Some episodes to queue up, a few useful links, and a handful of reminders.

The drive/flight/whatever to Burning Man is its own ritual. It’s a pilgrimage.

Preparing for Take Off

First things first:

Do you have your ticket?

No, seriously.

Do you have eyes on it? Is it in your hand? Is it in the vehicle? Did you check the envelope? Did you check the other envelope?

It happens to the best of us, and there is nothing worse than realizing in Fernley that your ticket is still on the fridge.

Did you set your email away message?
Did you tell the neighbor where the spare key is?
Did you download the things you meant to download before cell service disappears?
Did you pack socks, electrolytes, your ID, your meds?

Do you have a clean outfit tucked away somewhere for after you leave the playa? People in Reno are super cool but tracking in all that playa everywhere you stop is not cool.

Do you have a plan for your trash? Because you know who sucks the most? Assholes who leave trash along the route back through default.)

Ok cool.

Let’s go Home.

Episode B163: So You’re Going to Burning Man!

https://www.burnerpodcast.com/explore-episodes/so-youre-going-to-burning-man

We wanted to create an episode for the virgins. Burning Man can be overwhelming, beautiful, stupid, profound, annoying, hilarious, and occasionally all of those things before breakfast. This episode is meant to help orient the spirit a bit. If you know anyone new to our culture, send them this one when it goes live.

Episode B162: A Symphony of Steel

Interview with mutant vehicle legend Henry Chang
burnerpodcast.com/explore-episodes/burner-podcast-a-symphony-of-steel

This one just went live, and I’m really quite proud of it. Henry Chang is the Leonardo Da Vinci of Burning Man. Without a doubt one of the most interesting people I’ve ever interviewed - and that’s saying something since I’ve been doing this for 15 years.

Burner Podcast Presents: Alkaline

Session A071 - Tormenta at Spanky’s
Listen on Apple and lots of other places

The Burner Podcast RSS feed is home to the flagship show itself, as well as other Burner Podcast Presents spinoffs including Burner Podcast Presents: Alkaline, a show featuring DJ mixes as the sonic documentation of the global Burner community — the soundtrack to your burn.

Over the next couple of years, we intend to collect DJ sets from every Burning Man regional event in the world.

160+ episodes and 11-ish years

Burner Podcast is ranked in the top 5% of podcasts in the world. It’s an artist-documentarian project for and about burners; not a podcast about Burning Man.

You can browse the full feed here:
burnerpodcast.libsyn.com

And where they live on the website:
burnerpodcast.com/previous-episodes

You can listen to Burner Podcast from pretty much any platform.

Do note that Spotify has stopped carrying Alkaline. Probably due to music copyrights. But the Burner Podcast proper episodes seem to remain untouched as of now.

Here are a few I’d suggest adding to your pre-playa download pile:

Packing for Burning Man

burnerpodcast.com/previous-episodes/episode-84-packing-for-burning-man

Yes, it may already be too late for this one but hey, maybe you got a last minute ticket. Useful if you’re currently surrounded by bins, costumes, half-charged devices, and the sinking suspicion that you have packed three capes but no underwear.

Also, Rebecca’s packing list is linked in the show notes, which may save you from at least one preventable meltdown.

Un[censored] Your Burn with Wolverine

burnerpodcast.com/previous-episodes/episode-132-unfuck-your-burn-with-wolverine

Safety Third. This episode gets into Narcan, hydration, drug interactions, physical health, and the deeply underrated spiritual practice of washing your hands.

There are no magic pills. There is no secret veteran hack that replaces taking care of yourself and the people around you.

The Ten Principles Episode with Halcyon

burnerpodcast.com/previous-episodes/episode-105-the-ten-principals-episode-finally

Whether you’re brand new or you’ve been going long enough to have opinions about “how things used to be,” it’s worth revisiting the Ten Principles before arrival. A very interesting deep dive with Pink Jesus himself, Halcyon.

Rockstar Librarian

rockstarlibrarian.com
burnerpodcast.com/previous-episodes/category/episode-89

Kate’s music guide is one of those beloved burner resources that feels impossible until someone actually does it. Also, yes, she is an actual librarian, which makes the whole thing even better.

The 2026 guide will go live here.

Useful links before you lose signal

Official Burning Man events:
playaevents.burningman.org

Burning Man art listings:
burningman.org/black-rock-city/black-rock-city-2026/2026-art-listings

Previous Pre-Playa Planners:
burnerpodcast.com/previous-episodes/category/pre-playa-planner

Burner Podcast Spotify playlists:
burnerpodcast.com/spotify-playlists

(they’re not super current but whatevs - I got prep to do)

Burner Podcast closing DJ sets: https://on.soundcloud.com/vXoVNddwleAvFcMuwf

Burner Podcast Presents: Alkaline - Archives of the previous seasons
burnerpodcast.com/alkaline

For when you’re almost there

At some point, the signal will start dropping. Maybe around Pyramid Lake.

Whatever you forgot, it is probably too late now.

Don’t panic. Someone on playa will have exactly the thing you need at exactly the perfect time, or the lack of that thing will become part of the story you tell later when you’re pretending you were totally fine.

Have your ticket and ID ready at Gate.
Don’t get out of the car unless you’re told to.
Keep it at 5 mph.
Don’t crack the beer until you are parked and done driving.
Love bomb the folks working the entry points.
And take care of each other.

Find Me in Black Rock City

I don’t know where I’m dropping anchor this year. The crew I’m camping with is keeping it loosey goosey on purpose as it’s their off duty year. So we’re called Camp Off Duty. We’ll be out in the city somewhere. But…

Come find me Tuesday at 10:30 A.M. at Center Camp!

My bff and Burner Podcast contributing editor and multi-time guest, Dr. Kim Perkins, is giving a talk entitled:

“Kindness & Snark: Twin Forces of Counterculture at Burning Man”

I’ll be there. Her talk is scheduled at 10:50 A.M.

And I may make some updates to this post before I go off grid.

https://www.burnermap.com/ĀrashFromBurnerPodcast

Until then…

Love, light, and all that other crap.

See you in the dust, my friends.

—Ārash
@mrarash
@burnerpodcast

Published [8/11/26]

Henry Chang can be described in so many ways and they'd all be accurate. Jazz-pianist-turned-electronic dance musician and self-taught mechanical engineer. Or a political scientist turned musician. Or a home builder turned sculptor. While most in Black Rock City recognize his iconic stainless steel creations like Valyrian Steel and the Flux Capacitor, this conversation dives deeper into the overall symphony of art, one of its many expressions being the machines most know him for.

A former student of political science and computer science, Henry eventually abandoned the "silos" of the default world to follow a calling that merges the precision of aerospace fabrication with the soul of a musician. In this conversation, Arash and Henry trace his journey beginning in Laramie, Wyoming, where Henry grew up as an 'oddity'. We follow him to university where he faces a life-altering event which leads to a paradigm shift in how he approaches his career. We explore how he integrated his music, his interest in engineering, and his calling as an artist.

Crucially, this episode also explores a side of Henry most do not know: his background as a war historian. The conversation is bookended by a deep look at the responsibility of artists and burners in a world at war.

Episode Info

Burner Podcast | Episode B162

Recorded at Henry Chang Design in Las Vegas on 8/09/26

Contributing Producer: Gordon Katz

Learn More

Henry Chang Design – Explore his portfolio of "artgineering" projects, furniture, and minimalist architectural home designs: https://www.henrychandesign.com/

Soul in the Machine – Listen to the "art band" for which Henry built custom stainless steel drum walls and laser harps: https://soundcloud.com/soulinthemachine

Beyond Thunderdome (Autocar) – A technical look at the 5.0-litre V8 engines and the World War II-era lathe used to build his sculptures: https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/features/beyond-thunderdome-henry-changs-insane-automotive-sculptures

The Machine in the Man (Burning Man Journal) – An in-depth exploration of the three-axis Tourbillon and Henry's journey with Radical Inclusion: https://journal.burningman.org/2019/07/burning-man-arts/brc-art/the-machine-in-the-man-henry-chang-and-artgineering/

Inside Henry's studio with Area15: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI9BGitclY8

Henry's camp: instagram.com/miragegaragebrc

Standard Boilerplate

A show for those who burn the other 350 days of the year

Burner Podcast celebrates over a decade in production and is listed among the top 5% of podcasts in the world by ListenNotes. An independent gift to the Burning Man community, we are an artist-documentarian project dedicated to capturing the stories and heart-centered truth of our global population. Burner Podcast episodes feature audio memoirs, roundtables, and deep-dive conversations for and about those who identify as burners.

Explore 160+ episodes at: burnerpodcast.com

Follow us for wildly irregular updates: instagram.com/burnerpodcast | facebook.com/burnerpodcast

Episodes of Burner Podcast are produced by a revolving cadre of dusty maniacs. The 2026 team includes Music Director Chris Huber aka M.I.A. and New Media Editor Cable King, among others.

Burner Podcast's theme music is produced by Joman | jomanmusic.com | instagram.com/jomanmusic

The Burner Podcast RSS feed is home to the flagship show itself, as well as other Burner Podcast Presents spinoffs including Burner Podcast Presents: Alkaline, a show featuring DJ mixes as the sonic documentation of the global burner community — the soundtrack to your burn.

About the Host & Founder

Ārash Afshar is an Iranian-American writer, photographer, and cultural architect. He champions Artist Consciousness and views his mission as facilitating radical humanization through philosophical memoirs, documentary portraiture, and recorded conversations. Learn more at yesterdayiwasclever.com.

Transcript

henry chang: [00:00:00] Okay, we’re in Las Vegas. we’re at my shop and, my portion of this build... I, I have 11,000 square feet in this shop. And, I’ve always had pretty, decent sized shops just because the nature of what I do. K- you know, the sculptures are kind of big. The m- the machines aren’t small. The machines require a lot of power.

you know, the, the machines take up space. And so, so I’ve, s- I mean, I’m sure a lot of, you can say this probably just about any sculptor that goes to Burning Man,

arash: the biggest,

henry chang: their biggest requirement is, is space.

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: And so, I’ve been here for 12 years, and before that I had a, a shop in Oakland for a couple years, and before that I was in San Diego.

[00:01:00] Oh,

arash: San Diego? That’s right, yeah, ‘cause you went to UCSD.

henry chang: Yeah

arash: Yeah, yeah. it’s-- I mean, it’s like, I, I can tell the listeners that it’s definitely like walking into a mad scientist realm. Like, that can’t be the first time that somebody’s used that, that cliché.

Yeah

henry chang: Yeah, I, to me it doesn’t seem that way. To, to me the place is a big mess and I need to clean it. But yeah, people walk in and there’s definitely some, some things that you see that you won’t, that are pretty unusual.

arash: Yeah. There’s like a, there’s like a chair, there’s like all the different pieces, and then there’s like your, like what I almost wanna describe as like a super villain chair where like there’s giant screens in front of you, and then there’s like the huge windows like blasting light in from the outside.

And you’re, you’re like pretty much here like 24/7. You’re either working or you’re like... Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I live here.

henry chang: Yeah, yeah. I, I live here and I’ve found that, well, in my opinion, I mean, of course not everybody would agree with this, but [00:02:00] I just find commuting to be kind of a waste of time ‘cause it’s, it’s a waste of your life. I mean, I mean, and I’ve done a lot of it. Like when I lived in, lived in San Diego, there was, there was a lot of wasted time on sitting on the freeway, you know?

And,

arash: you can’t, you can’t get away with the kind of things you can-- Like in San Diego, it’s more compartmentalized and like the shops are gonna be in one part of the region and living space is somewhere else.

But like Vegas is a weird place. Yeah.

henry chang: Well, I, I actually ha-- So I live here. I actually, made it so that it was legal. w- when I first bought this building, there were a bunch of offices in these rooms upstairs. And,

arash: and

henry chang: my parents, they ha- they actually had this really beautiful, huge,

arash: 12,000

henry chang: foot house that they didn’t use most of the time.

Well, they lived between here and, and, this [00:03:00] island in China. And, and so I had this option of staying in this big, beautiful house, but it would, you know, I’d have to commute 25 minutes each way. And I, I actually preferred just sleeping on the floor of one of the offices and, and not have to commute because, again, I, I felt like that, that was, you know, 50 minutes a day that I was kind of wasting my life.

So, so

arash: Do you, do you- Yeah. What’s your-- What’s like-- What is your relationship to time in regards to when you work? Is it like, is the flow state hit or do you have a set schedule for yourself?

Oh,

henry chang: there’s no set schedule, and I pretty much... Like, my work is actually my hobby, so to me it’s not really work m- most of the time. I mean, of course there’s some stuff that work, that, that is work, like paperwork, stuff like that. But, when it comes to actually designing and fabricating [00:04:00] things, I love doing that.

I, if, if I could just do that and not do anything else, I’d be

arash: Yeah

henry chang: perfectly happy. but I, I actually, I spend a lot of time mountain biking, and I actually consider that to be my job because I feel like, if you don’t exercise as you get older, your quality of life is just gonna go to hell.

arash: Yeah, 100%.

henry chang: So, so, so I’m going out and exercising, that’s my job, and, and my work, my work is my hobby.

I would do that 24/7 if I could.

arash: I could.

henry chang: But like, my, my body would go to hell if I did that, so I c- you

arash: All right. So you, you wouldn’t-- you would not do mountain biking for fun. You’re doing it because

it’s like, “I gotta

henry chang: I do find it to be fun, but I like, I like, I like being creative better than, better, better than mountain biking, although I do love mountain biking, you know? And the reason that I mountain bike is, is because it’s fun. I, [00:05:00] I th- I think that over the long run, any kind of exercise that you do is way, way more sustainable if you enjoy it.

arash: Right.

henry chang: And, so yeah, I, I, I love it, but, you know, if, if I could still be in shape and not do it, I pr- just sit, and I could just sit around and design things and stuff, I would do it. But I, I know, I don’t know, I see what happens to people when they, when they become totally sedentary, and I, I’m not okay with that for

myself.

arash: I, love that this topic is an introduction because when I was making notes for this conversation, that’s what came up quite a bit for me is like, exploring the theme of integration and what, like, the job is versus the art. And

henry chang: The, the art’s not the job.

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: For, you know, I mean s- some parts of it are. A- any job, of course, has parts of it that you don’t enjoy, of cour- but [00:06:00] yeah, I mean,

arash: I,

henry chang: I like, being creative. I like solving puzzles, you know? And so when you’re designing and building things, it’s, it’s a, for me anyway, it’s a, it’s a constant series of, of things that you have to solve.

Yeah. Right? And, I, I don’t know if... I get some sort of, some sort of, endorphin reward I’m sure for, for be- for doing that, you know? I’m sure there’s some sort of, some sort of addictive thing about it for me. And like- So, mm-hmm

arash: some sort of, some sort of addictive thing about it for me. And like g- getting into your history, like this is... Th- there’s been a journey of like, integrating, like folding these sides into each other.

henry chang: Right. I, I, I actually think it’s all, it’s all really quite interconnected. But yeah, I, I think, [00:07:00] culturally we tend to, like, silo things.

arash: Like,

like

henry chang: artists do art, engineers do engineering.

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: And generally speaking, at least in our culture, engineers don’t do art and artists don’t do engineering. But to me, it’s all kind of related to each other.

Yeah. You know? And, and I, and I think the, that separation is kinda artificial and it’s something that we’re taught. And, I’m not... I, I, I haven’t thought much about why I don’t do that as far as, like, the separation. But, yeah, I, I feel like it’s, it’s artificial. But of course- You haven’t thought about it, you said? About why I don’t separate it? Well, well, part of it is because, in my education I started out in engineering and I switched over to computer science.

arash: Mm.

henry chang: I got [00:08:00] pretty far along to where,

arash: I

henry chang: starting to take some, some upper division classes in engineering, like, statics and dynamics and, and fluid dynamics and stuff like that.

So, so I got to where I had a, kind of a ... I mean, I would, I wouldn’t call myself an engineer, but I understand engineering. Does that make any sense? Yeah. So I’m not gonna call myself an engineer because I don’t, I don’t have a license, you know? So, that would be false advertising. But then, but, but I didn’t really fully immerse into the mechanic- into the engineering, academic, you know, that academic, ecosystem or whatever, whatever you wanna call it.

And, and, with art, I don’t really have any educational at all.

arash: Yeah

henry chang: So, so I didn’t get siloed in e- either one of [00:09:00] those things. Mm-hmm. You know? So does that make any

arash: siloed in e- either one of those things. Hmm. You know, so does that make any sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, so what I wanna do is I wanna follow like this thread and, I have kind of like this loose-- I feel like this like loose, outline of how you, you arrived at where you’re at now.

And, I wanna go back to the beginning. Like, your childhood was in Wyoming

henry chang: Yes. It was written in Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. And the way, you know, my, parents immigrated from Taiwan a couple years before I was born. And my dad, yeah, he went to grad school and he, he got a PhD at University of Wyoming, and they offered him a, a teaching position

arash: Mm

henry chang: after he got his PhD. And that, so that’s how a Asian family ended up in Laramie, Wyoming.

There, it’s, that, that kind of isn’t really a very normal thing. Yeah. The, and,

arash: Like, I mean, did [00:10:00] you have other people that look like you around you?

henry chang: There was one other Japanese family, and that was it. There wa- you know, and I don’t-- They, their kids weren’t the same age as us ‘cause I ca- I ca- yeah. So yeah, me and my brother, we were, we were the only Asian kids in the, in the high school.

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: Yeah. And, there was one Black family.

arash: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

So,

henry chang: it wasn’t a very diverse place.

But it wasn’t 100% redneck because there, there was the university there, so it was, you know, it w-

arash: w-

henry chang: there was kind of a, there was at least a mix of, people whose fam- their parents were highly educated, and then people whose

arash: whose

henry chang: families were, like, ranchers and stuff, you know? So, and then, what do you, do you need to know anything else about, beyond that about my- Oh, that

arash: I’ll, I’ll, I’ll ask. Yeah, I c- I’ll keep poking around. Don’t worry about it. so the-- [00:11:00] I wanna kinda like get a, get like a quick snapshot of like what, what it was like for you. Like you, I think I read that you early on understood that you had this inkling as an artist, like you felt the, the, the draw to create

henry chang: Oh yeah, like, Well, my, my parents were typical Asian tiger mom type things, you know, where you had to do really well at school and,

arash: and

henry chang: my, in, in my seventh grade art class, I, I really enjoyed that. Like, And I, I think I was pretty good at it too. You know, they, they teach you how to draw and all that kind of stuff.

And, but then a- after, one semester of that, they were like really proud of some of the drawings that I did and stuff, but then they’re like, “Yeah, you’re not allowed to take any more art classes.”

arash: Okay. Because- Making the other kids insecure?

henry chang: You failed or you just didn’t- No, no, no. Because they, they [00:12:00] didn’t want me to try to become an artist because I-- they want you to be a doc- doctor, lawyer, engineer, you know, you know, you know how the typical Asian thing is.

And,

arash: Same

henry chang: and so, yeah, so I was steered away from that. But, you know, you know, my dad was a professor of civil engineering,

arash: so,

henry chang: so I... But I was able to take, in high school like a bunch of mechanical engineering. not mechanical engineering, mechanical drawing

classes.

of, of course that, you know, like, it-- Actually I owe a lot to that teacher.

I owe that guy a lot. I mean, you know, he’s dead, so I can’t go back and thank him, but, but he could tell that I had a kind of an aptitude for it. And he used to give me harder assignments than everybody else.

arash: Wow.

henry chang: and,

arash: and- That’s really

henry chang: [00:13:00] and- That’s really cool ... and, y- yeah, and I was just really into like making my drawings look really nice. Like I would make the fonts and I would just try to make a beautiful drawing. I wouldn’t just like complete a mechanical drawing. I would try to make the whole thing really beautiful, you know? And, and also, I did a lot of construction of like models, like, like, you know, Tamiya and

arash: Revell, s-some

henry chang: those.

