Why Burning Man Still Sucks 2017-Podcast 616

Why Burning Man Still Sucks 2017-Podcast 616

In Why Burning Man Still Sucks 2017-Podcast 616. March 29th, 2017. Noon Pacific Time. Burning Man 2017 tickets on sale. Already did my ‘burner’ profile. 2 weeks ago waited on line to register for the ticket sale. Third year in a row. All out for tickets to the biggest party in the universe. Out in the Nevada desert. August 27th to September 4th.

Gonna Get My Burning Man Tickets!

Tick tock. One minute to 12 Pacific. Count it down. Here we go. This won’t take long. I won’t have to cancel the big client meeting at three in the central time zone. I’ll get on. Get my tickets. Smooth as silk. A friction free transaction. Forty-Five minutes later I’d canceled the meeting. Oops, tickets sold out. In Why Burning Man Still Sucks 2017-Podcast 616.

Scalpers

Quick Internet search. Stub Hub has tickets at double the price. Frustrated. Angry. Must have done something wrong. Maybe I should register for the STEP program like last year. Yeah. Or maybe call some ‘burners’ in Chicago. If you ingratiate yourself with the ‘burner’ community you might be able to score some tickets from someone who isn’t going to use theirs.

Jeff Bezos Party of 20? Come right in

Remember. Tickets to burning man in the general sale are 400 plus dollars and nearly 100 dollar for a vehicle pass. There’s a final sale coming up. Those tickets are 1200 dollars. What’s under my skin is the way Burning Man is sold. Over Sold and Under Delivered. Clearly there’s a lot of people who want to go and can’t get tickets. Fix it. Find out about my experience trying to buy tickets in Why Burning Man Still Sucks 2017-Podcast 616

We’re Hippies. Really rich hippies

This year Burning Man will gross 43 million dollars from ticket sales alone. They say It’s something you need to experience. A city in the desert. A culture of possibility. A network of dreamers and doers. Oh wait that’s the commercial. Reality is you’ve been waiting for 30 minutes for the kid with dreadlocks who can’t remember whether you ordered a strawberry smoothie or an emerald peanut butter…for the third time.

Not Radically Inclusive

Why Burning Man Still Sucks 2017-Podcast 616. Burning Man still sucks because if you’re wealthy enough to buy a thousand dollar ticket from some ticket reseller, which I am told Burning Man ‘doesn’t endorse’, you’re a ‘burner’. Part of a ‘radically inclusive experience’. Yeah. No. “A citizen of the worldview that is Burning Man. May it be encountered everywhere”. It won’t.

Drive a Maybach Motor Home? Coming out from Santa Rosa for the week to do some acid? Like the old days before, you know, all the corporate stuff. You’re in! Welcome Burners. And all your cash. A unique and distinctive culture awaits people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, but not us working stiffs.

Welcome To The French Revolution

Ten principles for Burning Man: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification (which basically means no sponsors), Radical Self Reliance, Radical Self Expression (although any and all media ‘projects’ have to be pre approved), and on and on. It reads like the French Revolution’s ‘Rights of Man’ Declaration. You know the one where the peasants are crushed and everyone ends up living through Thermidor II.

Stupid Rules At The Radical Burning Man Festival

And the rules. Don’t run that noisy generator at night. If your truck is old bring plywood to catch the oil dripping from that nasty crankcase. Watch out for the undercover cops checking up to see that you’re not trafficking. Be careful of your carbon footprint. Oh by the way, Burning Man has a bigger carbon footprint on average than the dirtiest of the dirty polluters. Don’t worry about that though. Nothing to see here folks. Move along.

Burning Man is a symbol of the possibilities of Silicon Valley. That’s why I wanted to go. A temporary society built on the ‘No Rules’ Punk and Anarchist pathos. Sadly the Burning Man approach to customers is basically ‘so long suckas’. So yes. Sadly, Burning Man is in fact a symbol of the possibilities of Silicon Valley.

America We Have A Problem

Yep All this tech. We’re On It! Really good at customer service. We give you an experience. We’re here for the environment. We use cloth bags. We Care. The truth is you wait on the phone or on line for service for hours. You can’t get a seat at the Genius Bar and they’re just going to tell you to buy a new iPad. No one cares about your problem because you’re not Jeff Bezos. Steve Jobs is turning over in his grave.

