The Utah Entrepreneur Trying to Remake Pine Bluff, Arkansas

Summary

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Gone South – Season 5, Episode: "The Utah Entrepreneur Trying to Remake Pine Bluff, Arkansas"

Host: Jed Lipinski
Air Date: August 5, 2026

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Overview

This episode of Gone South shifts from classic Southern crime storytelling to a character-driven investigation of ambition, decay, and community renewal. Host Jed Lipinski introduces John Fenley, a Utah entrepreneur determined to launch a media storage business—and rejuvenate the struggling city of Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Through a winding narrative, the episode explores the friction between outsider aspirations and entrenched local power, the realities of trying to fix a ‘broken’ place, and the unpredictable consequences of economic decline and individual resilience.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. John Fenley: Out of Options and Out of Utah

• Background:
  In 2019, John (age 39) finds himself at a crossroads after a divorce, living in Provo, Utah, and tinkering with ideas, especially Crossies, a media storage business. He applies to Y Combinator in CA but faces setbacks amid Silicon Valley's high costs and instability.

• Quote:
  "I just on a whim, decided to look up the largest buildings for the lowest price. I was looking for anything over 65,000 square feet." – John Fenley [04:51]

2. Discovering Pine Bluff

• Finding the Warehouse:
  John stumbles onto an enormous, dilapidated 220,000 sq. ft. warehouse in Pine Bluff listed for $375,000—a price he assumes must be a typo.

  • "It was a 220,000 square foot warehouse on 17 acres in the middle of the city. And they were asking $375,000 for it." – John Fenley [05:13]

• First Impressions:
  John is charmed by Pine Bluff's lushness and affordable space, despite noting its notorious crime and population decline.

  • "The temperature was fantastic in November, October... Like paradise. Like coming from Utah, things grow... it was beautiful." – John Fenley [13:11]

3. Pine Bluff’s Decline and Hopes for Revival

• Troubled Context:
  Once an industrial/agricultural hub, Pine Bluff struggles with crime (homicide rate 7x national average), economic collapse, and depopulation. Racial and income disparities with neighboring Whitehall are stark.

• Revitalization Efforts:
  Go Forward Pine Bluff, a nonprofit with sales tax funding, aims to spearhead economic development and community projects.

4. Origins of Crossies and Entrepreneurial Dreams

• Inventiveness:
  John’s lifelong love of science and technology leads him to invent Crossies, a service digitizing and storing customers' physical media for virtual access.

  • "You have a VHS tape. How are you going to watch that on your iPhone or your iPad?" – John Fenley [10:29]

• Broader Vision:
  Beyond media storage, John envisions a makerspace, science museum, artist studios, robot combat arena, and more—a communal hub called 'Serendipic.'

  • "I want to have co working spaces... sculptings... a science museum, paintball, go kart track, RV parking, even... robot combat arena. I love battlebots." – John Fenley [25:01]

5. Acquiring the Warehouse and Early Setbacks

• John lowballs the asking price and secures the warehouse. Shortly after, he faces enormous logistical and financial barriers even before moving in (theft, vandalism, zoning issues).

  • "When I got here, there were whole walls and buildings that had been stripped completely of their walls... started cutting the building apart for scrap." – John Fenley [22:15]

6. The Murphy Catastrophe

• As John preps to move, he learns that Murphy, a similar media storage startup, has collapsed, leaving tens of thousands of customers’ CDs stranded and discrediting the business model.

  • "If Murphy fails and they had lots of funding and they go under, no one will ever trust me..." – John Fenley [18:47]

• John acquires Murphy’s assets, but the pandemic hits, complicating shipping and warehousing of the million CDs he inherits.

7. City Hall, Go Forward, and Local Power Struggles

• Bureaucratic Nightmare:
  John is stymied by Pine Bluff’s planning commission and zoning department over vague and shifting requirements.

  • "They kept telling me, well, he decided he didn't want to get the permits, and then somebody else would tell him no, we told him he couldn't get the permits. And I'm like, what am I supposed to do?" – John Fenley [28:23]

• Suspicion of Sabotage:
  John perceives Go Forward as threatened by his independent initiatives, believing their control over city tax dollars and projects preempts competition.

  • "If I were to open a makerspace of my own... it would make them look bad. Their funding would be in question at that point." – John Fenley [30:35]
  • "They just want to be able to say that they're doing it right... They can check the box... They don't care if people are there using it. They don't care if it's helping the community." – John Fenley [31:36]

• Project Poaching:
  John's ideas (go kart track, artist in residence) appear in subsequent Go Forward initiatives.

