Episode 45:Kai Buys a Tent
How did Kai prepare for taking two weeks off of his business? What did Kai learn by forcing himself to make this space? What was the Burning Man like?
Summary
Kai recaps his first Burning Man, starting with a last-minute tent purchase at a Fred Meyer’s two hours from the gate after his group changed plans without telling him. The conversation covers how the burn strips status signals, forces adaptation to shared conditions, and left Kai with loneliness as a named problem to address back home. Nick and Kai use it to ask why genuine adult community is so hard to build once college-era spontaneous friendship is gone.
Highlights
- Kai bought a six-person tent for the burn, wasn’t told the group had quietly switched to smaller tents, and bought a replacement at a Fred Meyer’s two and a half hours outside the gate. His original tent, lent to a campmate, came back nine days later still in its bag.
- Kai says the burn’s radical self-reliance tenet works by removing you from your normal environment, which makes it easier to notice feelings you’d otherwise pass over. Being in the desert with 70,000 people and no way to buy supplies applies pressure that makes self-examination hard to avoid.
- Kai stayed at the 40-person camp Hammer and Cyclery and says Burning Man was the most intentional social experience of his life. The shared disorientation, everyone camping, running out of things, adapting, made it easier to connect with strangers than any setting he’d known before.
- After getting home, Kai’s re-entry wasn’t about money or the gift economy. It was the sudden absence of community. He says that gap let him name loneliness as something to actively fix, and he’s already seeing a therapist about it.
- Nick raises the church analogy: religious friends tell him one practical benefit of faith is inheriting a social network. He wonders how to replicate that for people who are neither religious nor Burning Man attendees.
- Kai says what builds community is shared intentionality, a destination the group is moving toward together. The in-jokes and relationships come from the journey, not from the event itself.
- Kai went in believing the ‘reentry is hard’ talk was hype. Coming out, he accepted that his first burn is unrepeatable, and that trying to recreate it would set him up for failure. He says the burn’s value is that it changes as the person changes.
Read the transcript
Like any good story with Ernie Man, we’re going to start six degrees off track and then we’ll eventually get to where we need to be. We all went to Cabela’s, a small chain of stores that sell shit you never actually need, but may need for camping or hunting. And we decided to treat ourselves because hashtag treat yourself. And I bought a six-person tent. And my friend bought a six-person tent. I’m not sure if I should use names or not. I’ll use names. Keaton bought a six-person tent. Claire and David bought a six-person tent for them to share, and things were good because I set up that six-person tent, and that six-person tent was almost too large for my living room. And I’m like, good, I will be comfortable at the burn. I’m going to bring a huge air mattress. And then, unbeknownst to me, Everyone decided to get smaller tents because they realized we wouldn’t have enough space in the communal area for all the tents. And so, on the way to Burning Man, I am told this fact. And so, I naturally say, Why didn’t you guys tell me this was happening? And they didn’t have an answer. And I’m like, so how are we doing the tent thing? Well, my tent fit. And they didn’t have an answer. And so we stop at a Fred Meyer’s. Chain on the west coast, like I don’t know what the east coast equivalent would be. Random big box store that’s not Walmart. And I end up buying a tent equivalent two and a half hours outside of the burn. And uh I was very sad that I did not get to use my gigantic tent. And part of the reason I’m starting a Burning Man camp is so I could use my gigantic tent. And yes.
So you still have the tent.
You didn’t like jettison it on the side of the road or anything. I gifted the tent temporarily to a campmate who ended up never using it for the nine days he was there. At the end, I was like, yo, can I get the tent back? And he hands it to me. Still in the tent zippy bag thing, covered in plya dust. And oh, yeah, I never ended up setting it up. And I’m like, awesome, it’s ready for next year. And that is the story of how I did a tent.
We spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about how we’re really organized and we try and keep our shit together. And, you know, I don’t know about you, but I don’t really suffer fools gladly, you know. I’m one of those people where if you want to hang out with me, that’s great, it’s wonderful, but you should like show on time and give me your full attention and do the other things that one would expect in basic human politeness in 2016. And I feel like you share some amount of that sentiment, where you expect a certain maturity level out of people, and you expect a certain. Set of outcomes out of their commitments and so on and so forth. And it seems to me like Burning Man is an opportunity to take that and I would normally just say set it on fire is like a joke, but then it would be a Burning Man joke, and that would be like too punny. You’re more. Let’s see.
Discarding the real world intention.
Yeah, there’s really it’s a It’s a splinter reality in many ways, right? Like, and it’s a splinter reality, not even just in terms of the sheer amount of psychedelic drugs that are circulated there, but more even in terms of the fact that it is a whole separate, like People are, you and I share a song that we enjoy. It is a very simple little ditty, only two chords, by a band called Sleep. And it is Yeah, it’s called Dope Smoker. It’s great. We’ll link it in the show notes. It’s a lot of fun. It’s very good. It’s really good. I mean, Pitchfork gave it like an 8-6 or an 8-7. So, like, you know, we’ve got other people backing us up on this one. It is a legitimately good song. The first two lines go as follows Drop out of life with bong in hand. Follow the riff-filled smoke towards the promised land. And I feel like at Burning Man, just everyone is doing that. That’s it. Bong or no bong, you know? Like.
There’s a lot there, man. To a point, yes. And I think, like, yes, there is a lot there within like the Burning Man system. What surprised me most about the burn coming in for my first time was. You really find what you’re meant to find while at Burning Man, and you gravitate towards that right group for that. And that sounds like a bunch of hippy-dippy frufoo shit, but Time and time again, all of my friends and people I met at the burn who came in with some sort of expectation or something that they needed, the burn helped them find that or find an answer to that. And it’s for me, I think. There’s that concept of radical self-reliance that’s one of the core Burning Man tenets. For me, what I observed was that the radical self-reliance really takes the form of Being pushed outside of your normal everyday reality, being pushed outside of your norms, being pushed outside of the expectations you have, and seeing what you find there, because it’s so rare you’re given an outside perspective of your life or of your habits. Burning Man forces you to adapt that because it’s such a different environment. You’re in the middle of the freaking desert with 70,000 other people and you’re camping there. And by the way, you can’t buy stuff. I hope you brought enough propane. It doesn’t. For it doesn’t fit your normal conceptions of what life is like. And so these external pressures, I think, make you see yourself in a clearer light or make you see Oh, I feel unhappy right now. Well, why is that? And it gives you space to start that process of unpacking who exactly is in my head with me, and what do they want? And how do I negotiate some sort of accord with them?
Emily Witt wrote a really good piece on the London Review of Books about Burning Man, and I’m going to quote a little bit of it that I think kind of hooks into the sentiment that you’re talking about here. The $400 ticket price was as much about the right to leave what happened at the festival behind as it was to enter in the first place. Still, though, I’d been able to do things here that I’d wanted to do for a long time, that I never could have done at home. And if this place felt right, if it had expanded so much over the years because so many people to so many people it felt like home, it had something to do with the inadequacy of the old ways that governed our lives in our real homes. Where we felt lonely, isolated, and unable to form the connections that we wanted. And I think about that a lot. I. live in a metro area of 11 million people and have been like systematically alienated from it for three and a half years. You know, the best professional benefit of Chicago at this point to me is O’Hare International Airport. And no one should be praising O’Hare International Airport in any capacity for any reason other than Tortoise Frontera, which frankly you can get in passable format elsewhere in the city.
Now, I agree.
Yeah, and I mean, I’m sure this must be exacerbated in a smaller town like Eugene, where you live. I don’t ever ask you if you’re lonely, but you know, like is that part of it?
