to do two of those a year. Maybe you can help me write that. Uh so I started writing building Burning Man and uh we shared the the persona of Daryl Van Ray uh Larry's evil alter ego and interviewed each other and you know made up the newsletter for around scene. This is before the internet broke. I mean the internet was still DARPA. It was still nothing but research institutes and military on it. U the commercial internet didn't really land. I think it was till late 1995 was when the first Nescape project came out.

Oh yeah,

I may be wrong about that, but it was I'm pretty sure it was late '95 because that changed everything. Suddenly we had a website, we had email discussion groups, we had lots of of going on and that's I think a big part of why Burning Man grew so fast, some would say too fast in the mid to late 90s uh that there was an amplifying effect of people being to connect um off the play online.

I mean, it basically doubled every year, right? I mean,

yeah, it did

until it kind of blew up in our faces in 1996.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was my first year and I remember showing up on Saturday and I don't know, it just my just first impress, you know, or just lasting impression was like cuz I didn't know what what to expect at all, you know, and I I just remember just being like this is like Dante's Inferno. It's just like there just like everything's on fire. It's like you constantly smelling smoke. People are throwing like polyester couches in bonfires, you know, like it's like I smell like burning plastic and stuff, you know, and I remember like seeing tents get run over by cars and stuff and like you know and there were just some crazy experiences but of course coming back at the end it was like that was so crazy that's insane this is like I almost died but was like I got to come back and do this again next year we're going to make this next year we're going to make that you know like

yeah it's amazing you know Bernie man has always been kind of like the elephant being described by various blind people who are standing in different parts of it and 1996 was a perfect example of that you know to most participants it was like amazingly great and they would they wanted to come back and do more stuff. For most of the organizers it was a disaster and most of the volunteers quit like all of the rangers I think except one quit.

Um

yeah

John Law famously quit. I quit. I took 10 10 years off after that.

Oh really?

I did. Yeah. Um I mean there was a lot going on in my life like trying to uh trying to make my mortgage payments. I was the only person who owned a home and I had when I realized that I had uh made a mortgage payment on my credit card, I I thought that was probably pretty unsustainable because of the amount of work I was putting into it in the months leading up to Burning Man.

That you know, combined with all of the rancor within the organization and their inability to balance their checkbook.

Yeah. I mean, how organized was it beforehand? I I mean, I think definitely after 96 they got is that when they they formed Black Rock City the LLC? I mean

Yes, that is correct.

Yeah.

Yeah. It was um it was an LLC held by John Law, Larry Harvey and Michael Michael.

Mhm.

And um yeah, money was always strange.

Well, I just remember the end of was it 97 uh when they had the money like the when the sheriff took all of the money, right? And then they uh there was remember Larry standing on the hay bale or whatever and just was like, "Hey, if you give us 500 bucks, we'll get you you'll have like a ticket for for life." And I remember like looking at my empty pockets, you know, like the lint, you know, and I was like, "I wish I had $500 right now, you know." But uh I have a couple friends, my friend Curtis Coleman, like he was one of them who who bought one of those tickets, I think. Uh

Gary or Yeah. And it's still to this day, it was like 20 people or something like they still have like Yeah. And that that whole event, you know, spawned the regional network. Uh George Pap, I believe, was one of those people.

Oh, yeah.

And uh he went back to Austin and started throwing parties and then that led to Burning Flip Side, which is the first official regional event.

Yeah.

So, yeah, 97 was a huge huge transition year. A lot of people, it was doubtful. A lot of people were doubtful that it would even happen at all after 96. And I I was pretty confident that it would. I didn't know if it was something I wanted to still be part of, but I was pretty confident it would happen.

Um, I remember this saying at the time, it's like, you can't stop people from going out there. There are now way too many people who love doing that thing, and they're going to do it whether you organize it or not, which proved to be true years later with the uh the not burn,

the renegade burn, whatever.

Yeah.

U, but that's, you know, it's the momentum is the momentum is in the community and it's it's kind of become an unstoppable force like Santa, you know, Yeah.

You can't you can't make them not do it.

So, you went uh like 93 to 96 and then you took 10 years off.

Well, I kept going. I just took I just stepped back as an organizer. I couldn't I couldn't work on it year round.

I remember having remember having Larry over for for Thanksgiving dinner one year in that time

in my house and uh Larry's just talking about next year, next year this, next year that. We went outside for a smoke and I'm like, "Dude, we just did it right. You know, it's only been two months. Can we just give it a rest and talk about maybe something else? Let's talk about books. Let's talk about films. We like all those things. He's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah." And he went back in and sat down at the table and he's like, you know, next year. So, you know, he lived it year round. It was kind of like I don't know. I think it was kind of like one of these magicians. I don't know what form of magic it is where words create reality. Um he he just spun that story into existence. by keeping it going

and always always talking it up to everybody that he he ran into.

Well, it's funny.

I remember like when I first came back from Burning Man, it was just like every third word was the word was Burning Man was like, "So, honey, Burning Man, I went out to Burning Man and Burning Man. Burning Man, Burning Man, Burning Man." And, you know, after the first 30 minutes, you know, it was kind of like, "Oh, that's interesting." You know, and then 30 hours later was like, "Okay, you can you can stop saying that now and then 3 days later was like you have to shut up like I will leave you if you keep talking about that like I can just imagine for Larry Yeah. I mean that's well it's kind of like the whole nature of this show you know it's just like the the the influence or impact of Burning Man like for for Larry I mean that was his that's his whole life right I mean that's his entire it

was like reason for being right I mean, was it who was it? Uh Dan Miller told me about like they they had both gone to some Rau like beach like thing like in 1976 or something and that he was like oh that was like the first kind of time Larry saw like oh there's people camping and there's fire and and community or something and then then he was like oh yeah then 86 and we built the man and Baker Beach and then each year it got it got bigger. and bigger and then and then it was Larry who went to Cacophony, right? And said he was like, "Oh, I want to I want more people to show up." Was that how it

No, no, I haven't heard that. I I wasn't involved, but I've not heard the story told that way.