  • "Then they started to bring this tax back, and they started talking about a go kart track. And I'm like, when did you start working on this?" – John Fenley [32:31]

8. Personal Struggles and Miraculous Windfall

• Financially strapped, John nearly leaves Pine Bluff. But an unexpected sale of his share in VidAngel (a streaming company that survived a Hollywood lawsuit) nets him $890,000.

  • "For my entire life, money was the main constraint on what I could do. That barrier instantly evaporated and brought up many philosophical questions. I'm still trying to understand it." – John Fenley (quoted by Jed Lipinski) [34:44]

• He plows money into more property, buying 74 parcels at a city tax auction, and a smaller, up-to-code warehouse.

9. The Persistence of Hope—and Setbacks

• Slow Progress:
  Despite landholdings, John’s projects stall. He’s robbed; shipping containers of CDs sit untouched; his family is divided by distance; he’s a minor celebrity but faces skepticism.

• Community Engagement:
  John tries to give back—science demos at local events, running for mayor (garners 10%) and now for city council, piloting youth boxing (Gloves Not Guns), working on community gardens, and a mobile science museum.

  • "Part of what I was campaigning on was like, trying to... say we can be more efficient about these things. We can do things that actually make a difference and they don't have to be expensive." – John Fenley [38:52]

10. A Middle Place: Still in Pine Bluff

• Despite struggles, John remains, buying more property and pursuing his vision. He’s the subject of at least two documentaries ("hopefully going to release this epic documentary sometime next year" – John Fenley [39:50]), embodying both the hope and contradictions of the Southern “turnaround” story.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “When I was younger…if I think it [a thought] precisely enough, I can take that thought out and put it in the computer. And then that computer can think that thought for me faster than I could ever do it myself. And that was exciting to me.” — John Fenley [07:31]

• "My mom...ended up losing that sale. But her sense of ethics came across in her actions. She lived her life doing the best she could in every situation, and I try to do the same." — John Fenley [08:13]

• "I feel really good here. I have a good relationship with a great many people here, especially like, people that are doing really cool things...what kind of things Pine Bluff could use to, like, become a place where people want to be." – John Fenley [37:49]

• "It was, like, partly the most beautiful thing I've seen and partly one of the most sad things I've seen. Because, you know, it's such a simple, cheap, small toy, yet they didn't have access to anything like that." – John Fenley, on local kids’ joy at a toy Jack-in-the-box, Family Fun Day [38:28]

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Timeline of Key Events (Select Timestamps)

• 03:45 – 05:13: John discovers Pine Bluff warehouse; describes initial reaction to real estate prices.
• 07:01 – 07:50: Childhood fascination with science/technology—planting the seeds of later ambitions.
• 09:14 – 10:55: John explains his Crossies concept—digitizing and storing personal media for virtual access.
• 15:57: John buys the warehouse, prepares for a fresh start ("And that's when shit hit the fan.")
• 18:12 – 18:47: Murphy bankruptcy threatens John’s business credibility.
• 20:16 – 21:30: COVID-19 derails his moving plans; epic logistical struggles.
• 22:15: John discovers the warehouse has been gutted by thieves during his absence.
• 25:01 – 25:37: John's all-in-one civic vision for the building ("I want to have a lot of stuff...").
• 28:23 – 29:12: Frustration with city bureaucracy—conflicting guidance and stonewalling.
• 30:35 – 31:36: John’s critique of Go Forward projects as more about appearances than effectiveness.
• 34:29 – 34:44: VidAngel windfall brings sudden financial freedom.
• 38:52: John reflects on his mayoral defeat, still pushing for practical, impactful projects.
• 39:50 – 40:07: Documentary crews captivated by John’s quest; he hopes the story inspires hope.

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Conclusion

The Utah Entrepreneur Trying to Remake Pine Bluff, Arkansas weaves a complex tale of hope, disillusionment, and the stubborn optimism required to revive a dying town. John Fenley’s journey—alternately quixotic, frustrating, and inspiring—becomes a lens for exploring the deeper challenges facing the rural South: who gets to lead a renewal, what obstacles stand in the way, and what it takes for history’s grip to loosen. The episode ends with John still fighting—wealthier, certainly wiser, and more attached to Pine Bluff than perhaps even he expected.

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For questions, story tips, or feedback, email the Gone South team at gonesouthpodcastmail.com.
Follow Gone South on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram @gonesouthpodcast.