That is part of it. I mean, within Eugene, that’s part of it. And that’s something that coming out of the burn helped me experience. And within the burn itself, it was definitely the most. The most intentional and intense act of being social that I’ve experienced in the last few years, probably in my entire life, just because You’re thrust. I mean, the camp I stayed with, Hammer and Cyclery, had 40 people at it. So instantly, I’m part of this community, and I’m the new kid in this community, and other people have been coming for. Four, five, seven years at this one camp, and then you expand outside of the burn, and you’re able to walk out and Make friends with absolutely anyone, connect with people, drive on a social level, go to any of a dozen different dance parties that night. It is intensely social. And on top of that, everybody is living that same experience of: hey, we’re in a radically different environment and we don’t, you know, have all the supplies and stuff. You know, some stuff is fucked. Nothing’s fucked. Everything’s fucked. Who knows? It pushes you in that interesting direction and gives you this intense social experience. And when people talk about the division, if you ever read any Burner blogs or Burning Man reports, people often talk about that division between the real world or the Burning Man world and the default world. And how re-entry to the default world is hard. And going into Burning Man, I thought, eh, this is a bunch of bullshit. And coming out of it, I was like, you know, these people are actually right, but It’s not that, oh, Burning Man is this paradise, and we don’t use money, and it’s a gift-based economy, and it’s nirvana. It’s more, hey, in your day-to-day life, you probably have a routine. And how often do you actually like hang out with people or see people or? Go about intentionally building those connections, fighting against the demons of loneliness that you experience as an independent business owner. In my case, it’s something I struggle with. It’s something I see a therapist about, it’s something that I’m intentionally investing in. over the next year to get better at. But at Burning Man, you’re just thrust into the thick of things. You know, you better have everything you need. If not, make a friend who does. And you get to experience that, and it’s this intense social experience like that. Loneliness was never once on my mind at Burning Man. There were moments where I felt alone because I intentionally wanted to separate myself from other people and just experience the burn by itself. The first night the burn was open, we got there three days early to help with camp setup. Monday night after they are Sunday night after they opened the gates and people were coming in. I did a nighttime bike ride into Deep Playa and I’m just standing there Nobody I could see is around me, and this 50-mile-an-hour dust storm kicks up, and I’m just standing there with it blowing in my face. Like, nobody around me, I can’t see a thing, and it was this Transcendental experience where I knew there’s this city of 70,000, 80,000 people being assembled around me, but in the center of it or in this part of it, I’m alone and I’m just experiencing this raw elemental nature of it. And a 10-minute bike ride away, I’m on the Esplanade and seeing gigantic glowy domes and art cars and crazy, crazy things going around. But there definitely is this. interesting social aspect of it. One night I went on a long tweet storm o about communication and the necessity of cell phones at Burning Man. I discovered I had LTE service. My friends had LTE service, and nobody was texting, and nobody was communicating. And I was like, ah, it makes it so much easier. But I was on top of this gigantic art structure. Just hanging out there. And this woman sits down across from me next to another guy. They start chatting. 30 seconds later, they’re making out. 90 seconds later, they’re down at the bar at the base of the art structure. And it just blew my mind to see people instantly connect in that way. And I had a few moments like that where I sat down in a tea house, skinny kitty, and I struck up a conversation with the woman next to me. She just was back from Paris. She’s about to move to Brooklyn. She got gifted a ticket and decided to come to the burn because why not? We ended up hanging out twice more during the burn. And just being in such a radically different environment, I think. For the right people or for the right mindset, if you’re entering into it with a, hey, I’m going to see what sort of connections happen, I’m going to see who I meet. The burn provides such an interesting environment because you’re already so outside of your norm. It’s easier to make those connections where normally you might be a little more introverted or shy or hesitant to push yourself in certain ways, but By already being taken out of your normal element, I think it’s easier to form those sorts of connections. What happens when you go back to your normal element? It took me about four weeks to downshift into it. I’d always heard people talk about, oh, you know, it’s going to be weird when you’re paying for money again. The weirdest part about paying for stuff with money again was when I accidentally got hit by the U-Haul trailer. When I was trying to get my wallet out of the back of the SUV, when we stopped at a gas station, but there was no sort of downshifting to reality in that sense. It was more. When I got dropped off at home at the end of the bird, after we drove back from Burning Man to Eugene, I was like, oh, this is the first time I’ve been truly alone without my friends or without my camp. Or without the burn around me in almost two weeks. This is weird. And being forced not to confront, but to encounter that. Not loneliness, but that feeling of being alone or that feeling of not having that community around me was very, very interesting because it made me realize, it brought it out into the light and let me see, oh, that’s something I really enjoyed while I was at the burn. That’s something I’d enjoy continuing on in the real world or this world that I exist in. Okay, now my mission is to take this want and figure out how I manifest it, take this need. Just like we talk about the difference between wants and needs, and a consultant’s job is to. Help a client actualize the need, I realized, like, oh, wow, I want that. Oh, wow, I need that. Okay, now my mission is: how do I build that support system? How do I build that social network around me? So for me, that reentry process was really Coming to terms with, like, oh, there’s not a bunch of people around me. This feels weird. And realizing, hey, I would like more people around me, a stronger social group around me. Okay, what steps can I take to build that?