Larry used to tell me they just showed up. These people showed up and uh I think Danger Ranger might have been the first. Michael showed up and he put it in the rough draft in the cacophony newsletter.

Mhm.

Under there was always a section in there called sounds like cacophony. Uh and I There were at least two of the beach burns, maybe three were were publicized in the rough draft. Um, so yeah.

Yeah.

And Larry Larry did Larry did end up, you know, becoming a member. Well,

he was a member because the cacophony Society that is of course

part of the uh the credo is you may already be a member.

Uh he realized that he was a member and he he went on a number of events with us.

Yeah.

That weren't Burning Man.

You ever um did he ever do the Bridge climbing?

No. No. Not a bridge climber.

Yeah.

And uh Yeah. I kind of wish I had never done that. I was uh

Did you ever do that? I mean,

fun fun fact about me, Andy, I was arrested on uh New Year's Eve of Y2K, climbing the Oakland Bay Bridge in a tuxedo with a backpack full of martinis with seven of my seven of my best friends. We spent the night in at 8:50 Bryant the in the drunk tank at the San Francisco jail. The only sober people on New Year's Eve.

Wow.

It was pretty sad.

The most the the most well-dressed people in the drunk tank, too.

We were we were extraordinarily well-dressed. No, it was it was kind of exciting for for a moment. It was like it was like we're in an action movie, you know. There was a Coast Guard boat down below shining a spotlight up and bullhorn and a helicopter came in above, but they had us they had us trapped from both directions.

But, uh, Were you Were you guys climbing the um the tower or are you actually

Yeah, we're

we're climbing the furthest uh west tower, the one closest to San Francisco.

Yeah, cuz I mean I remember seeing some pictures in the cacophony book of people actually going up up up the cables like with no harness or anything else like I would not be caught dead doing that. Like

those cables are are basically safety rails. It's it's as safe as you can possibly make it. Um till come up. But uh no, we got to we got up to the roaded on that trip and did not did not ascend above the road level before we were interrupted rudely by law enforcement and uh and asked to uh to step away.

Ah, and is is it like because Harley was telling me like she did a bridge climb, but you it was like a ladder. It was like some like narrow little ladder and you got to kind of climb.

Yeah, there's I mean it's the thing is all designed for access. So you don't have to be a mountain climber to go up any these bridges.

Ah, and it's like internal or quasi internal, right? Like

inside the Yeah, some of it is inside the trusses. Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, and yes, I mean actually getting onto it is the tough part now. Uh, the Golden Gate Bridge, they did a huge security upgrade on it and, uh, pretty much welded shut all the access doors and put security cameras every like 50 feet. So,

the Golden Gate Bridge is no longer a soft target uh as it used to be in the early days of cacophony. But that doesn't mean you can't use it for an event. One of my favorite cacophony events was the uh the race of doom or also known as the thousandth jumper marathon.

What was that?

You know, Golden Gate Bridge has always been a uh a suicide destination suicide spot. And there was a time there in the 90s when it was getting up to the number 10,000 that sort of turned into a death count. Uh Every time somebody would jump, they'd say, "This is the 997th. This is the 991st." And so we decided to uh to have a race of doom to be the thousandth jumper. So we all uh on the day of the San Francisco Marathon, we all put on race placards that said the number 10,000 and we staged a mock like skirmish out there trying to jump over first and pull each other back.

Stop traffic. Stop traffic for sure.

Oh wow. Wow. Do you remember cuz Okay. Cuz I lived San Francisco in like 94 to 2001 before I moved out to Hawaii. But uh I think it was some I don't know, maybe I'm mixing up the time, but like somebody put a diving board on

Yes. It was around the same time.

Yeah, that one. Nobody took credit for it, but I know who did it. Their secret is safe.

Yeah, that was that was like literally at the same time.

Yeah. Yeah. Cuz I remember there were there were some pretty outraged people like, "How dare you you. I was like, well, that's hilarious.

Because it's funny is often a good enough answer.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you got time soared into doing the Black Rock Gazette. Was that just I imagine you just did one episode or or one night?

No. No, we took it daily, Andy. We made it a daily.

But it's only like three days, right? I mean,

yeah, but we had three editions and one of them was the Sunday edition with a Sunday supplement and a cross word puzzle and a horoscope and all that stuff. Yeah,

I had a pink sheet. It was two two sheets of legal sized paper on Sunday.

So, yeah, we wrote a bunch of the stuff ahead of time and then we kind of filled the populated the news hole with uh whatever nonsense

we would make up on the spot.

Yeah, I was going to say because that would probably take up a good bit of your time you just like writing these stories.

Yeah, we wrote, you know, we wrote we wrote stuff in advance um like artist profiles and you know, all that stuff.

Yeah,

Larry Larry you know, pontificating. But then, yeah, the we had we had a a news hole. I think that's technically the term of a newspaper. You know, it's funny what I Burning Man has given me the opportunity to play at two jobs that I kind of imagine myself having in another life. One is newspaper publisher. Uh the other is bar owner. But I got to publish that newspaper and just fill it with whatever whatever we wanted to. And it it got hilarious. The um we have some very funny people Um, some very weird people helping out on it. My favorite story from the Black Rockck Gazette was God. Well, it's just ridiculous to try to to make this thing because, you know, technology versus the desert. Desert always wins.

Well, yeah.

So, we had uh we had endless problems with the equipment. You know, for instance, pinch rollers, those little rubber rollers that make paper slide through a printer, they don't pinch once they get ply dust on them. You have to take it apart and clean them every like 20 or 30 copies. So they'll still grab. So constantly battling things like that. And uh I think it was 95, third year we did it, 94 or 95, we uh we had a printer failure or actually we just didn't have the right driver for the printer that we had.