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Transcript

[Jed Lipinski]

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[John Fenley]

But about two weeks after I got there, he got an eviction notice. Somebody had bought his apartment building and was kicking everybody out, like everybody in the building, so that they could renovate all the units, raise all the rents. And so I was talking to him and since I have a background in real estate, I was like, you should try to buy something if you can. And he's like, I don't know, but maybe I could do that. And so we started looking at real estate to buy in la. And let me tell you, it's expensive out there. Very, very expensive out there. I mean, some of the places we looked at were like $400,000 for like a two bedroom little shack that you could see through. And you go and look in the windows and it's like gutted inside. It's like just a shell of a building, but it's in L. A, you know, so it's worth $400,000, you know.

[Jed Lipinski]

John started looking at residential properties outside LA, partly out of curiosity. He looked at commercial listings too. His dad, who was also living with them at the time, was a sculptor. John figured that if he found a large enough space, his dad could set up a studio there and he'd have room to get crosses off the ground.

[John Fenley]

I had this in the back of my mind and I just on a whim, decided to look up the largest buildings for the lowest price. I was looking for anything over 65,000 square feet.

[Jed Lipinski]

John logged into a website called LoopNet, which lists commercial real estate across the country. He spotted a giant warehouse for sale in the town of Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

[John Fenley]

And I thought the price was a typo, but it looked interesting enough that I called the agent and he confirmed that it was not a typo, that the price really was unbelievably low for what it was. It was a 220,000 square foot warehouse on 17 acres in the middle of the city. And they were asking $375,000 for it.

[Jed Lipinski]

John had never been to Arkansas. In truth, he'd never even really thought about Arkansas before. He knew that Bill Clinton had grown up there and that the capital was Little Rock, but that was about it. And yet the warehouse spoke to him. His media storage business needed space, a lot of it. Scrolling through the listing photos on LoopNet, staring at all those square feet at a price he couldn't find anywhere else, John felt something click into place. But starting a business is hard. Doing it alone is even harder. And doing it in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, as John was about to discover, would push him to his limit. I'm Jed Lipinski. This is Gone South. When John Fenley was a kid growing up in Utah, his favorite place was the Hanson Planetarium in Salt Lake City. His mom took him there over and over to see the laser light shows and the plasma globes, the glass spheres whose tendrils of electricity follow your fingers when you touch them. His mind was blown by the planetarium's dry ice bubble exhibit and in which kids blew bubbles into a glass chamber, watched them hover over a layer of carbon dioxide gas, freeze and then shatter when they popped.

[John Fenley]

It was just this place where you could experience awe inspiring things that you just don't experience on a daily basis. You know, you go outside and you play with sticks or something and you don't see the interaction of these concepts like buoyancy of air, like it's just something that I never thought about before I saw that, you know.

[Jed Lipinski]

In addition to science, John was fascinated by technology. He built his own toy robots and became obsessed with computer programming.

[John Fenley]

When I was younger, thinking about computers and programming, it was like I can take a thought in my head and if I think it precisely enough, I can take that thought out and put it in the computer. And then that computer can think that thought for me faster than I could ever do it myself. And that was exciting to me.

[Jed Lipinski]

John's mom had a PhD in early childhood education and taught kindergarten on a Native American reservation. She later became a real estate agent and John grew up accompanying her to showings and open houses. She instilled in him a strong sense of ethics. If she saw an issue with a house a couple was planning to buy, for instance, she wasn't afraid to point it out.

[John Fenley]

I think there was a house. Remember distinctly the people loved the house. But she had seen some evidence as they were walking through it of water damage. And she told them about the water damage and showed them where it was and that it was going to cost a lot to fix this water damage in the foundation. And it looked like it had been a leak that had lasted a long time and caused a lot of damage. But it wasn't anywhere in the paperwork and nobody knew about it until my mom told them about it. And she ended up losing that sale. But her sense of ethics came across in her actions. She lived her life doing the best she could in every situation, and I try to do the same.

[Jed Lipinski]

By the time John graduated college, his mom had pivoted to real estate investing. John helped her manage the properties, fixing leaky faucets, replacing outlets, painting, collecting rent. But his passion was for inventing and entrepreneurship. He had a long standing interest in nuclear fusion and even designed his own fusion reactor.

[John Fenley]

So I just got the coolest little demonstration unit from SciSupply. It's a charge mass experiment. So the fusion reactor is pretty simple. I feel like this fusion reactor is the fusion reactor that Nikola Tesla would have designed if he'd known about fusion. That's the key to the fusion reactor I'm designing.