Yeah. Yeah, so it gives you some lessons for how to create better communities back in your home. And there’s kind of a knock-on effect. I don’t know about you, but everybody that I know from Chicago that goes to Burning Man, they’re all friends with each other. The idea of a Chicago burner community is very, very strong. And It’s I mean, there are 11 million people here, so it’s probably like at least a thousand people end up going to Burning Man from the city. So there’s obviously it contains multitudes, but like There’s a thing here called Shiditarod. Have you ever heard of Shidarod?
No, but I’m already in love with it.
I know, right? Well, if you don’t know what the I Diderod is, it’s like a 3,000-mile dog sled race through the Alaskan interior, and it’s widely considered like one of the hardest sporting events that you can possibly do. It takes weeks. It goes from Anchorage to Nome in the middle of winter. Shy Nitarod is a shopping cart race in Chicago in the middle of winter.
I’m reading from their marketing copy right now: epic urban shopping cart race. Dress up, cause chaos, do good.
Yeah, and it’s entirely run by burners, shocking no one, right?
Like $25,000 raised last year. That’s wonderful.
Yeah, no, it’s really cool. And I think it raises like for the Greater Chicago Food Depository, which is the nonprofit that my partner works at. So that’s pretty dope. But yes. So point being, shy ditterod is something that occurs all year, and it culminates in like February or early March or something like that, right? So Burning Man happens in late August, early September. So you have something that’s almost exactly six months positioned away from Burning Man, which gives you the opportunity to have an all-year-round activity. With other people who at least the minimum qualification, and I don’t even think that’s that because I’ve never been a Burning Man and I’ve volunteered for Shaiditarod in the past, is like the thing uniting most of them is like Well, they’re going to dress a shopping cart up like a shark, and then they’re going to go and dress an actual car up like a shark, and it’s going to be a bigger shark, and then they’re going to drive it into the desert somewhere. And that’s okay. Well, if that’s your thing, you now have an annual community for that. And you can gain more genuine friendships, right? Like, how many of the people That you met at Burning Man, are you probably not going to talk to or know or even remember the names of until the next Burning Man?
A good number. But what I think is even more impressive is I’m in steady communication and contact. We’re talking like I have a Formal letter correspondence with one. I frequently text with two others. I Facebook message with another two. Connections that were people I did not know before the burn. And these are friendships that I’m planning on maintaining for the foreseeable future because they’re wonderful people that I connected with there. So there’s definitely a split there between folks you encounter at the burn who become friends that you see at the burn. But also, connections you make at the burn that you carry outside of the burn. And those fascinate me.
I mean, you’re going to not be at Burning Man for 51 weeks out of the year. Burning Man. is at best two percent of your life. Right? So at the absolute minimum, I would pray that Burning Man provides a Framework for engagement with the other 98% of your life.
