Burning Man: It’s not just for your stoner college roommate or your friend who doesn’t shave her legs.
Our CEO and EVP of sales (they’re basically the Barack and Michelle of Firespring) went to Burning Man this year, and here’s what they had to say about their experience.
Why Burning Man?
JAY: I have a lifelong friend who has been 15 times. He’s been asking us to go to Burning Man for a long time, and we also have friends here at Firespring who got married at Burning Man last year, and they talked about it as a life-transforming experience.
TAWNYA: And it’s been on the bucket list. I’d say it was in the top five things. And we moved it up to number one.
Burning Man attendees need to bring everything they need to survive the week on the playa. What kind of prep went into your trip?
T: It took an incredible amount of preparation. As a matter of fact, I was not prepared for the amount of time that it took. If we were to total up the hours that it took…I don’t know, how much time, Jay?
J: Years.
When you rolled up in the RV, what was your first thought?
T: Holy shit. Holy shit. I think that’s what I said three times. Holy shit, are you kidding? When they said an uninhabitable desert they weren’t kidding. Nothing grows and I mean nothing. Yet there are lines of cars and campers, people everywhere and a city has been erected.
J: It instantly felt apocalyptic when we arrived to Black Rock City—which is what they call the entire area that becomes Burning Man. You get through the main gate and then you wait in line to go to the camp area where you redeem your ticket. Every 20 to 30 minutes you’d move forward a few feet and then wait some more. But the things that were going on around us were the holy shit moments because people were getting out of their vehicles—writhing around with hoola hoops, strolling along with no clothes on, cruising around on their bicycles and wearing gas masks.
J: Lots of new friends.
T: Yes. That’s actually one of our expectations for Burning Man and we met amazing, amazing, amazing people. The people who were camping around us were absolutely fantastic. This one couple from New York flew into LA, got in their rented RV and drove. They’re in their 60s. He’s an executive with Canon, she’s a teacher. There were two other couples that had come together who drove in from Portland and they were absolutely darling. There were campers right behind us from California—
J: They wore Darth Vader helmets around the playa. Bikinis and Darth Vader helmets.
T: I think he’s in the film industry. And then on the other side of us, these two kind of hipster dudes that are in college that drove in from Vancouver. And they were all amazing. Every evening we all got together and had cocktails on the Playa, watched the sunset and shared our experiences from the day. We will stay in touch for sure.
So you use your real names? Or do you have Burning Man names?
J: We named our bikes. And then our bikes became our Burning Man names, without us planning that. We didn’t go prepared with 
Burning Man names.
J: I don’t know, maybe Twinkle Tits?
T: Let’s go with Twinkle Tits.
What were your Burning Man names, dare I ask?
J: Francesca and Mondo.
What about Burning Man came as the biggest surprise?
J: One of the most surprising things for me is that everybody who attends Burning Man can make it the experience they want it to be. There’s a lot written and said about Burning Man that it’s all about drugs and debauchery and sex and rock and roll or whatever, but there are people there that are experiencing Burning Man in completely different ways based on their level of comfort and their level of interest in exploring certain things. I thought that it might be uncomfortable for some people who weren’t going all-in for the whole experience. But the cool thing was that there’s no one at Burning Man that judges anyone.
T: I would second that. It is so much whatever experience you want to make it. That absolute celebration of self-expression is beautiful in every shape, form and fashion. I found that the experience in its entirety exceeded my expectations.
What were your high and low points of the week?
T: The high point sounds so silly, but it was such a random thing that occurred. Jay and I were on our way to try to find someone that we’ve never met but we have mutual friends with. We’re on our way to find Bill and there are art installations along the Esplanade and one stood out to me—there was this phone booth that said “Talk to God.” And I stopped and said, “Oh my gosh Jay, that’s so cool, let’s talk to God” and he responded, “We don’t have time right now. Let’s come back.” So we get to this camp, and we ask a couple people, “By any chance do you know Bill?” One man said, “Oh, I will take you to Bill under one condition. You must play God.” And imm
ediately it clicked that they had something to do with the phone booth that we had passed. They had a box with an intercom and a telephone set up and they can see right into the booth. Whenever someone steps into the booth to talk to God, whoever’s in this area of camp picks up the phone and plays God. So Jay played God, I played God and the people who came into the phone booth were just so appreciative and gracious. It was just so fun! And come to find out…the gentleman had no idea who our friend Bill was. It was all a ruse. That was the highlight. The lowlight was setting up our camp. That got very tense for Jay and I.
T: We’re basically pulling this material that acts like a sail, and Jay’s saying, “Why do we need this, why do we need this, we don’t need this” and I said, “Jay, this is what we’re doing.” It was very…
J: Tense.
T: It was tense. Plus, we had to foil the windows of the RV. We had to put painter’s tape on the seals of every door and every window because the dust just finds its way in and we were tired and it got dark…putting the shade structure up was definitely the lowlight.
