Burning Man LIVE

Hear the stories of the art and artists. Black Rock City hosts 400 artworks from around the world. This episode features 12 of them, and this year’s Temple. 

This is a sonic journey of artist's recordings and chats with Burning Man Project's Director of Art, Katie Hazard. 

Desert Arts Preview is your chance to step behind the scenes and listen to the process of creating interactive, collaborative, community-built artworks.

This episod...

REMASTERED FOR 2025: Our most popular episode of all time. 

Listen in as longtime Burners talk about the dynamic aspects of thriving in Black Rock City: mental, physical, material, and relational.
Andie, kbot, Molly, Stuart, and Vav explore:

• socks secrets
• FOMO variants
• saying yes and saying no
• giving and accepting help
• No Friends Monday

and much more and other and new!

Featuring cameos from longtime Burners: Anjelika, Chef Juke, Cr...

Zander was the executive director of The Long Now Foundation, dedicated to long term thinking. He also helped build their library, a book club for the end of the world, with all the titles we would want to rebuild civilization, if needed. 

He is one of the brains behind the 10,000-Year Clock, designed to tick off the years, and chime the centuries. He’s now co-creating the future of the web at Automattic. 

He and his team are bringin...

AI is a context changer, a shaker upper, and a force multiplier to what our human minds can do.

Andie says that AI is a major philosophical shift in humanity, and when this kind of thing happens, the first people she goes to are artists and academics.

Andie and Stuart talked with a few artists and academics about their AI infused art coming to Black Rock City. They share their dreams and nightmares, and how to 'go beyond.'

 · Chad Eli...

Kevin Kelly is a leading thinker of the digital age. The founding editor of Wired Magazine, he helped produce the Whole Earth Catalog, and an early internet pillar called the WELL. He is a journalist, an artist, and a longtime member of the Burning Man community.

He is a radical optimist.

The future is a construct of the collective imagination. We see utopian stories as too pie-in-the-sky. We have a morbid curiosity for dystopian sto...

Black Rock City's soundscape is a wild ride from Afro-punk to Zydeco. This episode explores the why and how of two styles: 

• the thumping electronic dance music that makes BRC a DJ's Mecca
• the anything-goes improv of jazz, a dusty mirror to the Burner spirit

Stuart, a self-proclaimed EDM newbie, gets a crash course from a DJ in the know. He chats with a legendary DJ about how Burning Man transmogrifies DJ culture into somethin...

Leo is a pioneering light artist, bringing teams and tech together to activate buildings, bridges, and bastions. He started Burning in 1994, founded Disorient camp, and is part of Black Rock City every year.

Here he shares his journey from crafting a single beacon at his tent to leading monumental art projects that reshaped skylines. He illuminated the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, the historic bridges of London, and projects everywh...

Thunderdome has been part of Black Rock City for 25 years. Marisa Winter has led it for most of that time. One need not experience it to benefit from the wisdom of a high-profile, high-intensity theme camp.

Marisa and Stuart talk through the leadership structure and community practices that result in Thunderdome's chaotic harmony of performance, showmanship, and cathartic “consensual violence.” 

Marisa shares insights gleaned from de...

Most people in Black Rock City live together in placed camps, aka theme camps, the most unique aspect of this unique event. BRC has 1200 camps.

At the intersection of Communal Effort, Self-Expression, and Immediacy, theme camps gift a uniquely decommodified ‘third place’ of offerings and ambiance.

At this annual symposium, staff and volunteers share how they gift their interactive camps to participants. There’s an art and a science t...

Solar power is simple now, thanks in part to Burners who gift the power of the sun. The Burners in this episode also gift steamed rolls with savory fillings, called bao — so much delicious bao.

The theme camp “Bao Chicka Wow Wow” has been a part of Black Rock City for a decade. Its campmates share the prosperity of bao with artist groups, volunteer teams, and participants lucky enough to find their camp or their pop-up “restaurant r...

Explore the magic monuments of Black Rock City 2025.

Katie Hazard, Director of Art, leads the selection, placement, and installation of artwork,  and she leads Burning Man's art grant selection committees. 

The ARTery is in the center of Black Rock City, slightly offset like the human heart. It’s the epicenter of art support for nearly 400 art pieces, from towering sculptures to immersive environments.

Before these art projects are so...

Legend whispers of a time when Burning Man was a lawless Eden, a fiery playground of unbridled do-ocracy; no rules, just pure creative chaos. But as Black Rock City has grown into a thriving metropolis, so has the need for structure. We've gone from jokey forms for an ‘artistic license’ to complex permit obligations. We’ve gone from giving ourselves permission to taking on a system that can feel overwhelming.

How can we better balan...

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 calle...

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 organi...

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...

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.
 · Bri...

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 n...

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 sto...

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 t...