Marian Goodell: Burning Man and Radical Self-Expression

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of The Future of StoryTelling. It’s my pleasure to have you with me today for the FoST podcast. Burning Man is much more than an event. It’s a transformative journey to an immersive world, a world that’s co-created by the participants according to a set of 10 principles that include radical self-expression, participation, gifting, radical inclusion, communal effort, and civic responsibility. Since its founding in 1986, Burning Man has become a pilgrimage that attracts 80,000 burners to the annual gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

Charlie Melcher:

And has organically expanded to 37 countries around the globe. Those of us who are interested in creating experiences and communities that are generative, impactful, and transformative have a lot we can learn from Burning Man. It’s for this reason that I’m so excited to welcome today’s guest, Marian Goodell. Marion, is the first CEO of Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that produces this world renowned event and supports the global network it has inspired. As the steward of Burning Man’s guiding principles she’s helped the community to grow and expand while maintaining its culture, spirit, and collaborative ethos. Please join me in welcoming Marian Goodell.

Charlie Melcher:

Marian, welcome to the FoST podcast. We’re so honored to have you with us today.

Marian Goodell:

Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I just want to say I got to go back to Burning Man this year after a 20-year hiatus, and it was extraordinary. I had an amazing time and I couldn’t believe how large it had become. Honestly, I think it was maybe three times as big as when I had been there 20 years before. And I know you all had been off for a couple of years. How was Burning Man from your perspective this year?

Marian Goodell:

It was really special. It felt really good to be back in community with human beings again. The event builds up to be about 78,000 people, and so it was very rewarding to be in the moment of building a community together. The heat was unusually severe. It was over 105 degrees at least three days in a row, and that caused a lot of the thermals to bring dust up. So it was a unusually challenging year, physically and on top of reminding ourselves how to do what we do, it was exhausting. But it felt… it was important, it’s very important.

Charlie Melcher:

It is incredibly important, and so we appreciate all of the hard work that you and your team put in to make it possible. But what it really feels like, because in many ways you all who organize it, you’re not that heavy hand. It’s a place where people are co-creating, everyone bringing themselves and participating in a major way. And I just feel like there are some things that Burning Man has done in terms of codifying of principles and everybody shows up and knows them and operates within them, and then that allows for tremendous creativity and collaboration and just like a flowering of beauty. Tell us what those rules are. I’d love to be reminded for those who don’t know them, the basic principles.

Marian Goodell:

Sure. The 10 principles are guide posts, they’re guiding lights. They were written in 2004 after Burning Man had been happening really since 1986 on a beach and moved to the Black Rock Desert as an overnight camp out, so to speak, in 1990. So about 14 years into it, as the community wanted to know how do we do it ourselves? What are the values we have to remember when we’re building an event of 500 people or 1500 people? And we realized that there were certain questions that came up frequently. And when we pestered Larry, the founder, to write them down, he called them principles and he said that these were what we found we had in common with the 15 years we had been gathering as a community in the desert.

Marian Goodell:

And so these principles are, there’s 10 of them, there were nine, but we pestered him into 10 just because. Radical Inclusion, is the first one. So we welcome the stranger to the table. We want to have people join us and we ask them to follow the community values. Gifting is a big one. There’s no bartering at Burning Man. Bartering is transactional. Gifting is giving of yourself, giving to others. Another one is Decommodification. Wow. We made that word up to commodify something is to take and adopt it or take advantage of it, and we want to decommodify. We don’t want Burning Man to be used as a brand to sell anything else. We don’t want people to think that they can sell their Burning Man experience or buy it.

Marian Goodell:

Another one that’s very powerful and important when you’re in the desert is Self-Reliance. You are coming to Burning Man and expected to take care of yourself and bring what you need to survive. We don’t sell food, we don’t even sell water. So we’re relying on self-reliance. Radical Self-Expression, super playful, super fun, come and be yourself. The next one is Communal Effort. In order to build a city that has nearly 80,000 people in it, the organizers are not there to do all the work, we couldn’t, it wouldn’t be as magical. So there is communal effort and a companion to that is Civic Responsibility.