[Jed Lipinski]

John says he's had dozens of business ideas over the years. He's registered over 200 domains, including omnipotentyou.com, which he says was an attempt to build something like Wikipedia, years before Wikipedia existed. But the idea he kept coming back to was Crossies, his media storage business. The concept was pretty simple. Say you spent years amassing a collection of thousands of CDs, vinyl records and cassettes. Rather than throw them in the trash and pay $12.99 a month for Spotify, you want to be able to listen to your collection on your iPhone. You also want to be able to sell or trade your music with other people. That's where Crossies comes in. If you mail your CDs, records and cassettes to John, John will store them for you, digitize them, and then make them virtually accessible. For a small fee, you can take

[John Fenley]

your physical media, put it on this virtual shelf, and you still have access to it, you still own it, it's still yours, but it's now virtual. You have a VHS tape. How are you going to watch that on your iPhone or your iPad? And one of the first kind of tests I did was digitizing a VHS tape and then playing it on an iPad over the web. And I realized something about VHS tapes. They're actually not bad quality.

[Jed Lipinski]

John first conceived of crossies back in 2004. But like pretty much all of his ideas, he never really followed through on it. Business concepts came easy for him. Turning them into actual businesses didn't. But then in 2019, he discovered the building in Pine Bluff. In truth, it was more like several buildings. 17,000 square feet of office space attached to a cavernous industrial warehouse, which in turn was divided into five sprawling rooms,

[John Fenley]

which, after looking at LA prices, 200. And I was like, is the size of typo too? Like, no, it's literally acres of indoor space.

[Jed Lipinski]

John was smitten. The place seemed perfect for his business, which needed enough space to store thousands and in success, millions of customers, CDs and cassettes. But it was appealing for other reasons too. Back in Utah, John had run a makerspace, a kind of shared workshop where people tinker with 3D printers, laser cutters and other stuff. The warehouse could easily accommodate one of those as well. John called the listings agent and asked if he could check out the property. They immediately said yes and invited him down

[John Fenley]

and ended up flying out and taking a look at it and just kind of falling in love with the place.

[Jed Lipinski]

On that first trip to Pine Bluff, John filmed the space for a video he posted on YouTube.

[John Fenley]

This spot here might show it. There's that area and this area.

[Jed Lipinski]

It's just enormous. After visiting the warehouse, he took a tour through downtown. So what were your first impressions of Pine Bluff?

[John Fenley]

It was nice. It was a nice place. And some of the things that they were doing, they sounded really good. You know, I heard about Go Forward Pine Bluff and it sounds on the surface like a good program.

[Jed Lipinski]

Go Forward Pine Bluff was a local nonprofit created to revitalize Pine Bluff. It was funded mostly by a voter approved sales tax and focused on economic development, education and quality of life.

[John Fenley]

They're trying to move the town forward, they're getting tax money and they're doing good things. That's kind of what their advertising says. And I liked that. There was a casino coming in. There's development happening and the people were friendly. I came right in the fall and the temperature was fantastic in November, October, it's wonderful down here. So I wasn't too hot, I wasn't too cold. It was just like paradise. And like coming from Utah, things grow. Like, I'm used to the desert and here was so green. It was beautiful.

[Jed Lipinski]

But Pine Bluff, as John knew, was also troubled. A few years earlier, Pine Bluff had been ranked the second most dangerous metropolitan area in America, behind only Detroit, with a homicide rate about seven times the national average. Over the last decade, the city had lost around 15% of its population, the largest percentage drop of any metro area in the country. The school system had deteriorated so badly that the state of Arkansas stepped in and took over two local school districts the root of these problems went back decades and mirrored the decline of many other small towns across the South. Pine Bluff had once been a hub for agriculture and manufacturing, but farm work dried up as machines replaced workers and factories shuttered under the pressure of cheap foreign competition. The warehouse that caught John's eye was a case in point. It had once housed a steel manufacturing company called Varco Pruden, but the company had been acquired by an Australian conglomerate and moved its remaining employees to the neighboring city of Whitehall. Whitehall was roughly 70% white, with some of the highest median incomes in Arkansas. Pine Bluff, by contrast, was about 70% black, with a median income about 60% lower. Like I said, John was aware of all this, or most of it anyway. But in some ways, he saw Pine Bluff's downtrodden status as a plus. In his mind, the place had nowhere to go but up. By getting his business running in Pine Bluff, John could bring some industry back and contribute to the town's revitalization efforts. It was the kind of thing his mom would be proud of. So after just a few days in Pine Bluff, John decided to buy the warehouse.

[John Fenley]

I actually lowballed him. I offered less than what they were asking and they took it. So I probably could have offered even less.