So we couldn't print anything.

So we put out a call to uh to graphic artists and illustrators and said can we want you to you know hand illuminate the newspaper as if you were a medieval monk. And uh came out great. But there's all kinds of as monks are want to do. There's there's marginalia uh some of which is pretty disturbing if you go through that. It's all it's all on the burning man website. If you go to historic publications and look at the Black Rockck Gazette for 95, pretty sure.

Oh wow.

You'll see some of those.

So in 96 you kind of pulled back from doing that. I mean I think Black Rock Gazette

in 96 but but it kicked ass in 96. Black the Gazette was firing on all cylinders. I had a whole production team uh of of uh drag nuns and uh Zen publishers. We did three uh episodes. Each one had a different uh daily editor. We every one of them made fun of uh Adrien Adriana Pisclair

with with with with uh

we we reviewed Pisclair and gave it in in tones that were super condescending like scrap scrappy little you know we use words like scrappy um anyway the newspaper was great the uh that was also the I also helped bring the first radio station uh to Burning Man u which was radio free Burning Man that worked great it was also the first year we did a webcast and this is the part people don't even believe that in 1996 we did a live stream from the Black Rock Desert it's true

wow 640 by 480 I'm sure you know Absolutely.

Yeah. But that was also the year that I, you know, putting all that s*** together. I ended up making, you know,

mortgage payments on my credit card.

Yeah.

My daughter was my daughter was in high school and I'm like, she's going to go to college and I think I should probably be a responsible

I should play adult for a while.

Well, that's a thing. The thing a lot of people don't realize like life does intrude and some people have lives and families. That's why I took 13 years off and yeah, now my son is just like he just finished all his college applications. So, you know, Nest will be empty soon, you know.

So, Oh, I I love that the whole thing with cuz it with the piss clearing like your local town like newspaper rivalry like because when I I interviewed Adriana and um yeah, I would just talk about like the whole mechanics of it because I was like surely you're not printing them up on the playa and and I think that I I'm not sure if it in the beginning that they they she did that too. But then like later on she was like, "Oh, no, that we would put it in the order and then it would be printed in Reno and then someone would like drive it up and then and then like later on I think when she did the the weekly it was she was just like, "No, no, no. It's like it's all done in advance and we print just kind of bring it up, you know."

Yeah.

I I I'll tell you the sequence of how we did this. The first year we did it all in this little cargo trailer. M

uh the second year we brought a little bit better equipment and we said let's get an RV to keep it in the RV which was a great idea except we were splitting the RV with the radio station and they their door was constantly opening and closing and turned into a dust nightmare. And so year three was when we uh decided to move production to Gerlac. So we rented a room at Bruno's and we had our print shop there. We still had a press room on the Playa and but that meant commuting back and forth between the two spots which you could do back then. You could drive all you wanted. I uh actually can I tell you a side story about that year?

Sure.

My wife my wife drove out to Gorak to pick me up not knowing that I'd already left. We got our wires crossed

and uh she was struck by lightning

in her 1967 VW microbus. So anybody who tells you you can't be you can't be have a lightning strike in a car is full of s***. Um, but we didn't know what had happened to her. She came back to camp. It was a big ass storm. She came back to camp and she's like got kind of corkcrew eyes. She's like dazed. She says, "I'm kind of numb from the elbows. I can't feel my hands and I can't really hear right." And so, you know, we there was no there's no hospital. There's no rampart. There was a med. Uh there were a couple of people who had some, you know, medical background, but the way we actually figured it out was that I looked in her mouth. She said, "My my cheek hurts." I opened up her mouth and there were black burn marks next to each one of her metal fillings. So, we pieced it back together that she was uh she was out in midplay, took the lightning strike, it came in through the metal roof, arked into her jaw.

Really?

It discharged out through her hands into the steering wheel.

Oh my.

And uh and she came too, slumped over the wheel going into a giant circle and not really knowing what had happened.

Yeah. Wow.

So after that year, we decided maybe that wasn't the best thing. That's when we went to production in Reno at a at a print shop and they delivered it to us.

Oh, okay.

We g we gave the delivery guy a day pass, you know. So there was there was no shortage of people at the local kinkos who wanted to

I'm just trying to support that project.

Imagine like you're just driving along in the micro bus and then I'm I'm sure you probably just blacked out. or whatever. You he kind of like all of a sudden one second and then the next minute you're just kind of like what what just happened?

Paisley Paisley Hayes is definitely a hero of Burning Man for multiple reasons including that one. Um she also really she pulled most of the weight on that theme camp. She developed a lot of the ideas behind Tiki Camp. Um she did a bunch of the art for the Black Rockck Gazette. U she invented the uh the the Monkey Hut.

It's true story really.

She was the first person that I know of to say, "Hey, we could kind of bend the rebar into a hoop and kind of jank a concert hut out of that."

She's very very genius at the McGyvery kinds of things and a great designer.

Name the hut after herself. I mean, come on.

We we just called it a we called it a Quanet because that's what they used to call them in World War II. Somebody else came up with Monkey Hut later and it was like that fits.

Ah, I have to rebrand that. It's a Yeah, it's a It's a paisley hut.

It's a paisley hut. Yeah. Come on.

Yeah.

Get with it.

Wow. Um, so how long did you do the black rock cuz did like So after like a 90

96 was my 96 was my last year.

Mhm.

I I stepped back from all those things, you know, from being involved in the radio and the

webcast and all that stuff. In 96 camp

um Well, I still did a camp. Yeah. In 97 we went and we were part of uh one of the first villages. We had an area called uh what was it called? The Naybar Hood and it was a bunch of little bars all clustered together kind of like a prototype for what would later turn into Golden Guy Alley.

And we had uh yeah, we had a little bar in there. Our friends uh from Big Rig Industries had one. I just remember the name was Hangover Kill.