You know, back in the day, the hobby shops had these plastic models where you would, you know, you’d buy, I don’t know, like 100 pieces, and then, you know, you’d, you’d, paint them and glue them together and stuff like that. And, and I really got a charge out of like make, trying to make those things beautiful.

You know,

arash: like, Mm

henry chang: I don’t know, like, like I was really into tanks, just like painting the camo on, you know, and trying to make it as realistic looking as possible. And with, with all the l- you know, the soldiers, they’re like a couple inches tall, and I would just like try to [00:14:00] paint in eyes on them and y- you know, every little detail, like the buttons on their pockets and all kinds of stu- you know.

And I’d make these dioramas of all these, these war scenes and stuff. And I really got a big charge out of Out of doing that. Like I, I got a hu-- like if I completed a, a really well done model, I would get this huge rush.

arash: Hmm.

henry chang: I’m not, I, I’m not sure why, but I don’t know. I guess, you know, when you complete a project and, and you’re happy with the result, it’s satisfying, right?

arash: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’m very, very, very familiar. Yeah, yeah. They-- And so they’re, they’re-- That’s so interesting. So your parents were, like, trying to, like, talk you out of that, and this mechanical engineering teacher that you had was like, saw it and,

henry chang: Yeah. Well, it was mechanical drawing. Yeah, mechanical drawing, yeah.

arash: But it’s kind of interesting ‘cause, like, you, you kind of found a way to have this creative outlet in a way that’s almost masked, like so that your parents look at it and go, “Oh, [00:15:00] look, it’s technical work.” Yeah, it’s

henry chang: engineering, you know?

And

arash: it was, it was like creative capoeira.

henry chang: And, and actually, the reason I say I owe him a huge debt is because basically all the design work and stuff that I do now, like, like with CAD, you know, computer-aided design, the, the fundamentals of it all come from that mechanical drawing that he taught me.

You know, that’s like everything that I do every day- Wow ... it, it stems from that. Yeah. Like he, he did a amazing job. I didn’t realize it at the time, you know? And I think that’s really important for, for some people when they, when they have a talent that they’re able to express, that they’re able to develop when they’re young, that they have good guidance.

Because the flip side of that is that I got a s- I got a C in my metal shop class. Yeah. Believe, believe it or... [00:16:00] And I was p- pretty much a straight A student except for a couple things. And, and it w- the, the dude wasn’t a very good teacher, and I didn’t really understand what he was talking about. He wasn’t communicating, you know?

arash: Wow.

henry chang: Yeah. And, and I got an A in wood shop, but yeah, I just didn’t understand, how to use any of the mach- I mean, I, I think j- most of the kids didn’t actually.

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: Like one of my... Th- this, this one kid that was my friend, like we had to do this project, and he just like... So I didn’t know how to use this press brake, and

arash: Yeah

henry chang: he just ended up...

You’re supposed to make this little box out of sheet metal, and I didn’t know how to use any of the stuff ‘cause I couldn’t understand what the fuck. I’m not sure why the teacher was, why I just didn’t connect with that teacher. But this friend just ended up, he just made it for me. It took him like 10 minutes.

arash: That’s fascinating. I copied it. Yeah.

Yeah.

henry chang: and really I should have gotten an F-

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: Yeah ... because I didn’t [00:17:00] even do that work, you

arash: The delivery mechanism matters, you know? It’s, it’s, it’s not, it’s not always the same.

henry chang: Yeah. The, so it’s import- like anybody that’s a teacher out there, you can be so influential in somebody’s life. Yeah. That, that’s all I gotta say about that, so.

arash: Couldn’t agree with you more. That’s massive. We all have those teachers that, like, give us that breakthrough. Yeah. Yeah. how did-- So you end up at UCSD. How did that- Yeah ... come about?

henry chang: I was just trying to get out of Wyoming. So, and, and like my-- what were my options? Like Cornell and UC San Diego, and, and I think maybe UC Boulder too. I, I... Yeah, I think I was on the wait list there, but I just, they sent me a catalog, and it had, like this tree on the cover. There was a tree on the cliff, and then there was ocean behind it, and I was like, “Okay, I’m going there.” I didn’t even look at anything inside the [00:18:00] catalog. So-

arash: So. Which is pretty funny ‘cause UCSD is like, I mean, now at least, def- it’s definitely a pretty notoriously difficult school to get into.

Oh,

henry chang: yeah. I, I mean, even back then, like, going from Wyoming to, you know, I could get As in high school. I mean, I’m sure a lot of people are like this. They-- It’s pretty easy in high school and then, and then you go to college, and then everybody’s smart if, if you get into a good institution, you know?

It’s not like you’re the smartest one anymore. Everybody’s just as smart as you. And like, and it’s, and, or smarter, you know? And, that, that was definitely a shock to the system. It took me a while to adjust, ‘cause then all of a sudden you had to-- Because those UCs, they s- they didn’t have grade inflation like the Ivy League schools.

Like, you know, they had to get their bell curve, so like you could, you’d get-- I, I, I got hammered in a couple classes, you know, because they’re, they’re try- they’re trying to [00:19:00] weed people out of certain departments and stuff, you know? And so, yeah. part, parts of it were a little bit rough. Eventually I adapted, of course, you know, but yeah. So I started off with, in mechanical engineering just because, you know, that’s what the family wants. And Computer science, it, it just, that, that was sort of like high school almost where that came really easily to me.

arash: Interesting Like,

henry chang: it was just, yeah, I just had a natural aptitude for it. And then, and mechanical engineering not as much, and ironically because, in hindsight I think it’s because I, hadn’t spent much time working with things.

Like, like, you know, I built those plastic models and stuff but, but like farmers, they, they-- People that grew up on farms have a big advantage when [00:20:00] it comes to engineering school because they have to fix shit out in the middle of nowhere and they have to improvise and so they kinda know how s- they know how things behave.

Like they know all, they already know all about leverage and things like that, you know, ‘cause they’ve, they’ve experienced it in real life. And so, so they’ve, they’ve got a lot of pract-- Yeah, they, well, they got a lot of practical knowledge already. And whereas if you, if you don’t have that experience, you don’t have the practical knowledge, and learning the theory part, which is what you do in college, it’s more difficult if you, it like, it’s not perfectly...

Like it’s really intuitive if you’ve worked with this stuff a lot, you know? And so, like later on after I had worked in, you know, after college when I had done a bunch of art things, I was like, “Oh yeah, I would’ve done a lot better in...” Or, or that mechanic- or that physics class or that, you know, the s- the m- the statics class in engineering.

That [00:21:00] would’ve been a lot easier if I had done all this shop stuff first. Go ahead.

arash: Yeah, I’m, I’m really, I’m really interested in the poli sci, though. Where did that

henry chang: Oh.

arash: So,

henry chang: When I was a kid, my parents used to make me go to bed really early and, they, they made me get too much sleep actually be- ‘cause I’d, I’d wake up at 5:00 in the morning and then turn on the TV, and there wouldn’t be anything on and it would just be like s- you know, that snow or whatever. And so I would watch that for half an hour ‘cause, ‘cause there wa- because there was nothing else to do.

People were asleep and,

arash: there was nothing else to do. Yeah. You could sleep and- They’re just like, “Go to k- go to sleep, kid. We don’t wanna fucking deal with you.”

henry chang: m- so my dad used to tell me these stor- he, you know, he would tell me stories about He had all these, you know, he grew up in the middle of two wars, like World War II and then the Chinese Civil War. So his,

arash: you, [00:22:00]

henry chang: I think until he was like, what?

13 years old they, they were in war. You know, they were, you know, occupied, you know, running away from this or that. You know, they, they were kinda nomadic actually, like running around trying to avoid enemy, the enemies and, and, so he would ... I, I don’t remember that many of the stories, but he would tell me stories.

And so later on, I, I was really interested in warfare and I, I think that’s probably why.

arash: Hmm.

henry chang: And, so you know, starting from like 10 years old, I would, I was just like, I loved reading history

arash: and, Mm.

henry chang: and I, and I, and I’m an information addict. That’s another place where I get a lot of, brain reward and endorphins or, I don’t even know what it is exactly,

arash: but,

Yeah. Yeah, information is delicious. [00:23:00] I agree. Yeah.

henry chang: yeah, like, well, I can’t really s- like if I’m eating a meal, I don’t

arash: like

If somebody’s there,

henry chang: If somebody’s there, yeah, I can talk to them, but if I’m by myself, I need to like be reading something while I’m eating. I can’t just sit there and eat. You know? Like, I either have to have like s- some sorta informational video, like a documentary going on or, or have something, be, ‘Cause I get bored really easily if I don’t, if I’m not able to have a constant influx of information.

arash: I hear you.

henry chang: And so, so, so in college, the w- the way that I ended up with the poli sci is that I really enjoyed college and like I didn’t, I didn’t wanna graduate because like the computer science jobs that I had, they were, they kinda sucked actually. I, I didn’t get, I didn’t get good j- not good jobs in sort of, as far as pay, but good jobs in, in terms of the work.

[00:24:00] The, the coding that I was doing, like fixing like, one of the companies, they were like, had an Oracle type system where you know, it, it just handled everything in the whole company from you name it, you know? Like, so it, it’s this giant software package and, you know, probably m- you know, millions of lines of code and all this stuff.

And so they would always have these bugs coming in, and I, I was the motherfucker that had to sit there and fix these bugs, which is, it’s a pretty much of a grunt job. And then, and so you, and it’s, it’s just not a satisfying job because you don’t get to like start a project and then get the satisfaction of completing it.

You’re just putting these Band-Aids all over the place on things. So you have to sit there and try to figure out somebody else’s code, figure out where their error is, hope that your fix doesn’t introduce some other error.

arash: Ugh.

henry chang: Yeah, it was sheer drudgery and s- but so you’d fix it, but, you know, [00:25:00] every, ev- for every bug that you fix, another one comes in, so you never really finish anything, you know?

arash: ending. It’s, there’s never a climax.

henry chang: Never ending. There’s never an ending. Yeah. The, yeah. And so-

arash: just a drone.

henry chang: a drone ... so, y- and I really loved school. Like, I played all kinds of sports and, and,

arash: But I guess the thing about, the thing about poli sci that stood out to me is that with, with your story so far, there’s been so much, like, family pressure to do the thing that, like, is, you know, a good career path. Yeah. But it’s like, where does, like, is pol- where does poli sci fit

into that?

henry chang: poli-- that, that’s-- Since I, I had done so much reading of history and whatnot, just as a hobby,

arash: Hmm. That was your

henry chang: the study of poli... I probably should’ve been a history major instead, but, but poli... You know, and I, I took, I took a bunch of poli sci classes and enjoyed it, and I’m like, “Hell, I might as well just get a major in this,” you know?

Yeah.

arash: it.” Yeah.

henry chang: so I double... And c- ‘cause another one of my goals is that I wanted to try to break the record for the most [00:26:00] number of units by an undergrad. And, but I, I didn’t get the record. I had, like, 290-something units, like 296 units, and the rest record was, like, 350. And my advisor was like, “If you don’t, if you don’t apply for graduation, I’m gonna kick you out.” “You’re ruining all my statistics,” you know? ‘Cause they’re supposed to, like, get people out in a certain amount of time, you know?

arash: That’s really funny.

henry chang: That’s true. So, but I just did the poli sci ‘cause it, I liked it, you know? And, and by that time, I had figured out how to write. Like, at the beginning, like, I, I was pre- I was a pretty terrible writer b- ‘cause I hadn’t developed it that well in, in high school.

And,

arash: Yeah

henry chang: yeah, I don’t know. I thought it was fun. Like, I thought, I thought it was fun to, like, you know, learn about some political thing, and then, and then, you know, you had to read the work and then interpret it, and- Yeah ... [00:27:00] and it was fu- as long as, as long as the, the material that you were reading was interesting, it was fun to write a paper about it, you know?

And so I know that’s, that’s-- the whole thing’s a little odd, but, my, I mean, my whole life has kinda been like that. I, I try to do things that are fun,

arash: Hmm.

henry chang: so.

arash: You so, i-i, and that, and I’m-- Let me tell you. Yeah. So much of your story is so, like, I feel all of it. I’ve had, like, been through very similar things from, like, different angles.

So I’m kind of like, I keep, I keep, like I’m hearing this story about, like, just even your, your comfort with being able to admit to yourself that you want to do something because it’s fun.

henry chang: I’m 44

arash: I, I’m 44, and I just finally came around to that, like, in the past, like, four years. So, like, what was happening at that time in your head where, like, that thing was there?

Like, I feel like you, you probably couldn’t say that out loud to your parents.

henry chang: Oh, hell

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: Yeah.

arash: No. [00:28:00] Like, “Fun? Get the fuck out of here. We just survived two wars- Yeah ... to bring you here.” Yeah, yeah.

henry chang: Yeah, yeah,

arash: The pressure of, like, being a, being the child of im- the pressure of being an artist child of immigrants who have escaped difficulties most people we know here in the United States have no frame of reference for.

So there is, like, this sense of, and I wanna, like, I want, I wanna know what you feel about this. Like, for me, like, there’s always this sense of a little bit of survivor guilt. Every day that I’m having fun and I’m loving what I’m doing, there’s a little bit of survivor guilt that I didn’t, you know, become the, the, the child that my parents wished I would be.

henry chang: ki-- you know what? I don’t really feel too guilty about it.

arash: Good.

henry chang: but

arash: Got

henry chang: however, I, I do recognize though that We’re all really fortunate to not have to, to not have to have gone through [00:29:00] some of the things that that our predecessors did. You know, like, I’m, I’m talking about ev- anybody that was born in the United States, we’re, we’re, we’re fortunate because the, the, just the instability and, you know, not having enough food,

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: not having clean water, not having any sanitation.

arash: Yeah. But,

henry chang: well, just let me give you a quick rundown of my, my dad. So his, his father was superintendent of schools for Shandong Province. And, and, and that school, they were on the run the whole time, like from the Japanese and then from the communists. And then... And they-- Th- for this school, you know, this is like, I don’t know, 14 to 16 year olds, something [00:30:00] like that.

I’m, I, I don’t know the exact ages. But th- they had an agreement with the army that the army was not gonna come to conscript these kids to go fight, right? And, and one of the generals ended up breaking that agreement. And so, so he tr- you know, he traveled over to the headquarters of the, him and I don’t know if it was aides or other students, I think it might have been both, to, to protest that, you know, the, the army is, they’re breaking their agreement, you know?

And, and that j- it wasn’t really the army that was doing it, it was a general, you know? And,

arash: Wow.

henry chang: and so they went to protest and, and they locked him up. A couple days later, they had a, a kangaroo co- court, and they executed all of them. And so, so after that, like my dad and his five siblings, you know...

So my, my [00:31:00] grandma had to figure out a way to like support the family, right? And so I think she taught English at some school in Taiwan, and they, so they lived in a one-room, dwelling with dirt floors. So, you know, so... And di- and didn’t really have enough food to go around. And so, so they’re all... You know, th- they went through some hardship and, and, also they kinda had to get out of Taiwan because of the political situation.

Because, you know, my th- my grandfather had been branded a traitor for n- for protesting to the army, you know? So they had to like do well so that they could go to a, the good university there and get the hell out of, get the hell out of Taiwan because, because politically, they were kinda like, [00:32:00] you know, I don’t know, my grandfather was supposed to be a traitor, right?

And so-

arash: was the life raft

henry chang: Yeah, so like your- Yeah. So, so when my... Yeah, like when my dad figured out that he had to, he had to, in order, his ticket to get out of there was he had to get into Tai Da, which was, yeah, the, the s- the, the best university there. He locked himself in a room and studied for six months.

arash: That’s

incredible. And, and then- Yeah

henry chang: But, you know, it, it w- with the political situation, it felt like it was kind of a life or death thing, like...

Or not really life or death, but a really fucked up life versus, versus a real life

arash: Yeah. You know? Yeah. So- Yeah

henry chang: so that’s what I, the, the type of thing that I’m talking about where we’re all very lucky that we don’t have to, we don’t have to face stresses like that. Of course, everybody-- It’s not perfect here either.

Everybody has problems.

arash: Sure, sure, sure. you

henry chang: No- nobody’s life is perfect. But we don’t, but we don’t have to deal with some really huge problems. [00:33:00] You know? Like,

arash: Yeah

henry chang: so.

arash: there’s, there’s, there’s certainly a lot of things, you know, we, we always have room for improvement. I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna insinuate that that’s not the case, but there’s definitely things that I watch people become very upset about here in the United States, and I’m like, “Really?”

Like,

henry chang: They don’t know how good they have it. We all have it so good. There’s people... As far as the overall situation here, people shouldn’t get too upset, I don’t think. It could be so much worse. They, you, you, they don’t have any idea how ba- how much worse it

arash: Yeah. I, I, I- You think people that want

henry chang: Or like some people that are, want a revolution.

No, you don’t. You do not want that. Like it’s, it’s bad for everybody.

arash: you don’t. Yeah. You do not

henry chang: But

arash: for everybody. Yeah. That exact, that exact sentence you just said, “You don’t know how much worse it can get,” I, I say that pretty regularly. Yeah. You really don’t. Like, it’s, All right, I wanna, I wanna get back on the, on your story track here.

No, we’re gonna come back to this ‘cause this is a part of the [00:34:00] story. so I know that on the lead-up to Burning Man, your first burn was 2005. but before that- 2004, I think 2004, okay. on the lead-up to that, I have notes for two things here. jazz. You get into, like, you, you start to play music. Yeah.

and then you’re also designing and building homes.

henry chang: Yeah. Okay, so, so the music thing, that started... I played-- My parents made me play violin for a couple years.

arash: Why? Why is that?

henry chang: Oh, that’s that whole tiger mom thing again,

arash: Oh, that’s that whole tiger mom thing again, you know? Yeah. But Like why?

That’s g- that’s a g- ‘cause this is what’s, what is the point to doing that if it’s like not moving career forward? Or do they see it as moving career forward?

henry chang: I’m not sure why, even though they don’t see that as a good career, but the... I don’t know. I’m not sure. I, I, I need to f- I need to

arash: Yeah Is it to, just to impress the Joneses or whatever? Like, “Here, my kid plays

henry chang: Maybe a little bit, but I [00:35:00] don’t really know.

arash: Mm. I don’t really know. but they definitely wanted me to play a musical instrument, you know? Interesting. Yeah

henry chang: But they definitely wanted me to play a musical instrument, you know? And, and, and th- it’s definitely an Asian thing where, where the, you know, they w- they want you to l- learn that, those skills. I mean, it’s kind of ironic because later on they m- they wanted me to stop playing the piano. ‘Cause, and it’s like, “You’re the ones that made me start this in the first place.” Like, f- th- but-

arash: Yeah, we didn’t want you to enjoy it.

henry chang: good one. It’s a good- So, so I ended up switching to piano when I was, like, 10, and, like I sucked at the violin. but, but, but I had an aptitude for the piano and, and I liked it, you know. I, I liked it.

And, and then, and, and then I rebelled when I was, like, 16 or something like that. But then in college, I heard some stuff that I was like, “Yeah, that sounds really cool,” some solo piano stuff. And so I went out and bought a piano and, [00:36:00] and, started... And, and the s- songs that I liked, there was some new age piano stuff that you couldn’t, you couldn’t buy sheet music for it.

So I, so I taught myself how to play by ear and started,

arash: yeah,

henry chang: I started playing a bunch of new age stuff and then, and then I got into blues and jazz after that.

arash: New age, like were you into Enigma?

henry chang: Oh, I love Enigma.

arash: Enigma. The, the new age stuff that

henry chang: That, the, the new age stuff that I was playing was, it was just solo piano stuff. But yeah, that one Enigma album, I’ve listened to that things.

