Stealing Fire

by Steven Kotler

  Over in Nevada, meanwhile, it was sunny skies and light winds and Burning Man was in full swing. Camp PlayaGon (a combination of “playa” and “Pentagon”) was bustling. A collection of high-ranking Pentagon officials, futurists, and hackers, PlayaGon had been charged with setting up and running the livestream broadcast and emergency Wi-Fi for the entire festival. But when news of Katrina reached them, they took a break from their duties to get a closer look.

  “One of our guys took over a recon satellite,”17 recounts Dr. Bruce Damer, a University of California biomedical engineer and NASA contractor. “Our Pentagon wireless satellite phone rang, the general on the other side was saying ‘what’s going on’ and instructing our guy not to answer. We then had control of this thing and could watch Katrina come in.” And never ones to miss an opportunity for a high-tech prank, the PlayaGon crew lit dozens of hydrazine flares (military-spec glow-sticks) around their camp and programmed the satellite to track the blaze from space, too.

  But those real-time feeds of Katrina lashing the Gulf Coast had a sobering impact. The citizens of PlayaGon wanted to help. So did plenty of other Burners. After gathering more than forty thousand dollars in relief money from concerned attendees, an advance team left the festival, drove down to the Gulf Coast, and got to work.

  With Doctors without Borders as their inspiration,18 they dubbed their nascent organization Burners without Borders. At the time, New Orleans was getting all the national attention, but these Burners decided to focus their efforts on coastal towns in Mississippi, which had been equally damaged but largely ignored.

  The first thing they did was set up shop in a parking lot and build a much-needed distribution center for established charities like Oxfam and the Red Cross. Then, over the course of eight months, they donated more than $1 million in debris removal and reconstruction efforts. The organization did everything from restore a Vietnamese temple in Biloxi to raze and rebuild the entire town of Pearlington. As CNET noted: “This was no ragtag group of 10 to 20 hopeless do-gooders showing up without a plan. This was more than 150 people, toting heavy equipment, supplies of food and water, [and] years of experience surviving and thriving in harsh, off-the-grid environments.”

  Before leaving, they teamed up with local residents to build a giant sculpture out of flood debris and, true to form, turned it to ash in a giant, cathartic bonfire. “Our town was destroyed and we were abandoned by our government and our leadership,” one Pearlington resident said, “but [Burners without Borders] came in and reminded us that even in all that devastation was the chance for art, for celebration and for community.”

  Since that time, Burners without Borders has become an international organization, active in disaster zones from Peru’s 2007 earthquake to Japan’s Fukushima disaster to New Jersey’s Hurricane Sandy. And the relationships they’ve forged with locals in those areas have come full circle—with leaders from those communities coming to Burning Man in subsequent years to learn where all of that capability and enthusiasm comes from.

  In an even less likely example of Burning Man’s spreading impact, Dr. Dave Warner exported its core ethos to war-torn Afghanistan. In 2011, Warner, a data-visualization expert and the guy who had hacked that Katrina satellite, was in Jalalabad, just thirty miles from the caves of Tora Bora where Osama bin Laden had given U.S. forces the slip a decade earlier. A large man with long, graying hair and beard, Warner has a resume19 that reads: “former U.S. Army drill instructor . . . PhD neuroscientist, technotopian idealist, dedicated Burner, dabbler in psychedelics, insatiable meddler and (weirdest of all) defense contractor.”

  Warner and a gang of MIT scientists, who called themselves the Synergy Strike Force, had posted up in Jalalabad to spread “the gospel of open information.” Based on the Burning Man principle of radical inclusion, Warner insisted that all Synergy Strike Force projects remain unclassified and that the information be shared with everyone. “I’m dismantling the Death Star,”20 he told a war reporter, “to build Solar Ovens for Ewoks.”

  So, Warner opened a “Burner bar,” where he traded free drinks for terabytes of information. It was more of a Tiki hut, really—covered in bamboo, a simple cooler with some Heineken and the odd bottle of liquor displayed, but also a sign that read “We share information, communication (and beer).”