[Jed Lipinski]

John made the offer in October 2019. He flew back to Utah the next day and began packing up everything he owned in preparation for his move to Arkansas. He had high hopes for this new southern chapter of his life.

[John Fenley]

And that's when shit hit the fan.

[Jed Lipinski]

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[Jed Lipinski]

By December of 2019, John Fenley was ready to move to Pine Bluff. He'd packed all of his belongings and equipment into a shipping container. He'd alerted his wife, who was living with their three kids in Provo, and offered to take them, while once he got settled, his dad agreed to join him.

[John Fenley]

And then December 13th of 2019 I hear about Murphy.

[Jed Lipinski]

Murphy was a tech startup that did something pretty similar to what John envisioned for his company, Crossies. Customers sent their physical CD and vinyl collections to the Murphy warehouse in Madison, Wisconsin. In exchange, Murphy stored the discs and gave the owners high quality digital streams. As John was preparing to move to Arkansas, he read an article on the tech website the Verge that said Murphy had abruptly shuttered and entered bankruptcy. Thousands of customers personal music collections were now stranded in a locked warehouse in Wisconsin.

[John Fenley]

And I was distraught by this because in the back of my mind I'm thinking, if Murphy fails and they had lots of funding and they go under, no one will ever trust me. No one will ever trust the same business model coming from somebody else if Murphy fails. And so I felt like it was an existential threat to what I was trying to do. And I immediately flew to Wisconsin to try to see what I could do to solve the situation because the article made it seem like they were literally going to start throwing CDs in the dump in Wisconsin.

[Jed Lipinski]

John negotiated with the owners of Murphy to bring the dissolved company back to life just so it could sell itself to him for less than $10,000. He got the Murphy name, its database, and the right to handle the company's media, which included around 1 million physical CDs. Inheriting a brand new business posed some obvious challenges, but John saw it, in his words, as a perfect storm of opportunity. From what he could tell, the two things that had killed Murphy were server costs and rent. He thought he could eliminate both by writing better software and moving the CDs into his new warehouse in Arkansas. John bought Murphy in January of 2020. He planned to rent the space in Madison for a few months and then slowly relocate the operation to Pine Bluff. Then in March, the world changed.

[John Fenley]

When the pandemic hit the company that owned that building, they did Covid research and they were manufacturing testing kits and things like that. And so they were like, you have to get this stuff out immediately. I don't care what agreements we've made in the past, this takes precedent. We need you out.

[Jed Lipinski]

With the state of Wisconsin on lockdown, John couldn't find a moving company that was willing or able to pack up the thousands of boxes of discs in Murphy's warehouse. So John and his dad did it themselves. They spent the month of March wheeling boxes out of the warehouse and into the two 40 foot shipping containers John had rented for the move. He was able to hire a trucking company to ship the containers to Pine Bluff. But before that happened, John says the company called to say they couldn't move the containers after all.

[John Fenley]

The company that I'd hired to move the containers was like, we can't move the containers. The governor shut down the roads and I can't move your containers. We can't move anything across state lines. And I'm like, okay, I guess I have like a million CDs sitting in Wisconsin that I can't do anything with. And then like, stuff was shut down here in Pine Bluff. Like, I had some momentum and then everything ground to a halt.

[Jed Lipinski]

The situation in Pine Bluff wasn't any better. The warehouse John bought had been abandoned since Varco Pruden moved out 15 years earlier. But when John showed up, it looked dramatically different from his first visit months before.

[John Fenley]

And apparently there had been a security guard over here watching the place, making sure that it was kind of protected until I made the offer on the place. And then once it was sold, basically they fired the security guard.

[Jed Lipinski]

As I said, John had bought the building in October of 2019, but because of the Murphy situation, he didn't move to Pine Bluff until April of the following year. Meaning the building had been sitting empty and unguarded for about six months.

[John Fenley]

And when I got here, there were whole walls and buildings that had been stripped completely of their walls. Somebody had come in and, like, started cutting the building apart for scrap while I was gone, while it was empty and abandoned. Even after I was here, people would come in, I'd be in the front of the building and somebody would go to the back and start stealing stuff. I'd be in the back of the building. Somebody would be walking through the office building in the front stealing stuff. I would walk through the building and somebody would be in there stealing stuff. Like, it was bizarre.

[Jed Lipinski]

For the first few weeks, John and his dad slept in a tent behind the warehouse. They eventually converted the first floor of the office building into living quarters and turned a few of the executive offices into makeshift bedrooms. They installed security cameras and ringed the property with chain link fencing. John also hired a local guy named James to act as his unofficial security guard and right hand man. The thefts gradually subsided. By May, the pandemic was in its third month. John's wife had been holed up with their three kids back in Utah and. And the demands of remote learning were wearing her down.