Marian Goodell:

So you’re not just doing it together, but you have responsibility to be a part of the greater whole and that your actions affect others and that the survival of the group and, of the event, and of the community is what you should keep in your forefront of your mind and help others and help the community. The last three are Leaving No Trace. We have no trash cans at Burning Man. Yup, I know.

Charlie Melcher:

It’s crazy.

Marian Goodell:

Think of an eight-day event that has no trash cans, that would be us. And we do not have anybody roaming around. We don’t even start the process of cleaning up the environment of the place until after the event, and we count on the camp mates to clean up their own stuff and take it away. Participation and Immediacy, those are the last two. Participation is pretty clear. We are looking for people to participate, show up, engage, do something. And the last one’s Immediacy. We like to say that there’s no replacement for your immediate experience. It’s kind of like Ram Dass says, “Be here now.”

Charlie Melcher:

There’s such incredible wisdom in all of these, and many of them feel like this antidote to the things that are wrong in our society today. Everyone’s about themselves, here you’ve got a principle that it’s about gifting, it’s about giving. Everything seems to be about commodification in our world. You have literally decommodification. No one even has a Nike swoosh on a shirt. None of those brands appear anywhere. And then of course, just radical self-expression. I think so many of us respond against feeling like we have to walk the line. We have to stay in a certain neat tight box, dress a certain way, act a certain way. It’s the ultimate ‘Let your Hair Down’ place if there ever was one.

Marian Goodell:

It’s a permission engine. We like to say it’s a permission engine. And behind the scenes we’ve always adjusted things in order to then maintain the output. We do create rules that help facilitate the forward movement of the experience. We try to only create rules though that we have to, we’re really rule adverse.

Charlie Melcher:

Just to comment from my own life experience, the first time I went over 20 years ago, the very first thing that struck me as so profound was that there was no money and no bartering. And that by its very definition changed the relationship you had with everyone. Just really transformative for me at that time. The thing that I was most taken by this time was the radical self-expression, but really it was the radical creativity. And with such planning and so much work and things that must have taken the entire year to build and plan. I literally just looked around and was like, “What? These people don’t have jobs. They just spent the whole building, coming for this.” And for some maybe that was true.

Marian Goodell:

Well, and you’ll see too, when you look at the principles and people notice and it is deliberate that they all work together. But without having a store and you needed tomato juice for your bloody Mary, it’s communal effort. It’s gifting. You are wandering around looking for tomato juice and someone has it, and you don’t pay them $5 for their glass of tomato juice. They’re like, “Here, take my tomato juice.” So all of these principles work together and they do fortunately work in almost any environment.

Marian Goodell:

They just dial up or down a little bit more. So self-reliance and communal effort out in the Black Rock desert are much more extreme and important. And you might be remote on a very green, grassy verdant part of the world, but you’re so far away from civilization that gifting is the only way that people are going to survive because it’s two hours to go get food or it takes a ferry.

Marian Goodell:

Some of the different Burning Man events they’ve taken part of the success that we have here and they’ve moved themselves as far away from civilization as possible. I like the challenges that our experience creates around how far can you take yourselves away from the things that make you feel safe? And the further away you take yourself out of that safety zone, the more that you’re going to rely on your own resources, and you’re very likely to realize that the kindness of others and our humanity is based on each other and looking to each other.

Charlie Melcher:

Let’s talk for a minute about the creativity that flowers there because it truly is like 80,000 flowers. Everybody is flying their colors and figuring out how they want to show up. And of course, in bringing things, working on things collaboratively to put out there. I had this moment riding my bicycle out in the playa, late at night, pitch black with a few friends. Then all of a sudden, literally out of the darkness, appears this magical little movie theater.