They were only open in the morning and they only served day drinks.

Oh.

Oh, and we had an iron bartender competition. That was fun. I was a judge for Iron Bartender, you know, modeled after Iron Chef. We had people come in and he would give them random ingredients and have them, you know, give them a blender.

And one of the first contestants, nearly cut his finger off and started bleeding all over the blender. It was kind of like, wait, we we have to stop here, guys. Stop. Medent for this fellow. Sorry, you didn't lose. You were just disqualified.

Oh, a couple give extra points for that. It's like if you show blood, it's fine.

Well, we weren't we weren't we weren't above making meat drinks.

God, I'm trying What was the name of that camp? The Aesthetic Meat Foundation.

Oh god. Yes.

Yeah, that was truly horrifying. I I have a strong stomach and I'm I'm hard to hard to shock, but

yeah,

that was pretty shocking.

But the state of that meat even after, you know, the thing is it just got worse because it's hanging out there.

But they were like splashing blood like on the directly on the Maya and stuff and like but they were like a bunch of vegans or something. I heard I remember they're like this is

I couldn't I couldn't bring myself to get close enough to them to find out.

Yeah. Yeah. And another

I was like that's your that's your art, bro. That's your art. That's fine. I respect that.

Yeah. But then going back to what you're saying about like 95 96 or so like the the internet kind of becoming more like available for ordinary people to to organize. Something I was reading in the cacophony book was uh about um I didn't realize this about the Bianca Smutshack. Cuz if people remember Bianca Smutshack, they're like, "Oh, that was that place that had all the p*** and people would like, you know, do all these like sex acts and this and that." But like I didn't realize I was like, "Oh, that was one of the first like like chat room kind of

Yeah.

sites.

It was. And the the onplay presence was just a physical manifestation of their internet presence." And uh

Yes.

Is that what the internet presence was like

that. Yes. I I don't know. I I didn't really attend either of them

cuz I'm not a big fan of of STDs, but

no, I was kind of more like a a spectator. I remember going by they're like, "Oh, they have really good grilled cheese." And then like I don't the line was really long and they were like, "Oh, you can look at all this p*** and all these people." I mean, my my funniest Bianca's story it was because it it was basically like those those flat top shade structures and then just they brought like two or three truckloads worth of couches and there's just all these couches and always people like having sex all over the place and um there like tarps like all around the outside and I was like walking around the outside and they saw these two like black rock rangers you know and there's the tarps would kind of like peeled back and you can send there's this opening you can kind of see inside and there's these two black rock r u um or or bureau of land management I should say like rangers Not black wing BLM right, right? So the guns is there everything, you know, and they're just there, you know, arms crossed and they're they're both just like staring intently like at this little like this gap, you know, in the thing. And then so like me and my brother, my friend, like we just kind of sidled up to them and we like behind them. We're kind of like cross our arms too, you know, we're just kind of like looking like over their shoulders and we you could see a a man and a woman in a sex act and and we're just kind of like, "Oh." And so like we're watching the cops like watch these people and then like one of the cops just kind of slowly just kind of like turns you just kind of I guess he kind of like senses you like there's some presence behind him and then just kind of he's like turns around you he was like whoa we're like oh hey sorry to surprise you officer and he was like nothing to see here move

do you really say that

yeah yeah

that's that's kind of one of the buttons on your you know on your on your talking cop doll

yeah I think here like, "Oh, it seems like there's plenty to see."

Yeah. Wow.

This is a hard-hitting investigation, you know, we're in the middle of

Wow. So, that was the the early days. So, when did you kind of get back into more like working and organizing or working for the man?

Well, like I said, I kept going. I I didn't go every year, but I I went most years. I still would do team camps. And uh 2010, I helped my good friend Robert Burke bring his uh his ill- fated giant mobilized zeppelin, the the Hindenburg Burke, which was a fiery debacle. Uh but it was uh God, I think it was 20, I don't know, 2012, 2013. Yeah, 2013. Larry Harvey called me up kind of out of the blue. I mean, it wasn't totally out of the blue. We stayed friends that whole time. We uh we you know we were very cordial and we were in contact. We did things like we were both on Chicken John's mayoral campaign coming up with uh ridiculous media pranks for Chicken. Uh but uh he called me up and said that he was having trouble writing the theme. Um his thought partner Rod Garrett had died recently and uh he was kind of stuck. This was after I think the year before when he did a 2.0 theme. It was evolution 2.0.

Oh yeah.

Kind of was was stuck creatively. He had a great idea for the theme. It was a cargo cult. But he said, you know, it's so culturally appropriative potentially that uh they're going to kill me unless it's really funny. So Stuart, I need you to help me make it funny.

Punch it out.

So So yeah, I came in and helped uh helped write the cargo cult theme, which is pretty funny. And I thought it was done, you know. Then like a week or so later, I get this uh invitation to go to a meeting at Burning Man headquarters. I'm like, Larry, what what is this? He said, "Oh, no. We we design the the man base uh every year to match the the theme and uh you know, we meet every two weeks and talk about that, you know." And I was like, "Okay, I'll go to one." I went to two. And after the third one, I came out and and my old friends uh Harley K Dubois and Marian Goodell were both kind of sitting there with arms crossed looking at me like, "Are you working here now, Stuart?" Uh, in a good way, but that turned into me getting a job offer to come in and, you know, rejoin things as the uh activating our education program, which they had just uh created on paper with the incorporation of black burning that project. So yeah, that was it was like 2013ish

and um yep, since then I've written or co-written every one of the silly themes. So that's kind of fun

and kind of traumatizing.

Well, I mean when Larry and I used to do it together, it was just like a it was like a fun argument. It would begin with a joke and turn into a slugfest and then end with a hug. Uh usually Yeah,

but uh God, how bastard had to go and die. So now it's like nobody to argue with. So

well, who do you bounce around ideas with now? Like uh

I I have I have a close group of people that, you know, that are

old-timers like me. Um I get their I take and I take the temperature pretty much. That's all I do on Playa anymore

is I talk to people about ideas for themes and you know kind of do a giant focus group on different theme ideas and theme directions.