Th- that, that’s, that’s good, like, lovemaking type of

music.

arash: yeah. Yeah, 100%. A lot of ‘90s lovemaking happened- Yeah ... to Enigma. Oh, big time.

henry chang: a big fan? Oh, big time.

arash: Yeah. And then, so houses, you were building and designing houses. This was the, the... How did you get into that?

henry chang: So- How did you get into that? So, so my, my, my dad, he, he was a [00:37:00] professor of civil engineering and he, he, he got into developing, developing land and stuff because all his skills kind of naturally worked into that. And, and later on, Well, here, here’s a twist to the story. When, when I was 26, I was, I was still in college actually.

Like, just to make a long story short, I, I got, got busted for distribution of marijuana. We’d transported some marijuana from from one place to

arash: Okay

henry chang: a- Right ... place to another. And, like, so just to make a long story short, I spent, like, 10 months in federal for that.

arash: I was about to ask, how’d your, where’d your parents- So- How did they respond to that?

henry chang: appearance. Oh, oh. The, the, I, I was officially black sheep after, after that, for sure. And so that, that’s why, I don’t know, the art stuff doesn’t really, phase me at all because,

arash: Ah. No, I see what happened. I see what happened. [00:38:00] You had an experience that just ripped that fucking Band-Aid right off

henry chang: right. Actually, I, I quit trying to get corporate jobs after that. I’m like, “Man, they’re not gonna give me a job if, ‘cause I’ve got this distribution of marijuana felony

arash: they’re not gonna give me a job if-- ‘cause I’ve got this distribution of marijuana

henry chang: on my, you know, on my record.” And, and in hindsight, that was probably not true because in Silicon Valley they, I don’t think they care all that much. Some of the companies would, but like,

arash: you know,

henry chang: I don’t know, weed is not really seen as being all that evil. No

arash: month is no joke.

henry chang: Yeah. Well, federal is ... That, that’s that whole war on drugs thing.

Yeah. Because they ha- they had these mandatory minimums. If it would’ve been state, I w- I wouldn’t have even g- have gotten a felony, actually.

arash: I’m gonna be with a different woman selling Yeah. Well, no, what I mean is like, it’s no joke as far as like a life chapter. Like- Oh, yeah ... that’s 10 months of your life.

henry chang: Oh, yeah. I mean, in hindsight actually, other than having a criminal record, it was actually kind of a good experience because... I mean, I [00:39:00] wouldn’t recommend that anybody do that.

arash: don’t go to federal

henry chang: that, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna have a great experience in prison.”

arash: Oh yeah, you’ll have a great experience in prison

henry chang: Because no, no, it, it, it’s not fun. But it, it’s only good as far as like, well, I don’t know, the more diff- like if that hadn’t have happened, I probably wouldn’t even remember what the hell I was doing that 10 months now.

All, you know, like 30, what is it? 35 years later. You know, I, I would have a little bit of memory of, of, of certain things that happened, but, but of course the memories of being in federal are quite vivid.

arash: Right.

henry chang: Right. You

arash: I would imagine

henry chang: it, it’s a lit- it’s a little bit of a shocking experience.

arash: I almost wanna do, like, I wanna set up a plan for us to do a sequel podcast where all we do is go through that chapter.

henry chang: Okay.

arash: That o- ‘cause that’s freaking crazy.

henry chang: Yeah, it is. But then after that I didn’t try to get any corporate

arash: Yeah, it is. But then after that- Mm ... I can try to get into your corporate job. Yeah, yeah.

henry chang: And so, [00:40:00] and, I, I think I was just... I overthought that, you know? But God, that, th- that would suck though to try to go into a job interview, “Oh, by the way, I’ve got a felony.”

arash: I’ve got a felony.”

Yeah,

henry chang: So,

arash: yeah. I hear you. So- No, the, the thing is, you know, as long as I- I’ve had a lot of these conversations with my other, my other like, you know, people of color friends, basically folks that are not like white and grew up in the United States.

This, this, this-- No, actually it applies to everybody ‘cause I’ve talked to like gay friends about similar things. If we’re, if, if we can still mask it just enough, we’ll continue to put up with the, the tolerable discomfort. So like if you hadn’t gone to jail, you may have still been able to keep faking it enough with your family and your parents and like get into another job that’s like drudgery and you hate it.

But with this, it forced you to rip [00:41:00] the Band-Aid off. Like now it’s out there, can’t hide it, like you are officially the black sheep, so it- Oh ... it, it frees you up into making life decisions that you might not have felt the freedom to, to take if that hadn’t happened, and that’s the gift that it gave.

henry chang: That’s one of them, sure.

arash: Hmm.

henry chang: Sure, y- that the whole art thing may not have happened for sure.

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: Yeah, and, so So I, I ended up, designing so- w-working in the family business a little bit.

arash: Mm-hmm.

henry chang: and actually bef-before this, I had actually already... This is how, this is actually how big of an effect my mechanical drawing teacher in high school had.

Like, I saw a demonstration of

arash: AutoCAD

henry chang: AutoCAD o-at one time, and I just thought it was the coolest fucking thing ever that they [00:42:00] could have all these different layers and st- you know, I just thought, “Oh my God, that’s awesome.” So I actually spent like 2,500 bucks, or I don’t remember. It was a not insignificant amount of, of money for the time to, to buy a CAD program just for fun.

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: Just, just like I didn’t even have a, a, a purpose for it. But then, but then, you know, once I got out of prison and stuff, I was like, “Man, I’m not gonna go try to get a programming job.” So I, so I started, doing some drawings for my family with like some, apartments and stuff, you know?

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: Which it was, it was okay, but, you c- you can’t really be very creative with, when you’re, designing apartments, you know, because everything has to pencil out for the bottom, bottom line, and it totally limits the scope of what you can do.

You can’t really... So, so the designing [00:43:00] i- is inherently creative, but then your boundaries are so narrow, you know. And so I did a few of those, but then I was like, “Yeah, I wanna build a house because then I can be more creative,” right? Because with an apartment you can’t. It, it’s the bottom line has to matter, right?

And so I ended up, at the time the, the housing mar- yeah, the, and the, the housing market and therefore raw land was inexpensive. Like if the housing market’s not doing well, raw land goes down disproportionately. Because if you have a house at least you can rent it, but if you just have a piece of raw land, it’s not, it, it’s just you’re paying taxes and, and you can’t build on it because the housing market sucks, right?

So I got this beautiful lot f-for pretty cheap and, and it, it was, on the edge of a cliff, and it was really long and skinny, and it [00:44:00] had this 180 degree view out over Rancho Santa Fe, which is, I think it’s the most, it’s the wealthiest zip code in America.

Yeah,

And, and it’s these rolling hills. It, and it, it’s way better l-looking at Rancho Santa Fe than being in Rancho Santa Fe looking the other way bec- because, the, all their stuff is just all these estates that are beautifully landscaped and It, it’s just gorgeous.

And so, so I got that lot and I, I had this long, skinny buil- you know, on one end, my buildable area on one end of the lot was only eight feet. So my, my house was only eight feet. And so I was able to get pretty creative with designing that thing. And, and I built it out of concrete and steel, because, because since it was on the edge of that cliff, it was r- it was in a ravine, you know, and, there was wildfire danger.

arash: Yeah. Yeah.

henry chang: so I tried to make it as... [00:45:00] Yeah, it was pr- it was not that flammable,

arash: And in that, in that, yeah, in that region, most things are made out of wood ‘cause of the earthquakes. it... Most things are made out of wood

henry chang: most things are made out of wood, not just ‘cause of that, because the hou- housing industry is, makes stuff out of wood. That’s just the... That’s actually something that I found to be a little bit frustrating, is that all the residential contractors, like your plumbers and electricians and stuff, they’re not used to working with steel studs and, and they’re all highly resistant to it.

They just wanna do things that they know. They don’t like doing new shit. And so

arash: so- And perhaps they, they push that, myth that it is, it’s because of the earthquakes.

henry chang: Oh, you could-- yeah, a concrete and steel structure can totally withstand earthquakes if they’re designed properly. You, you know? And I mean, I mean, [00:46:00] ju- the way that you traditionally build a wood structure, yes, it, it will flex and it can handle, you know, it can handle that stuff. But what, what the steel-- you know, if you’re building it out of concrete and steel, you’ve just gotta have cross bracing.

You gotta have enough reinforcement so that it, it-- well, it’s not gonna flex, but you can have it so that it’s strong enough so that it won’t break, you know? So,

arash: so

henry chang: yeah, I, I really like the way-- And the other thing that I liked about steel instead of wood is that you don’t have to worry about termites, and it also doesn’t warp.

Like it- everything stays straight. It doesn’t settle. Every, you know? And, and it-- I thi- it’s quieter. I think you end up with a much higher quality product after, after you’re done. You can seal it a lot better, like, so that you don’t have in- you know, s- ‘cause with wood, since it warps, you get all these little gaps all over the place, and it’s way easier to get ants running in and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And, And, [00:47:00] and,

arash: and so,

so

henry chang: but after I was done, the, the-- since it was this long, skinny house and just normal furniture pro- I don’t know, to me, I needed really modern furniture ‘cause it was a modern layout. And the only-- They didn’t have IKEA back then, thankfully, ‘cause I, I find IKEA to be quite acceptable when it comes to, that type of look or, but, that kind of more modernist look.

But at the time in San Diego, there was just nothing. It was just-- Except for they had a Roche Bobois, which, in La Jolla, which had stuff that was just beautiful, fit my aesthetic, and just outrageously expensive. I couldn’t afford it. And so, so I just started building my own furniture because I wanted to make the thing, I wanted to make the interior beautiful, you know?

And, and, and I pretty much, I had a pretty good aptitude for it ‘cause right from the [00:48:00] start, the stuff turned out pretty well, and people were like, “You should try to market that,” and all this stuff. And so,

arash: you almost like, it’s almost like you have, like, an AutoCAD inside your brain, and then you’re, you’re able to kind of see it and envision it, and then lay it out, and then create any form into being.

Yeah, that, that’s what I was talking about. It’s all connected. Mm.

henry chang: a lot of that comes from like, your spatial awareness part of your brain, that’s the same part of your brain that, that does music and math. And, so I, I th- I think playing music actually has a lot to d- to do with being ab- at least me personally, being able to visualize things. And, huh,

yeah.

arash: transition ‘cause I wanted to get into it. So is, I’m trying to figure out this part of the timeline. Yeah. Burning Man 2004, s- was [00:49:00] Soul in the Machine formed before that? Okay, so-

henry chang: I got the, So I was playing jazz all through the late ‘80s and ‘90s, and, and I didn’t like electronic music because I ha- I had this roommate that was always trying to get me to go to raves, and I regret not listening to him.

arash: But, Yeah

henry chang: but he had this terrible, audio system in his bedroom. It was, like, his clock radio, and he would play that stuff, and it w- it just sounded terrible.

C- And, and it wasn’t until I went to a rave-style event in 1999. I really regret not having gone to them with the, be- be- be- but, a- in ‘99, and I was like... And you have the PA, and, and el- electronic dance music has that huge low end that you can feel. You c- it’s not just something that you hear, but you can feel it if, if it’s produced properly, and it makes people wanna dance.

You know? Like, like you g- you can feel the [00:50:00] rhythm. It’s, like, it’s a, it’s a tactile thing. It’s not, not just an auditory thing. And, I was like, “Okay, now I understand why people like this, and I, I think it’s really cool.” But then the first thing I... You know, at the time I was playing a bunch of jazz, and I was watching the DJ, and you, you know, you, you can’t really see what the DJ’s doing all that much.

And, and my first thought was like, “This is, this, this sounds awesome, but, but w- there should be musicians playing it.” That would, it would a- a- add that extra element of... You know, when you, when you see good musicians, like, th- there’s a little bit of, of magic that’s added to the performance,

arash: Yeah

henry chang: And, and I was like, “Yeah, th- th- that should be added, added with this stuff.”

And so right away I’m like, “Yeah, I wanna, I wanna start an electronic music band.” And I hadn’t ever done that with jazz because there’s no market for it. Like, like I, I had this awesome teacher. I mean, awesome as far as, [00:51:00] like, his skills for playing and stuff. P- Like, he was professor of jazz studies San Diego State, and, But, he, and he had this really, really good band, and they had trouble getting gigs.

arash: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

henry chang: So, so what the fuck am I gonna do? Like, I, I’m not even... I’m many levels below him, you know? And, how am I g- how am I gonna be able to get a gig if, if his band can’t get... And so, so I never tried to start a jazz band, but then right away I’m like, “Yeah, I’m gonna start an electronic music band because there’s a demand for this music and there’s no bands.”

Yeah. You know? And so, and at, at that time I w- that was when I was start, I was building, furniture and sculpture and stuff. Yeah. And so it was just kinda natural, yeah, we’re gonna build our own instruments. Because, because the instruments that, that you can perform electronic music with, I mean, they’re [00:52:00] basically MIDI controllers, so it’s like keyboards and some electronic drums, and that’s about it.

You know? The, the other ones are... And I don’t think the keyboards, even though I’m a piano player, I don’t think keyboards are really a great, perf-- It, it, it’s not, yeah, it’s not a great performance instrument with modern staging because your plane of performance is parallel to your sight line, so it’s kinda hard to see what the keyboardist is doing.

W-like, in the classical world, they had these amphitheaters where the audience would rise up above the stage, so you could totally s- with a classical pianist in a, like at Carnegie Hall, everybody can see, you know, what Vladimir Horowitz is doing, you know? And, and appreciate the virtuosity that he, that he’s displaying.

But with modern staging, the audience is below, so you can’t even see what the fuck they’re doing. So, so, even though I’m a piano player, you know, I was like, “Yeah, we gotta make the, [00:53:00] the...” And, and actually, I think that’s one of the reasons that in rock, it’s one of the reasons, not the only reason, is the guitar, the plane of performance is perpendicular to your line of sight, so you can totally appreciate when a guitar is just ripping it.

You can, you can see what he’s doing

arash: and,

henry chang: and it’s all right out there for everybody to see. And yeah, and, and so you get that magic of, of the, the virtuosity. And, so I wanted to make... So the MIDI triggers basically, you know, the keyboards, they didn’t lend themselves to that, so I’m like, “Okay, we’re gonna build our own instruments and make them into MIDI triggers.”

And so, like the laser harp and the drum wall and everything, you know, I’m trying to make it so that, so that the audience can see what’s going on, you know?

arash: Yeah. That’s the--

henry chang: And DJs have the same problem. Their plane of performance is parallel to the line of sight.

arash: Right, right, right. I’ve never thought about that. Yeah, you’re so right ‘cause I’m, I’m trying to look and, but I don’t d- [00:54:00] like, I don’t know if, I don’t know if as many people get off on seeing those little technicalities, as you and I do. But, ‘cause it, it does seem like sometimes a dance floor is interested in kind of like almost like just being at the altar, like worshiping at the altar.

henry chang: अहाँ

arash: you know, there is like a, a bit of a star worship thing, but like you’re, you’re kind of seeing it as like I’m, I’m imagining like a cellist, you know, and people surrounding, like watching every movement of that. That’s so, that’s such an interesting new angle on it. So you, you, you, you start to approach the music from that direction, in-

henry chang: as the performance is concerned, yes. Not, not when we’re writing it, but when we’re performing it, yeah, we want, we want it to all be out there because, I mean, that, that’s the whole reason we have the band in the first place is that with the DJ you can’t see what, what they’re doing, you know? And so

arash: So how many, how many people in the band?

henry chang: I mean, it varies, but usually we have [00:55:00] three instrumentalists and two singers.

arash: Okay.

henry chang: And the number of singers can kind of vary,

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: so

arash: So how did you, how did, how does Burning Man enter the picture?

henry chang: So, well, so, our first gig was, I don’t, sometime in 2004, and

arash: our

henry chang: our second gig was at Burning Man.

arash: All right. Like in 2004.

Yeah. And,

Did you go to Burning Man

henry chang: just from what I knew about Burning Man, it seemed like it was the right place to take

arash: Ah, yeah. H-how, so hold it. Was that, did somebody else coordinate that? Did you decide, “Yes, we’re gonna go to Burning Man,” and get a, get the, get the crew together to go? Like, how did that play out?

I

henry chang: thing. Yeah. Because, yeah, the, I mean, I mean, it’s, it’s definitely a burner type of thing. It’s, it’s,

Well,

fir- first of all, the Burning Man [00:56:00] culture likes, I don’t know, people like costumes when you build them yourself, stuff like that, you know?

The, I don’t know, grassroots art, all, all that kind of stuff, you know? The bur- well, Burning Man appreciates creativity, you know?

arash: Man

henry chang: Yeah. more than any place else in the world, I would say. You know? I mean, artists get valued at Burning Man more than they will anywhere else- Yeah ... in my opinion.

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: So like, like in San Diego where I was living at the time, ar- w- artists don’t get valued at all, you know? So- Yeah ... which, I grew up in San Diego. I agree.

arash: was it. I grew up in San Diego. I agree.

henry chang: Okay.

arash: Yeah, yeah. San Diego’s more like, I might wanna go to the beach today. I don’t know.”

henry chang: Yeah. And, and there’s nothing the matter with that, you know? It, it, th- th- that’s totally subjective, you know? Like, if, if people d- value something or they don’t, there’s nothing the matter with it, you know?

arash: There’s, there is a, I think like in order [00:57:00] to appreciate art, there needs to be some sort of tension. I think the tension is-- And that’s not necessarily mean like a, like a negative stressful tension. Like there’s some sort of a, like energies crashing against each other. There is something that wants to be spoken, and in, in those environments you, you tend to find a, a, a stronger appreciation for art

henry chang: Yeah, I, I haven’t really thought about the whole, the whole why of

it. But,

arash: But yeah, but no,

henry chang: yeah, there’s, there’s so much expressiveness at Burning Man though, right?

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: people are... That, that’s one of the things about, you know, the, the first time that I went, that’s something that really struck me was, at Burning Man, you see people doing what they really wanna do.

You see them dressing the way that they want to dress. You know, compare, compared to the real world, like, it, ev- everything’s very conformist. Like, it’s not necessarily what... The way that you dress in the real world [00:58:00] isn’t necessarily what you would dress like if you could just do whatever the hell you wanted and not have any kinda negative feedback.

arash: wouldn’t wear, I wouldn’t wear clothes at all. No.

henry chang: That’s how it goes with us all. So, so, you know, there’s a, there’s a lot of conformism. And I, I actually didn’t even realize how conformist things were and how conformist I was actually until, until after going to Burning Man the first time. That, that, that was, that was the biggest takeaway for me personally, was like, “Fuck, I’m conformist.

I think that I’m a non-conforming artist.” Which actually I was, but I could be a lot less conformist. I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t realize,

arash: Yeah

henry chang: know, you know, how, how, how, how much freer things could be, you know?

arash: Do you-- And I, I enjoy asking people this at your first burn, ‘cause I feel like most of the time people have an answer. Do you remember a moment that stood out to you as, like, something [00:59:00] clicks? Like, you’re looking around at something... I don’t know. For me, it was silly. For me, it was, like, this thing of watching this guy walking on a, on a wire at a camp, and I just burst into tears, and I was like, “I think I get it.”

Like, it all came together.

henry chang: Mm-hmm. Like it all came together I, w- well, for me it w- it was probably like after the Burn. W- we’re driving back on the freeway and I’m looking around at all the cars on the freeway. And you look at how people express themselves personally w- via their vehicle in the real world, and you might get some pin stripping on your car or you might have some nice rims and that’s about it,

arash: Yeah. Yeah.

henry chang: And, compared to the vehicles that you see at Burning Man when people real- can express themselves however the fuck they want. And there’s this huge gap, right? And the way people dress and, and so it wasn’t until I got back out in the real world that like, I’m like, “Dang.”

