The Serious Business of Play with Burning Man and AG1 CEOs

Right. My answer changes slightly seeing that the room is half 'I've never been to Burning Man.' I first went to Burning Man in 1995. I felt it, even though there was only 4,000 people, that I had been drawn into something that made me want to be a little different, to play differently, to show up differently, and literally to play differently. And I was at the Academy of Art College getting my master's in photography, and I'd seen photos that drew me there. And between '95 and '96, I then sought out the founders because I wanted to know what the [__] I just experienced. There was no internet. I went to the library to do that. Um, I actually then found myself in the middle of the organization and helped build the 1997 event and then so on. And as CEO, this has been since 2013. We created a nonprofit in 2011. We had been an LLC building the event.

And we saw that the future for what is the Burning Man culture meant we wanted to take the structure more seriously for the long-term survival of the Burning Man culture. And what I've seen change over time actually almost mimics my own journey. In 1997, as the internet came to life, we started hearing from burners that would leave Burning Man and wanted to know how to make it happen in their own towns. And the internet then provided that opportunity to give people an email address and started Austin burners and New York burners. So what's really changed, for instance, is that last year in 2024, 105,000 people experienced Burning Man culture not in Black Rock City. Wow. 70,000 were in Black Rock City. So it's eclipsing the event. And so that's the part that's really changed is for when I meet people. I met someone the other day and she said, 'I've never been to Burning Man, but I've been to Africa Burn.' I said, 'You have to now say you've been to Burning Man. You've been to Burning Man in Africa.' That's what's changed.

Honestly, we let a lot of the — it's very decentralized. So the only governance we really have is when they want to have an event that's affiliated, they need to follow the principles and practices. And if you're affiliated, your event may get named in our publicity on our email and on our website and that kind of thing. We're very cautious about what we do in America that would affect other countries. So places like China, places like Singapore, Middle East — like their social rules and values are definitely different than what you would see in Black Rock City. So we have to be super careful that we're not seen as pitching people using language or assumptions about global culture. And that's very active currently. It's like even internally we're looking at our language. And so I'm more interested in when it comes up locally, then that's when we stimulate what people are interested in and how they can come towards it.

The business is a nonprofit. We've been a nonprofit since, I think, 2011 we got the nonprofit status. We have 18 board members. We have 145 regular year-round employees. We have about a thousand temporary employees that are just seasonal for Black Rock City and about 10,000 participants engaged directly in making Black Rock City happen. But I like to say that Burning Man has 70,000 volunteers. So I hate using those figures. You know, on the surface, we're definitely not your average organization. We definitely lead and drive ourselves around the culture and our values are to be in service and to be supporting the culture. We don't really have product. We don't even use the word product. We don't use the word market. We don't use a lot of normal words in order for us to remember to maintain an internal culture of being connected to what we're doing and connected to what we're doing outside in the world.

Well, the principles were — so that those that don't know, there are 10 principles. The principles were developed in 2004 as a response to this growth outside in the world. We put people on an email list and they would periodically ask questions: Why do we not sell anything at Burning Man? Why do we do this? Why do we do that? And Larry — I would send Larry into the email group or onto the internet because I knew some of the answers, but he loved to tell the stories. And eventually he got tired of answering these questions over and over again. And he went away for vacation at Mazatlán, Mexico. And he came back with nine principles. And we teased him and we said, 'Nine principles? Why not 10?' And he came back the next day with his favorite, which was immediacy. And what the principles were designed to do was to describe what was happening and to do it in a way that showed they were not laws and they're not really monitored as laws. They're intended to be guideposts and they're intended also — you can create a Burning Man experience that they all need to be there. You don't just have one of them. So you can have communal effort — there's a lot of communal effort, but you need communal effort. You also — we want radical self-expression. We want people to also behave independently and radical self-reliance. So these are all meant to work together and they create a dynamic tension that reflects the society and the culture that happens. So we expressed them to give people the opportunity to understand, well, how do I embody this? How do I help engage with others to bring them to the surface? And the dynamic tension of them is the part that probably is the most interesting. Decommodification is really easily misunderstood. People think decommodification means no money. No money at Burning Man. No money out in the world. We don't like money. Why do people have salaries at Burning Man?

Oh my god. That's probably the place that we're most easily misunderstood at this particular point. Yeah. I mean, this fall we were put in the position of fundraising more than usual. And when people would read the online 990s, they're like, 'Oh my god, you know, how many employees and there's all these people making money and you're losing all the money.' Well, a nonprofit is still a business. And our relationship with money has evolved. And just like our culture and our intention out in the world has evolved, so has our relationship with money. It's easy to assume that as an event, if you look at through the lens of being an event, that oh well, we need to raise money selling tickets. But we've all watched the cost of everything go up. We've watched the cost of festivals, of conferences, of gatherings, and Burning Man wants to remain accessible to people of all walks of life all over the world. So, we don't want to just raise the ticket prices and say, 'Damn the torpedoes. Whoever can afford it gets to afford it and that's who gets to come.' We want the ticket prices to range for those that are artists and they're coming from across the country or across the world. We have our cheapest ticket is $225 and our most expensive ticket is $3,000. And you don't get anything different. What you get is the chance to know that we have deliberately set up a system so that you're supporting the opportunity for other people. And the conversation around money for many of us is not easy and in this past couple of years it's become a challenge for all of us. I mean, the world at the moment, and you're a business owner.