  In their intelligence gathering, no detail was too small: reconstruction projects, troop movements, construction plans, hydrology surveys, health clinic locations, polling sites, names of local farmers, even crops those farmers were planting. Warner took all the information from his “Beer for Data” program (as it came to be known) and plugged it into a data-visualization tool he had created. The results outperformed every three letter agency you can think of, and—because Warner had refused a security clearance—he could “gift” anyone who asked with these results.

  Lots of people asked. The Pentagon relied on his data, but so did the United Nations, Afghan officials, aid workers, and journalists. In one of the most chaotic environments in the world, gifting, transparency, and radical inclusion saved lives and dollars.

  While Burners without Borders and Beer for Data mark two of the earliest examples of festival principles being exported into crisis zones, they’re unlikely to be the last. “With so much experience in self-organizing their own municipal infrastructure21 in a hostile environment,” former Apple executive Peter Hirshberg wrote in his book From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond, “Burners are particularly skilled at functioning during chaotic crises when normal services—running water, electricity, communication channels and sanitation systems—are not available. Burners don’t just survive in such an environment; they create culture, art and community there.”

  It’s for this reason that Rosie von Lila,22 a former head of community affairs for the Burning Man organization, has been invited to the Pentagon three times and the United Nations twice to discuss infrastructure and disaster planning. “I’ve been amazed at the depth of interest,” Von Lila says. “[T]raditional organizations are realizing the limitations of top-down mobilization and are seriously studying how bottoms-up community mobilization—the core lessons of the Burning Man community—can be deployed in critical environments.”

  Or, really, in any kind of environment. Burning Man “demonstration projects” can be seen everywhere from23 solar power installations on rural Indian reservations (Black Rock Solar) to experimental community spaces in blighted metropolitan areas (The Generator, in Reno, Nevada) to smartphone apps (including Firechat, which was designed as a peer-to-peer communication network at Burning Man, but then played a critical role in protest movements in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Russia). And because Burners vigorously defend an open-source, noncommercial approach, their efforts are easy to share and hard to censor.

  Burning Man “regional burns” now occur in nearly thirty countries, from Israel to South Africa to Japan, providing global access to the experience. It’s been called a countercultural diaspora, but that might be too limiting. After all, what’s countercultural about disaster relief, intelligence-gathering, and urban planning?

  These projects all provided creative solutions to persistently wicked problems, ones that defied the best laid plans of the most powerful militaries, governments and aid agencies on the planet. Relying on the ingenuity, collaboration, and relentless hard work of a community forged by ecstasis, Burners are extending their impact well beyond the celebration that birthed them.

  “Burning Man didn’t invent the festival,24 the art car, or the Temporary Autonomous Zone any more than Apple invented the personal computer,” continues Hirshberg. “But like that other venturesome innovator . . . Burning Man executed the concept beautifully, and through its work is having an outsized impact on our culture—and quite possibly on our future.”

  Disrupting the Brahmins

  While Burning Man principles and skills are being deployed in some of the harshest conditions on earth by volunteers with limited budgets, a large number of the examples in this chapter
have involved the creative class—that is, people with the resources, influence, and time needed for such pursuits. And, typically, that’s the way these things have always worked.

  At least as far back as the Eleusinian Mysteries, which counted notables such as Plato and Pythagoras among its members, ecstatic culture has often been spread by an educated elite. In Europe, we saw this with the Rabelaisians25 of the sixteenth century, and the Club de Hashish in the eighteenth century—both of whom explored altered states, open sexuality, and libertine philosophies in pursuit of inspiration. In the 1920’s socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Taos home26 served as a mescaline-fueled salon for everyone from D. H. Lawrence to Georgia O’Keeffe and Carl Jung. In the 1960’s Esalen’s founders and faculty infused bohemia with academia,27 drawing heavily from the ranks of Stanford, Harvard, and the European intellectual community. Yet, even though these movements all began with a select few, they ended up having a disproportionate impact on philosophy, art, and culture.

