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Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:
Sarah Holder: Aaron Sanders still remembers the first time he bought a ticket to Burning Man.
The year was 2008, he was an artist, living in San Francisco.
And he couldn’t wait to head to rural Nevada for a week-long radical gathering in the middle of the desert.
Aaron Sanders: So you could go into the record shop and they just had like a stack of Burning Man tickets and you could buy them. I think at the time they were maybe like, I don't know, 300 bucks or something like that. Like it was, you know, it's still a lot of money for me at the time, but you know, I was like, this is amazing. And then I, you know, skipped home, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, like I have a golden tick– you know, just really, really exciting.
Holder: And like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, Burning Man was also otherworldly, wonderful and weird. Tens of thousands of people – all camping together in a makeshift city. There was art and music, and biking and community.
Sanders: It was amazing and, you know, kept on going for another, um, 12 years straight, something like that, like right up until the pandemic.
Holder: But while the experience over those 12 years was amazing, Aaron says getting tickets got harder and harder every year.
Sanders: Everyone I know, um, you know, we, we'll set up like a, basically like little mini LAN set up with like several computers and all trying to, you know, make sure somebody gets in line to be able to buy tickets.
Holder: It’s like buying Taylor Swift tickets for the plebes.
Sanders: Oh yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah, 100%. It was really like, you know, in to where, you know, you'd go to the friend's house that has like the best wifi or like the strongest, like the widest bandwidth, you know, they can, you know, just because it could come down to like seconds.
Holder: And if you didn’t score a ticket right when they came out? Well, that meant you were in for another mad dash to find one secondhand. It also meant that if you had an extra ticket, you could always find a buyer.
Sanders: You know, like there's always somebody that was looking for a ticket or that wanted to take it, you know, even up until the very last minute.
Holder: Burning Man took a couple years off during the pandemic. And so did Aaron. He moved to New York with his partner. They opened an art gallery, which now also doubles as a cannabis dispensary.
And when Burning Man tickets went on sale earlier this year, Aaron decided to buy some. But then July came around and he realized taking a week off work and making the trek from the East Coast wouldn’t be in the cards. So, he decided to list his tickets on Craigslist.
Holder: What's it been like trying to resell your tickets this year?
Sanders: Well, I mean, so far, I mean, this was when David reached out, that was the first bite that I got, really.
Holder: Sorry to get your hopes up.
That would be Big Take producer, David Fox, looking for an interview, not a ticket.
Sanders: I mean, I initially put it out there at 1200 bucks for a parking pass plus two tickets, which normally I think the tickets are going for like $575 and then the parking pass is like $150. And so, you know, I was selling them for under face value, but not like significantly under face. It was more just kind of like, will anybody want them at this price? Like at this point, you know, I'd probably, uh, take what I can get.
Holder: And Aaron isn't alone in his resale woes. Every single year since 2011, Burning Man tickets have sold out almost immediately, until now. And Bloomberg's Ellen Huet says that's a big deal.
Ellen Huet: Demand for Burning Man is down this year. I think it's just like a really interesting indicator of something pretty fundamental about it changing.
Holder: Today on the show: has Burning Man burned out? I’m Sarah Holder, and this is the Big Take from Bloomberg News.
Huet: My name is Ellen Huet. I'm a features writer on the tech team at Bloomberg News, and so I write for Bloomberg News and for Bloomberg Businessweek. And I'm based in San Francisco. and I've also been to Burning Man eight times.
Holder: Eight times!
Huet: Yeah, I know. Well, one time it, one time it was for only 24 hours. So, but if you're counting the number of times that I've been to.
Holder: You’ve entered the playa
Huet: —the desert, yes, it's eight. I counted last night.
Holder: Needless to say, Ellen — like Aaron — has built up years of expertise going out to Black Rock City in the Nevada desert. Or, to use the correct term, she’s spent a lot of time on the playa – taking it all in.
Holder: What brings you there, year after year? What do you do all week?