I just listen to anything in social the swamps of social media because it's like you know like Reddit or anything people there never happy about anything you know it's always like it's like a sucks why you know I mean it's like what you want to just like do a carbon copy of like a one that we had before like oh the floating world 2.0 here you go you know like

well if it's if it's It's not controversial, then you know I'm doing something wrong.

That's right.

This is this Yeah, this is super non-controversial. I was really expecting people to go, "Oh, please barf." And now everybody's just like, "Oh my god, that's so good."

Upset because they're they you've made it difficult for them to be upset about it.

Well, there's a little bit of grumbling from there's a little bit of grumbling from the art department that uh they're going to have too many trees. And that was maybe an unfortunate choice of illustration. I love the illustration that Tanner Boger did for for Axis Mundi. It's this beautiful world tree with roots with DNA strands in them and reaching up to the to the inf infinite heavens.

So they're thinking like MO issues like people are going to be bringing

No, just just that the art will be we already have a lot of people make trees out there. Andy,

in fact, a couple years ago, this is a fun story. I got caught out by the crash fence when a complete white out storm came in. Uh, I had a cart, but I I spent like the next two hours going at like 1 mile an hour back into the city, navigating by my good old analog compass that I still wear on my wrist for situations just like that.

Wow.

And and uh we passed we passed a a tree, you know, with LED lights on it.

And then like five minutes later, we passed another tree with LED lights on it. And then five minutes later, The person next to me goes, "Steuart, we're going in a circle. We keep going to that same tree."

No, there were just there were just a lot of there were just a lot of trees out there. Um I think I don't know the tree of Teneria was an inspiration to so many people. That was a magnificent magnificent tree.

What was that?

It was the one with all the the uh the super sophisticated programming of lights in the leaves. It had like thousands of leaves that all went through, you know. different pattern changes and colorations.

Better than that.

Anyway,

hepatitis tree. Remember the I call it he was like was it the shower or at night it had like fire like during day would like drip water and people would like oh look this giant outside shower and it I think it just like recycled the water like it and then

you know it drip down and then pump it up and drip down like I don't think there's any filtration afterwards. People were like yeah a bunch of people got hepatitis here.

Um, no, I missed that one. But yeah, water is always a miracle. Water is always a miracle in the desert, right? You know, Chicken John had his uh had his tap out there in a very early year in the 90s. He just put in a like a uh like a garden tap with a hose bib on it and uh

you know, poured a a puddle of water underneath it.

Was it actually connected to anything or it was just

I don't think so. I don't think so. But it but it looked like it was working because the I was wet. It might have been might have been connected to something

something to stumble over.

It was a joke. It was a joke.

Yeah. Wow. So, okay. I mean, well, Smash content nowadays. And so, uh, well, actually, so you're brought in to help with what, like the education department, whatever. Um, cuz I know Caveat said that you and him and and Larry also sort of formed the well, I guess, which was just now the the philosophical center, right? Was that around the same time or

Yeah, it was a little bit a little bit later. It was a couple years into the tour, but um yeah, Larry decided to activate that program area basically through u mostly through writing.

Mhm.

So, he called a convention of a lot of lot of writers to activate a blog series around the 10 principles.

And Caveat was one of those. And then he and Caveat and I all enjoyed uh just having a philosophical conversation every couple of weeks.

Yeah.

So I can't say that the philosophical center was super productive of anything that you can look back and say look at all of this cannon of literature that we produced.

I mean we did some essays. Caveat you know is super prolific and he's written probably more about Bernie man philosophy uh than anyone. And uh When Larry died, I was uh I was tagged with that title. So, I'm now the director of the philosophical center. But I gotta be honest, my my work is less in philosophy and more in, you know, storytelling.

Larry liked to describe the philosophical center as being two things. The as he put it famously, the conscience and collective memory of the community. And I'm more inclined towards the second half of that. So my work these days is very much around collecting, preserving uh and uh and sharing stories of the community, founder stories, hero stories, loser stories, fail stories, all of that in as many media as we can get. So

I have the uh I have the privilege of supervising our documentation teams. I'm a a member of our video unit, Profiles and Dust. I have published uh or helped publish three books under the Burning Man books imprint and I have my own little podcast that you may have listened to called Burning Man Live.

I love

So that and uh and uh lately I've been up to my eyes in uh trying to update our old our old creaky website which is a thousand pages uh with let's just say a little bit of outmoded framework for getting around. I call it the Winchester mystery site because there's so many broken links and doors to nowhere. So, I've been uh I've been head down in that. We should be what should be live by the time this podcast airs at burning.org.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, I know that the the regionals section of it was has notoriously been kind of janky and like out of date.

Oh my god. Oh my god. Yeah, it was it wasn't even on the same platform. The last time we did a migration from like, you know, from bespoke volunteer code to WordPress to an older version of WordPress, regionals got left behind and so regionals was still its own little own little world. Uh so I'm happy to say that that has been addressed.

Oh, great.

And we now have things like an event finder. So if you wanted to know what events are happening, summer around the world where you can find that out.

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I remember years ago I started the what the regional information center then became the regional network center and then it got folded into everywhere. But uh as uh remember was it Anthony in New Orleans would always decry me every year. He was like Andy's giving us homework you know cuz I I I thought of the model of kind of like you know when you go to like a convention you know the different you know, so you would different regionals would make like a poster. So, you know, so like each p place would have like a poster. And so I was like, okay, like everybody like, you know, I'll make some janky ass one based on like what what's on the website and then that's going to be like your default and like unless you guys like come up with something on your and you know, at first like hardly anybody did, but as the couple years went by like more and more people like made them and I was like I was like what what if they just kind of took these as like a PDF or whatever and just copied and pasted it onto the website. Like this is better than just like a, you know, text information, you know, it's like here's the email address, here's the website, you know, it's like it's like, oh, people like posting pictures, but I don't know. I'm sure some of those things like exist somewhere, but

Well, baby steps, baby steps.