Marian Goodell:

Oh. The [inaudible 00:11:44].

Charlie Melcher:

The [inaudible 00:11:44], and it’s a perfect little theater and it’s in the middle of a desert, and you walk in and they hand you some candies at the front counter, and then you go into the theater and we’re watching this wonderful black and white film, and it was a dream. It was just a dream. What is your take on how people are bringing that level of creativity and why?

Marian Goodell:

Well, I think that that’s a lovely example. The group that does that love movies, and they themselves have actually one of them has been in the media business on one format, and it’s a good example of, “Well, what do you bring to Burning Man?” If you want to come and you want to be playful, how do you reach inside yourself and what’s the gift? And really the best place to start is what do you know best? What do you love to do? And then imagine bringing that to Burning Man.

Marian Goodell:

There’s another group, they bring something called a Dust City Diner, and it looks like a diner. It’s like art car, so it moves. It’s not in the same place every night. It has a marquee and they turn it so that you can’t see it from the city, so you have to go way out and then look back to find it. It has stools that are so high up, you have to step on a step and step on the stools and you get coffee and grilled cheese. They wanted to serve food.

Marian Goodell:

So the other way to bring yourself to Burning Man is to imagine how are you going to play? You yourself might be playing, you might be dressing up as Flo, you might be riding your bike all night because you want to go find the Dust City Diner and you want to climb up on that stool and you want to play back. You want to be like, “I want to Coca-Cola.” And they say, “Nope, only coffee.” You’re like, “I’ll have a burger.” “Nope, only grilled cheese.”

Marian Goodell:

You dig in yourself and you ask, “What am I here for? What’s the best way for me to be self-expressive and how can I be my authentic self? And how do I want to play and be a person and just let all my guard down?”

Charlie Melcher:

It really does make you question all the rules that you live your normal life by. That’s the thing that I always have left Burning Man thinking. It’s like, “Wait, why is the world organized around business or other kinds of economics?”

Marian Goodell:

Yeah. That’s the thing about the event that is sometimes hard to explain to someone that’s never been to it is like, “Well, it’s just a big party in the desert and there’s all these rich people, and then there’s burning things, and there’s like a whole lot of ways in which you can look at the narrative that is, again, being perpetuated by the media or people that have not been because they’re afraid of what the output is.” But the reason why we keep doing it, and I could stop anytime, people wonder whether the organization which is a nonprofit, is perpetuated its existence when something like Burning Man is done and over and it’s not. It’s still at a really powerful place in how it gives people at a time when, gosh, where is there consistent hope? Where is there a place that you can go with your imagination and in the company of others. Create big things?

Marian Goodell:

It’s there to give you the opportunity to imagine that you are playful, a playful being. You are creative by doing that without a whole lot of dogma in front of it. You can’t really go to our website and find, “You will be creative and you will leave transformed.” No, if people leave transformed, that’s great. I am driven by the way that the experience does deepen your faith in humanity. It gives you hope. It often gives people confidence that they can manifest what they want and need.

Marian Goodell:

And that’s not just building art. It might be seeking a job they want, it might be finding the relationship they want. To be in that environment for anywhere, I don’t think you can get as much out of Burning Man if you come for just like 48 hours. I don’t really think that that’s long enough to immerse yourself into it.

Marian Goodell:

You really need to come into it for, I tell my friends four days, I won’t let them come camp near me if it’s not at least three nights, four days. Because that’s where you’re stripping away your expectations that your phone is going to work because it won’t. You’re stripping away your expectations that if your bike has a flat tire, you can take it to the repair place and someone’s going to repair it for you. No, you might find someone that comes along and that they’re going to help you repair it and there might be a camp that would help you repair it, but all of that’s going to be a gift. And that’s all based on how you show up and how you present yourself and what kind of expectations you set.