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: know? And, and, and of course like any other, a lot of other first timers, you know, I didn’t [01:00:00] talk about anything about, I didn’t talk about anything but Burning Man for like two months. Yeah.

arash: thing but Burning Man for like two months. Yeah. Really? You were able to end it at two months? I’m impressed. I always, when, when I meet somebody where they’re like, when people say, like if Burning Man comes up in conversation, people often will say, “Oh, yeah, no, I’ve heard of it. I haven’t been. It’s on my bucket list.”

And I always, I always respond the same. I’m like, “I know you haven’t been to Burning Man, because once you go, you don’t shut the fuck up about it.”

henry chang: Yeah.

arash: Yeah. The-- But like I, I read something about, how like you had a moment of inspiration, via your musical performance at Burning Man about, physical art making.

henry chang: Oh

arash: Like how this like, the new ideas started to shift in your head about how you’re gonna express yourself next,

next round.

henry chang: okay, so, so before Burning Man, you know, I was in, I was in the art or [01:01:00] the furniture and s- sort of small sculpture world and, and I did a bunch of things like, custom railings and, you know, I would, I would make these really f- really fancy, like, custom, Floor-to-ceiling

towel racks and stuff that, you know, like could definitely make somebody’s bathroom look pretty, pretty pimped out, you know?

And, and, and things like that where, you know, I’d work with some interior designers, and furniture and, and all that. And, but everything was kinda like really, really high quality, really high,

arash: high

henry chang: finishes and stuff. And they, and they would be small, you know? And all the clients would be, tended to be not in California, even though that’s where I lived, because in California, you know, the, the wealthy people tend to have like really big houses and, it, it, it would just be really expensive to, to outfit a, an entire house with that kind level [01:02:00] of detail.

But, but in New York and Chicago and stuff, you know, you might have a $10 million apartment that’s like 1,500 square feet or something like that. I don’t know, I don’t know how accurate those numbers are. But they can... But then, you know, if you have this really expensive condo, you’re gonna wanna do it up a little bit, right?

If, if just buying it without, you know, a shell costs you like $5 million or whatever, right? So, so I, the, so the clients there, yeah, so my clientele was like with, with smaller s- things and like, and that’s what I was into. I was into high quality, but, but not, but I didn’t have big scale. And then when I went to Burning Man, I’m like, “Okay, so people like big scale.

arash: Interesting.

henry chang: big things.” and it, and, and I, I kinda switched my mind about the whole thing where like, okay, I think people like quality too, so I, I, I think the best art, or not necessarily the best art, but [01:03:00] if you really wanna have maximum impact, you’re gonna have big scale and high quality. We wanna have both, you know?

arash: And So,

henry chang: and so I, you know, it... So what, what, I mean, I didn’t do the cars until later on, and so I, I didn’t apply that lesson until seven or eight years later, you know?

arash: And so I, you know, I... So what, what, I mean, I didn’t do the cars until later. And, and so I, I didn’t apply that lesson until seven or eight years later- Mm ... you know? Where were you just for, for like that time period? Were you still regularly going to Burning Man and-

henry chang: okay, so after 2005, it, it was in a-- I, I did a, a sculpture. I- it was actually an honorarium. And then, and, and we also took the band,

arash: Mm.

henry chang: and that w- it was way too much.

arash: The sculpture and the band? Yeah.

henry chang: because we were performing every night, and I had the sculpture, and, one, this one m- bandmate was just this person that I really don’t like very much.

And, [01:04:00] so y- so the whole, that whole experience just didn’t... It burned me out. It w- it, it was way too much work, you know? And the, I mean, the whole thing was a mistake because... And I didn’t go to ba- back to Burning Man until t- 2011, so I missed, like, five years. And it, it was a mistake because, well, it wasn’t Burning Man, it was just,

like,

who I went with and how much responsibility I took on.

I made some bad decisions, basically.

arash: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah

henry chang: and then, and then,

arash: I

henry chang: I mean, I repeated that in 2024.

arash: Repeated the bad decisions?

henry chang: Yeah. Where, like- Yeah ... just way, way, way too much. And the thing is, I know better, and, you know, I should get kicked in the balls for that. That’s, it’s really dumb.

It’s really dumb when you

arash: you do it if you, why’d you do it if you knew better?[01:05:00]

henry chang: I don’t know, just, some opportunities to do some cool shit, you know? But then, at the time I was already responsible for taking three art cars, you know, and then, and then, and then that big thing, Alethia, you know, that 50-foot-tall mutant vehicle. so, so the year before, you know, it was, it was like this 40-foot-tall, 40-foot, static sculpture, but then the next year we made it into a mutant vehicle, you know?

And like, it, it, it’s a long story,

but

arash: Well-

henry chang: that, that’s just way, way, way, way too much stuff to do. Yeah. Yeah. Like, to be responsible for.

arash: I mean, you’re still,

you’re

henry chang: I shoulda cut some stuff out, you

arash: stuff out, you

henry chang: I shoulda said, “Okay, we’re not taking this car, we’re not taking this car.” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you know?

Or [01:06:00] either that or like, “Okay, we’ll take this car, but this person’s gonna be responsible for it, and I’m not gonna have anything to do with it because I don’t have the bandwidth,” you know? So, so I,

arash: yeah, yeah, though I just took on way, way, way too much, and it’s really stupid. So there was a- So there was- a period where you were taking, it sounds like, what? Three, four art cars and a sculpture And the band? That, that

henry chang: yeah, though I just took on way, way, way too much, and it’s really stupid. so- ... there was- And so- ...this period So through, through, that, that in 2024, that’s what I did, yeah

arash: Good lord.

henry chang: It’s not very smart

arash: That was not that long ago, my friend. Yeah.

henry chang: like,

arash: So of course I

henry chang: like, yeah, I, I got fried, you know? Like, I mean, I mean, there’s a whole long story that I’m not gonna go into, but, yeah, it was just way, way, way, way, way too much. [01:07:00] And

arash: Mm-hmm.

henry chang: so yeah.

arash: I, I wanna know, I wanna know, like, what best represents your transition into what the world, I would s- it’s probably, like, safe to say the world predominantly, like, knows you for the mutant vehicles, right?

Like, you’ve got all of this other stuff, but, like, those have been, like, the biggest front page splash, right? what do you... Like, what does that feel like to you when you look at it? ‘Cause, like, I’m, you know, I’m lear- I’m learning about you, and I’m talking to you, and I’m seeing, like, this entire symphony, like, this entire thing that’s a part of your creative process, and each one of these things is just this one expression, right?

But then the world outside, who doesn’t live inside your head and your heart, sees this, th- the mutant vehicle, and to them, that’s the pr- the representation of you as an artist. Whereas, like, here we’re having this conversation, I’m like, that’s just, like, one, that’s just, like, one instrument in [01:08:00] the band is, if, like, if your band is the art expression, right?

Right. What does that feel like to you? What do you, do, do you, what do you think about that? Unless I’m... Am I wrong, by the way? Do you agree with the assessment?

henry chang: Well, yeah, yeah. I, I, I agree. I

arash: Yeah

henry chang: well, the thing is, one of the... One- when I built the first art car, the, the, that was 2011.

arash: was 2011. That’s Mr. Fusion?

henry chang: Well, the precursor to Mr. Fusion was 2011, and I, I say it’s a precursor because I built the bodywork and, and I bought one of those little, like, Cushman-type landscaping carts.

You know, it’s a metal cart. And, and a lot of people will, will use those for, for their first art car. And I shouldn’t say a lot, but it’s not, it’s, it’s not uncommon, put it that way. And, and, and I built this really nice bodywork, and I bolted it to the side of the Cushman [01:09:00] and, and I, and I had to... But I had to cover up the Cushman with, like, some frame and some fabric because, you know, the Cushman’s ugly, right?

And, and yeah, to get accepted as a mutant vehicle, you also can’t Yeah, you, it, it can’t be obvious what the underlying vehicle is.

arash: And, Mm-hmm

henry chang: and I thought that would be a pretty good art car, and I hadn’t been to Burning Man since 2005, you know? So, but so when I took that car to Burning Man, like, the whole art mutant vehicle thing had changed because, like, it, it had kinda like gotten a little bit of a turbo boost.

And the difference between the level of the mutant vehicles in 2011 and 20- 2005 was pretty huge, actually. And, and, and afterwards I was like, “Man, I know I can do a lot better.”

arash: Yeah

henry chang: know? A- and, ‘cause, ‘cause I [01:10:00] was... The, the, the, that whole Cushman cart thing, that, it sucked because you didn’t have any, the wheels are small, so the washboard, y- it’s on leaf springs.

You can’t drive very fast over the washboard because it’ll start bouncing up and down un- uncontrollably. And, and also it didn’t have any range. I was, I was uninformed about the amount of power that you needed to, the, the amount of power that you needed to have on board, and your normal six lead-acid batteries, it just doesn’t have enough.

You’re not gonna have any range. I couldn’t even make it to the... I could drive across the playa, and I wouldn’t be able to make it all the way back to my camp without, without it running out of juice. And so I w- I was pretty embarrassed by the, the whole lack of functionality of that thing. So a- afterwards, you know, and I’m looking there, at the, at the Cushman, and I’m just looking at, you know, the front axle is an I-beam, [01:11:00] you know.

And I’m l- and, and I knew how to b- you know, I, I’m a sculptor. I know how to build structural elements that are, that are aesthetically a lot better than an I-beam, right? So, and still serve the same function. So I was like, “Screw this, man.” And so I, I sold the cart, kept the bodywork and, and, and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m gonna just build the car from scratch.”

And, and make it all beautiful. Like, make it all sculptural. Not-- I don’t wanna have this car that I have to hide. And so that ended up becoming... That ended up being Mr. Fusion. And which was a pretty interesting experience because I didn’t know jack about cars. Like, literally almost nothing. But I, I, but I did know structures.

Like, I, I knew how to build. Like, I understood trusses. You know, I understood how to do CAD. I understood how to weld. I understood how to machine. But I didn’t know anything [01:12:00] about cars. And so that, that was definitely a, a trial by fire just... A-and so, and, and the way that I built Mr. Fusion is that I-- the way that I figured that out is that there was a, a stock car that was just a rolling chassis that...

A stock car, like a racing car, right?

arash: Mm-hmm.

henry chang: It didn’t have a motor or anything. It d- had nothing in it except for it had, this quick change rear axle that I really liked the looks of it. So and it-- and, and buying the whole car would cost me about the same as buying one of those axles. So I’m like, “Okay.” So I bought the whole car and just, just looked at how it was constructed.

I’m like, “Okay.” Just so I could learn about, you know, it had a double wishbone suspension up front and, and this quick change rear axle. And so I’m like, “Okay.” You know, I’m gonna just accomplish the same thing with [01:13:00] You know, build, build a, a chassis that is kind of does s- a similar thing, you know, and, and to have a double wishbone suspension, et cetera, et cetera.

And tr- and try to make... But then try to make it all sculptural.

arash: Yeah. Yeah. And so- Oof

henry chang: And lucky- luckily that was actually a good plan. Bec- you know, some of my... That car actually functionally was more practical than some of my subsequent ones because, because on the subsequent ones I had mechanics, and I made the mistake of listening to them about certain things. And,

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: and, and like, I don’t know, this, like on the second one it, there really should be way more, the battery should be way more accessible. There should be... B-

arash: but

henry chang: know, mechanics are used to working on cars that, where there is no [01:14:00] room. There’s no room, and they like to just pack everything in there.

And yeah, I shouldn’t have listened to the mechanic. I g- I guess, I guess it’s my fault because I had al- I had already done one where things were accessible and easy to work on and, and whatnot. and I, I, I’m a little bit bitter about it. I’m like, “Fuck, why, why the hell am I listening to the mechanic?”

Because he made it worse, actually. So, just in terms of practicality

arash: So interesting. ‘Cause I

henry chang: far as... ‘Cause I mean-

arash: mean, like, you’re, you’re coming from this, God, there’s, like, a word for this that I can’t recall right now, but just, like, almost coming at it from it’s almost like a superpower of, of, for lack of a better word, ignorance.

Like, you’re n- like, you’re not being bogged down by the systems that they were raised in, so you’re looking at the problem from this completely new angle. Yeah.

henry chang: Yeah, exactly. They, well, I act- in hindsight, I actually have more experience designing cars. They know more, more about motors and the drivetrain for sure, absolutely, infinitely [01:15:00] more. But when it comes to designing the car, they’ve made zero... They’ve designed and, and fabricated zero, and I’ve at least done one, so I shouldn’t have listened to them.

arash: Huh.

henry chang: You know? But the thing, the thing is mechanics, and of course not all of them, the, the better ones understand what they don’t know, you know? Or, or

arash: not necessarily better mecha- but just more aware, you know?

henry chang: not necessarily better mech- but just more aware, you know? But then the more egotistical ones think that they know all about anything that has to do with a car, which is f- really, really not true. Like

arash: can, that, that applies to any industry anywhere, right? Like the, the disruptors that come at it like the way that you are. a lot of times it is kind of like thinking like an artist or tapping into artist consciousness. You come in and you’re just like, you know, that, what if we do it this other way?

I’m not saying it might work and it might not, but like, why don’t we give it a shot?

henry chang: [01:16:00] Right.

arash: Right. That, and I, and I gotta say, by the way, in regards to mutant vehicles on Playa, I have said this on many episodes, and I will never stop saying it, God bless you for bringing art cars to Burning Man. It’s like, I think, and I know I’m, I’m biased maybe ‘cause I’m not mechanically inclined, it feels like every mutant vehicle on Playa, if you’ve got out there, you are tinkering with it, like all week one way or another.

I have a feeling that you’re not, they’re pretty dialed in, but like, that is a

common

henry chang: they, can have their, they can definitely have their problems.

arash: That, that

henry chang: sure. Oh, I mean, I... Yeah. Well, certain ones are much more reliable than others, and yeah, the The, the, the one that has all the problems, again, I listen too much to the mechanic.

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: Because he, he, he, he wanted to have, like, this motor that... Actually, I shouldn’t throw him too, too much under the

arash: too much at him. Under the

henry chang: I don’t know. Actually, it’s... I, I don’t care. Yeah. [01:17:00] Like, he wanted to have a motor that he could brag to all his friends about, so he wanted to, like, have it kind of high performance. And th- that’s totally the wrong idea for a Burning Man art car.

You don’t want high performance, you just want reliability. The, high performance does you nothing on the playa. It can look like it’s high performance, but you don’t want real high performance.

arash: kind of like the amount of megapixels they keep adding to cameras that are so far beyond what the human eye can even see on a phone screen.

henry chang: How many megapixels are we up to

arash: Oh, I don’t even know.

Like, t- and I’m a, and I’m a professional photographer and I don’t know.

henry chang: Right.

arash: Yeah, no, I stopped paying att- at some point I’m like most of the-- I mean, I’m not shooting on billboards, like currently. but even then we’re, we’re past that. It’s, it’s, it’s pretty, it’s pretty nuts. For a while it was just a race to just sell more megapixels.

You

henry chang: You know, you know, when it comes to that motor, it’s my fault though, ‘cause I should have just overruled him. [01:18:00] Yeah. Because, yeah, ‘cause that motor, the high-performance motor has all kinds of problems ‘cause it, it doesn’t run at a high enough

arash: RPM- Yeah. ... e-ever

for,

henry chang: know, we’re supposed to go five miles an hour or whatever, and you don’t...

Yeah, the high-performance motors, they’re not designed... They’re designed for something else, not going five miles an hour,

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: And so it, it’s got all kinds of problems maintaining oil pressure and whatnot because of that.

arash: It’s got all kinds of problems Yeah But one question, why not? Is that- Let me ask you this. so, so you, you start to bring these, and this is like where like the media attention on your work just explodes, right? Like there’s more, there’s more eyes on you. what does your family think of all of this and where you’re at?

henry chang: Oh, oh, they like that.

arash: They like the media? They like the approval?

henry chang: Yeah, they like that.

arash: Yeah,

henry chang: so I mean, I’m not totally black sheep

arash: they like that. Yeah ... so I mean, I’m not totally- Are you a gray sheep now? Yeah. Yeah[01:19:00]

henry chang: yeah, I mean, th- that, that definitely helped a lot because, yeah,

arash: immigrant thing, by the way. Somebody from the outside approved, so now we’ll approve.

henry chang: f- That’s interesting

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: Huh? Somebody needs the outsider approved somehow. Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Pretty much. I’m not a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, but, you

arash: Pretty much. I’m not a doctor or anything- Yeah ...but, you know.

But at least you’re famous.

henry chang: But yeah. but at least I’m not a total failure. I’m only halfway a failure that way, you know? So, That’s

arash: That’s good. That’s really good.

henry chang: Um,

arash: I had like a, I had a, a note here, and we kinda started to talk about this subject, which is interesting ‘cause I’ve always written about this as like the artist versus the j- like the art versus the day job. the day job is the parts of what we do that makes money and that is a bit of drudgery, like the administrative things.

And then the art is the fun stuff, you know? And, and that changes. Like the art, like for you, the art, like the engineering is a part of the art. You know, like you’re actually like enjoying [01:20:00] all of these parts rather than like trying to like plow through them as fast as possible in order to get to the end goal.

henry chang: Yeah, yeah. You know, Oh, the engineering is totally part of the art, and that’s a- it’s actually fun, you know?

arash: Mm.

henry chang: be- it’s, it’s fun in the sense of like, it’s, it’s part of the puzzle that you need to solve, you know? But, but everything that I design, I, I don’t design things that, I don’t think I’m not gonna be able to build.

That, that’s, that’s one thing that, like I like to go... Well, with AI, it’s not really that necessary anymore, but I used to go and look at other models and whatnot a lot, other things that people have designed just, to get inspiration for, “Oh yeah, that looks really cool,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

But one of, one of the things that I’m struck by with a lot of it is that, yeah, that you couldn’t build that thing for this reason or that reason, you know? That, that, it’s really beautiful, but you can’t really build it. [01:21:00] And, and, I, I, I like making beautiful models, but the best part of it is when you get to br- bring it to life and make it into three-dimensional, make it a th- you know, a real object rather than, rather than just this thing that lives inside of a computer.

Right. You know? And, so but that, that’s part of the puzzle and that’s part of the fun of it, is having, having that, okay, when I design this thing, it’s gotta be in such a way that you can build it. D- you know, don’t build, don’t design something that’s impossible to build, ‘cause then I’m gonna miss out on, on the, the big fun, gratification at the end when you do actually build it.

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: Yeah. You know? Yeah. So, so, so that con- that constraint is just like built in and, and to me it’s part of the challenge and the fun is to try to, is, is to always [01:22:00] have that constraint. And it’s, I think it’s good actually, because if you don’t have constraints, like, like I talk about the constraint of it sucked to design apartments because of the constraints, but that’s ‘cause it’s too much constraint.

Too little constraint can suck too though, because then y- if you have an infinite amount of choices-

arash: Yeah

henry chang: you

arash: know?

No, the, the, the best,

the best stuff, the best stuff comes out of

some kind of constraint. Like, because then, like, our artist brain gets to think around how to fill the gaps in what we’re able to get away with, you know?

Yeah

henry chang: Yeah, yeah. C-- I mean, it’s gotta ful-fulfill some purpose, be ec- be somewhat economical, you know, and, and, and, and be practical to be able to fabricate it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you know? And so, So what do you think-

arash: So what do you, what do you, what do you, where are you going like next? Like now that you learned your lesson about not bringing multiple art cars and being [01:23:00] responsible for a sculpture and this and that, like what do you, what do you wanna do next? What does your next burn look like?

henry chang: Well, well one of my, my, The things that I’ve always wanted to do was to build, bring a giant kinetic sculpture to Burning Man.

arash: Mm.

henry chang: And, and I’ve, I’ve been on this kinetic sc- sculpture thing for a while now. You know what I’m talk-

arash: to- Like

henry chang: the things with all, all those rotating gears, you know? And, yeah, that, it’s probably-- I, I doubt if it’ll be quite as quite as, I’m not sure what the right word is, p- popular or compelling or what- whatever the word is, as the vehicles because everybody relates to the vehicles very...