Yep. Yep. And what I often see happen is it does that the camp I stayed at, they’re already organizing like, okay, let’s get together every two weeks and talk about Next year’s camp, what we want to put in place, what our experience wants to be. I’m planning a camp of my own, and I’m already having planning meetings. We haven’t even ended the year yet. And I’m like, cool, let’s get the camp layout sketched. Let’s figure out the roles we need to fill. Let’s figure out what this looks like. So, Bernie Man definitely does give. I always use the metaphor of a coat rack for some reason or a hat rack. It gives you something to hang These shared experiences on outside of the burn, and then you get to experience the burn and experience that manifestation of it, that launch of it. There were so many times. During the burn, where I was sucked into business mind and seeing market opportunities around me. And I think that’s an entire other podcast episode. But what amazed me is the parallels between the launching of a camp and the launching of a product. Every I mean uh the common mantra at Burning Man is everything’s fucked and nothing’s fucked. And in business I see that happen again and again. Like You do a launch, and yeah, things are going to be fucked. It’s not going to work perfectly. We ran out of gas on day five, and then we discovered there was a camp that was gifting gas away on day six. And we were like, everything’s fucked. We have no gas. Nothing’s fucked. We have gas. It’s it’s This ongoing process. But outside of the burn, it’s connecting with that community and figuring out what you want to invest your time in to maintain these connections and then Take your experience at the burn next year to the next level? Is it creating an art car, creating a camp, going in intentionally with some friends, figuring out a way to push yourself? in a new direction or in some way that’s new and different and going with a different crew to see what that brings out in you. But I think there’s so many ways it can help you grow as a person just by experiencing it and stepping outside of the normal for a little bit.
Yeah. Yeah, it’s we all need our own escapes, right? Like, I think um You know, some people have sports, some people have church, some people have vacation, and You have burning man now. You know, like we all need some way to do that. What I’m more interested in is kind of, and I’m going to keep returning to this because it’s just. Catnip for me as an interviewer is like the community aspects of it because I think that it is I have roughly the amount of religion of a mosquito, just to be abundantly clear, but I talk with a lot of my friends and colleagues who are religious and They say that one of the big benefits of their religion is not just the spiritual aspect, but the fact that they basically inherit a social network around their church and around the community that comes out of that. And I wonder about what it takes, especially later in life, now that I’m like thirty-five and going to dinner parties for a living, basically. What it takes to create a more like open and convivial framework for people who May not be religious for one and may not be going to Burning Man for another. Like, how do you how does that get fomented, right? Like, Burning Man I would argue Burning Man existed as a concept before the idea of inheriting a community around Burning Man did. People were Burning Men in the Presidio of San Francisco, and it was like 10 people in a drum circle. Back when San Francisco wasn’t plundered by a bunch of pirates. You know, nobody was going in and doing that and thinking, well, I’m going to make a lot of new friends at this. So how did that come about? And how does it come about in other communities? And this is just stuff that I constantly think about. Like, I don’t have an easy answer for it, but these are the sorts of things that I contemplate, especially in a city which is historically extremely not conducive to such activities. Yeah. And trying to swim in that, you know?
It’s a pair of very good questions. And I’m. I’ve started to ask myself those same questions as I work on more projects that have a community aspect to them. And looking at Burning Man, Just almost as like a study in this, what I see stand out is when there’s some intentionality, some Something that the group collectively is pointing towards or destination they’re working towards, that’s what really rallies people together and helps build that community because it’s in the shared journey to that destination. That you develop your in-jokes, that you develop your relationships, that you develop the things you don’t realize make a community until you’re in a community that doesn’t have them. And I know that seems like such a weird thing to say, but I think you understand what I’m saying. It’s so true.
It’s so true. Yeah, it’s one of those things you end up taking very much for granted. I don’t have anything else other than full-throated agreement. You know, man, I was talking with a couple of friends of mine at a fire pit like two or three nights ago, and one of them was citing like we were talking about Doritos, of all things, and we were talking about like the original flavors of Doritos, and it was so funny. And we were like going through Wikipedia and talking about. And they said, like, you know, it used to be that all you needed to do in college when you were in a dorm was throw your door open, stick a doorstop wedge in, and open a bag of cool ranch Doritos. And then people would just start walking into your room and talking to you. And one person was like, Yeah, man, I wish I had done something better than Doritos. And another person was like, I’m so glad I have a door that can close now and I can just ignore society and not have to do the Doritos thing. And I’m like, I’m not. You know, I mean, I’m throwing a fire pit, so obviously I’m like welcoming a lot of people into my home, but if like some rando showed up in my house Or in my backyard and asked to be at the fire pit, there would be an immediate snap judgment on who they are and whether they know anybody there. And there would be a measure of suspicion. And that actually kind of completely sucks. Like, that is a fundamentally pessimistic way of viewing others and a very like closed off way of perceiving the world. And I blame myself in part because of this, but like I would rather have a community that reminded me more. Of my like years in college. And that’s going to sound so retrograde to be like, well, I wish I was back in college To be clear, I wish I was not making the same mistakes as I was in college or having the same cocktail of horrendous emotions as I was in college, but just the way that new relationships came about. And the way that people just went out with one another and engaged in that sort of social activity, that is. When you get to be 35 years old, kind of a dead concept.