Huet: I think the pattern that a lot of people who, who end up getting really into Burning Man, they have is some experience probably similar to mine, which is the first time you go, a friend brings you or, you know, someone kind of helps guide the way they tell you, “Oh, you need to bring this and that and here's what you might expect.” And you go the first time and you're just taking it in. And you're like, wow, this is so incredible. Look at this art. Like it's really fun. You meet a lot of interesting people. Um, it feels very separate from, like, the “default world," which is what they call normal life. And I think that's a big attraction for a lot of people.
So, you know, after my first year, I remember my friend asked me, he's like, Okay, now that you've seen what's there, like, what would you be really excited about adding to Black Rock City next year? And I built a like 20 foot tall swing set because I was like, Oh, I really want more swing sets at Burning Man and I want them to be very tall. You know, then wanted to put on wacky events. Like, one year we hosted an event called barbershop barbershop where some of us sang barbershop quartet songs and other people offered amateur haircuts and people actually came and got their haircut at our camp.
Holder: Yeah, like you, I feel like a lot of the people I know that go to Burning Man are really creative, really artistic, really like, backpacking or camping. But my other impression is that it's really popular with, like, Silicon Valley people. Is that true? What is its connection with the tech industry?
Huet: It's this weird overlap because there is a lot of Burning Man that has nothing to do with Silicon Valley. Like, there's a lot of people who come and they're, you know, they're from Germany or they're from LA or they're, it is just like, not why they're there. At the same time, spending time in Silicon Valley here, going to Burning Man is like so normal. It's like everyone, not everyone, but like a lot of people do it. It's no longer this like surprising thing.
Holder: And it isn’t just for run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley tech workers.
Huet: I, like, saw Sergey Brin, like, the first time I went to Burning Man.
Holder: In fact, Google and Burning Man have a pretty long history.
Huet: There are some classic stories, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, when they were tasked with picking a CEO, um, to take over at Google, like an adult in the room, they had a bunch of people they were considering, and in the end, they picked Eric Schmidt because he was the only candidate who had already been to Burning Man.
Holder: Why was that so attractive? Why did they want someone to run Google who had been to Burning Man?
Huet: I think they thought that going to Burning Man and, like, choosing to go to Burning Man was indicative of some, like, essence of spirit within him that they wanted to have, um, at Google. And, to be clear, they had been to Burning Man many times. Like, the very first Google Doodle from 1998 is actually the Burning Man symbol, which is like a little, um, man made out of two parentheses and an apostrophe. Um, and they had put up the Google Doodle to signify that, Hey, we're out of office this week. We're going to Burning Man.
Holder: Flash forward to the 2010s and Ellen says it was almost odd to not trek out to the playa every August if you lived a certain type of Silicon Valley life.
Huet: You have Elon Musk saying that, you know, if you've never been to Burning Man, like, you wouldn't understand it. And like Burning Man is spiritually basically the same as Silicon Valley.
Holder: So what's different about this year?
Huet: This year, something has changed. Tickets did not sell out. And this is the first time that this has happened since 2011. And this has just made things really complicated for people I know who are running camps. A lot of them bought tickets early and have extra ones, and they're trying to like, offload them and people are not buying. And then most importantly, the Burning Man organization, which sells the tickets, has for the first time kind of offered, like usually they just only sell tickets for like a two hour window at, you know, a few times during the year. This year they're like, “Hey, it's just available.” Like, if you want to buy a ticket to Burning Man today, I think you can. And that's basically unheard of.
Holder: Coming up after the break: why is Burning Man no longer such a hot ticket. And what does it say about what’s going on in Silicon Valley?
Holder: For the first time in more than a decade, Burning Man tickets have not sold out. I asked Bloomberg’s Ellen Huet whether anyone saw this coming.
Huet: There was like a little rumbling, but not anything like this.
Holder: Ellen says there’s no one clear reason why demand is down. But I still wanted to test a few theories.
Holder: I texted a few of my burner friends and one of them said, “What I'm reading is fewer sparkleponies in the way of the true believers.”
Huet: Yeah, I think that could be very real.
Holder: Full disclosure: I did have to ask Ellen to help me translate that sentence.
Huet: A sparklepony is a loving but derogatory term for someone who is new to Burning Man and exhibiting maybe, uh, a lack of self reliance. So one of the principles of Burning Man is self reliance which means being able to provide for yourself – physically, emotionally, all that. Sparkleponies might show up in, like, a cute outfit, but forget a coat. Gets very cold at night. And if they're freezing and shivering and need your help and can't provide for themselves.