Oh, yeah.

First, it's a it's a modern publishing environment that we can get it, too. So, whatever happened to the Black Rock Cassette? I mean, uh

Oh, God. I think they did it they did it through like 2000 or 2001.

Uhhuh.

But, uh, you know, newspapers everywhere tell the same story, don't they? Who reads a newspaper anymore?

And then, you know, go anymore. And she kind of folded her the pissclair and then weekly, right? But what I mean, what I know that there's some sort of newspaper now like They'll they'll probably keep popping up. Um yeah,

over the years I' I've probably seen at least a dozen of them. I don't know. The one I really miss was Spock Science Monitor.

Oh, Spock Mountain.

Spock Mountain.

I actually camped next to them. Was it 2003 or 2004? And uh yeah, they had a similar thing where it's like I remember they had like a trailer and then had like their computers and they were printing up and they

and they had this god what was it called? Hyper whiskey. It was

what a great camp. I camped nearby there, too. We may have We may have enjoyed a hyper whiskey next to each other, not even known it.

Do you remember it was like towards I think it was like one of the last few days when they were like it's like we're going to we're doing the diaper challenge. Do you remember that when they were like, "We're going to make diapers and we're going to walk around all day long in nothing but diapers." And then it's like at the end of the day it's like you have to use the diaper. And I remember them telling me they're like, "This is harder than it looks. you know. Yeah. All right. Well, uh kind of gets us to our second questions. Um so where does life begin for Stuart Bangor? So what's your your pre Burning Man precacophony uh background like? Where so where did you grow up and what happened to you?

I grew up in uh in Southern California and I remember thinking I was impressed by my dad had a couple of friends who had done lots of different things. So when it came time to like picking a career path, I was always like, I don't want to do that one thing and get my gold watch and retire, you know. My dad's had this one friend named John McGroy who had been he'd been in the army and in the Navy. He was a prize fighter. He was a published poet and he'd started a bunch of his own businesses, right? He went on to uh at the age when most people retire, he joined the Forest Service and led uh a crew of uh youth making trails. And then when he finally did retire, he went home to Ireland and you know fixed up an old cottage on the seashore. I I was like that's a that's a life, right? That's a life of of adventure and you know some failures, some successes, but but a lot of things going on. So when I uh when I got to college, I was on I was on kind of a I was on a pre-law track because I was I was very successful in debate and public speaking in in high school, went to, you know, the national tournament, all that stuff. I looked around myself one day and I realized that all my friends were turning into lawyers and I didn't want to turn into a lawyer, particularly for one thing. The thing about debate that made me crazy was that literally on the flip of a coin, you would take a a side on an issue and argue to win. Whether you believed in it or not, you know, that that advocacy disconnected from your own ethics was deeply disturbing to me. So, uh, you know, I screwed around a little bit. I got I lost my scholarship to USC and then tried doing some, you know, some manual labor and then went back to school on another debate thing. Anyway, I finally finally joined the Air Force in 1979 and uh ended up as a Chinese analyst. I for some reason I had this latent talent for languages I didn't know and I took the uh the language test, the the D-lab, the defense language aptitude battery and apparently I I blew it out of the water. And so I went to um I went to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey for their one-year Chinese course and then spent like another year in tech schools and survival schools and learned how to jump out of planes. Thank god I never had to. Uh survive in the woods, all that good stuff. And then uh then I did four years in the Far East, mostly out of Okinawa, flying on spy planes, basically reconnaissance aircraft all over the Asian theater. And uh I did that I spent eight years in the service, then uh didn't want to spend the rest of my life in it

for a variety of reasons. We decided the Air Force and I decided that we weren't uh we weren't made for a lifetime commitment. So yeah, then I the first job I got offered was up in the Bay Area. Uh my last duty station was in Tucson at Davis Mountain. So uh my wife and I and our very young daughter at that point moved up to the East Bay, started working in a variety of variety of capacity. I don't know. I Yeah. Got a bunch of jobs knocked around, did some freelance writing, uh started my own little marketing business doing small business marketing and around that time is when I uh started up my zen and that introduced me to the cacophony society and the rest as they say is Burning Man.

Ah, so one year you learned Chinese.

Yeah, but it was an intensive course. It was that's all you do.

Wow.

Eight hours a day and you know

you do that long enough in your start dreaming in it and, you know, talking to your friends in it all the time. It was great. It's a really great program.

Have you like uh do you do you still speak Chinese or do you have you

parlay? I still remember a few key phrases like uh that's Mandarin for shoot down the American spy plane.

You heard that a lot.

You never want to miss that. You never want to miss that. Now, you don't ever want to hear it, but if it comes over the radio, you definitely don't want to not hear it. You know what I mean?

Ah, I guess there was probably a certain like he had a short list of like Okay, maybe

I learned how to say that phrase I think in like four different languages at one point I could say it in in Vietnamese, in Korean, in Russian.

Wow, that's incredible.

Yeah, it was it was fun. It was it was definitely different. Um, you know, a lot of people end up most people who join the Air Force don't end up actually flying on planes and I flew like 120 130 odd missions. on different types of uh of of intelligence related aircraft.

Wow. Yeah.

And got to travel a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. See the world. Um but it's interesting how like a number how many people especially like in the earlier years it's like have you know who were involved with with Bernie man. Not sure what about cacophony but like who have like a military background.

