Youth Flee Burning Man: "A Retirement Home in the Desert"

Discussion of recent data on Burning Man attendance trends, including a New York Post article and Black Rock City census figures showing a decline in younger participants and a rise in attendees in their forties and fifties. The conversation covers historical context from past events, personal experiences at the festival, and comparisons to other gatherings.

Additional analysis explores organizational challenges, succession planning, and broader cultural shifts affecting participation. The episode also touches on related events and movements that have evolved over time.

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins:Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. You, as somebody who had gone to Burning Man in the past, we’re gonna be going over an article and some new statistics. and the article is titled, Burning Man has become a wrinkled sausage fest for aging millennial men data shows. And the data is extreme. This article is, by the way, from the New York Post, and we’ll be going through it, commenting on it, and bringing in additional data. Right. Burning Man, the nine day celebration of art, music, and anarchistic hijinks in the Nevada Desert has been steadily shrinking since its 2019 peak. But the share of people in their forties and fifties is on the rise, data shows. The number of free loving revelers flocking to the playa I love they put it in quotation marks like you got

Simone Collins:Oh, New York Post. Come on.

Malcolm Collins:Where each year a city is built on bare sand and razed after a week of drug fueled closing optional partying. No. One of the, posts I found, on Twitter, because I was looking at analysis on this, was a guy who had regularly gone to Burning Man who said the number of attractive naked women has dropped 95% over

Simone Collins:the years. 95. That’s a statistic for you. No. No.

Malcolm Collins:It dipped to about 70,000 last year after peaking at close to 80,000 according to last year’s census of Black Rock City, the ad hoc municipality that hosts the burn. But the oldies are proving that they have more stamina than the kids in 2014. Oh. Burners under 30 made up thirty percent of the playa. The number plunged by more than half to 14 in 2025.

Simone Collins:Oh my god. That’s actually quite That’s remarkable. Yeah. That’s

Malcolm Collins:Oh, and and that’s an old age. We’re not talking under, like, 20 or 25. Under 30. 30 is less than 14% now.

Simone Collins:That’s really different from how I remember it.

Malcolm Collins:When you went, you said it was would be the majority. Right?

Simone Collins:Yeah. I I was very so as a young lady who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was accustomed to events where people were naked, and I was also very accustomed to all the people who were naked, obviously, being boomers, being my parents’ age, and being really gross looking. And then what really shocked me about Burning Man, which I attended, I think, as a junior in high school in 2005, was that the naked people were actually hot. Like, I I wasn’t, repulsed when I saw them. I was like, okay. Like, these are attractive naked people. I thought only ugly people walked around naked because that’s kind of the normal San Francisco Bay Area.

[Correction—it was 2006]

Malcolm Collins:It is the normal San Francisco Bay White people. Who lived in

Simone Collins:San Francisco. About, you know, like, being naked. They actually had one of the things that happened at Burning Man was a thing called critical tits. I think it happened outside Burning Man too. But there there was this thing where just, like, all the women would ride their bikes with their shirts off in big flocks. It was, like, it was a one once every time, but, like, it was delightful. Yeah. So many things like that. But I guess now, it’d just be like saggy flapjacks on a bunch of bikes instead.

Malcolm Collins:Did you ever walk around Burning Man naked? Or

Simone Collins:I did not take my clothes off. No. I did not take my clothes

Malcolm Collins:so it’s

Simone Collins:I was I was underage. That probably I mean, I there were, like, a bunch of naked feral children running around, but, like, I I guess I guess it would have been fine. I Our

Malcolm Collins:house is full of naked feral children

Simone Collins:to Have you tried to get yes. You have. Look. Getting our children dressed is harder than dressing a a rabid raccoon. They will scratch. They will hiss. They will bite. I’m not dealing with that. It’s like, if I don’t have to. Jeez. I feel like if we could just spray paint clothing on them, we would. Just anyway. Wow. That’s what we’ll

Malcolm Collins:be doing going forward. So that is that is the future. Spray paint clothing on in the morning. You have a you have a machine that, like, grabs your kids. They’re squirming and spray paint

Simone Collins:them down. Genuinely. Genuinely. I should actually, like, try to watch YouTube channels of pet influencers who, like, make their poor over medicated animals wear clothing.

Malcolm Collins:So, like, we’ve got, like, a dog washing sink. We should be using that for the kids. I had then I’d have to

Simone Collins:lift them into it. See, I can just kind of push them into the bath after I drag them because I literally you know what? Every time with Titan, I have to drag her. She’s smiling the whole way. Good. She loved it.

Malcolm Collins:A little too much.

Speaker 3:I’m gonna be honest.

Simone Collins:A little too much. Catch me, daddy. Catch me. It’s not good. It’s not good, Titan. Anyway yeah. So wow. So it’s older now. Because it it was notably young, and there were a lot of hot people there when I when I went. Yeah. And I yeah. It’s yeah.

Malcolm Collins:And they were naked. Apparently, there’s just not many topless women at all anymore.

Simone Collins:That is also shocking. I mean, now to be clear, like, critical tits wouldn’t have been a thing at Burning Man if women were always walking around topless. So it wasn’t, like perpetual nudity wasn’t so much a thing. One of the reasons being that you’re in a pretty extreme weather environment. Like, you’re you have to wear goggles and you have to have a mask with you constantly because the dust storms come, and you actually need to cover, like, all the things or else I mean, dust is gonna get everywhere anyway. But, also, it gets super cold at night. You can’t walk around naked because it’s, like, 40 degrees and windy and cold. So, you know, as you know from being in that troubled team camp on the desert, like, it gets super freaking cold at night, and you you need to try to survive.

Malcolm Collins:So to continue Yes. Adriel Knight 41 attended in 2023 when a rainstorm flooded camps and turned the exit routes into an impassable muddy mess. Famous. She recalls one young influencer saying, this is not like Coachella at all.

Simone Collins:First off, who’s going to Coachella? Second off, who’s going to and that was that like, there’s a I

Malcolm Collins:had classmates. When I was getting my MBA at Stanford business school Of course. There was, like, a big group of them that went to Coachella, and I were are you sizable enough. And I was like, what are you f*****s doing?

Simone Collins:I know. It seems so insanely miserable. Insanely miserable. I mean, I would say, a