Holder: Okay, so you don't want to be a sparklepony.
Huet: Don't be a sparklepony. Find a friend who will give you enough gear advice so that you can take care of yourself.
Holder: A census of last year’s burners found that a record number were first-timers! So perhaps there *were more “sparkleponies” in the mix in 2023, who ended up deciding once was enough.
Those newbies – along with the playa-hardened regulars – had to deal with another historic event last year.
Huet: in 2023, as many of you probably heard, it rained a lot at Burning Man, and the whole playa turned to, um, basically like a mud puddle.
Archival Clip - BTV David Westin: Nature sent torrential rains, the equivalent of two months worth in a single day.
Archival Clip - AP newsroom: The mud, the rain conditions haven't happened in over a decade so we had just the worst conditions possible. I mean you couldn't walk.
Archival Clip - AP Newsroom: I was never in such a rain before, but, uh, it wasn't that bad.
Huet: I was there. It was very fun. I actually had a really great time, but it was really stressful for a lot of reasons, like people who wanted to leave, couldn't leave. People's like infrastructure and equipment some of it got like wet and that's really hard to deal with, especially if you have to store it throughout the year. So 2023 was a hard year.
Holder: A hard, soggy, year on the playa.
But it was also a hard year, as Burners might say, in the “default world.”
Prices of everything from groceries to housing shot up and strained the US economy. And Ellen says that might be another reason fewer people than usual are springing for tickets.
Huet: Burning man's really expensive.
Holder: If you order online from the website, the most basic ticket to this year’s Burning Man costs $683.88 thats with taxes and fees. A parking pass is another $154 bucks. And then you need to factor in the cost of traveling to rural Nevada, and all the gear and supplies you need to sustain yourself in the desert for a week. It all adds up.
Huet: And so for some people, it just may not be something they can afford this year.
Holder: Burning man could be another victim of inflation.
Huet: Yeah, that's, that's, I think that's a big possibility.
Holder: Like anything that starts underground and ends up blowing up, there’s always going to be somebody that believes the good old days are over.
Huet: I think there's always, you know, there's sort of the joke at Burning Man is that like, oh, it was cooler last year.
Holder: But ticket sales don’t lie. It’s clearly an extra-off year for the event, with the mud, the economy, and the generational “vibes”... all possible explanations. So I had to ask Ellen straight up: has Burning Man peaked?
Huet: This is speculation, but I do think it's possible that yeah, Burning Man has become too mainstream and if you see a drop in popularity, it might be reflecting that. It might be reflecting people feeling like this thing that used to feel like an unusual or sort of like counter-cultural thing to do is just kind of normal now. Um, I wonder if it's just a victim of its own popularity and that, like, as with many things, it starts off as this, like, weird side thing to do and then, like, just, the more popular it is, the less it is that and, you know, what once was a signal about Eric Schmidt versus other CEO candidates, now it's kind of like I think, you know, at your most cynical, you could say that if you're in Silicon Valley, going to Burning Man is a good way to network. Like that is a very different scenario than it was, you know, 10 or 15 years ago.
Holder: But even if some people may be taking a break from Burning Man, Ellen says that like a phoenix from the ashes, there’s always a chance it can rise again.
Huet: And if it survives, I hope that it can have this kind of dip in which it maybe evolves into something new, or returns to some sort of roots.
Holder: And as for Aaron, who’s still hoping that a serious buyer will respond to his Craigslist ad? Well, he told me he has a plan to sweeten the deal. And it involves his newly up and running cannabis business.
Sanders: What we're going to try and do actually is, um, just tie it in to kind of like a promotional giveaway for our dispensary.
And so it's going to be the mother of all giveaways. We're going to give away two tickets and the parking pass if, for basically signing up for our newsletter.
Holder: Burning Man officially starts on Sunday, August 25. Ellen won’t be there. Her summer is already too busy. But if she changes her mind, I think I know where we can get a good deal on a couple of tickets.This is The Big Take, from Bloomberg News. I’m Sarah Holder.
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