It's true. Um I think you know Air Force Survival School was I I think my first truly transformative experience being uh being out in the woods in Eastern Washington for two weeks in January. Uh I definitely learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about my uh leadership abilities and obligation to other people. Um you know, how to survive together. And so yeah, camping in the middle of a desert 100 miles from civilization was really nothing to me. Um, I helped write those first survival guides. And there's one phrase that was in there, I think it's still in there, that survival guide has just like has so many coats of paint over it that there's still a journal, a kernel in there that I wrote, what does it say that absolute essentials are an open mind, a sense of humor, and positive mental attitude. Because survival training all starts with PMA man with positive mental attitude. Remember they I'll never forget the story on like day one of survival school. They told us a story about a uh I think he was a air guard pilot. His plane went down in Alaska kind of in the middle of nowhere and they found the the founded what had happened. He'd gotten out of the plane, walked around it three times, gotten back up into the cockpit and shot himself with his service revolver.

What?

Yeah. and he was he was less than a mile from a road, but he just gave up. And the lesson is if you give up, you're f*****. You know, you're you're not going anywhere. Uh so positive attitude.

Yeah.

And I still think I I think I carry that with me to Burning Man. I'm I refuse to get jaded. Uh I refuse to uh to succumb to the oh, it's just not what it used to be vibe. It's it's always something different, right? It's always something different. Right. I don't want it to be the same.

Exactly.

If everything was the same, why would you even get out of bed in the morning? You know, if you knew exactly what was going to happen.

It's like everything changes, but also everything stays the same, too. You know, it's like why come back if it's if it you know, you're you you don't have the same familiar things that you you love that are still there, right? You know,

you just got to learn to love other things.

Yeah. Well, this kind of gets me to the the last question about the the impact influence of 30 minute on you cuz I don't know one of my central kind of questions is just sort of like why like you know why are we doing like why come back year after year you know I was talking to coyote we're going through the math I'm like how old were you when you first went how old are you now and I was just like you realize you've been doing this more than half of your life and he was like huh you know like it's like what like what what drives you to keep coming back like what is it about Bernie man

well coyote and I are almost exactly the same age were born in the same year, like a week apart, and I've been going longer than him, so do the math.

Yeah.

Um I'm I'm glad you mentioned it because he's, you know, one of the reasons why it still means to me is that I've made so many amazing friends. I've created a new family or I've assembled a new family around me and and Tony is one of them, right? Um he's literally he's very much like a brother to me. And there's so many people like that that I just feel that I I know that they do anything for me and I would do anything for them. That's that's something I had when I was in the service and it took me a while to find that again, right? You know, you get in a crew and you don't necessarily like everybody, but you trust everybody. You can rely on everybody. And so that's something that Burning Man has given me. But that's not why I keep doing it. The reason I keep doing it is for people who haven't experienced it yet. Um, couple years ago I When when Paisley and I did our last theme camp together, Campo Mysterioso and Senor's Time Travel Tavern, we had a terrible year. You know, it was one of those years where we kind of left with fewer friends than we started with and actually even put a big strain on our marriage.

Uh it was sort of last year just camp dynamics and you know camping with friends of friends and you know people not pulling their share all that. So we were sitting around No friends Monday, just the two of us in camp kind of looking glumbily at all this tons of crap that we would have to you like strike and load back up on the truck. We had a pretty elaborate camp. It had it was like a a rustic uh roadhouse from the 19th century, you know, big facade. It looked like, you know, the the front porch.

The front porch actually used to used to used to park across from us and we'd have porch offs because it was the same kind of a look but stationary.

Um so we're just kind of sitting around, you know, trying not to argue. And this this kid, this young guy, late 20s, comes walking into a camp, a little too clean, a little too yepy dressed, you know, and says in in a bit of a thick French accent, he says, "Uh,

can can I can I charge my phone here?"

Like like asking politely or or just where's the charging point?

No, he wasn't a dick about it. He was just like, "Hey, can I charge my phone?" And this was This is a while back. This was 2014 or 15, you know.

Um,

but uh we were just like, "Yeah, okay. We still have power. We'll we'll do it. Sure."

This kid sat down. We started talking to him. It turns out he's like, you know, he's he's in finance. He's a broker of some kind in Paris. He said, "I've heard about Burning Man for years, but I was saving my money for a car, for a really nice car, a really really expensive car.

Uhhuh.

And then I swear to God, he started crying and he said, "I can't believe I wanted a damn car when I could have had this." And pretty much every year I meet somebody like that who gets it for the first time and is kind of sold for life and wants to come back and keep doing it. And I want to hope that there's more of them out there.

You know, particularly at where we are now in our history, we are at definitely uh a generational inflection point.

Mhm.

I'm not going to around to keep doing it indefinitely. Um, you know, it's already honestly it's it's a bit of a strain on my health to go out there,

but I want there to be more opportunities for more people to have that kind of an experience.

So, you know, and it's not just endlessly repeating Black Rock City. I'm really I believe strongly the the regional network needs to has capacity to grow um and that there more should be just more opportunities for more people to get into the culture and have their first experience even if that's just a clean up and you know in their hometown or whatever it is to to start working with the kind of amazing people that you and I know um are gravitate towards this world.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But I mean it's also Bernie man's kind of like a cycle, right? Like people kind of cycle in and cycle out. I mean

it's true.

I I don't I made this little thing like a couple years ago. The uh the graduate Yeah.

Like because uh I don't know. I mean, well, first it started off as just being like uh like it was like, oh, I'm a retired, you know, like I'm like alumni, you know, I'm coming back. I'm like, how about we do an alumni reunion? But then it's like the more we kind of thought about it and this concept of people like like graduated burning net, you know, I'm like some people it's kind of a negative thing like ah I'm done with that. I'm jaded. I'm old. I'm never going back. But then other part was like well no no you could look at it as like like I went to this four-year university university like I got this incredible education. It's like I now have this diploma in my hand, you know, like I'm going to go out in the world and I'm going to make the world a better place, you know? So, it's like Birdman doesn't mean it's like, oh, you you get the bug and then that means you just have to the only worthy experience is going back to like Black Rockck City like every year after year after year. It's like like I said,

you can do like regional events or or some people don't even do that. They just kind of just incorporate their own Burning Man.