  In July 2013, we experienced a contemporary instance of this dynamic in the mountains of Utah, where a small but influential group of innovators are building community based on what they call “the power of shared peak experiences.”28 Guided by Jon Batiste and his New Orleans marching band, we found ourselves in a large crowd of artists, activists and entrepreneurs, traipsing through an aspen forest. After about thirty minutes, the procession arrived at a wildflower-strewn meadow and the largest dinner table either of us had ever seen. It was a quarter-mile long—a single straight line stretching across the whole of the hillside—with white linen place settings for a thousand.

  As we sat down, we noticed all the little details expressly designed to prompt awe and delight, like hand-crank radios playing jazz from a pirate AM station and stainless steel whiskey flasks with Walt Whitman poetry inscribed on their side. The hosts proceeded to serve everyone by hand, laying out an inventive multicourse meal. Then, timed perfectly with the rising full moon to the east and the blazing sun setting in the west, everyone raised a glass to the palpable sense of community present that night.

  After dinner, the entire forest transformed into an LED wonderland. Soundstages were playing everything from pulsing electronica to spoken word poetry. Butterfly and glo-worm art cars buzzed soundlessly up and down the dirt paths. And in the distance, scattered across the hillside, were the domes, tents, and pavilions that housed everyone gathered to connect and collaborate over this midsummer weekend.

  As much as the fingerprints of Burning Man were everywhere at this event—the remote setting, the glamour camping, the art, performance and whimsy—there were two crucial differences: not only did it take place at nine thousand feet above sea level, but it wasn’t going to disappear at the end of a week. This summertime gathering was a coming-out party. Just seven weeks earlier, the hosts, Summit Series, had bought the entire mountain.

  “We wanted a permanent home,29 explains Summit cofounder Jeff Rosenthal. “We wanted to build a town dedicated . . . to what altered states really can provide: creativity, collaboration, innovation, entrepreneurship and community. And because our community shared that vision, we were able to crowdsource $40 million and buy a ski area (Powder Mountain) that sits on a mountain range the size of Manhattan.” So while folks at Burning Man are just starting to build themselves a homeland, Summit has already taken that step.

  Already, there are more than five hundred home sites on the land, with people like Richard Branson, Kobe Bryant, GE’s CMO Beth Comstock, and Nike president Trevor Edwards already committed to the project. And instead of the typical McMansion resort plan, they are actively fostering community by prohibiting oversize statement homes and concentrating development into tightly clustered neighborhoods. Everything is being built to platinum-level LEED environmental standards. It’s the world’s first ecstatically inspired eco-town, though it didn’t start out that way.

  Summit began in 2008, when five entrepreneurs in their early twenties came together to solve a common problem. They didn’t know any really successful entrepreneurs, and had no one to ask for advice. So the quintet came up with a creative solution: cold-call business leaders and ask them to go skiing.

  Nineteen people showed up, including Zappos’s Tony Hsieh and Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz. “We learned that when you take a bunch of really bright, diverse people,” explains Rosenthal, “and let them share a dynamic immersive experience, you get powerful results. Lifelong friendships were formed. It removed the tedious, transactional nature of networking. I guess you could say that one of the things we discovered on that trip was that altered states accelerate business.”

  This one-off experiment soon became the Summit Series, a string of “nonconferences” built upon those original insights. The series, which has been called “TED crossed with Burning Man”30 or “the hipper Davos,” has struck a chord. Summit’s first event was a ski trip for nineteen people, their second event was a trip to Mexico for sixty, and their third event was at the White House.

  After hearing about the organization, President Obama invited them to bring thirty-five young leaders to dinner for a discussion about Millennial culture and the future of innovation. And what they shared at the White House, and have been implementing ever since, is a vision of social entrepreneurship that values both purpose and profits.