Marian Goodell:

And by stripping all of that away, I think it gets back to the part of our humanity and our nature that is really good. There’s so much fear we have, and we spent two years afraid of other people breathing on us. Oh my God. So we already have fear about politics, and religion, and boundaries, and borders, and then we added fear of breathing on one another. And by resetting the possibilities of people being together, you absolutely go into a place that is naturally trusting and loving and connective.

Marian Goodell:

So if that’s natural, and that’s part of our goodness, why wouldn’t you go back out in the world refreshed and rejuvenated, wanting to say hi to strangers? Where does that happen in our daily lives?

Charlie Melcher:

I think about this in relationship to StoryTelling and stories have always been one of those ways that we’ve come to understand the world. It’s one of those ways where we come to understand how we fit in and connect other people and maybe even some little bit of empathy for the other. But what’s happening here, you’re living these stories, you’re playing different roles. There’s a whole different community that has been built.

Charlie Melcher:

And again, it’s giving you a picture of a future for humanity, for society that is very different than the one that’s slightly falling apart around us every day. And I particularly think about this because so much of StoryTelling, even particularly in deserts, is very dystopian. Or so much science fiction is dystopian and this is a kind of pro-topian fiction that you get to go live. It’s a story about how society actually saves itself and people become good citizens, and loving, and helpful to one another, and celebrate their creativity. And they don’t just get to read about it, they get to actually live it.

Marian Goodell:

You really create your own story. I do remember the first year I went to Burning Man and I was a little intimidated when somebody gestured to try to get me to come and do a little belly dance. And it was just a small group of people standing around a boombox and a woman in a belly dance outfit. And I remember wiggling my hips, but I didn’t really approach because I was afraid. And I went home and I remember thinking, “I don’t want that to be my story.” Next time someone invites me in to do something. And that’s how you take it back out into the world. So whether I’m at Black Rock City or not, that example of that moment where I thought about, “Well, what am I really afraid of? And who am I? What’s my story? What’s my own narrative?”

Marian Goodell:

Burning Man, we’ve advertised once, we used ads in Weeklys in 1997 when we thought we might be in debt, and that Burning Man had had trouble with the government between ’96 and ’97. So I put a bunch of ads in Alt Weeklys all over the West Coast in Seattle and LA and Salt Lake City, San Francisco of course, and Portland. But other than that, we rely on word of mouth. And of course, what is word of mouth? Story telling. So I like to think that it’s about the stories. Like majority of the people when we ask them how did they hear about Burning Man?

Marian Goodell:

It’s not like it’s advertising. And yes, there’s articles, but most people that put them over the edge to come, it’s because they heard a story from a person. And they want to come because they want to come away with a story. That’s one of the portals for the Burning Man experience is when you leave, you want to tell your story.

Charlie Melcher:

I think from a person who’s interested in trying to stimulate creativity in a community, trying to think about how do we co-create with people and create an environment that would allow for people to do their best work and to collaborate in really innovative and creative ways, I can’t think of a better place.

Marian Goodell:

Well, we considered also, we considered a cultural movement. So to encourage the individuals that have now engaged in a successful environment where the principles were in play, where they know that it doesn’t take a lot. Once you come to Burning Man and you see what the tools are, we’ve written these things down and we’ve written papers on the successful output. We really, really want people to come together in other places and not just do an event. I don’t really think you’ll have to have a camp out to come together as a community and petition your town for an art piece.

Marian Goodell:

The public processes for us to bring creativity, and self-expression, and communal effort, and joy into our communities and into our towns is really actually limitless. And what Burning Man really is a big civics experiment. So if we’re a big civics experiment in community, why can you not take that, and what we’ve continued to do is nurture and facilitate it. We have 80 affiliated events around the world. They have to follow some principles, but this is not a franchise. We don’t get any money back.