[John Fenley]

She hadn't been outside really, and she was stuck inside with the kids and she was going crazy. So I offered to let them stay with me in Arkansas. I've got this giant warehouse. It's like this huge playground. I've got my dad out here, We've got generators. I'm starting to clean out this giant building, this office building that's like huge. So they fly out and they're here and we're having a great old time. My dad's cooking and he got his kitchen set up in the office building. And each of my kids picked out all the offices that they were using as bedrooms. And we've got Internet, we've got all their computers set up. We're having LAN parties and they're doing their schoolwork and it's great. It's great.

[Jed Lipinski]

The problem was the building's office space was still zoned as light industrial property. And in his meetings with the Pine Bluff Planning Commission, John realized that converting it to residential would take time. The planning commission wasn't comfortable with kids sleeping in a commercial building and neither was John. So less than a month after they arrived, John sent them back to his wife in Utah. In his meetings with the city, John was encouraged to write a proposal for what he wanted to do with the building beyond residential units. He was told to list any other potential uses. That way he wouldn't have to make new requests in the future. John never had a shortage of ideas, and Pine Bluff was sorely lacking in amenities. He began to envision his building as not simply a business, but as a creative and entrepreneurial hub for the Pine Bluff community.

[John Fenley]

I want to have a lot of stuff. It's 17 acres, it's 220,000 square foot building. I want to have co working spaces and my dad wanted to do sculptings and he ran a foundry in the past. And this place has overhead cranes. Like that's how big this place is. It has overhead cranes. So in my plans I have like the residents of first and entrepreneurs, the science Museum, paintball, go kart track, RV parking, even, you know, I wanted to have robot combat arena. I love battlebots. You know, I love robotics and battlebots and I love robots. That's been a passion of mine too. So I'm asking for everything because they told me to ask for everything.

[Jed Lipinski]

The plans also included a sculpture garden, a drive in theater, and a small gymnasium for boxing, fencing and gymnastics. He called the project Serendipic, a reference to the serendipitous encounters that he hoped the space would foster for the people of Pine Bluff. The planning commission approved his proposal with the exception of the go kart track. John was thrilled. But as it would turn out, John wasn't the only one with plans for Pine Bluff.

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[John Fenley]

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[Jed Lipinski]

That Pine Bluff's planning commission had approved most of John's plans was a promising start. But it didn't mean the building was safe, legal, or ready to use. It was only the first step in a costly and time consuming process of bringing a building up to code. While the warehouse itself was structurally sound, copper thieves had stripped the wiring out of the walls. Electrical work needed to be done. But before that could happen, the fire department told him he needed to install a sprinkler system throughout the entire building.

[John Fenley]

And I'm like, that's ridiculous. This whole 220,000 square foot warehouse, like, so many things like, were gonna have to happen. And they wanted me to have blueprints drawn for the whole thing on top

[Jed Lipinski]

of the sprinkler system. John says the city wanted him to have Detailed blueprints drawn up for the whole building, even though he only intended to modify the office space. And of course, before any construction could begin, he would need permits. But when John hired a contractor to start the process, he says Pine Bluff's inspection and zoning department seemed to give him the runaround.

[John Fenley]

And I was trying to get information about, well, did he get the permits or did he not get the permits? And, like, why didn't he get the permits? And I was paying him to get the permits. And they kept telling me, well, he decided he didn't want to get the permits, and then somebody else would tell him no. We told him he couldn't get the permits. And I'm like, well, what am I supposed to do? And they're like, well, we've already told you what you need to do.

[Jed Lipinski]

John felt like the inspection and zoning folks were running him in circles. They refused to put anything in writing, he says. So he started recording his interactions with them.

[John Fenley]

And I was able to go back through those recordings and find contradictions in things that they were telling me to do and contradictions in what they were telling me other people had done. And it ended up blowing up. And one of the people in the zoning department just, like, literally walked across the room and, like, rip the clipboard out of my hand where I was trying to fill out another form to get another inspection.

[Jed Lipinski]

Clearly, John had not anticipated the financial and logistical hurdles he would face as an individual trying to bring a massive and long abandoned warehouse up to code. In fact, it's quite possible that the city government had begun to see John as a liability. But John saw things differently. He interpreted their pushback and his inability to get straight answers as a sign of larger forces at play.

[John Fenley]

And I find out, I kind of gradually connect, that maybe it has something to do with some of the projects that Go Forward is doing in the city.