  Today, when Summit hosts a weekend, you’ll find little-known entrepreneurs, activists, and artists mingling with the likes of Questlove, Eric Schmidt, and Martha Stewart. This kind of cross-pollination has produced some interesting collaborations. Summit mobilized a team of marine biologists, adventurers, and philanthropists to organize a protect-our-oceans trip through the Caribbean and raised more than $2 million to establish a nature preserve. They’ve supported Pencils of Promise, a nonprofit dedicated to global K–12 education that’s built almost four hundred schools, and helped launch Falling Whistles, a global network of over 120,000 members dedicated to eradicating child soldiers in the Congo.

  But it’s not just nonprofit work they’re interested in. They’ve also begun a venture capital fund that has helped seed dozens of start-ups, including the buy-one/give-one shoe company TOMS, the eyeglass upstart Warby Parker, and the ride-sharing giant Uber. By using non-ordinary states to promote community, they’re reimagining the staid world of professional networking, philanthropy, and venture capital.

  And Summit isn’t the only organization leveraging those lessons to accelerate change. MaiTai Global, started in 2006 by venture capitalist Bill Tai 31 and kitesurfing legend Susi Mai, uses action sports (mostly surfing and kitesurfing) as a stimulant for group flow and entrepreneurship. Theirs is a potent partnership. Bill Tai sits on the boards of a half-dozen of Silicon Valley’s best-known companies, while Susi Mai is the only woman to be awarded lifetime status as a Red Bull athlete (one of the ultimate honors in action sports).

  MaiTai hosts multiday gatherings that blend kiteboarding sessions, off-the-record conversations with founders, start-up pitch marathons, and a transformational festival atmosphere. “We curate our experiences very strategically,”32 explains Susi Mai. “We find the right mix of really interesting people and subject them to powerful state-changing experiences that accelerate social bonding. It’s the same formula used at Burning Man and at Summit.”

  Mai also points out that there’s a lot of crossover between these cultures. “Very early on, we got a lot of support from the Burning Man community. Burners instinctively understood what we were trying to do so they just started showing up. And it’s a very participatory community, so when Burners do show up, they build stuff, they start organizing, they get everyone involved.”

  Very involved. To date, dozens of companies have leveraged the talent and contacts in the community to raise venture funding and find key partners, most done with handshake deals on the beach, at the end of a great kiting session, when, as Tai says, “everyone’s feeling the stoke.” They’ve also come to see action sports as a filter for start-up success. “We’ve noticed that
learning to kitesurf has a lot of parallels with the challenges of entrepreneurship,” Mai explains. “If someone has the grit and presence of mind required by the sport, then it shows a lot about their character and how they show up more broadly in life.” And the parallels aren’t just conceptual. Over the years, MaiTai members have founded and led companies with an aggregate market value of more than $20 billion,33 making them one of the more influential (and athletic) groups of entrepreneurs in the world.

  Building on these insights, MaiTai recently created the Extreme Technology Challenge (abbreviated to XTC, naturally). Rather than having promising start-ups pound the pavement in the hunt for funding, the Challenge gathers them together at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas for a pitch-fest meant to invert this process. “Instead of droves of founders showing up for a series of thirty-minute meetings with venture capitalists,” explains Tai, “and those funders then having to ‘backdoor vet’ prospective leaders, we spend real time together in an environment where a person’s true character is revealed.”

  Finalists receive an invite to Richard Branson’s Caribbean hideaway, Necker Island, where, between kitesurfing sessions, they get to pitch Branson himself. On Necker, as at Burning Man and Summit’s Powder Mountain, everything is deliberately designed to create communitas. We experienced this firsthand34 when we were invited to the island to talk about flow and entrepreneurship. From the cliffside zip lines that carry you to breakfast, to the stunning Balinese-inspired architecture, to a broad menu of action sports, everything is built to trigger that state of effortless focus. “When I do [reach flow],” Branson told us over smoothies on his back porch one morning, “I get an extra two hours of great work done, and the other twelve are really, really productive—so trying to get that balance in life is really important; not saying that one shouldn’t party hard as well.”