Yeah. Yeah.

I uh Yeah. I I think about this a lot. When I when I first came back to Burning Man Project dozen or so years ago, I was coming out of a marketing background. I had worked for years uh in the agency world, building e-commerce websites and operating, you know, marketing websites. And I sat down and I was like, "All right, what's our product?" Right? If we got a website, what should it be selling? What are we selling to whom? And people are like, "Oh, it's like this oh it's like that you know it's it's like TM or yoga or blah we're selling a transformative experience so I sat down and I built a pipeline model I said really what are the stages right from people who are aware of Burning Man which is in the tens of hundreds of millions people who are interested in or curious burner curious which is a subset of that people who have gone to an event or two participants people who have got deep into being a contributor of some kind or another either bringing a camp or a car or an art project or a donor. What's beyond that and I think it is the graduate. I really do. It's you know if anything our end product are cultural leaders who go out and take this vibe out into the world and do something we haven't even imagined right and you know there there are lots of them right? There are other events that were informed by this experience. You know they don't call themselves a Burning Man event or they might not map to all the same you know, exactly to all the same principles. But to me, that's that's the ultimate impact is people to go out and start something that we didn't.

Oh, yeah. And and and not to for them to do something like kind of like unique you and not just kind of get bogged down, you know, like, oh, we're going to replicate exactly like Black Rock, you know, like make it your own. Do your own thing and it's specific to where you are. Yeah. And Bella here is wants to be part of the show. Not sure if you can hear her purring. Well, we're just about almost hour and 15. Uh this has been a really amazing interview. Thank you so much. Uh anything you want any like well anything you want to plug or any like you want to point anyone to like any like uh websites or if anyone wants to get a hold of you like M

I think if you like listening to podcasts and if you're listening to this one, you probably do.

I certainly hope you will at least give a listen to Burning Man Live available through all of your normal podcast channels and some abnormal ones.

Yeah.

Uh

there's uh there's some very fun episodes. Actually, the one that we're dropping

in a couple of days

is one of my favorites. We recorded a a bunch of them on Plyia this year or the the webcast trailer. Oh yeah. Yeah.

And this one is with u with a villain name Ruth Hub, also known as Aloha.

He lives in Y Manol. It was funny cuz I just got in contact with him because um uh couple of friends were like staying with me and they're like, "Oh, and we stayed with Ruth Hub down."

You absolutely should connect. He is a fantastic human.

Uh he's a longtime DPW guy and he and a partner of his started a comp a consumer food waste recycling composting company

uh that's serving local local agriculture not the plantations

and he's a fantastic m music too. So he plays a little plays a little music for us too. It's a great episode.

Yeah. Yeah. I have to say I have listened to every one of your episodes.

Oh no way. It's like 120 something.

H I've been listening for a while. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. All right.

Um I took you know 13 years off and like I said you like raising my son like you know life and truth but uh you know I remember trying to kind of keep my toe in the water and in my job I work in a hospital and just like looking at a microscope all the time so it's it's I listen to like a lot of podcasts and for the longest time I was like I was like why isn't there a Burning Man podcast and then like only like much later did I find out this like oh there there actually are a couple I mean and I think like that's when I found yours And I was like, "Wow." And I started listening to yours and then I was like, "Oh, there's a couple of others." It's like the the Burner Cast. Um, there like Accuracy Third.

Accuracy third. Yeah.

Yeah. I I haven't listened to all of those ones. Like I'm not going to go back in time listen to like, you know, hundreds and I don't know thousand hours of audio. But um, but I don't know. It was It's kind of like we were talking about like on the Ply this year. I think that, you know, each show is kind of like a cover sort of a different facet of of Burning Man, you know, it's uh complimentary, not not competitive, you know, and uh but yeah, I definitely encourage uh

you got a favorite episode you want to point people to

uh of your show? Let's see. Trying to think. They're all really good. It's like when the interview process and just like, you know, they ask like Oh, what are one of your flaws? And it's like, uh, I work too much, you know.

Yeah.

Uh, I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Um,

my flaw is I'm not self-critical enough.

Oh, you're perfect.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well,

well, since this is Christmas, I will I will throw another suggestion out there.

Okay.

Look for the uh look for the holiday special we did a couple years ago.

Oh,

it was a lot of fun.

We kind of modeled it after after the old the old Christmas TV specials

where the hosts pretend to be snowed in in a cabin and random guests keep showing up. Oh, look. Hey, it's it's Dean Martin.

Oh, that's awesome.

But we have Santa Zero, Rob Schmidt, who started started Santa Con. We have uh one of the founders of Tiki camp, Alisa Archer, and then we have my favorite bit is uh Tubatron uh playing accompanying himself on the tuba while he sings Hanukkah in Santa Monica by by Sephara.

Yeah.

Anyway, they're all good.

Yeah,

except the ones that suck.

Oh, no. Nothing sucks. All right. Well, thank you so much, Stuart.

Yep. Thank you, Andy. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. The more reviews the show has, the more likely it will even appear in search results. Also, please tell a friend and share this show with anyone that you think might like it. Word of mouth reaches quite far, especially in the Burning Man community. If you would like to contact us, please send an email to Shadow of the Manodcast. atgmail.com. You can also follow Shadow of the Man on social media at Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky X, and YouTube. The links for all of these are available at shadowoftheman.com. Feel free to use any of these social media accounts to provide any feedback you might have. Your thoughts on the show are greatly appreciated. Thank you and see you soon for a new episode of The Shadow of the Man. 

Thank you for listening to this latest show. We have to make another one so gotta go. Don't worry for next month we already have one in the can. Very soon you'll be listening to a new shadow of the man.