Not, I shouldn’t say everybody, but the public in general relates to the vehicles quite stro- quite in a [01:24:00] strongly positive way because... And I think the reason is because it’s such a big part of our life. Like, cars are such a big part of our life.

arash: Like, Mm.

henry chang: just about every day you either drive or ride in a vehicle, right?

And, and,

arash: and, these,

henry chang: my vehicles aren’t really metaphorical in any way. They’re just, they’re just sculptures that you drive, you know? And, and so it’s, there’s no veil of abstraction that needs to be pierced to understand what it is. It’s, like, like, people get it right away, you know? And so, so it, it’s actually, it’s pretty easy, I think, to get the...

Be- because people generally don’t build, you know, custom car makers, they don’t build cars from scratch. They tend to modify existing things, like at Burning Man or not, you know, in bo- in both cases. And so, so when you have something that’s kinda obviously built from scratch and is just a sc- it’s a sculpture that [01:25:00] drives around, like, it, it, it, it’s easy to get a strong reaction

arash: Yeah. Yeah.

henry chang: A- and, but at the same time, I really like these kinetic sculptures and I wanna... So you c- you’re not gonna be able to ride around in it

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: know. But, but I, I’ve g- I’ve got a theme that I’ve got a big kinetic sculpture that I wanna bring. I’m actually gonna start a nonprofit to... And it, and it’s got a theme, specific theme.

I mean, can I talk about that or...? Sure. Okay. So, so one o- in reading about history, there’s all kinds of... There’s so many stories, you know, ‘cause there have been millions, billions of people that have preceded us, right? And, I don’t know, like, if you just take World War II at all, just as an example, you know, that was such a gargantuan conflict that, you know, you know, tens of millions of people died for one thing, you know?

And, [01:26:00] and there’s just so much that happened, and most of it’s quite awful, but some of the stories are s- a few of the stories are quite good that people went against you know, they tried to do the right thing, you know? What’s that?

arash: in courage, for sure

henry chang: Yeah. And so, so I wanna do, I mean, there’s one of these people that I...

There’s a couple of them that are famous, but most of them are tot- pretty much unknown, I’d say by 99.9% of the, of the general public. and I wanna, I don’t, I wanna make a piece about mass rescuers. And these are people that, that were somehow had a position of power wi- within the system and went against the system to try to save a bunch of people.

And, and the most obvious example is O- Oscar Schindler. You know, he had a slave labor camp, and then he risked his life. [01:27:00] Like, he’s really interesting because if, if that’s all he was, everybody, you know, he’s a war criminal ‘cause he, you know, he imprisoned all these J- he took advantage of all these Jews for free labor, you know, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But then he risked his life and spent all his money to save them, you know? And, so that, that’s a pretty interesting hero story right there because of the, ‘cause at the be- up until he tried, started trying to save them, you could say he was a war criminal, you know? And, but then when they started killing the Jews, that was a bridge too far for, for that guy, you know?

And so, and there’s other people that in World War II that s- you know, like, there’s a Japanese diplomat that saved over 10,000 Jews in either Latvia or [01:28:00] Lithuania by... He went against orders and wrote out well over 10,000 visas that he wasn’t supposed to be- ‘cause when the, when the Nazis were coming and, and these Jews needed to get out of there.

And

arash: so Mm.

henry chang: he spent every waking moment of the, of the few days that they had left writing visas that he wasn’t supposed to. It ended up costing him his career,

arash: Wow. you

henry chang: But, And then who, who’s another one? There’s a Nazi in, in, that was in, Nanjing that saved over 100,000 Chinese people, and he used his status as a Nazi to create a, a safe compound where the Japanese weren’t allowed to come.

You know, they were just going around butchering people, right? And so on that compound, he like, he... So he would go around into the city and he would wear all his Nazi regalia and all that

stuff, right? And he carried a Nazi flag with him to protect [01:29:00] himself from the Japanese soldiers, basically. And, but he risked his life in a huge way because th- there was this mass killing going on, and he could’ve easily, you know, one of the soldiers could’ve easily just...

But, but luckily for him and all the people that he saved, you know, the soldiers didn’t, they respected the, him because he was a Nazi. Is

arash: isn’t it, Yeah.

henry chang: it, I mean, that’s pretty w- his name was, was John Rabe, and I don’t, I don’t think very many people know about him. And, and so he got like, w- the numbers range between 100,000 to 250,000 people that he saved.

And, yeah. And, it, it’s definitely an interesting story. After the war, because he was a Nazi, the, the British wouldn’t allow him to, they didn’t allow him to get a job

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: was a Nazi. This is a Nazi that saved, [01:30:00] I mean, it sounds kinda oxymoronic, Nazis that saved people,

arash: right?

henry chang: Yeah. But, but he wasn’t in, he wasn’t a N- he was a Nazi because he liked socialism.

He wasn’t a Nazi because he wanted to kill Jews or whatever, you know? And, and, and ob- obviously that this guy’s not a killer, you

arash: obviously that this guy’s not a killer. Right. You know? I mean, every movement has a lot of different components. It doesn’t come in-- It’s not one singular monolith, as much as we like to say that about the people we don’t like.

Yeah. And

henry chang: and so ju-- I mean, just to finish that story, so his family was starving literally ‘cause they had no money. But, but the people in Nanjing heard about it and, like, they started sending him monthly food shipments too, you know, ‘cause they remembered. I mean, he sa- he saved a lot of people, you know?

And so... And there’s another one that we just found about recently, relatively speaking. He’s actually famous already for being a famous bike racer. fuck, what’s his name?[01:31:00]

arash: Evel Knievel? He won the Tour de France before and after World War II.

henry chang: Hugo? He won the Tour de France before and after World War II.

Can we pause for just a second?

arash: Can we pause for just a second? To, to... I mean, I’ll just delete it afterwards

henry chang: Okay. I mean,

should I keep t- Or-

arash: Well, we’re getting- I’ll

henry chang: just tell this story and then

arash: I’ll, I’ll, Yeah

henry chang: I’ll say how it relates into the-

arash: We’re getting pretty close to wrapping here anyway. Okay. Yeah. Just- This actually relates into- Make sure you’re holding the mic Uh, I’m just making a note for-- to make an edit at one minute 36

henry chang: His name was Gino Bartali, and, and he might be the greatest cyclist in history except for the war interrupted his career, of course. And, and, ‘cause he won before and after, so there’s,

like, like,

six years maybe that he didn’t, he didn’t have an opportunity to race, which is obviously in his prime since he won before and after.

But he is-- But he was, you know, one of the most famous athletes in Europe. And, and so when the-- I-in Italy, he was allowed to train. He, he could ride wherever he wanted. So he smuggled, fake papers for Jews inside the, frame of his bike.

arash: Wow.

henry chang: and the police, like, never searched him. But so it might seem that it’s safe, but if his network ever got rolled up, then y- [01:32:00] they, they’d have shot him, you know?

So, like, it wasn’t safe at all, really. And so that’s what he did during the war. He, like, pretended like he was training. He was training, but he was al- simultaneously smuggling papers. And, you know, and so he could go all over the place in northern Italy wherever he wanted and, and deliver papers, you know.

And so, but he

arash: like it’d be a great movie.

Yeah

henry chang: It, well, most, it’s mostly not that well-know-- Well, he never told anybody. Like he, like he t- told his son not to tell anybody because he, he said it was between him and God and not him and the general public,

arash: Wow. That’s beautiful.

henry chang: found to be

arash: I found that to be- Yeah

henry chang: admirable, actually.

arash: Absolutely. So your, you, so your, your k- your kinetic sculpture that you’re envisioning is channeling these stories?

henry chang: Yeah, so, so I’m, I’m gonna ha- have some, you know, I’m gonna tell these stories in some plates at the bottom [01:33:00] and, and all these people’s, their names are gonna be in the gears that are rotating up there. And, and the purpose of it is just to memorialize them and just to

arash: just

henry chang: hopefully people realize that if they’re ever in that type of situation, that they have a choice.

arash: Like, you don’t, you don’t have to just go along with it. Like, most of the people would be like, “Yeah, I was just following orders.” Yeah. And you don’t necessarily

henry chang: Like you don’t, you don’t have to just go along with it. Like most of the people would be like, “Yeah, I was just following orders.” And you don’t necessarily have to totally follow all the orders. You, you know, if, if you c- if you see that they’re clearly immoral, these people all made a difference. They saved a lot of people, you

arash: So- It, it, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting ‘cause the examples that, that inspire you, I’m almost hearing them as like, like rebel like an artist. Like, come up with creative ways to throw a wrench in the works of the system rather than just like standing out. [01:34:00] Like, I mean, yes, it’s standing in front of a tank is, is, is an, is an act of courage, but you’re gonna get run over.

Whereas like, you know, you come up with this creative ways of throwing wrenches in the system, that, that’s the stuff that can really make, make

henry chang: Yeah, these all, these people are all part of the system.

arash: Угу

henry chang: kind of remained part of the system and kind of like subverted the system from, from within, you know?

arash: From, from within Yeah, yeah

henry chang: S- and

arash: So, They’re thinking, like, what I, I love these stories. Like, they’re-- these are stories of, like, longer vision, right? Right, where there is-- You see so much of this playing out in the public here currently in social media and stuff. Like, it’s like this, there’s grandstanding, and then there’s the immediate, the immediate satisfaction of winning a public argument and looking like you’ve taken a stand, which I appreciate for a lot of people that are looking at, like, “No, we’re just gonna go fucking stand in front of a tank so it can’t keep going.”

But is-- What’s the real outcome? Is your real outcome, “I wanna save as many [01:35:00] lives as possible”? Then part of that might involve, you know, playing along and, and not getting that satisfaction from the public ever. Like the, like the bicyclist you were just saying, you know? Like, didn’t get a movie, you know? And, and, didn’t get the social media approval of sharing stories, you know, or whatever.

But like, but, but-

henry chang: That’s not why he did it,

arash: That’s not why he did it Yeah, and, and, and ar- and made a bigger impact as a direct result

henry chang: and, and made it bigger as a direct result. Yeah. You, you, you know, all, all these, these people are all, were all part of the system.

arash: Ja.

henry chang: Yeah. And, you know, and but they saw something that was clearly wrong, and they, and they, and they used their power within the system to do something.

arash: Wow. Yeah. You know?

Yeah. and

henry chang: they didn’t try to change the system. you know, and, and, and the thing is these people actually did a lot more than a lot of other people who weren’t in the system and [01:36:00] admirably resisted, but they didn’t have the power to accomplish as much because they’re not part of the system.

arash: the power- Right ... to accomplish as much

because they’re not part of the system. ‘

henry chang: Cause like, if you, if you’re outside of the system and like let’s say you’re trying to save some Jews, there’s a limited amount that you can accomplish,

arash: over in Nanjing.

henry chang: Compared to like John Rabe who saved, you know, over 100,000 people, like y- over in Nanking. Y- you know, if you’re outside of the system, there, there’s no way that you can do that.

arash: God. You know? But I mean, it, it, it still takes a quite a bit of creativity ‘cause like I know plenty of people inside systems who are getting bulldozed by the tank. Right. a very dear friend of mine joined a, a police department.

he’s master’s degree and highly educated and conscientious, and the system has like chewed him up and spit him out. He thought he was gonna change it from the inside,

henry chang: Oh

arash: it’s a fascinating story and we could, again, this, this could be part three of our podcast. But, it, but I, I’m really [01:37:00] happy you brought up this topic, and I’m like overjoyed as the interviewer that this is where we’re like, we’re getting into our final chapter of the conversation.

Yeah. Because, no joke, the final notes I had here, and the reason I brought up the poli sci stuff earlier, was that I wanted to know your thoughts and opinions about Burning Man and politics. You know, there was like this huge-- There was like an outcry when, you know, Otto Von Danger brought like Burn Wall Street, right?

Like, “It’s not supposed to be political.” But like to say-- And then there’s of course the argument, which I w- I personally agree with, but I want your opinions on, that ch- saying, “I am apolitical,” is a very privileged place to be because y- you know, you’ve not seen the tanks. You’ve not experienced, you know, close enough like what it looks like.

I appreciate choosing to go in that direction if there’s some sort of a creative or spiritual path that you’re following. But simply d- [01:38:00] disconnecting from that, from the default world and what’s going on here and going, “I’m not here for politics. I wanna, just wanna make something that looks pretty,” it’s kind of a privileged place to be.

My opinion. I’m dying to know yours, but it sounds like obviously since you’re planning a political piece, that’s- Well- Yeah.

henry chang: I, I,

arash: Or argu- somebody, something some people argue it would be.

henry chang: ri- right. So, so I don’t w- I don’t wanna do a, something political that’s gonna be polarizing at all. Right yeah, yeah, I will say this is political in a sense that, yeah, of course, this, the mass rescuer thing, it is political. But, but, but it, but it, but it’s also, it’s also political in a way that how can you argue with what those people did?

arash: Right.

Like,

henry chang: so in this... So it’s, I would say it’s political, but it’s not v- I don’t think it’s very polarizing. Yeah. Because they, I think almost everyone can agree that they did the right thing, right? Like, I-- a lot of times what I think when people [01:39:00] say political, what they’re doing is they’re trying to lump a lot of what’s making them uncomfortable together into a single word that they can dismiss, right? I, I think, like, maybe, like, the, the question is, maybe, maybe a part of what people were trying to reach for, I think, when they’re, when they’re frustrated with that kind of stuff on Playa is I think they’re questioning this is supposed to be a liminal space where interesting abstractions and form and experimentation is happening with creativity.

arash: And then you’ve got some pieces that come that, like the claw in the, you know, like the, the, those little things where you put in a quarter and you get a toy out of the machine. It’s got a little claw that comes down. It’s almost like it pulls you out of the Playa, and now you are connecting to the default world in a manner that almost makes you uncomfortable.

And I can see how somebody having that experience would look at that and [01:40:00] label it political, right? Like, who was, like, the Ukrainian artist that brought I’m, I’m Fine? That

henry chang: mean Ukrainian? Yeah,

arash: I’m so sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, about, about the Russia-Ukraine war. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. God, that piece was like, I mean, m-my mind was blown. My mind was absolutely blown. but like I d- I did talk to people who, who were like, “This is uncomfortable.” Like ev-- ‘cause like every time the sirens would go off in Kyiv, it, it would go off in real time, on the

henry chang: I thought that was the best piece that year. So n- and, and it’s not because of the quality of it or anything like that because, you know, but because of the connection to the real world really, of something that was very intense and also really relevant, you know?

And, and, you know, I, I mean, I think that that’s... I l- I like that one because, you know, it, it’s just seeking to be- bring awareness is all. I, I don’t think, I don’t think that art is [01:41:00] necessarily that great if you’re trying to change people’s mind with a piece of art. I think it’s, that’s just not effective because y- you need, usually if you’re gonna change somebody’s mind, you need to be able to express complex ideas, and art’s generally not the greatest way to do that.

But, but to bring awareness to certain things, that’s different, you know? And so, so like with my piece, I’m not trying to change anybody’s mind about anything. I just wanna people to know, “Hey, these people had a choice.”

arash: Mm.

henry chang: If you’re in a, if, if anybody’s ever in that position that sees this, you too have a choice, you

arash: do have a choice, you know? God, that is, that is, that is, that’s incredible. Thank you. That is like, I think that’s the clarity I was, I was searching for. It’s-- ‘Cause usually people have a hard time articulating, you know, trying to figure out what is it about this that feels good? What is it about this that doesn’t feel good?

If it’s trying to change [01:42:00] mind, arguably it feels manipulative. Whereas if the artistic expression is connecting you to a certain emotional story about another human being or another culture of human beings that you may not feel an immediate easy connection with, then you’re creating something powerful, and then you can come up with your own conclusions about what, how I, where I wanna go and out of that.

henry chang: Right. Y- you know, I’m not, I’m not gonna say that everybody should... If you, if somebody’s in a position of being mass rescuer, that that’s the only right path, because all the, all these mass rescuers, they, they paid a price too.

arash: Yeah.

henry chang: So, well, first of all, there’s a lot of people that died that won’t be on the sculpture because they didn’t succeed, you know?

so that, that’s one potential cost. Like, that’s the most common story, actually, I would say out of, out of the genociding that was going on in World War II, is that way more [01:43:00] people failed and get paid with their life than, than actually succeeded. so I w- and, and, and all these people, like I was telling you, like John Rabe, you know.

Well, I guess he d- the fact... Well, Chiune Sugihara, he was the, he was a Japanese diplomat. Yeah, he lost his career because he wasn’t following orders, you know? And he was extremely talented at being a diplomat because he, he knew multiple language and he could, he could speak multiple language, languages more fluently than anybody else in Japan, actually.

And so he just had a talent, and apparently he was extremely charming and just like this generally exceptional human being, and that’s... He was made to be a diplomat, you know? And,

arash: but

henry chang: you know, he paid for it. I, I, I forget what he ended up doing, but he had like some menial job for the rest of his life, you know?

And so, [01:44:00] so, so it, it’s not gonna be... I’m not saying that my piece is just gonna be to bring awareness that you have a choice, and that’s it. It’s not gonna be saying you, you absolutely should do this, ‘cause for a lot of people, one, they might not have the skill to pull it off. So m- maybe they shouldn’t do it.

arash: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

You know? Yeah.

henry chang: they’re just gonna get themselves killed, you know?

arash: Maybe they’re just gonna get themselves killed, you know? Totally

henry chang: like, you know. So, I’m, I’m not gonna s- there is no right answer to that. It’s just that you have a choice, you know. That, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all it’s gonna be. So. Harry, this has been an amazing conversation. Yeah.

arash: There’s no right answer to that.

henry chang: ju- you know, just let me say that, you know, thank you to the community for being there and, [01:45:00] and thank you to v- for being something that I can be a part of actually. Because there’s a v- there’s no other community that I really feel quite the same way about as Burning Man, you know? So where I really wanna be a part of it, you know?

So

arash: Same. I hear you. That’s why we do it. That’s why we keep, keep doing these things.

henry chang: Ja

arash: Henry, thank you so much. No joke, I, I’m-- seriously, I, I would wanna sit down with you, like, one or two more times. I wanna-- I g- I do wanna get-- at some point, let’s get together and I wanna hear your, your, your prison story. but yeah, you are, you are a, a wealth of interesting information, and I, I, I just, I really hope...

I’m so fascinated by this entire, like, symphony of creativity and experience that you’re having, and so much of your story is about integration, which I personally just really appreciate right now. Even right now, this conversation we’re having about, like, you know, like, world events and the playa, like, you know, your, [01:46:00] your view is more, like, about integration rather than division.

Like, no, I’m not escaping to Burning Man. It’s making reality more real. It’s a part of this entire full catastrophe of reality that we live in, and it’s all expression, and it’s all art, and it’s all war, and it’s all beautiful, and it’s all hell. And, and, it’s really fucking cool to have this exact experience having this conversation with you.

henry chang: All right. Well, well, I appreciate the opportunity to, to be able to express some of this stuff too. Thank you

arash: Thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

henry chang: Look forward to the next time

The Soundtrack to Your Burn

Session A071: Tormenta at Spanky's Wine Bar

Recorded live at Spanky's Wine Bar, Black Rock City 2025

Based in Berlin, Germany, Shirin — aka Tormenta — is a regular in the European burn scene, including NoWhere in Spain. In 2025, she made her first trip to Black Rock City, where her playa initiation came complete with storms, mud, and cancelled gigs. Fittingly, tormenta means "storm" in Spanish.

This set was recorded at the iconic Spanky's Wine Bar in BRC 2025: music for pleasure, self-determination, and moving like you mean it — "a little cheeky and a little filthy," with Tormenta's signature bouncy-dark sound.

