Why We Crave Gurus: A Skeptic's Reckoning With Belief, Bitcoin, and Burning Man | Vikram Gandhi

Hey everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. For decades, various friends of mine have very passionately encouraged me to go to Burning Man, the annual festival in uh the desert of Nevada. that draws tens of thousands of people. And uh these uh passionate invitations and exhortations have uh landed for me as uh sometimes inspiring and intriguing and sometimes irritating.

It's uh people who really are into Burning Man a little bit remind me of that classic uh cartoon in The New Yorker from a decade ago that has two women eating lunch. And one of them says to the other, I've been gluten-free for a week and I'm already annoying. And that can really happen with people who get deeply into Burning Man. So today we're going to talk about the truth about Burning Man, but we're going to talk about it much more than that because my guest is a fascinating uh figure into culture. His name is Vikram Gandhi.

He's the co-director of a new uh documentary on HBO called The Man Will Burn, but he's done a lot of other stuff that I want to talk to him about. In fact, he he burst uh onto the collective consciousness uh in the early aughts uh when he made a documentary called Kumare in which he plays a fake Indian guru who uh is able to inspire a a real following conundrum uh that creates a real reckoning for him. So we're gonna talk to uh Vikram today about uh whether a skeptic can find meaning, why we're so drawn to gurus What is the truth about Burning Man and much more?

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