I thought these burning man guys were really smart savvy artists and computer geniuses. Turns out they’re just a bunch of idiots. Despite all the tools available they can’t figure out how to create an event with a seamlessly positive experience for people from the first contact and ticket sale, to the event itself, to heading home happy after its over. And then there’s the police state thing. Customer satisfaction? Oh wait. That would be capitalism. Let’s talk about it in Why Burning Man Still Sucks 2017-Podcast 616.

Yes, I know this is sacrilege but…Sponsored by X Government Cars.

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Podcast 561-Pacific Coast Highway

Podcast 561-Pacific Coast Highway. People have been asking for some ‘travel log’ podcasts from the Great Northwest Road Trip 2016 series, so in Podcast 561-Pacific Coast Highway, some travel log audio from Oregon’s coast during a storm, again the angry surf along the Pacific Coast Highway in California north of San Francisco. Most travel sites write about the Pacific Coast Highway south of San Francisco. On this trip I have driven Route 1, all the way from just south of Seattle, through San Francisco to Los Angeles right along the coast. What a long strange trip it’s been. Winding roads, crazy storms, spell binding coastal maritime towns and villages and breathtaking vistas coming down out of mountains. There aren’t enough superlatives to describe the experience of twisting and turning two lane roads in 16 year old Mobile Podcast Command laboring up and down, sometimes in brilliant sun and sometimes in the midst of fog, or heavy wind and rain, all under a full moon during these few days in the middle of October 2016. The biggest challenge has been getting out from under a series of storms that have pounded the west coast, from Seattle to San Francisco. In podcast 561 you’ll hear the wind and rain in Oregon, the surf in Northern California, and a little surprise at the end of the podcast for you midwesterners. I have often said long trips take on a personality of their own and you end up having to just go with the flow. Travelers who try to stick to a schedule, try to see too many things or get frustrated with the ‘trip’ are not good travelers. After thousands of miles through the mountains, plains and coastlines of the United States, I’ve learned to settle in for these long trips and just enjoy whatever goes down. This trip, the heavy rain and fog has been following me all down the coast, which has made it even more of an adventure. From pulling into state parks and RV-Parks in the middle of the night and hooking up to electric, to driving 8 to 15 hours at a time on the PCH, it’s been really fun and educational. If you’re looking for those romantic seaside towns tucked away along rocky coastlines, this is the place. There’s the reason they say ‘The West Is The Best’. Sponsored by Hydrus Performance.

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Podcast 514-Bob Davis Podcasts Radio Show-31

Podcast 514-Bob Davis Podcasts Radio Show-31. This week’s edition of the radio show, now heard Sunday’s at 4PM on AM1280 The Patriot in Minneapolis and Saint Paul with new affiliates as we get them through the syndicator, GCNLIVE.com. This is a great review of the week, with some new content for the radio show that hasn’t been in the podcasts. The mission of this show is to bring content from the podcasts back to the radio. This week – in podcast time – has been a difficult week, in the wake of the Orlando Terror Attack. The social and political debate has followed the path I predicted last Sunday night. Gun Control advocates on one side, people who think the failure is the President’s and it is because he refuses to use the term Radical Islam to describe the enemies of the United States. Again predictably, the same lines of argument played out in Congress, and across the board in the media. Most of what happened this week has been useless in protecting Americans from potential ‘lone wolf’ terrorists, and the fact is, little will be done as we have a presidential election, and then the inauguration of a new president and congress in January of next year. It will take time for the new president and congress to grapple with these issues, and form new policy ideas and formulate plans to ‘deal’ with whatever the problem is. The fact that the argument follows predictable pathways is as depressing as the event itself. We’ll change the energy a little bit in Podcast 514-Bob Davis Podcasts Radio Show-31, to talk about creativity, business and being an entrepreneur. If you listened to Podcast 513 it will be amusing to listen to the edited version of that podcast for the final segment of Podcast 514-Bob Davis Podcasts Radio Show-31, because it is edited for radio station programmers and owners, slightly softening some of the harshest criticism of the radio business heard in Podcast 513. Still, some of the points are applicable to any American business institution these days, whether it is corporate America, or even some elements of politics. Given the technology we have to amplify the individual, there’s still a lot of old thinking in business and politics these days. Sponsored by Karow Contracting and Hydrus Performance.

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