Full set: soundcloud.com/tormenta_music/tormenta-at-spankys

Follow: instagram.com/tormenta.music/

NoWhere, Spain Burning Man regional - goingnowhere.org | instagram.com/going_nowhere_burn

Spanky's Wine Bar - spankys.org | instagram.com/spankysswinebar

Alkaline's 2026 season is Produced by Burner Podcast Music Director Chris Huber, aka M.I.A.

Executive producers Navjeet Sarna and Amber Rose

Standard Boilerplate

A show for those who burn the other 350 days of the year.

Burner Podcast celebrates over a decade in production and is listed among the top 5% of podcasts in the world by ListenNotes. An independent gift to the Burning Man community, we are an artist-documentarian project dedicated to capturing the stories and heart-centered truth of our global population. Burner Podcast episodes feature audio memoirs, roundtables, and deep-dive conversations for and about those who identify as burners.

Explore 160+ episodes at: burnerpodcast.com

Follow us for wildly irregular updates: instagram.com/burnerpodcast | facebook.com/burnerpodcast

The Burner Podcast RSS feed is home to the flagship show itself, as well as other Burner Podcast Presents spinoffs including Burner Podcast Presents : Alkaline, a show featuring DJ mixes as the sonic documentation of the global Burner community — the soundtrack to your burn.

About the Host & Founder

Ārash Afshar is an Iranian-American writer, photographer, and cultural architect. He champions Artist Consciousness and views his mission as facilitating radical humanization through philosophical memoirs, documentary portraiture, and recorded conversations. Learn more at yesterdayiwasclever.com.

This should be a moment of pure celebration - and it is. But it has a shadow.

I am grateful to have lived a life that allowed for me to do something like this. To have community who supported me throughout the process and are still doing so. Not just with encouragement, but legit shared with me their resources, helped me with housing, and guided me through my process. My friends kept me going when I was ready to tap out - and I was very ready to on multiple occasions.

I am grateful, mostly. I’m grateful on most days and most of each day. But there is a fraction of the time that I find I have no choice but to face my demon. To look him in the eyes, and accept that he is a part of me which I cannot whitewash, try as I might. His name is resentment.

Resentment haunts me. I don’t identify with him and I’m afraid of letting the world know he even exists. But on many days, it feels like I am in a race against him on the roadway of time. He’s trailing me - hot right on my heels. Some days he catches up and he’s right next to me, glaring at me. Taunting me. With that smirk on his face as he toys with me. He’s so confident he can beat me. Maybe because he is a part of my legacy.

My father lost that race long before I was born. I’m told by some of a time when he was not the man I knew. The man I knew had fully lost all will to keep resentment at bay. And my deepest fear is, and always has been, to end up like him. To be so deeply identified with resentment that it becomes my identity. A tumor so hidden that no one catches it till it’s too late. Which, coincidentally, was how my father’s cancer diagnosis went.

Today, as I write this, resentment is not quite right at my side. But I can see his silhouette when I look over my shoulder. He’s close enough for me to name, but not so close that I’m ashamed. When he’s right on top of me, I’m too ashamed to name him. Over the years, I’ve hidden from him and hidden him from you. But my gamble is that perhaps by telling you about him, maybe I can finally take a little break and rest.

I look back on the past five years and can point to countless examples of love and support I’ve had. But on my more resentful days, what gets magnified in my mind are memories of people who have not had my back. Memories and darker days where I felt alone and angry, where the only thing that kept me going were thoughts of “I’ll show them.”

I’ll be the first to say that there are a great many situations where things may be up for interpretation. But there also are some people in our lives who legitimately don’t have our backs.

Gaslighting ourselves into believing everyone who ever crosses our paths has only our best intentions in mind can become its own practice of spiritual bypassing. Falling into this trap is the risk we take when we choose optimism. By defaulting to assume positive intent, from time to time, some shitty people will slip through, or we may dismiss some very obvious patterns of behavior. Though I am of the thinking that it’s still worth it. Better to have loved and lost. Life isn’t about how many times we get knocked down, but how well practiced we are in getting back up.

But I gotta be honest with ya, it does feel like getting back up gets a little harder each time. After we’ve collected all these bruises and injuries and aches and pains, bouncing right back up seems to take a little longer than it used to. It feels like resentment has caught up to me and shoulder checked me right into a wall. I lie on the ground and consider staying there. He crouches next to me and taunts me and I wonder if maybe he’s right. I should just stay down.

On some days, I resent my parents’ learned helplessness, which they projected onto me, making me feel insecure and afraid of taking the risks needed to move forward in my career earlier, instead of so late in the game. But I get back up because I remember that they didn’t know better. They believed that their world was just ‘the world’ and did their best as parents within those confines. I resent colleagues and people in positions of influence who have seen how long I’ve been working on Burner Podcast and have chosen to sideline me when opportunities arose. But then I get back up when I consider that I may have simply not been a factor in how things played out. There are forces at play I’m not privy to and some relationships were more transactional. Now I know that and I thank them for teaching me discernment. I resent artists whom I supported in their earlier chapters, thinking that someday they’d return the favor and hire me when they have a budget for a music video director. But then I get back up when I remind myself that if that was why I’d supported them to begin with, then I was engaging in exactly that same type of transactional mindset which I’d detested.

Some people do suck. Some situations have no good way to flip. It’s all an interconnected eco system so complex that it would be impossible to see all the connecting points. Which part of that story we choose to hold on to is the yoga. When I’m tired, when I’m angry and broke, when I’m struggling, resentment catches right up to me and the world looks a little more grey. The only solution I’ve come up with to pick up a little more speed has been to focus on one or two small things and build from there. To go focus on some nature. Spend a little time with an easygoing friend who makes me laugh. To let go. Just a little.

Popularized by the British Cycling team’s approach, the aggregation of marginal gains is the philosophy of searching for a tiny, 1% margin of improvement in everything we do. They did it by looking at all the little things that impacted the bodies and minds of their team, ranging from the quality of their mattresses to the water pressure in their shower. I do this in my own race against resentment. To pick up a little more speed, I’ll address the smallest things I can in my mindset. I’ll journal about things I appreciated today. I’ll learn more about psychology and my own upbringing and culture. I’ll go do some yoga in the park. I’ll write a piece like this and hit publish even though I feel fear. Especially if I feel fear.

I could’ve just sat and let resentment do the typing. But then it wouldn’t have been something I could be proud of. It would’ve been a bitch fest. A vent session. Which, of course, is not to say it can’t be its own form of art and serve someone. But it’s not my style. It’s not what flows from me naturally. So I let my muse take over and set a clear intention of healing. As in, before I entered flow and began typing, I first wrote a couple of sentences in my journal very clearly stating my intention to write for the purpose of healing. Before I’d sat to write, I was playing around with some very clever plays with words in my head and fully getting off on the idea of throwing some serious shade at some very specific targets. But then, as my fingers landed on the keys, this other energy took hold, and I watched on my screen as it guided me towards a place of levity in real time.

Optimism is an act of courage. It is a risk we take, over and over. To say that we will continue to open our hearts, even after we’ve collected plenty of evidence that it can be shattered. To put on foot in front of the other, even when it seems like the race was lost a decade ago. To get back up every morning and make the decision not to succumb to yesterday’s resentment. To be present today and hopeful tomorrow.

I used to try to skip past this part. I’d see the resentment on my heels and I’d just race against him harder. Yesterday I was clever and I thought I could outrun resentment. Today I’m wiser, and I see that I first need to face him. To stop hiding him and being ashamed of him. He is a part of my journey. Maybe he’s here to help me. Maybe tomorrow I can even start to entertain the possibility that he is my teammate, this shadow that I’d labeled resentment. Maybe he is transforming into something else before my eyes. Maybe this leg up, an awareness of what I might become, was the greatest gift my father could’ve ever given me.

My forthcoming book is entitled Yesterday I Was Clever - An Accidental Memoire. It is a selection of essays about the artist identity and the Iranian-American experience, which can be read as separate pieces or as a linear philosophical memoire. Right now it is in my editor’s hands for final edits and I hope to have it available to be held in your hands before the end of this year. Stay tuned to yesterdayiwasclever.com to join the waitlist.

-Arash

This session was recorded on the El Pulpo mutant vehicle during UnScruz 2026. It was the first time a DJ has performed live on El Pulpo.

Burner Podcast Presents: Alkaline

The Soundtrack to Your Burn

[6/13/26]

Session a070

Produced by Chris Huber (aka M.I.A.).

Connect & Learn More

• The DJ set on Priscilla Hernandez's Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/priscilla-hernandez-895926277/live-on-el-pulpo-unscruz-2026

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/priscillathedj/

• El Pulpo Mecanico: https://www.instagram.com/elpulpomecanico

• Illumination Village: https://www.instagram.com/illumination_village

• Heavy Petting Zoo Art Car: https://www.instagram.com/hpzartcar

Standard Boilerplate

Burner Podcast is an independent gift to the community, not a PR wing for the Org. We are an artist-documentarian project dedicated to capturing the stories and heart-centered truth of our global population. Reality is a conversation, and the conversation must continue.

The project serves the community through three distinct channels:

• Burner Podcast: The original traditional interview show featuring audio memoirs and deep-dive conversations.

• Alkaline: The DJ mix show and sonic documentation of the global Burner community—the soundtrack to your Burn.

• The Dispatch: A space for remote check-ins, time-sensitive updates, and direct addresses to the International Burnersphere.

About the Host Arash Afshar is an Iranian-American, SoCal-based artist and oral historian. He champions Artist Consciousness and views his mission as facilitating radical humanization through the medium of recorded conversations, written words, and photography. 🔗 Explore projects: arashafshar.com 📸 Instagram: @mrarash

Support the Gift This show is a decommodified project. We grow only through your word-of-mouth—if this story resonates with you, please share it with a friend. You can also support the continuation of this conversation on Patreon. 🔗 Patreon: patreon.com/c/mrarash

This session, recorded at sunrise on ¡AXOLOTL! Art Car, Burning Man 2024. Black Velveteen first appeared on Burner Podcast with the closing set for Episode 88 (Post Burning Man 2018 Chat with Halcyon). Currently a resident at Habitat Seattle, Caravan, and Reflect, Chris continues to capture the heart-centered truth of the community through her sound and commitment to community building and collaboration.

Burner Podcast Presents: Alkaline

The Soundtrack to Your Burn

[4/12/26]

Session a069

Connect & Learn More

• The DJ set on Black Velveteen's Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/blackvelveteennow/burning-man-sunrise-on-axolotl-art-car-2024

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/djblackvelveteen

• Proton Radio: https://www.protonradio.com

• Airpusher Collective: https://www.instagram.com/airpushercollective

• axolotlartcar.com

• instagram.com/axolotlearthguardian

Standard Boilerplate

Burner Podcast is an independent gift to the community, not a PR wing for the Org. We are an artist-documentarian project dedicated to capturing the stories and heart-centered truth of our global population. Reality is a conversation, and the conversation must continue.

The project serves the community through three distinct channels:

• Burner Podcast: The original traditional interview show featuring audio memoirs and deep-dive conversations.

• Alkaline: The DJ mix show and sonic documentation of the global Burner community—the soundtrack to your Burn.

• The Dispatch: A space for remote check-ins, time-sensitive updates, and direct addresses to the International Burnersphere.

About the Host Arash Afshar (aka Miraḡe the Pluronaut) is an Iranian-American, SoCal-based artist and oral historian. He champions Artist Consciousness and views his mission as facilitating radical humanization through the medium of recorded conversations, written words, and photography. 🔗 Explore projects: arashafshar.com 📸 Instagram: @mrarash

Support the Gift This show is a decommodified project. We grow only through your word-of-mouth—if this story resonates with you, please share it with a friend. You can also support the continuation of this conversation on Patreon. 🔗 Patreon: patreon.com/c/mrarash

I’ve started a daily practice of recording and sharing a daily sunset video. I’ve had a few false starts in this practice. While deep in an extended period of ultra solitude and in writing mode, I hit moments where I wanted to connect with my people and found that the introvert friction made it a little harder. Also I really struggled with how much I want to contribute to this social media machine. I have it to thank of a great deal of the community I have but it also has crossed the tipping point in the amount of harm it has caused. Where I’m at with it currently is to see it as like SDG&E or any other service provider; I don’t like the monopoly but I’m not fully ready yet to fully pull the plug and go off grid. So, for now, I’ll play along and do so with very intentional containers and constraints.

One of those personal guard rails for me is that I avoid DMs and Messenger. If we’re friends, you have my number. If you’re a client, you go through the proper channels via my website contact page, business email, or my booking manager. I try to minimize the amount I’ll allow social media’s intrusive pings and bings and notifications to affect my mental health.

What I do want is to connect with my people more, to keep ya’ll in the loop on what’s been going on, and to utilize the machine to do some ever-so-slight good in a world very much on fire.

And when I feel like the machine is draining me too much, I’ll take a few steps back for a little while. Boundaries, MF! ;p

Speaking of attempting to have a better relationship with systems and machines I’ve not historically been nuts about… I’m finally starting to get into the money side of the arts.

The amount of pro-bono work I’ve done, as an artist, cultural architect, and photographer, has been enough to buy me good will for the next couple of decades.

I think.

I hope.

I’ve always jumped head first into being of service without thinking twice about the money. But I’m now making a shift. It would be impossible to reprogram my brain at 44 to cease being service forward and purpose first. But I am adding a layer of getting more comfortable with money, and truly believing that my presence and leadership in the world is valuable to a lot of people, artists and capitalists alike.

I am educating myself more on grants and have been building out the business back end of my creative work. The perfect opportunity to practice all this has come up as I’ve been working with North Park Music Fest this year, helping to secure sponsorships to support a great event which is focused on supporting the arts in my home town.

Speaking of home… Sometimes I worry that my not consistently posting about Iran may lead folks to think that I’m indifferent. I’m keenly aware of world events. I can’t not be. What most of you see on the news sometimes lives inside of me at all times. Iran sits in my thoughts every day, and has been long before most Americans could even point it out on a map. My family has been glued to the news about Iran not just for the past few weeks, but for the past 47 years.

Many Iranians in the diaspora have historically seemed to me to have leapt to the extremes of the spectrum, either glued to the news and obsessed at all times with Iranian politics or kinda detached and swimming in Gucci and Chanel and BMWs. The former might’ve just developed an addiction to the trauma. The latter have perfected performative passion and public grand standing. Persians who’ve never even been to Iran are having quite the moment on TikTok. Just add “Iranian diaspora” in your post and you’ll get a ton of views. But I digress…

My takeaway from this upbringing has been the opposite of the extremes which I’ve observed. My belief is that the best way we can contribute to the world is to focus on our long term purpose. The ocean currents shift, but steady we keep. I’ve put it a lot of work to develop this tiny megaphone I’ve duct taped together and this little bit of good will I’ve generated in my community and my following. I consider very carefully how I activate it. My life’s mission is to foster what I call Artist Consciousness. I thrive on being a unifier and a source for grounding. I feel most at home when protecting, serving, and guiding artists. My ideal world is effortlessly pluralistic and my roll, as I see it, is to help amplify the voices to contribute to the kind of reality I most wish to see. In many ways, I feel like I’m still that little boy in Tehran, sitting with all the grownups at the card table, and simply feeling elated at seeing a big group of people with diverse personalities just getting along. I want to help the world just get along. It’s a tall order. But it’s what I’ve been doing and what I plan to continue doing while I inhabit this human body. When I think about posting a hot take that will for sure get a ton of views, I’ll ask myself: Is this gonna help the world get along better? Is it going to help me get to that destination I’ve been seeing for the past decade? Am I modeling the nuance and intentionality I wish to see more of in the world?

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

Some of the more firey Iranians, I think, might see my focusing on supporting a local music festival as frivolous. I see is as the next move on the greater path. Instead of those two extremes, I think (I hope) I’m continuing to walk the middle way, towards a place where I’m in an even better position to support my people, particularly the artists. We don’t hear anywhere near as much as we should from Iranian artists in the diaspora. I have opinions about that, but I won’t get into that here. For now, lets just focus on this next step.

I want to connect with more folks who are interested in financially supporting the arts. Folks in positions to either personally fund art projects and events or those in decision-making rolls at companies who have budgets for sponsorships. I’m also learning more about grants. Turns out there’s money out there for this all this community building and crap I’ve been doing for the past 20 years.

Who’s in my corner?

There is no roadmap to what I’ve been building and it can get really freaking lonely out here. If any of what I’ve written inspires in you any suggestions, thoughts, or ideas, I want to hear them. If you want to introduce me to anyone, I want to meet them. I’m in this for the long haul. If you’ve read this far, even if we’ve yet to meet, you’re probably in this with me as well.

If this landed, share it with one person. If you want to support the work in other ways — photography referrals, direct patronage, or just spreading the word — it's all at arashafshar.com/kanye.

Published [3/31/26]

Ben Haldeman is an engineer, explorer, and the visionary founder of LifeShip — designing pyramids filled with DNA archives and cultural time capsules to send to the Moon and beyond. A former early employee at Planet Labs, Ben left to follow a calling that crystallized during a vision quest through the forests of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala.

In this conversation, Arash and Ben look past technical specifications to explore the existential heart of why we document ourselves as a species. If the Burn is an exercise in the ephemeral, building a temporary city only to let it go, Ben's work represents the ultimate counterbalance: a community-driven effort to ensure the human story survives among the stars. From his hippie parents' Volkswagen van in Nova Scotia to landing a pyramid on the Moon in March 2025, this is an audio memoir of a man following the signs through ayahuasca ceremonies, dusty sunrises at Robot Heart, and asteroid missions - dedicated to preserving the seeds of Earth and spreading life into the cosmos.

Episode Info

• Burner Podcast | Episode B161

• Recorded at Emerald Village on 3/19/26

• Featuring: Ben Haldeman

  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benhaldeman

• Black Velveteen – DJ whose session was recorded live on the AirPusher art car at Burning Man 2025: https://linktr.ee/blackvelveteen

• Full set: https://soundcloud.com/blackvelveteennow/burning-man-2025-airpusher-on-the-playa

• AirPusher Collective – The art car and community behind Black Velveteen's set: https://www.instagram.com/airpushercollective/

Connect & Learn More

• LifeShip – Organization sending biological and digital archives to space: https://lifeship.com

• Planet Labs – Earth-imaging satellite company where Ben designed the initial camera systems: https://www.planet.com

• Firefly Aerospace – Built the Moon lander for the Life Ship mission: https://fireflyspace.com

• AstroForge – Asteroid mining company focused on reducing destructive mining on Earth: https://www.astroforge.io

• AstroLab – LA-based company building the Moon rover "Flip": https://astrolab.space

Places & Events

• Burning Man – Annual event and the "capital city" of our global community: https://burningman.org

• LA Tech Week – The default world collision point where Arash and Ben first met: https://www.tech-week.com/la

• Svalbard Global Seed Vault – The "Doomsday" seed bank referenced in Ben's work: https://www.croptrust.org/work/svalbard-global-seed-vault/

Key Topics & Concepts

• LifeShip Moon Pyramid – The cultural time capsule and DNA archive that landed on the Moon: https://lifeship.com/pages/mission-updates

• Asteroid Mining – The process of utilizing space resources to protect Earth's environment: https://www.astroforge.io/mission

• Egypt Solar Eclipse 2027 – Total solar eclipse event near Luxor: https://www.eclipse2027.org

🌟 Standard Boilerplate

About the Show Burner Podcast is an independent gift to the community, not a PR wing for the Org. We are an artist-documentarian project dedicated to capturing the stories and heart-centered truth of our global population. Reality is a conversation, and the conversation must continue.

The project serves the community through three distinct channels:

• Burner Podcast: The original traditional interview show featuring audio memoirs and deep-dive conversations.

