Mutant vehicles! Theme camps! Art experiences! It all emanates from the community… overlapping circles of people who are everywhere between being newcomers and seasoned, local and global, young and old.

Andie Grace talks with next-gen Burners Taylor Andrews, Kat Ebert, Mani Senthil, and Whitney Wilhelmy about how to find your crew like you never thought possible.

They break down barriers and clear pathways through an initiative called “Rising Sparks” which demystifies BRC and Regional events, and guides Burners to get more from the magic.

They explore the art of participation:

• seeing the sweet spot between being unmoored and overdoing it
• balancing of survival and self-expression
• finding fresh takes on mentorship

Hear how they claim their place and shape the future.

"Rising Sparks is a grassroots collective fostering intergenerational collaboration, connection, and cultural continuity within Burning Man.

We cultivate community-driven spaces where emerging leaders, newcomers, and seasoned Burners can connect, dream big, and contribute to the future of Burning Man—both within Black Rock City and globally.

Our mission is to inspire participation, address barriers to entry, and cultivate leadership across generations by providing mentorship, community-driven tools, and creative collaboration opportunities.

We are igniting the next generation of artists, leaders, and changemakers by stewarding an accessible, culturally diverse, and evolving Burning Man culture."

https://linktr.ee/therisingsparks

LIVE.BURNINGMAN.ORG

Hundreds of people create the temple in Black Rock City. It’s a community intent on creating a work of art that is a space for people to grieve and revive.

For the first few years of Black Rock City we didn't have a temple. Now, people can't imagine living without it. Each year, participants create messages, tributes, and altars for who and what they want to release. The event culminates with the burning of the temple in what organically evolved to be a silent Burn.

Listen to Stuart talk with Miguel Arraiz García, the lead artist for this year’s “Temple of the Deep.” Hear stories about how a temple is built, from crew selection to fundraising, from chances taken to lessons learned. This poetic and playful conversation exemplifies how this year’s temple is already healing.

Miguel says, “We are always looking for the answers above us. I was trying to make something just to look for the answer between us or among us. So it is not that much building a temple, it is more building like a shelter for emotions, a safe space where you can be with people.”

Burning Man Journal: Introducing the 2025 Temple

www.2025temple.com

www.miguelarraiz.com

TempleGuardians.burningman.org

Renaixement: Burning Man 2016

Burning Man Journal: Tomorrow Today

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Disasters happen. Communities come together to recover and rebuild. Governments and NGOs help however they know how.

Will Heegaard sees every disaster as a chance to build back greener. His non-profit provides power and water from nature.
· power from the sun – instead of gas generators
· water from the air – instead of plastic water bottles

He helped with disaster relief from hurricanes in Florida, North Carolina, and Puerto Rico.
He helped in West Africa, in the Philippines, and with the Maui Fires.
He helped with the LA Fires.

And he taught himself to create power and water from nature while serving as a paramedic in Black Rock City.

These adventure stories include laughter and levity in learning.

FootprintProject.org

BurnersWithoutBorders.org

Burning Man Project: Philosophical Center

LIVE.BURNINGMAN.ORG

Back again by popular demand: more tales from Burning Man’s oral history project, an ambitious endeavor to track down and talk with people who helped shape the culture as we now know it.

Hear stories of early technology on the playa, in Silicon Valley, and on the internet.

· Andie Grace, aka Actiongrl, interviews from the vantage of having co-created Burning Man’s world of communications, from Media Mecca to this very podcast.
· Brian Behlendorf - technologist and open-source software pioneer. He developed Burning Man’s online presence and connected people through the Venn diagram of luminaries from SFRaves to Wired Magazine to the Apache Software Foundation.
· David Beach - designer, creative director, and instigator of the impossible with early dynamic content on the web. He helped create Burning Man’s first live streaming and web presence.
· Scott Beale - documentarian, founder of Laughing Squid, subculture super-connector of various tentacles of the meta-scene.
· Stuart Mangrum - zinester, cacophonist, billboard liberator, Minister of Propaganda, Director of the Philosophical Center, publisher of the first on-site newspaper of Burning Man (the Black Rock Gazette), and always in the same place at the same time as Burning Man’s media experiments.

Andie Grace

Brian Behlendorf

David Beach

Scott Beale

Stuart Mangrum

Laughing Squid: Burning Man 1996 Netcast

dispatch2023.burningman.org

journal.burningman.org/philosophical-center

burningman.org/programs/philosophical-center

Burning Man Live: A People’s History of Burning Man - Volume 2

Burning Man Live: A People’s History of Burning Man - Volume 1

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He is a celebrated author, entrepreneur, leadership maven, and a founding Board Member of Burning Man Project. He’s a serial contributor to the culture and the cause.