[Jed Lipinski]

By Go Forward, john is referring to Go Forward Pine Bluff, the local nonprofit that was ostensibly dedicated to revitalizing the town. The organization had launched a few years earlier as a grassroots effort by about 100 volunteers. It was funded primarily by a voter approved sales tax. But by the time John arrived in Pine Bluff, Go Forward had grown into one of the most powerful forces in local politics. John believed its influence was standing between him and getting anything done in Pine Bluff. As an example, he cited his plans to build a makerspace. Go Forward, it turned out, already had a makerspace of its own, a terrible one, in his opinion.

[John Fenley]

They supposedly have a makerspace they're running downtown, and they are getting Funding from this tax, and that funding is about $1,000 a day funding. And if I were to open a makerspace of my own, and it was better than what they were doing, and I wasn't taking any tax money, it would make them look bad. Their funding would be in question at that point.

[Jed Lipinski]

John had also proposed putting a science museum in the building. But of course, the city had one of those too. And like the makerspace, it didn't meet John's standards.

[John Fenley]

So the Arts and Science center on Main street, it doesn't have any science in it. Like, I've gone there a few times, and it's just sad. It's not a science museum at all. It's barely an art museum, in my opinion.

[Jed Lipinski]

These projects were funded through the sales tax that Go Forward Pine Bluff controlled. But in John's view, they were less about outcomes and more about optics.

[John Fenley]

The projects that they're doing, they seem designed to check a box. They check a box, but they don't actually care if the project itself is effective. They just want to be able to say that they're doing it right. So this makerspace that they're running, it's a check the box kind of thing. They can check the box and say, hey, we're spending money on a makerspace, but they don't care if people are there using it. They don't care if it's helping the community. They don't care about any of that stuff. And I just kept seeing that everywhere, and I was calling him out on it.

[Jed Lipinski]

Then something happened that John believed was no accident. Go Forward began announcing new projects that, to John, sounded a lot like the projects he'd included in his proposal for Serendipic. A press release went out saying that the Arts and Science Museum would soon have its own artist in residence program, something John had proposed months earlier. Then Go Forward announced plans to create a go kart track that came out

[John Fenley]

of left field, because I had put that go kart track in my proposal. And they didn't like the idea of having gas go karts or something is what their stated reason was. But then they started to bring this tax back, and they started talking about a go kart track. And I'm like, when did you start working on this?

[Jed Lipinski]

John began airing his grievances at city council meetings and on the local news station. His battle with Go Forward turned him into something of a local celebrity. People began approaching him on the street and telling him about similar problems they'd encountered. At the same time, John was going broke with his Business at a standstill, he took out a home equity loan and bought a small three bedroom house in town so his kids could stay with him. But there was nothing left over. During one visit, his son wanted to go on a bike ride for his birthday. John's bike needed a new tire, and he couldn't find one in Pine Bluff. So they drove to Little Rock.

[John Fenley]

There was a bike shop there, and they wanted like $70 for a new tire for my bike. And I'm like, I can't afford a new tire for my bike. We can't go on a bike ride because I can't afford to fix my bike right now.

[Jed Lipinski]

John was an optimist by nature, but his time in Pine Bluff had worn him out. He missed his kids and the comforts of home. He seriously contemplated selling the warehouse and moving back to Utah. But then something miraculous happened. Years earlier, John had sold a patent to a Utah based company called VidAngel in exchange for stock. VidAngel was a streaming company that let users filter out things like nudity and profanity from movies and TV shows. The company had been sued by a few major Hollywood studios who claimed VidAngel violated copyright protection. But by the time John was in Pine Bluff, they'd settled and pivoted to

[John Fenley]

a new model, and they had somebody that was willing to buy the stock for $8.90 a share. This windfall came in like, August 8th, like a week later, and suddenly I had $890,000 in my bank account.

[Jed Lipinski]

By liquidating his stock in VidAngel, John's bank account had jumped from approximately zero to. To nearly $900,000. In a tweet from that time, John wrote, for my entire life, money was the main constraint on what I could do. That barrier instantly evaporated and brought up many philosophical questions. I'm still trying to understand it. It's so strange. To celebrate, John flew to Las Vegas to see BattleBots, a live competition in which teams build remote controlled robots and pit them against each other. He helped his mom refinance a few properties back in Utah. He also filed a lawsuit against Pine Bluff for preventing him from using and developing his building. Then, a few weeks after the windfall, John discovered that Pine Bluff was auctioning off tax delinquent properties or land in buildings the city had seized from owners who'd stopped paying taxes.