J: The highlight for me was the first time we visited the temple, which is a massive structure, three stories high, and inside the structure, people will bring things that pay honor or reverence to people, situations or circumstances, animals, whatever in their life. They’ll come in and they’ll write something on the wall or bring a collage. In one case, a woman posted a little sign of her ex-husband saying, “Don’t let the casket hit you on the ass on the way out. So glad you’re dead, you made my life miserable and the lives of my children miserable, goodbye you son of a bitch.” She hung that inside the temple. This was a way for people to release these things that they’d been carrying, to release the burdens and the sadness, and on the last night, they burn the temple to the ground, including everything that’s in it. It’s a cathartic release of the baggage you’ve been carrying. The cool thing about it is every time we went to the temple, there were people inside experiencing great sadness or grief and would just be bawling. There was always a random stranger who didn’t know these people who would come up and embrace them for minutes, until they were done sobbing, then they would just separate. It was really moving and touching to be in an environment where people were connecting like that.
T: I’m getting emotional now just thinking about that space. It was so beautiful, spiritual and peaceful. There was a lot of hurt. A lot of grief. A lot of heartache. It took a lot of courage for people to come and share.
J: I would say my low point wasn’t until the night we left. We left on Sunday night to get a headstart on the traffic. 10 hours later, we had only moved three miles. We were up all night, driving 20 feet, stopping, waiting 30 minutes, driving 20 feet, stopping, waiting 30 minutes…it was agonizing. We later found out a minor was missing and they were searching every single vehicle that left the property. It 
turned out to be a 17-year-old girl who came with her parents and was hanging out with some guy that she’d met, and she turned up a couple hours later asking what was up. So we were all subjected to this torture of waiting.
T: That was the lowlight for you? I enjoyed it! Well, I did not enjoy staying up, but we had a lovely meal, we watched quite a few episodes of The Americans…I thought we made the best of it.
J: We did make the best of it.
What about the man? When do they burn the man?
J: The origin of Burning Man, way back 30 years ago on a beach in San Francisco, a bunch of people got together and created a huge structure out of wood and called it the man. And they burned the man to kind of get back at the society that wasn’t treating them right. And that’s what evolved into what Burning Man is today. It’s a little crazy now, because when they burn the man now, there’s a group of 70,000 people surrounding the playa in the middle of the desert, and so many people standing around cheering and watching as the man burns are executives from Silicon Valley, people like Mark Zuckerberg, you know, those kind of people…
T: Jay Wilkinson from Firespring.
J: …and it’s kind of ironic that so many of the people in attendance now are the man, but now they’re all standing on common ground, with the same sentiment, so it’s evolved away from this anti-establishment thing to building a community of inclusion and radical acceptance. It’s evolved. I think it’s a really good thing to have all of those people standing there celebrating the burning of this effigy. It was a really powerful night. It’s hard to explain, because you cannot possibly capture what it was like to be on the playa while the man was burning, or even on the playa on any night. You have to witness it to really understand the grandeur of it.
So, would you burn again?
T: For me, I think it’s important to share this journey that I went through while I was there. Wednesday, halfway through the week, I was thinking, this is incredible, this is surreal, I feel like I’m on another planet. This is an amazing experience and I’m so glad we did this, but I don’t know that I need to do it again. By Sunday when we left, my heart was smiling and I found I was saddened to leave. I was overwhelmed with the sense of spirituality of the community and there are so many things we didn’t get to do. I want to come back. Jay and I visited on the trip home and decided we need to go back.
J: This experience brought Tawnya and I closer together than anything else we’ve ever done. What it did for our relationship is the single biggest thing that I got out of Burning Man. I was really grateful we got to experience it together. Yes, we do plan to go back again.
What reactions have you gotten from people when you’ve told them you went to Burning Man?
J: My dad is a conservative, farm-and-ranch country, lifelong Republican and he said, “Every single person I’ve talked to about this
Burning Man thing tells me it’s all about the sex and the drugs. What were you guys doing out there?” So of course we were telling him, “There’s some good sex and drugs there, dad.” And also the nudity—he said he heard there’s nudity everywhere. Yup, there is. You can’t avoid the nudity. Tawnya saw more flaccid penises in the first 48 hours on the Playa than she had seen in her entire lifetime.
T: I wasn’t prepared for that.
J: So that’s what we hear mostly, the radical behavior that people hear and read about because they don’t perceive us as being in that camp. But we both have a true, genuine appreciation for self-expression and for people to live their lives the way they want without judgment. And Burning Man is a great place to experience that.
T: And people ask all the time, “Why? You? I can’t believe you would go.” And we have found that to be very interesting because that in itself is judgment. People have an idea that they feel they know Jay, or they know me and that we’re a certain way. One of the conversations we had while we were there, with this gentleman we were looking for, Bill—we finally found him!—we were all talking about 
how to bring this experience of art, creativity and non-judgmental celebration of self-expression back into our work lives, and our communities. Not the radical self-expression, but the idea of embracing being self-reliant and furthering that mental creativity. And we’ve been thinking about that and talking about that as it relates to Firespring.
Well, we’re all excited for the day one of you shows up to an all-team meeting in the buff.
T: Not going to happen.