And this year was not the first time we've ever heard that. I think the first time I heard it really was when tech started showing up at Burning Man and that was really 1999 and 2000 and people said the tech bros are ruining Burning Man. So money and the question about money continues to come up because people are so afraid that something so passionate, so connective will be eroded and ruined by the involvement of money. In fact, that's what we work really hard to keep away from what people's experiences are. We want them to come and have the experience and be together and create this bubble to help the transformation.

Well, I think, you know, we are here to talk about play and we're wandering into play and, you know, play is a form of experimentation, of course, and also I'm in the position of nurturing something that is cultural and also something that comes from the community. So we have to be really careful about how much we play with our ideas. We want to actually experiment with things that will improve the access for people. We want to experiment with things that will make the environment obviously more playful, more engaging, more joyful. We want to not be afraid of difficult moments. And many people here that are burners know that it was a difficult year for various reasons. We've had difficult years in '23 because it was raining and it was too hot in '22 and then we survived through the pandemic like difficulties. And the rain was magical. The rain was great for rain. Yeah, rainbows. Rain at Burning Man. We were having people hearing like the National Guard is coming in and you're trapped and are you okay? And it's like we were partying in the mud. We had a meeting with officials that had 64 different agencies on, including the FAA and the National Guard and the governor of Nevada who said we've briefed the White House. And we're like, the White House? For anyone who doesn't know, rain came to the desert and this beautiful — a lot, well, a lot for the desert, and it does something very magical to this soil, to this clay, and turns it into quite an interesting slushy experience. It's a dry lake bed. So, you know, there could be 3 ft of — it could be more like — it's about knee deep when it rains off season. Yeah. And it was more like ankle deep. And the longer it rains, the longer it takes to dry, and it rained for about 12 hours. So, it took more or less two days to dry. And literally the sheriff told us to evacuate the property. And we were like, 'We're not over yet. We're not leaving. Why would you?' But you know, that relates to — okay, that relates to what you just asked me, which is, you know, what do we do, where do we experiment? Like we'd never had that situation before, but we knew enough as the rain, as the clouds were approaching, to move fuel near generators, to clean out the first round of toilets that we could. We knew to stage things in preparation. We'd never had to do it before and it was a little bit of an experiment for us even internally to understand. We learned a bit about our communication systems. We started using our handheld radios. Yes. Whereas people aren't accustomed to listening to the radio anymore. That was the primary source of community communication. And then we have 3,000 radios that are on different staff members. So we started using that. So we use innovation even in the process of just trying to get through a rain event at Burning Man.

It's funny, when we decided to do this talk and we talked with Jody and we talked to Carrie and it was all like play is what really came up. You know, you can talk about Burning Man, Burning Man, Burning Man, but really what is relevant about it and why is it important and what about play threads through our lives in ways that really can resonate whether you go to Burning Man or not. From a business standpoint, the joy of what I'm doing is fundamental to be able to keep doing it. And if we just came to the office all the time with the same little cubicles — which we don't have, we have an open floor plan — and we had to just buckle down and heads down, we wouldn't see and feel what it is we're manifesting for others. So, from a real visceral standpoint, we might resemble a tech company sometimes or an ad agency. I used to work at an ad agency. We have Nerf guns. We have flying monkeys. You have bananas in your background. We have on our Zooms — through the pandemic and it stuck — periodically on specific days we do funny backgrounds. On the day when ticket sales start, the ticketing department puts bananas in their background. Bananas. We have — That makes me want to gift your organization like biometric tons of bananas. We have something called cake day. We got tired of moving around cards all the time. And so Dave X, if anybody's been to Burning Man, you've seen fireworks. And Dave X is our internal pyro guy who runs all the pyro. And he's also our cake master. Pyro guy. The pyro master. Exactly. And he makes sure each month that we recognize the people whose birthday it is. And Dave does not just list a bunch of names off. He usually does a video and gives us a history — a history of art or a history of cake day or birthdays or pyro. So, he's creating narrative and storyline that is playful and fun and makes us, you know, you don't have to have it literal. You're doing spreadsheets, you're having meetings. The joy of that moment in the morning on Monday mornings that sets you up for the whole week. Yeah. Your, you know, brain power of being — you've got to start your week and it's like, okay, I got to go to work. But if you're coming to work and everybody's joyful, we're talking about cake day, we talk about art at Burning Man. You know, I really believe that we can't ever be too corporate. We really need to be — the organization needs to exist in a playful place, but we also have a lot of, you know, it's a serious place. We have employees. We interview people. It's always funny to say, 'Hey, you know, this is not like Black Rock City. There's like — this is real work here. We wear clothes.' You wear clothes. Yeah, we do have trash cans. Black Rock City doesn't have trash cans for those that haven't ever been.