In this episode, Chip and Stuart explore how to use the 10 Principles to make conversations interesting and how a description of Black Rock City always becomes a riddle.

They resist the urge to quiz newbies on the 10 Principles, while they also say that Burners should not take themselves too seriously.

They try on the notion that nothing matters and everything’s humorous.

They make sense of big ideas like collective effervescence, emotional equations, and the need for aesthetics and beauty.

They talk about a deep diversity of ritual gatherings around the world, and the influence of the global community emanating from Regional Burns.

They tell stories about all this and more, and somehow it all flows.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_Conley

chipconley.com

www.meawisdom.com

LIVE.BURNINGMAN.ORG

Burners often speak about the work it takes to prepare their art, art car, or camp for Black Rock City, but for many, it doesn’t end there. A project sparked in the desert or at Regional Events can take on a life of its own, continuing year-round in surprising ways.

What happens when a camp or mutant vehicle takes a break from Black Rock City? After all the Communal Effort devoted to their playa project, do they even know how to stop? Apparently not... and the world benefits.

kbot and Stuart speak with people who pressed pause on producing in Black Rock City, only to put their time, imagination, and heart into projects that build a better world.

• Leon & Patrizia of New York Dangerous discuss how their resource rescue nonprofit fosters a ‘pay it forward’ form of altruism.
• Leo & Catarina of Jaguara share how their mutant vehicle has become a vehicle for education and expression in Columbia.
• Zoe (aka “Jeff”) of Camp Starbarf tells how a year off for her camp spawned a voter support initiative and a punk rock band!

Their stories share a theme: the 10 Principles (and playa-born fortitude) inspire their year-round endeavors.

https://nyd.nyc

https://jaguara.co

StarBarf (instagram)

LIVE.BURNINGMAN.ORG

Tom Price co-founded Burners Without Borders, Black Rock Solar, and a company that gifts clean-burning kitchens to people in Kenya.

Tom talks about the weather, specifically hurricanes, and how Burners Without Borders started and grows despite extreme circumstances because Burners are extreme!

Tom’s tales of adventure include paperwork pranks and ad hoc Cajun catharsis. If Burning Man is a permission engine, giving people agency in their lives, he says the lesson of Burning Man is finding out what is too much and then finding the sweet spot.

Note: The company names they joke about in this episode are NOT sponsors, because if we don't have Decommodification, we don't have Burning Man!

Burners Without Borders

Black Rock Solar

Tom Price: Burning Man Journal

Burning Man LIVE: Tom Price and the Benefactor’s Dilemma (2022)

Burning Man LIVE: Creative Solutions to Mass Destruction (2020)

TEDx Black Rock City: Tom Price: Beyond Burning Man (2011)

ecosafi.com

LIVE.BURNINGMAN.ORG

Academics from everywhere experiment, collaborate, and even interpret our stories of "This one time at Burning Man."

In this episode, Stuart talks with people from Burning Nerds, an annual gathering of academics in Black Rock City. They keep it light, though; not too many unnecessarily fancy words.

Dr Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä describes the technique used by the Burning Man Project that gives more power to the people.

Bryan Yazell and Patricia Wolf of the University of Southern Denmark use Flash Fiction in BRC to develop a new subgenre of sci-fi called climate fiction (‘cli-fi’), stories that are less dystopian, even less utopian, more protopian (fancy word) — not good or bad, but progress.

Professor Matt Zook of the University of Kentucky extols Black Rock City's unique aspects, from temporality to being a place apart. He and Stuart explore the interplay between digital and physical spaces, and what about community actually makes it good.

Then Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä returns with how the Burning Stories project, now in its 6th year of tracking tales, is a cultural repository and is training a gifted AI on how Burners be Burning.

jukkapekka.com

sdu.dk/en/persons/yazell

sdu.dk/en/persons/pawo

geography.as.uky.edu/users/zook

burningman.org/programs/philosophical-center/academics

regionals.burningman.org/european-leadership-summit

burning-stories.com

kk.org/thetechnium/protopia

sdu.dk/en/publications/enacting-hopeful-climate-futures-at-burning-man-2024

Bjørn S. Cience - Founding Board Member at Institute of Performative Inquiry

LIVE.BURNINGMAN.ORG