• Alkaline: The DJ mix show and sonic documentation of the global Burner community—the soundtrack to your Burn.

• The Dispatch: A space for remote check-ins, time-sensitive updates, and direct addresses to the international burnersphere.

• Opening theme by Joman https://jomanmusic.com

• Closing sets: https://soundcloud.com/burnerpodcast/sets/burner-podcast-closing-sets

About the Host Arash Afshar (aka Miraḡe the Pluronaut) is an Iranian-American, SoCal-based artist and oral historian. He champions Artist Consciousness and views his mission as facilitating radical humanization through the medium of recorded conversations, written words, and photography. 🔗 Explore projects: http://arashafshar.com 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrarash

Support the Gift This show is a decommodified project. We grow only through your word-of-mouth—if this story resonates with you, please share it with a friend. You can also support the continuation of this conversation on Patreon. 🔗 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/mrarash

📅 [3/18/26]

The Soundtrack to Your Burn In this session, we welcome a true sonic ambassador of the global community. Born in Iran and based in Los Angeles, Shamiran is an artist, musician, and sonic selector who has become a mainstay at Camp YOUniversal, known for their Persian Tea House (designed by the legendary Gregg Fleishman). A community activator and human rights activist to the bones, Shamiran can usually be found on playa with the sound and production team for Distrikt and coordinating Woman Life Freedom events in the default world. If she sounds familiar, it's because she was a part of Burner Podcast's 2025 Pre-Playa Planner crew. This set, recorded on Wednesday at Camp YOUniversal in Black Rock City during Burning Man 2022.

Full Set: https://on.soundcloud.com/BaFGFP6y4cbj3yhRWr

🌎 Connect & Learn More

• Instagram: instagram.com/shamiran_sateri

• SoundCloud: soundcloud.com/shamiransateri

• Camp YOUniversal

• Distrikt: instagram.com/distrikt_org

🎧 Listen & Context

• Hear Shamiran in conversation: Burner Podcast Episode 159

• The Alkaline Archive: Explore a decade of sonic documentation at burnerpodcast.com/alkaline.

• Burner Podcast Episode 136 with Gregg Fleishman: soundcloud.com/burnerpodcast/136-accidentally-spiritual

🌟 Standard Boilerplate

Burner Podcast is an independent gift to the community, not a PR wing for the Org. We are an artist-documentarian project dedicated to capturing the stories and heart-centered truth of our global population. Reality is a conversation, and the conversation must continue.

The project serves the community through three distinct channels:

• Burner Podcast: The original traditional interview show featuring audio memoirs and deep-dive conversations.

• Alkaline: The DJ mix show and sonic documentation of the global Burner community—the soundtrack to your Burn.

• The Dispatch: A space for remote check-ins, time-sensitive updates, and direct addresses to the International Burnersphere.

About the Host Arash Afshar (aka Miraḡe the Pluronaut) is an Iranian-American, SoCal-based artist and oral historian. He champions Artist Consciousness and views his mission as facilitating radical humanization through the medium of recorded conversations, written words, and photography. 🔗 Explore projects: arashafshar.com 📸 Instagram: @mrarash

Support the Gift This show is a decommodified project. We grow only through your word-of-mouth—if this story resonates with you, please share it with a friend. You can also support the continuation of this conversation on Patreon. 🔗 Patreon: patreon.com/c/mrarash

Today’s been hard. I was up at 5am doing something very out of character: doomscrolling. My scrolling hadn’t even started at 5am—I was doing it at midnight. Then I took a five-hour nap break and picked it back up again. For a person who’s always been a very public proponent of having a selective information diet, this is particularly troubling. Because having developed this level of fierce selectivity is kind of the only thing I can attribute to being able to complete any task or project at all. But here I am, falling to my knees to the seductress of the algorithm.

The world out there feels like a giant email inbox. I keep marking items as spam to no avail. Trump is like that one email list I ended up on at some point that, no matter how many times I unsubscribe, continues to flood my inbox. It’s as if the world itself is an Instagram algorithm. When it senses that I’m turning my attention elsewhere, it drops new posts into the feed of my awareness to pull me back to the one thing I made the mistake of looking at.

When the normal attention-economy tactics fail, the algo gets more creative. As if it knew that the negative shit wasn’t quite doing the job, what sucked me into doomscrolling was schadenfreude—pleasure gained from someone else’s pain. I caught a video of the Islamic Republic’s security forces in Iran getting plowed down by a car. It filled me with glee. Then another where a police station in Mashhad was overrun by protesters. And now it had me. So it started introducing more content from various parts of the world—more videos of protesters and revolutionaries getting the better of their oppressors.

But the good feeling that comes from bearing witness to someone else’s pain is momentary. No matter how evil the tactics of the other side, taking pleasure in another’s suffering doesn’t end well for anyone’s spirit. It’s like sugar or a cigarette. It may feel good for an instant, but the psyche pays for it later. By taking joy in any other human being’s pain or misfortune, we’re borrowing from our eternal soul to enjoy some dopamine right now.

One of the many reasons I’m militant about where I place my attention is that I have a difficult time even seeing images of Khamenei. Just this motherfucker standing there—just a quick glance at his dead, psychopathic eyes—fills me with so much rage it can throw a wrench into the rest of my day and make it hard to function at all. I worry that people think I don’t care. But I care too much—that’s the problem. I can’t not. Then my mind goes down the thread of being so sick of these old men and their obsession with power. Why is it that the ones who need to die the soonest are able to hold on to life the longest? Cockroaches.

So in order to continue to function and get through my day—to continue working in the direction where I believe I might have some ever-so-slight influence on this material world—I need to be militantly selective about where I place my attention.

A friend put into words today something I’d always quietly considered. She said that the people who seem to complain the loudest about immigrants are often the ones who’ve never left U.S. borders. She put into perspective a frustration I’ve always held: that these people honestly have zero idea how truly bad it can get when we fall victim to fear. It dissolves us as a community, and we hand all our power to forces beyond our understanding. For those of us who have lived outside the American empire, we’ve seen it firsthand. First- and second-generation Americans have an appreciation for life in the U.S. that most fourth- or fifth-generation Americans can never grasp. They’ve seen some silly bullshit on TV and think they know a thing or two about the world.

Today’s been hard. So I write to process this global grief. I reach for regulation over radicalization. I hope tomorrow’s sun brings the warmth of new hope.

I bet we’re all running through the scenarios in our heads about what it might look like to just buy a one-way flight home. How it might play out to leave our lives and jobs in the West and go join the fight. I think we’re playing out all the steps and daydreaming about being in the streets of Tehran. We’re all thinking about our sisters, brothers, and cousins.

We laugh, and we dance, and we go to work, and we attend meetings. We smile and go about our day. We know life is precious and we must appreciate every second of the freedoms and safety that we are so incredibly privileged to enjoy.

Sometimes when we’re alone, we sit in silence. For a few moments that feel like a decade, and with a thousand-mile stare off into some distance, we ponder if we’re cowards for not dropping everything here so we can return and be with our people, as they courageously stand against tyranny.

We may remind ourselves that we’ve got families and lives that we’ve worked so hard to build in the West over decades. We remember we have kids who rely on us and that we have the next generation of our people across the globe to consider. We justify to ourselves that we’re probably too far removed from Tehran’s modern-day culture and city streets and that we may not have much to contribute to the fight to begin with. That we may even be a liability.

The moment passes. We come to our senses. We do what’s within our power. We send money. We amplify voices. We share stories.

You’ll not know it, but Iranians the world over quietly grapple with these inner demons every day. It’s simply a running undercurrent of being Iranian outside of Iran. Always has been. It’s such a part of our background running code that on most days it remains fully subconscious.

But it’s there.

It’s always there.

Like a splinter in the mind.

Every Iranian family across the world feels this, whether they’re able to articulate it or not.

Ask the internet why people left Iran to immigrate elsewhere and you may find an academic answer that it was some mixture of social and economic opportunities and ongoing political and social repression. Some of that is true. But mostly it was fear. A deep kind of fear in the bones that most Western minds can’t comprehend.

My parents and their friends did not dream of immigrating to the United States in the way many Americans might imagine. Most never even considered the possibility of having to leave the country they were born in. Most Iranians I’ve known, particularly of that generation, left because they felt like they had no choice. They left because they feared for their children’s lives.

My parents and their community truly loved Iran. They had a deep love for the breadth and width of Iran, her history, and her culture. Years after having fled, our friends continue to ache for her. When relatives visited, they’d bring back a jar of Iran’s soil and earth, just so we can feel closer to the land of our ancestors. Burners here in the United States may recognize this spiritual longing. Go to a Burner household and many will have a jar of playa from Black Rock Desert sitting on a table somewhere. A reminder of Home.

A totalitarian regime doesn’t thrive by tossing every single one of its citizens in prison. It wins by fostering an environment where we all lock ourselves inside a prison within our own minds. We tap out. We give up. The Islamic Republic was so effective at this that many Iranians the world over continued to self-censor for years. An ocean and continents between us and much of the Iranian diaspora fears retribution from the Islamic Republic.

This is why Iranians all over the world have always shared a dream.

A dream of returning home one day.

A dream of a free Iran.

One where our entire population is not being held hostage at gunpoint.

Perhaps to be Iranian is to be, on some level, forever unsettled. Tracing back to the very core of our existence, back to our pre-empire days of nomads, tribes, and warriors. Ours has been a culture that held on to our poetry, philosophy, and identity, through the rise and fall of empires, religious invasions, and world wars. Persians stood in front of bulldozers to stop the Islamic Republic from erasing our history.

We are a people in waiting. Connection and community are our blood. Hope is our oxygen.

And we wait. And we hope.

And we share posts on Instagram and watch the BBC. We get updates from our cousins on WhatsApp when the internet is working. And we go to work and attend meetings and smile. We get on with our days the best we can. We try not to let our daily lives come to yet another halt.

Behind our smiles and hidden inside the silence of our minds, we are forever holding on to that dream. Even those who’ve never set foot on Iranian soil hold on to that hope. So that we can all go home again, even if just to visit our motherland. Even just once more. To be able to walk the steps of our grandparents and see the places of our ancestors. To be among our people. To proudly share our history, leadership, and philosophy with the world without fear. To celebrate an Iran lit by the sun of our true culture and free from the blood-soaked shadow of the Islamic Republic. To walk hand in hand to a better tomorrow.

Welcome to the all new, all different (but mostly the same same) Burner Podcast Presents Alkaline — the soundtrack to your burn. Our new season opener welcomes back Piccaya, last featured in episode 90 of Burner Podcast, this time sharing one of his many sets from Afrikaburn 2025.

Piccaya is a sonic traveler and storyteller based between Brussels and Barcelona, known for deep, organic, tribal-infused soundscapes that bridge the spiritual and the dancefloor. This mix captures a warm, glowy, hip-shaking journey recorded Friday morning at Bubbles & Bass in the Karoo Desert. Additionally, let it be said that your Persian Podcast host appreciated Piccaya casually dropping a Persian tune into the mix.

Links

piccaya.com → https://www.piccaya.com/about

Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/piccaya/

Kosmozoo → https://www.kosmozoo.org/

Camp & Event

Bubbles & Bass → https://www.bubblesandbass.com/

Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/bubbles.and.bass/

Listen & Context

Full mix → https://on.soundcloud.com/mFvDaw1BqKK9lJOK7s

Previous appearance (Burner Podcast Episode 90) →

https://www.burnerpodcast.com/previous-episodes/episode-90-rise-of-the-regionals

Curated by Burner Podcast host Arash (aka Miraḡe the Pluronaut), Burner Podcast Presents: Alkaline showcases mixes by DJs active across the global Burning Man community. New episodes now drop on the same feed as Burner Podcast.

Explore the original Alkaline archives (Sessions A001–A066), hosted and produced by Navjeet Sarna: https://www.burnerpodcast.com/alkaline

My father passed in March, and the importance of embracing our most authentic calling was the most profound lesson I learned from his life journey. His rigid adherence to his interpretation of cultural norms, I believe, robbed him of so many beautiful things he could’ve experienced, particularly toward the tail end of his life. He preferred to be right rather than be happy. For his funeral, we created a video collage of photos of him laughing and loving life. I never met the man in those photos, personally. He lived that entire life before I was born.

Maybe the phrase “it’s never too late” sounds like a hunk of BS to a 63-year-old if it’s coming from a 43-year-old. As a 43-year-old, I’m certainly tempted to dismiss the advice of 23-year-olds as a hunk of BS. But to whomever needs to hear this: it’s never too late. When I was 23, I was having a meltdown and fully believed it was already too late to shift course. Then again at 33. And then again. And then I remembered how real it felt to me at 23 and then at 33. These days, I watch 23-year-olds and 33-year-olds have meltdowns about it all being too late, and I smile.

(Portrait of Duffy in San Diego, 2017)

But don’t dismiss the wisdom of the youth. While it may come from their naivety, that’s exactly what gives it value. They haven’t yet collected as many psychic injuries as we have. Many of us, on this other half of life, can get comfortable gripping onto our sadness and our feelings of defeat. And we are threatened by the idea of trying something different because that would mean that maybe we don’t know everything. And that’s vulnerable and scary.

But the youth are here to show us another way. They have access to the entirety of human knowledge and are perhaps able to interpret some of it without the added weight of our trauma and psychic scars. Yes, of course, they have their own baggage, and it is just as real to them as it once was to us. But through their perfect 20/20 vision and youthful glow, they have the capacity to see some of the same things that we are looking at with the light of a new dawn, rather than through the blur of our stormy sunset.

In Buddhism, this practice is called ‘beginner’s mind’. I’ve been meditating daily for 20 years. This past year, it took some doing for me to finally admit to myself that maybe I’ve been phoning it in for a while now. That I could maybe humble myself and learn from a new teacher. And I have, and it’s been a game changer. As the saying goes, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” The youth have the power and clarity to be our beginner mind. They ask annoying questions about why we’ve been doing it a certain way forever. They have grand visions about changing the world in ways that make us roll our eyes. And the more what they’re saying pisses us off, the more likely it is that we really need to listen.

My parents had been in a hurry to convince me that it’s too late for as far back as I can remember. As refugees of a Middle Eastern revolution and war, their takeaway from the experience was to not take chances—to find a little corner for yourself in the world and don’t bother anybody. And that all you need is more money, and that will solve every single one of your problems.

My interpretation was the opposite. I couldn’t help but ask: what was the point of escaping revolution and war and seeing firsthand that we only get one shot at this life if we’re not going to take a real shot at a true and glorious life adventure?

Their interpretation wasn’t wrong. They spent enough time on the roller coaster and just wanted off. For me, my beliefs simply had no recourse but to change as a result of having spent the first third of my life casually suicidal on a daily basis. When I snapped out of it, my realization was: “Well hey—if my options are this exact thing that I was completely attached to in my head that I identified as success… or death… why not maybe experiment with the other eight trillion possibilities in the middle of that spectrum before I call it quits?”

And that’s been the way I’ve approached the various chapters of my life. I am a terrible person to talk to about money, and my eyes glaze right over if we talk about mortgages or home maintenance. But I know a thing or two about beginner mind. It is what I credit for the fact that, on the overwhelming majority of the days when I wake up, I am happy to be alive. And I sit with the knowing that if today were my last day, I would be satisfied.

It’s never too late to shift directions. We can’t Ctrl-Z any part of the life we’ve already lived. We can’t just delete our history or our traumas. There is no way to rip up the previous chapters of our story that we have written so far. But we can start typing a new way to live. We can choose to stop using certain adjectives. We can stop hunching over our screen and show our story to a new editor for some feedback. If the person reading our story has not actually lived our life, often their feedback can have even more value. What have we got to lose? Some pride? Having to admit that maybe we don’t know everything?

I am so deeply grateful for my family, both chosen and blood. I am grateful for this perfect moment sitting at a lovely café. I’m grateful for words; words are my favorite toy that I never get tired of playing with and that I have infinite access to pretty much whenever I want. And I am deeply grateful for having learned that most important lesson of all: that I’d rather be happy than be right.

The dust has barely settled, and Arash is still shaking it out of his hair—and maybe out of his brain. In this post-Burning Man 2025 debrief, he sits with Rand Pate, a 20-year veteran and long-time camp lead of Bubble Lounge, to unpack what might have been the roughest year on record. From hurricane-force whiteouts and shattered shade structures to an unexpected birth, a tragic homicide, and the most international population in playa history, 2025 pushed the community to its edge.

They talk about the evolution of playa culture, the loss of Center Camp Café, camp leadership under pressure, and why radical inclusion sometimes has limits. Rand shares lessons from two decades on the dust and how Bubble Lounge held its spirit through chaos.

The conversation closes with gratitude, gallows humor, and a new DJ set by Todd Spero, recorded at Slut Garden in 2017*.*

Episode Links / Resources

• Bubble Lounge Camp history – https://www.thebubblelounge.net/

• Burning Man 2025 overview (news, weather, stats) – https://burningman.org/event/ Burning Man+1

• 2025 event incidents (weather, birth, homicide) –

  • Dust storm & weather: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/aug/26/burning-man-weather-storms The Guardian

  • Unexpected birth (Baby Aurora): https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2025/08/29/baby-born-at-burning-man-mother-didnt-know-she-was-expecting/85895911007/ Reno Gazette-Journal+1

  • GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-support-burning-man-baby-girl-2025 GoFundMe

• Film Dust (Short Film) – YouTube search: "Dust Burning Man short film" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQABv8jgVSw

• Film Ignite (Documentary Short) featured on Burner Podcast episode 96: The Wind Whispers – burnerpodcast.com/previous-episodes/episode-96-the-wind-whispers

• Film Charlie Goes to Burning Man – YouTube search: "Charlie goes to Burning Man documentary"

• DJ Set – Todd Spero @ Slut Garden 2017 – soundcloud.com/todd-spero/instereo-night-burning-man-2017-friday-night-slutgarden

• Burner Podcast Presents Alkaline – burnerpodcast.com/alkaline

• Follow Mr Arash – instagram.com/mrarash

Show Credits

Burner Podcast Episode 160

Recorded in Los Angeles 10/24/25

Host / Producer: Mr Arash

Guest: Rand Pate

Contributing Producer: Public Menace

Music: Todd Spero – Slut Garden 2017 Set

Theme: "Horse With No Name (Remix)" by Joman

Call to Action

Share this episode with three friends whom you'd like to talk out of going to Burning Man.

Use hashtag #DontGoToBurningMan and #burnerpodcast when posting.

More at burnerpodcast.com.

About Burner Podcast

Hosted by (mr)Arash, Burner Podcast is the longest running traditional audio podcast in the global Burning Man community. Independently produced and focused on Burner consciousness and topics of intracultural interest, explore 160ish conversations at burnerpodcast.com/previous-episodes.

Burner Podcast host Arash Afshar is an Iranian-American SoCal-born (and sometimes Vegas-based) professional photographer. You can learn more at arashafshar.com and reach out directly at mrarash.com/hello.

Follow instagram.com/BurnerPodcast and facebook.com/burnerpodcast for wildly irregular updates.

This ‘post-burn blues’ has been... different.

In the past couple of years I’ve been sorta nomadic. Dropped anchor in Vegas for a bit, connected with some spectacular community, and then ended up back on the road again.

What this Burn showed me was that I’d been apologizing for my wandering the whole time. My Iranian family is not super psyched about my lifestyle. They think those who wander are lost.

Burning Man has a way of ripping my emotional band-aids off. I realized that while my dad was still alive, I was still subconsciously placing pressure on myself to put a cap on this chapter. “You’ve experienced enough freedom,” he’d say. My brother’s jokingly described me as ‘ferrel’. My mom lives in a constant state of panic about where I’ll be next. I’m not blind to the logic of their concerns. Nor am I indifferent to them myself. Perhaps I’m delusional, but what they see in me as bugs, I see as features. I am disciplined in my daily structure; so much so that I can implement it most anywhere. That, I’ve learned, is a superpower. To be able to quickly ground no matter where one is geographically, is not a thing most people can do.