Oh, gosh. Yeah. I mean, I’m sitting at 30 and experiencing the same thing where I miss those days in undergrad when It was easy to, oh, we’re in a class together. Great. Oh, we’re part of the same group together. Let’s hang out. And a friendship could just blossom from that. And That was something that I experienced multiple times at Burning Man and really want to carry back into my everyday life. I think it’s. It’s challenging because I think both sides of that, the person who’s coming in and the universal you. Need to be primed to accept somebody new and or prime for that type of spontaneous friendship or spontaneous relationship that could blossom out of a chance encounter. And if one half isn’t, it just won’t fire. But the great thing about Burning Man is People are coming in sleep deprived on who knows what substance. I can’t remember where I’m camping. Hey, could I borrow some water? I don’t know where my bike is. You’re all out of, not out of sorts, but out of your norm. And I think it’s similar to, I think, back to like my freshman year in college where half those things applied. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what’s going on. You seem cool, let’s hang out. And a friendship blossoms from that. And you happen to be sitting on top of a three-story tall art installation that’s covered in couches. And who knows what’s going to happen next? It’s a leveler, right?
Like everyone is dealing with effectively the same set of circumstances, except for the pirates who come in and get like air-conditioned tents, but they don’t count.
No, that’s a great way to frame it that. Burning Man at its core acts as this leveler where you’re going to show up and you could be having a conversation with somebody, and you don’t know: did this person spend their last dollar to buy the ticket to come to Burning Man? Is this person worth seven figures? All you know is they’re dressed up in some crazy outfit and they’re talking about a dance party they went to last night on an art car, and that serves as the great equalizer, that serves as the leveler. There’s no judgment. There’s no real social signals or status signals that are coming out around that. It’s, oh, you’re cool and we’re having a fun conversation. Do you want to meet up in a couple hours at three and I and see what’s happening tonight?
Yeah, I could tell you, man, I could count the number of times that’s happened to me in a professional context in one hand and I would have fingers left. Where I went to like a conference and I felt like it was a leveler on, and it brought like, you know, schmoes who have no idea what they’re doing with their jobs like me up and like I don’t know, people like John Meda who ran RISD or Ted Nelson who invented hypertext, they get brought down a little bit and everybody comes away learning something, right? And nobody ever felt like they were punching up or down, but like I ended up being in a room where I was breathing the same oxygen as Ted Nelson, which is completely cracked out and nuts. And I’m very gratified about it. But, like, again, maybe twice, thrice that’s ever happened in my life. And they can’t be replicated.
No. You know? No. No. It’s hard to find that community and find that environment. And one of the crazy things that I had to accept at Birdie Cman is The Burning Man I experienced will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, 10 evers in a row happen again. That to cling to that as the error experience of Burning Man and try to replicate it in any way is only to set myself up for defeat. So. Coming into that burn and going out of the burn, I firmly locked into my mind: hey, this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I could have another once-in-a-lifetime experience. Experience at Burning Man, but next year’s burn is going to be very different from this burn because I’ll have changed, the other people will have changed, my intentions will have changed, my experience will have changed. And that’s okay. And for me, at least, Burning Man represents that change. And the burn is going to continue on. It’s going to be different. There’s going to be people I don’t like. There’s going to be decisions made at levels above me that I don’t like. But it’s okay because the burn is change.