[John Fenley]

So it was like somebody deposits that much money in your bank account, and then there's a huge tax auction sale where there's properties going for like a couple hundred bucks. I've been in real estate my whole life. Like, how could I not go to the tax auction and buy as much property as I could?

[Jed Lipinski]

John wound up buying 74 parcels of land for just a few hundred bucks a piece. He also bought another, much smaller warehouse, which was already up to code and didn't require extensive renovations. Altogether, the purchases made him one of the largest landowners in town. He felt he finally had the resources to do what he'd originally planned to do in Pine Bluff. The windfall hit John's account in the summer of 2021. The following year, the writer Max Reed wrote a profile of John on substack called the man who Bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The story chronicled John's quixotic quest to establish himself and his business in a dying southern town. John had been in Pine Bluff for two years by then. But despite the extent of his land holdings, the story made it sound like John wasn't long for Pine Bluff. He had yet to break ground on his makerspace. A busload of electronics and supplies, which he and his son had driven down from Utah, had just been robbed. And the million CDs he'd acquired from Murphy, the digital storage business he'd bought in Wisconsin, were still sitting in their shipping containers. John's inbox was full of angry messages from Murphy customers demanding their music back. According to the substack profile, John's mother and girlfriend were building a warehouse of their own in Utah, and he planned to join them soon. I caught up with John a few months ago, close to four years after the profile came out. His phone number has a Utah area code. I assumed he was back in Provo, but it turns out he was still in Pine Bluff. In fact, he'd recently bought even more property. As John described it, he'd begun to see Pine Bluff as his home.

[John Fenley]

I feel really good here. I have a good relationship with a great many people here, especially like, people that are doing really cool things. I met this lady, Audrey Long, who runs a garden out here and talked to her quite a bit about the garden stuff and, like, what kind of things Pine Bluff could use to, like, become a place where people want to be.

[Jed Lipinski]

At a recent family fun day in Pine Bluff, John set up a little science exhibit with microscopes, levitating objects, and something called a Van de Graaff generator. But he discovered the kids were equally excited by the Jack in the box they found in the back of his van.

[John Fenley]

And it was, like, partly the most beautiful thing I've seen and partly one of the most sad things I've seen. Because, you know, it's such a simple, cheap, small toy, yet they didn't have access to anything like that.

[Jed Lipinski]

In 2024, in an effort to create change in Pine Bluff, John had run for mayor against the incumbent. He lost by a landslide.

[John Fenley]

And I lost. I got 10% of the vote. And part of what I was campaigning on was like, trying to, like, say we can be more efficient about these things. We can do things that actually make a difference and they don't have to be expensive. We don't need a giant tax. We can do certain things that will increase people's quality of life here and now, cheaply.

[Jed Lipinski]

John was undeterred. He's currently running for a city council seat on the Libertarian ticket, and his vision for Serendipic is finally taking shape. While the original warehouse remains closed, Murphy, the storage business is up and running out of the new warehouse. He's converting a school bus into a mobile science museum and building a community garden. He also hosts a youth boxing program called Gloves Not Guns out of one of his buildings. In the meantime, John told me two. Two different documentary crews have been following him around Pine Bluff for the past few years.

[John Fenley]

Yeah, one of them's kind of tapered off, but the other one is really kind of hitting the ground running with it. And they're hopefully going to release this epic documentary sometime next year.

[Jed Lipinski]

And what is it going to be about exactly?

[John Fenley]

About me and my challenges and my hopes and dreams, I think. I'm not sure exactly. I mean, I have an idea of what they must have filmed while they were filming me, but, you know, at the end of the day, however they decide to edit it together and put it together. I hope the message is hopeful.

[Jed Lipinski]

If you have information, story tips or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone south team, please email [e-mail] that's gone southpodcastmail.com for bonus content. You can follow us on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram at Gone south podcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter on substack at. Gone south with Jed Lipinski. Gone south is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created, written and narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Leah Rees, Dennis, Maddie Sprung Keyser and Lloyd Lockridge. Our story editor is Katie Mingle. Gone south is edited, mixed and mastered by Chris Basel. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney and Hilary Schuff. Thank you for listening to Gone south

[John Fenley]

nerds.

[Jed Lipinski]

Today's episode is sponsored by NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast, Personal finance can feel like a pop quiz you didn't study for. This podcast is your study guide. On NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast, you'll hear from trusted journalists who explain the why behind major financial decisions. You'll get research backed, insights, and clear pros and cons. Whether you're planning a big purchase or just want to grow your wealth, make your next financial move with confidence. Follow NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast on your favorite podcast. Apparently.