I want to see more of this world and connect deeply with more cultures. It’s what I’ve been feeling called to as far back as I can remember. As I type this, I’m recognizing how strange it is that I’d been afraid to say that out loud. What this Burn showed me was that I’d been apologizing for my life and lifestyle. Which made it so that I was doing me but I’d be doing it at 60-70%. It’s my life and I was going to live it anyway, but with a slow energy leak and a lack of full and complete commitment to the deep dive. So now, instead of forcing myself to ‘settle down’, I’m preparing to scale up. The events of this past year have demonstrated to me that, more than ever, tomorrow is not guaranteed. But right now, I’m plotting my next steps, which will be a variation of what I’m doing now, but internationally.

As always, I’m just sharing where I’m at right now. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Back when I was working in cubicle land, I had this quote from Terence McKenna pasted by my computer: “Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”

It’s getting harder and harder to tell what’s even real. The other day, I created an AI avatar of myself on my phone in under a minute that I’m certain my mom wouldn’t be able to differentiate from the real me. I don’t think I’d even paid for it; it was a free trial. I think in this next phase of life on Earth, it’s going to become the most important it has ever been to have a personal relationship with the people who are bringing you information about the rest of the world. There may be an opportunity here for Artists and journalism to merge. A space where people like me serve society by helping folks connect with other cultures. Rather than stats on a screen while we doomscroll, to be invited in to more deeply see humanity at it’s best, even if we find ourselves more isolated. An influencer or travel blogger who’s not selling you anything or slipping in product placement. Yeah I know - we all miss Anthony Bourdain, don’t we. I don’t know what shape this next project is going to take, but this is the direction I’m moving towards. Figuring out how I can use my skills as a photographer, interviewer and writer to serve this mission and have it pay for my life. I don’t know yet what it’s going to fully look like, but the working title I have for it in my notes is ‘The Entire Ocean’.

If you’e into raw, messy, and meandering talking head videos, here’s me doing one on YouTube about where I’ve been.

The Annual Pre-Playa Planner™

It's that time again, kids! The Pre-Playa Planner is the yearly tradition where Arash delegates all the actual research to his way-more-responsible guests. This year's dialed-in crew to help you mentally prepare for your adventures ahead:

• Esquire, founder of Bubble Lounge

• Saffron aka Sara Barnett, repping Art Support Services (A.S.S.) instagram.com/cornepeli

• Shamiran, artist, musician, sonic selector and Camp YOUniversal mainstay instagram.com/saterishamiran

The crew breaks down some of the 2025 art projects we're excited to see, rituals we're bringing back, new surprises we're bracing for, and logistics that separate the veterans from the sparkle ponies.

Burner Podcast Episode 159

Recorded in Los Angeles on August 2, 2025

📅 playaevents.burningman.org

🌀 2025 Art Installations: burningman.org/event/2025-art-listings

🎧 Here Shamiran's full set here: https://on.soundcloud.com/26hAaDXocNpuuuMIWU

🛻 Your Pre-Playa Audio Toolkit: burnerpodcast.com/roadtrip

🗃️ Previous Pre-Playa Planners: burnerpodcast.com/previous-episodes/category/pre-playa-planner

Contributing Producer: Public Menace of Bubble Lounge

🏹🪽✂️

Hosted by (mr)Arash, Burner Podcast is the longest running traditional audio podcast in the global Burning Man community. Independently produced and focused on Burner consciousness and topics of intracultural interest, explore 150+ conversations at burnerpodcast.com/previous-episodes.

Burner Podcast host Arash Afshar is an Iranian-American SoCal-born (and sometimes Vegas-based) professional photographer. You can learn more at arashafshar.com and reach out directly at mrarash.com/hello.

Follow instagram.com/BurnerPodcast and facebook.com/burnerpodcast for wildly irregular updates.

The fear I’m feeling is not of what you might expect. It’s not of political retribution or of the police state. I want to share some optimism, and the fear I’m feeling is of being piled on by my own fellow progressives. So I have to preface this with the most 2025 thing ever: preemptive fine print.

I get it. A lot of folks are either burned out from too much toxic positivity or can’t tell the difference between legitimate optimism and spiritual bypassing. So I’ll start by saying very clearly that the constitutional crisis we are facing is absolutely real. I have zero doubts that there are, in fact, bloodthirsty racists in positions of power. I don’t believe that every single person who supports this administration, however, fits that bill. I have some street cred when it comes to leadership and coalition building - you don't build critical mass by getting everyone to agree. You get people to your party when you make it so that there are a wide variety of attraction that will inspire lots of different people to come. A very tiny part of the people who show up to your show are there "just for the music" no matter what they tell you. And this is the reason why I don't outright dismiss people I politically disagree with.

What’s happening in our country is frightening and is very real. I am the child of immigrant parents who fled a violent fascist revolution. Whatever story many of you have in your heads about how this all might play out based on movies you’ve watched—my family watched it play out in real time. The things you’ve read about in middle school history books, we chat about casually at family dinners. Over dessert. Fascism is real. Safety is an illusion. Pass the cheesecake.

“Um okay Arash—when are you gonna get to the optimistic part?”

Here it is: while there are absolutely patterns in history we must learn from or we are doomed to repeat, it’s not going to be exactly the same. I see a lot of folks saying that and I think that's hurting the cause. Because instead of showing us that shit's fucked up and we should do something, a great deal of the narrative seems to be "you should give up and move to Portugal." (Don't move to Portugal; they're probably getting sick of all these Americans moving there.) Optimism isn't saying everything will be just fine. It's saying that if there is a 5% chance it can be slightly different, then the story is still not over. We’re still in the game. We can still write a new story.

A coffee shop I regularly attend has an employee who works his morning shift on the base, and then comes and works at the coffee shop. Needless to say, he’s an artsy lefty barista. We're at a local coffee shop where I'm editing photos. It's a vibe. Just setting the stage.

A couple of months ago, I asked him what he’d do—what he thinks would happen—if he got the order to turn on other Americans.

“Gurllll,” he responded—(okay he didn’t actually say “gurllll” but he said it with his smirk and a side-eye, and if you have any gay boys in your life, you absolutely know the look I’m describing)—“This is a different generation of military,” he continued. “They’re on TikTok. They’re on Instagram. They’re not gonna keep their mouths shut.”

Read: The Guardian: Troops and marines deeply troubled by LA deployment: ‘Morale is not great’

We chatted some more about the image the military has and likes to convey to the world - and then the way it really is trying to order around Gen Z.

Yeah, they need to follow orders. Court-martials are also real. It’s not like a lieutenant commander is gonna give an order and be met with, “Ew - hard pass. That order's sus." But the vibe around military culture isn't quite WWII either. That's what this particular service-member's perspective was. As an outsider, I felt like there was some validity there because with the little time I've spent on Tik-tok, I've seen lots of military folks saying a lot of stuff I didn't know you were allowed to say. But what do I know.

But back to our main, albeit scattered point. In addition to us living in a very different world, we do live in a democracy.

No, that doesn’t mean we’ve got clean hands. There’s more than enough blood to go around.

A great deal of the disenfranchisement I’m witnessing in my community, I believe, is a result of the America we were sold on in our upbringing vs the reality of the world we’ve grown to learn we live in. What I've witnessed can better be described as heartbreak, which is what happens if you once believed in something so deeply. But I guess I just never really had my heart broken by America because, as a Middle Easterner, we’ve always known America has tons of blood on her hands. We came here already knowing that we all do, in fact. No nation on this planet gets away scott free.

I’ve watched many Gen X white friends slowwwwwly come to this realization over the years as our access to international news sources expanded and we learned more about the world. It's like watching white Americans learn there is no Santa Claus over and over. Gaza, BLM, Trump...

The Right learned there is no Santa Claus and their reaction was to pick up assault rifles and demand someone immediately put on a Santa Claus outfit so they can go back to the feeling they had before they learned Santa wasn’t real. The Left’s just been sitting and quivering in the shower ever since they learned there's no Santa and then proceeded to question whether anything’s ever been real ever and what's the point to even trying. The Easter Bunny? The Tooth Fairy? I have a dream??

American Exceptionalists want you to believe that living in a democracy means we’re beyond reproach. Which, we've obviously learned we're so not. If you’re one of those heartbroken Gen Xers, I’m challenging you to hold back on just flipping the table over and walking away from the game completely. There is one advantage we have in our society: Red tape.

Watch: Service member joined an anti-ICE protest in Dallas following Trump’s deployment of Marines to Los Angeles, declaring: “We will not be pawns in the dismantling of constitutional rights.”

I know it's not sexy. It’s infuriating. It’s obfuscating. It makes you wanna rip your hair out. But it’s what you’ve got in a democracy that you don’t really have in an autocracy.

Our corruption levels are equal—but in a democracy, even if you’re a bully, even if your intentions are shitty, even if you’re doing a song and dance and don’t believe in any of this, you still have to figure out how to get through all that goddamn red tape.

While these last elections were playing out, I heard no shortage of folks pointing out that it's all a charade anyway. I'd hear this and think, yeah but at least they're still putting on the show to try to get your votes. In many places in the world it's more like, "here's your guy, STFU." To me, the fact that they still put on the whole dog and pony show is evidence that we're still in the game and that's not nothing.

We have red tape. We have layers and layers of bureaucracy. We have nonprofits and advocacy groups. We have branches of government most of us wouldn’t even know existed if we had a lifetime to study the United States. We have groups within groups who have warring agendas and uneasy truces - and for the first time, I'm kinda glad we do.

The strongman would like for you to believe he has all the power. He’s testing how far he can push. But the pushback isn’t coming from the next one down the line of succession. Godzilla is trying to stomp LA, and the pushback is not coming from King Kong. It’s coming in the form of 10,000 annoying gnats filing paperwork, writing articles, and arguing between different law enforcement agencies and entities about jurisdiction.

I gotta tell ya, as a former government employee who is all too familiar with bureaucracy, I’m feeling some slight pride right now of the mobilization I’ve been observing in the trenches.

The constitutional crisis is 100% real. I’m not downplaying any of it. I’m just saying it’s not going to play out exactly the way many defeatists say it will. Because I don’t think the Iranians and the Germans had layers and layers of lawyers and nonprofits and advocacy groups and annoying ass social media channels the way we have in America in 2025.

On top of that—and this is just my own personal thing…

Alan Watts described human beings as having “an irreducible element of rascality.” That playful, mischievous, unchangeable aspect of human nature. I’ve heard "proud heart-working Americans" describe how we are the most “freedom-loving people in the world.” The word 'freedom', itself, I've come to learn is quit subjective. Freedom for my friends to express their gender identities without persecution is experienced as oppression to others who've spent a lifetime barely keeping their sense of reality together. I think when folks say 'freedom' what they’re really reaching for is rascality. That rascal nature—that deeply embedded part of the American identity. I’ve spent some time out there in the world and I gotta say—I do believe Americans are up there as some of the most rascally people on the planet. While I’ve never banked on the United States for many of the things many Americans have, I _do_ feel this innate sense about my fellow Americans: If there’s a way we can circumvent, obfuscate, or simply troll… we’ll probably find it. It's not an accident that Burning Man was born here.

So don’t give up hope. Don’t assume the game’s already over. Every little thing you can do to contribute to creating more red tape, do it. Be an annoying gnat, buzzing around and poking everything that moves. Be ridiculous. Be annoying. Laugh and dance in the face of oppression; joy is an act of resistance. Trust me, my family escaped a country ran by cartoon supervillains who are literally infuriated that there are people in the world who are living, laughing and loving.

And let me say that I fully grasp that it can be easier said than done. I've watched much of this play out and succumbed to hopelessness, myself. I'm operating at like 43% of where I was before this chapter. But on the day of this writing, I had a text exchange with a friend and felt a surge of inspiration. So I jumped on it and rode the creative wave. I mustered the energy to write this while jacked up on morning caffeine and setting aside the tasks I’d intended to complete today. Maybe this piece inspires one person who needed it. Just one.

I felt energized enough to power past the fear that I’d be piled on by other lefties. The fear that someone with more education and experience would write one simple sentence and dismantle my momentary upshift of hopefulness. If you've read this far, and your instinct is to comment with "well actually," maybe try suppressing that urge. Not for me - my ego can take it - but think of how many other folks need a pick-me-up in a hopeless time and all they see is doomsday predictors. Maybe do it for them and if you want to tell me I'm an idiot, message me privately. I very well might read something terrible in a couple of hours, fall back into that sinking feeling and look back on this and think it was a total waste of time.

But maybe not? Maybe? The pessimist believes it's better to assume everything sucks so that they can be pleasantly surprised if some small part of things turn out better. The optimist is gambling that things might turn out ok and is willing to be wrong and look like an idiot.

Be an idiot with me. Maybe it'll all suck 5% less. Maybe that little bit matters more than you think.

For his first six Burns, musician and professional Las Vegas community builder Tyler Williams attended Burning Man the millionaire way — flying in late, partying big, and heading out before the Temple burn. After the tragic death of his friend and boss, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh, Tyler returned to the playa — this time sober and with a deeper sense of intention.

In this interview memoir, Tyler shares his story of growing up in the church, landing in Las Vegas with his band, and eventually working alongside Tony during the Downtown Project's legendary revitalization of Fremont Street. Along the way, Arash and Tyler explore the lows of Ketamine and the real highs found in purpose, community, and creative contribution.

Burner Podcast | Episode 158

Recorded on Bicycle Day of 2025 in Las Vegas, NV

🔗 Tyler's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tyler-williams-53089b20

🔗 Tyler's music: reverbnation.com/theoryofflightmusic

If this episode resonates with you, share it with a friend, and if you're feeling extra generous, check out BurnerPodcast.com for ways to support the show.

🌟 About the Show

Featuring in-depth conversations with artists, leaders, and visionaries shaping Burner culture year-round, Burner Podcast is the longest-running traditional audio podcast in the global Burning Man community. Ranked among the top 5% of podcasts worldwide by Listen Notes, it has been exploring international Burner culture for over a decade.

🎧 Dive into the archive at burnerpodcast.com/previous-episodes

📲 Follow @BurnerPodcast on Instagram and facebook.com/burnerpodcast for wildly irregular updates

You know how you know a movie is a good movie? Not because you remember every detail of the plot. You remember the moments. You repeat random lines of dialogue with your friends and reference specific scenes over drinks, which then lead to debating character and actor names. In this movie that is our life, the work commutes will almost certainly be batched by the month’s end. The pattern interrupts are what we remember.

When I began attending Burning Man, one of the more amplified bits of advice veterans would dispense upon us virgins was to embrace the principle of Immediacy. Be ready to diverge from whatever your plans were when the inevitable unexpected adventure happened to drop upon you. To say there are a lot of distractions at Burning Man is a pretty massive understatement. Letting go and surrendering to the experience is certainly one of the most profound takeaways from Burning Man—one most need, I’d say. Particularly if you’ve been lost in a daily fog of work commutes till your first Burn.

I took from the many distractions of Burning Man a different lesson. Burning Man serves as a stand-in thought experiment for life in general, and the distractions at both never run out. Ever. So after we’ve experienced the elation of a few pattern interrupts, what rises to the top and becomes more important than ever is purpose. That’s what happened for me, anyway.

The Default World is going to hell in a hand basket, but I have more clarity than I’ve ever had about my purpose and the direction of my work. I’d felt, since my earliest childhood memories, a calling to leave something of cultural significance before my passing. While I didn’t have total clarity on what form or shape this calling might take, it was more important to me than owning a house and raising a family. I don’t blame my immediate blood family for thinking that I’m confused, lost, and directionless, and I’ve given up trying to explain this to anyone who’s not interested in getting it.

There was a time that it upset me, and there still are times where it still does. But on my most clear days, when I feel most aligned with source energy and the words are flowing like an unobstructed stream in an untouched part of the forest, the feeling I get is one of infinite patience, loving kindness, and compassion. Sure, perhaps I have intimacy issues, trauma, or some other theorized label for why I don’t fit into the mold. There are certainly shitty days where I believe these things. But on my most peaceful in-flow days (which is most days these days), I see the judgments of others, I hear them, I deeply and intentionally consider and entertain them, and then I gently place them on a leaf and watch them float down that stream.

The world seems like it's going to hell in a hand basket. The distractions are, unfortunately, nowhere near as fun as the ones at Burning Man, but they still are distractions. The past couple of months I’ve been hunkered down building out the foundations of my presence as an artist, professional and otherwise. While to the untrained eye it all might seem like photography and podcasts, I have profound clarity on what my ‘job’ is as well as what my real ‘work’ is in this world. I believe strongly that right now it is more important than it has ever been to hunker down on our purpose.

There are forces in the world that want more than anything for us to lose our sense of purpose and fall in line with their version of reality. I believe that right now, in this time, the most powerful revolution is to dig our heels in, roll up our sleeves, and double—nay—triple down on what each of us feels, deep in our hearts, to be our own individual purpose for being here. Be it to be the most amazing father to your son, show up in the most dedicated way for the charity you volunteer for, or write that damn book you've been thinking about writing for the past decade. Locate your purpose, hunker down and put all your life force into it.

None of history's atrocities could've been carried out were they not executed and implemented with the compliance of those who claimed to simply be 'doing their jobs'. I can even see the argument that most if not all of the most horrid things have been implemented by people who believed in what they were doing. Politicians, soldiers, and militia members who espoused with seemingly unwavering conviction that their movement was and is the right one. But I don't believe this is the same as having an individual sense of purpose. It was not their own true calling that brought them there, but a submission or an allegiance to the desire of another, much more passionate manifestation. The desires of a warlord, a strongman, or even an oligarchy. No, I do not believe that an individual's sense of purpose, one who is most aligned with their own highest selves, would succumb to following the vision and orders of another. They are lost souls, desperate for a sense of meaning in a world that betrayed their trust, misinterpreting their life lessons as confirmation of their own powerlessness and victimhood. God has not given anyone orders to smite their neighbor. These are broken people who have convinced themselves that hate is the only way.

Whatever your own individual sense of purpose is, now is the time to dig in your heels and bring it into physical existence. Something inside you still wants to be born. Something yearning to be expressed. Something that transcends even the deepest mistreatment you’ve endured. Something that was there long before this world shoulder-checked you. A thing that remembers the wounds but wasn’t born from them. It still desires to be born. The colors and contours may have evolved as a result of your life's twists and turns, but at its core, it remains pure and unobstructed by our collective trauma. It’s more important than ever to water and nourish it. To double—nay—triple down on your own individual purpose. Whatever it is and whatever it takes. Because the distractions are showing no signs of slowing down any time soon.

🎙️ Take a listen at an episode of Burner Podcast from the archives. Episode 58, entitled Dispatch From Saguaro Man, was recorded in Snowflake, Arizona. We were in a trailer hiding out from the hail and lighting storm.

burnerpodcast.com/previous-episodes/episode-58-dispatch-from-saguaro-man

For over two decades, Anthony Bondi has been a living archive of Las Vegas' arts and counterculture movements. From his large-scale tactile installations at Burning Man to his massive independent archive, Las Vegas Arts in Print Media, 1990–2015, Tony has tirelessly documented the ephemeral and forgotten corners of creative expression in Sin City.

In this conversation, Tony and Arash explore the nature of cultural memory and the role of artists and storytellers. Tony guides Arash through an experiential journey into the hidden history of Las Vegas and its underground arts scene.

Burner Podcast | Episode 157

Recorded in Las Vegas on March 28 and published March 31, 2025

🔗 Las Vegas Arts in Print Media LasVegasArts.org

🔗 anthonybondi.com

📺 Anthony on Parts Unknown

🎧 DJ Set Featured: Tomothy Bee aka Tasty Tim

🎵 soundcloud.com/tastytim