Under the canopy of a massive geodesic dome in the desert, a 500-foot-long hot dog blasted off into space. 

A sea of revelers, many clad in blue fabric patterned with red doughnuts, flailed around like contortionists to a funky rendition of Richard Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” I was among them (sans doughnut outfit), screaming and laughing and crying and moving with the involuntary spasms of someone being exorcized, fully sober but feeling as spacey as the hot dog itself. 

The man to my right tapped me on the shoulder. Earlier in the weekend, my friend and I had nicknamed him “the Wook Elf” because his mischievous grin and limitless supply of trinkets rendered him a delightful embodiment of the classic festival participant (opens in new tab). He pulled one of those trinkets out of his tie-dyed satchel and pressed it into my palm: a sweaty sticker that said “Animal in heat.” I stuck it onto my denim shorts and hugged him, my new best friend of 30 seconds, as the hot dog wove its way through floating asteroids made out of movie popcorn.

Almost nobody inside the Las Vegas Sphere was on their phone — 20,000 humans packed into the world’s most technologically advanced bubble, and we were all utterly, absurdly, communally present. 

When Phish announced they’d be returning to the Sphere for a nine-show residency this spring, I said what I usually say when the 43-year-old jam band I’ve loved since early high school unveils something flashy: “I’m definitely not going.” I had a good excuse this time; my first book (opens in new tab) would be released a month prior, and my demanding, 10-city tour overlapped with the shows. 

I decided to enter the lottery anyway, because I never win the lottery. Before the general sale opens for any Phish event, raving lunatics such as myself can blindly enter their credit card information on phish.com (opens in new tab) for the possible privilege of a randomly selected early-access ticket and a $700 charge. 

When I won the right to buy two prime seats to shows 4 through 6 at the Sphere, I took it as a sign from the universe. When a friend wound up with an extra ticket to shows 1 through 3, it was another sign. When I found a really good hotel deal for shows 7 through 9, the universe was basically commanding me to go to the whole run. (Somehow, whenever I say I’m skipping Phish, the cosmos have other plans for me. I’m not one to tempt fate.) 

I’ve always loved a good cult — childhood summer camp, my college sorority, the Mission communal house (opens in new tab) I lived in for seven years — and Phish is no exception. I love our shared, secret language and call-and-response lyrics: I get goosebumps every time I shout, “and we love to take a bath!” with my 10,000 closest friends. I love our sacred symbols, like the red doughnut pattern (a nod to the muumuu drummer Jon Fishman wears every performance) and the church made entirely of cardboard. I love our mythological tales of lizards and malevolent dictators named Wilson. As someone deeply immersed in the performative quirkiness of San Francisco’s social scene, I love how none of Phish’s whimsy is forced.

It’s a phenomenon that feels rare and almost sacred in 2026, when AI has infiltrated everything from our therapy sessions (opens in new tab) to our trips to the grocery store (opens in new tab). What MIT Technology Review editor Mat Honan called “the era of AI malaise (opens in new tab)” has tainted our experiences of the present and our excitement for the future, especially in the Bay Area, the forefront of the race to replace most of humanity’s basic skills. 

Yet in spite of the Sphere’s haptic seats, 167,000 speakers, and custom-developed 18K camera system, the venue wouldn’t exist without raw, unrestrained humans at its core: humans who shout along to the lyrics, humans who snap at you for dancing too close to their personal space, humans who really could have used more deodorant, and, in the case of Phish, four particularly virtuosic humans who produce the music itself.

Not even the most advanced algorithm at the most cutting-edge AI lab could replicate something close to this kind of magic.

I come by my ancestral jam band heritage honestly: I’m the daughter of a devout Deadhead and native to the city that birthed the Summer of Love. In 2009, my brother was a student at the University of Vermont, where Phish originated, when the band announced it was getting back together after a five-year hiatus. My father, who had yet to find a viable successor to the Grateful Dead since Jerry Garcia’s death 14 years earlier, suggested the three of us catch one of Phish’s Madison Square Garden shows together.

For years, Phish was a special tradition I shared with only my dad and brother, an adhesive that bonded our family in the wake of my parents’ divorce. I considered myself a casual fan, of the “Sure, I love Phish, I’ll catch them when they come through town” variety. By the time I got sober in 2019, I’d seen them 11 times — a lot for a normal band with normal followers, but a paltry tab by Phish-head standards.

You’d think sobriety would alienate me from the Phish bowl, which is overflowing with tripping hippies and drunk revelers. But the opposite happened. Over the past seven years, my devotion has become almost religious. I’ve discovered that, during their shows, I can access a high that I never reached when I was addicted to drugs and alcohol. 

If substances were an escape from myself, Phish forced me to drop in more deeply. Surrounded by a community of people doing nothing but dancing and grooving and vibing, I could exist only in the present moment. The New Yorker, in a profile of the band published last year, likened the phenomenon (opens in new tab) to “bliss more commonly associated with Hindu Bhajans or Gregorian chants.”

Trey Anastasio, Phish’s frontman, is something of a sobriety folk hero himself. After the band split up in 2004 — largely due to his struggles with substance abuse — he famously entered recovery, then reunited the group a few years later. In 2024, Anastasio founded Divided Sky (opens in new tab), a residential rehab center in Vermont run by the drug court case manager (opens in new tab) who helped him get clean. As part of my book tour, I held an event in Vegas during the second Sphere weekend (another sign from the universe, obviously) in which all proceeds benefited Divided Sky. 

At a Phish show, Anastasio has said, people have no choice but to “come out the end having shared something.” This insular world of weirdos helps me satisfy that pesky human desire to belong — a feeling AI companions can’t replicate. The Sphere was no exception: I bumped into several SF-based pals on flights, watched the fourth show alongside my brother, fielded texts from my dad as he followed along each night on a “couch tour” (Phish-ese for watching the live-stream at home), and embraced one of my oldest friends during a haunting rendition of a song we’d loved in college.

Still, three straight weekends in Vegas turned that innate search for belonging into an endurance test. By the third Saturday morning, my feet burned, and my body radiated with exhaustion. I didn’t want the thing I loved most in the world to become something I forced myself to slog through for the sake of it. 

So I grabbed an early flight home and rounded up some friends to couch-tour the final show. Dancing in front of the TV with my dog in my arms became a new way to pay my respects, and as my friends and I kept reminding one another, “now we have the summer tour to look forward to.” (I booked tickets to Phish’s Labor Day run in Colorado the next morning.)

In an era when AI anxiety seeps into almost every aspect of our lives, and it’s impossible to scroll headlines without reading about the impending techno-apocalypse, seeing Phish inside a stadium-size supercomputer provided an unlikely refuge. My compatriots agreed: When a fan generated one of the beloved post-show recaps (opens in new tab) with AI, he was eviscerated (opens in new tab) in the comments section.

Perhaps the Sphere sells more tickets (opens in new tab) than any other venue in the world because it uses technology to produce the only thing technology will never replicate: human connection, one sweaty sticker and fast-food rocket ship at a time.