Marian Goodell:

We have four year-round staff members that help these folks who are basically in volunteer leadership positions for their community. Again, they’re not serving the greater event. They’re serving the desire to connect. I don’t even care if people know what Burning Man is. I care more about them feeling inspired to work with others, to be creative, for sure. That to me is the core. “What’s your idea? Come sit down and I’ll try to help you.” Or “I have an idea, do you want to hear it?” And “Let’s get more people.” Like all of those right there, that’s gifting, that’s inclusion, that’s self-expression, that’s communal effort.

Marian Goodell:

And then we’re going to clean up everything that we left behind. It’s really very human and I’m positive that’s why it resonates for you and it resonates for other people because what we’re doing in Black Rock City is just bringing it all together in a really combustible environment. And we’re doing it. We’re deliberately setting it up so people can take their experience elsewhere. They can tell the stories, they can create community. Our nonprofit is helping make art happen around the world. We’re facilitating, I’m just a facilitator.

Charlie Melcher:

A lot of immersive experiences, you’re in them, but you don’t really have a active role. Burning Man doesn’t allow that, really. You have to show up and participate. Tell me a little bit about why participation is such an essential part of Burning Man.

Marian Goodell:

It’s interesting. Often people that create festivals, and we don’t typically call ourself a festival. Festivals, large scale events, most of those narratives started with an event that was 5,000 people or up. Ours started with 20 people on a beach. And even if you don’t count the beach days, which weren’t overnights, you take it to the desert. The first group was 80 people, the second was 300. They didn’t set out to create a festival framework. They had an art piece that they couldn’t burn on a beach anymore, so they put it in a rider truck and drove it to the desert. So a lot of these principles of working together in communal effort and participation came out of necessity.

Marian Goodell:

The folks that were there in the very beginning, and I wasn’t, said that the man, the art piece, weighed three quarters of a ton and you couldn’t get it in the upright position unless everybody that was there came and helped pull on the rope. So it’s necessity. We would stop doing it if the culture drifted into a place of entitlement and expectations and if people stop engaging and they don’t build together, we are doing it wrong.

Charlie Melcher:

It’s interesting to hear you say, you don’t think of yourselves as a festival. Obviously you’re not organized around concerts or anything like that. It really is, in a way, its own unique experience or starter of a genre, if you will. But, to me, for people who are looking for immersive experiences, the ultimate participatory immersive experience, I think what anyone’s hoping for in that is the opportunity to play a different role. To experience life as if they were someone else. And in doing that, to leave feeling really changed in a way that’s not just of that day or that experience, but that stays with them.

Charlie Melcher:

That is, I think, transformational. That is really something that changes their lives. There just aren’t many things that do that in the world, and certainly not to the level that Burning Man has been able to do consistently for so many people. It’s funny, as you were talking about it being a big civics project, boy if only we could get Congress to go to spend the week at Burning Man.

Marian Goodell:

Well, we do even give tours to some of our congressmen representatives to their staff. We keep their identity there private, but we’ve had the wives of Governors, we’ve had a sitting person in the house of the US Congress. So I really embrace finding opportunity for people in everything from local to national, international politics to come and see what we’re doing. It’s one of my favorite things to do, is to bring politicians to Burning Man.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, Marian, thank you so much for talking with me about it. And thank you again for all the work you do to make it possible for so many. And we look forward to seeing you on the playa.

Marian Goodell:

Well, thank you for bringing yourself. I am inspired by the way people come to Burning Man. It’s always really nice when people say, “Oh, it’s really nice to meet you.” I’m always like, “Tell me your story.” I’m inspired by what brings people to Burning Man. So thank you for coming.

Charlie Melcher:

Thank you again to Marian for joining me on today’s podcast. To learn more about Burning Man, please visit the links in the description below. And a warm thank you to you, our listeners. If you enjoyed the show, please consider giving us a five star rating wherever you get your podcasts. You can also become part of the Future of StoryTelling family by signing up for our free monthly newsletter at fost.org. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media and collaboration with our talented production partner, Charts and Leisure.

Charlie Melcher:

I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of StoryTelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.