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- [00:00]
Chuck Bryant
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
- [00:04]
Josh Clark
We're always talking about how things work. And one thing that keeps your car running smoothly is regular oil changes. But life's busy and the oil light always comes on at the worst time. Well, that's why there's Take five oil change. It doesn't just save time, it gives you control of your day back. You pull in, stay in your car, check something off your to do list. No waiting room, no pressure. You're in and you're out in about 10 minutes. Oil changes include tire pressure checks and fluid top offs. And the friendly staff explain everything and welcome you with a free water.
- [00:33]
Chuck Bryant
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- [01:05]
Josh Clark
Hey everybody. There's a new film called Project Hail Mary that you're going to want to see. It follows a science teacher, Rylan Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, who wakes up alone on a spaceship light years from Earth with no memory of who he is or how he got there. As his memory slowly returns, he realizes he's actually on a last ditch mission to solve the mystery of a substance that's causing the sun to die. So, nope. Pressure. Calling on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas, Rylan has to figure out how to save Earth. It's a smart, high stakes story about science, survival, and most importantly, hope and connection in the face of impossible odds. So don't miss it on the big screen. See Project Hail Mary only in theaters and IMAX March 20th. Get your tickets now.
- [01:47]
Chuck Bryant
Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartradio.
- [01:57]
Josh Clark
Hey, and welcome to the Podcast Podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here with us too. So this is a straight ahead episode of Stuff youf Should Know, the podcast.
- [02:07]
Chuck Bryant
That's right. And today we're discussing the Fyre Festival, the festival that never happened. F Y R E. Yeah, of which there were two documentaries made and I'm pretty positive I saw both of them. Back when they came out.
- [02:24]
Josh Clark
Ooh la la. I only saw one.
- [02:26]
Chuck Bryant
Which one did you see?
- [02:28]
Josh Clark
I saw the Netflix one.
- [02:29]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, I think I saw both of them because I was like, I don't want to miss anything.
- [02:34]
Josh Clark
Right, right. Yeah. I think I got the gist of it from the Netflix one. I saw it essentially when it came out. So I haven't seen it in a little while, but I did an awful lot of reading about this and a lot of stuff came back.
- [02:47]
Chuck Bryant
That's right. We're going to kind of let it unfold as it happened, or as it didn't happen, rather. Which means, I guess we should start with the organizer of this musical festival that was not right.
- [03:00]
Josh Clark
Yeah. Mr. William Z. Billy McFarland.
- [03:05]
Chuck Bryant
This guy.
- [03:06]
Josh Clark
Yeah, this guy. That's another way to put it.
- [03:10]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, yeah.
- [03:11]
Josh Clark
He was born in New York in 91. He's a millennial through and through. And he was essentially a rich kid. I don't know that he was like fabulously wealthy. I don't have that impression. But he was. His family was pretty well to do. They were real estate developers in New York, which is really kind of all you need to know. But he was brought up in like a nice suburb in New Jersey and he seemed to have had. So what you need to know about this guy is he is a business minded cat. Yes, that's what he wants to do. He wants to create successful businesses, startups. He's got the whole dot com bug, essentially. And apparently so there's an author, a journalist named Gabrielle Bluestone, who wrote a book on the Fyre Festival and she chronicles Billy McFarlane creating his first company in the fifth grade. A web posting company, whatever that is.
- [04:08]
Chuck Bryant
Not web hosting, no posting.
- [04:11]
Josh Clark
So putting stuff on the web, that was his business model, I guess. And. And he said that he had three full time adult employees in India working for his company, which he was. Which he founded in the fifth grade.
- [04:24]
Chuck Bryant
That's right. Apparently in that same book. And the name of the book, by the way, is Hype Colon Inside the Fyre Festival in the Golden Age of Grift. And in that book she also says that he claims at least that he sold Start and sold three companies while still in high school. Although that hasn't been verified. But I wouldn't be surprised because this guy loves starting companies, it seems like.
- [04:47]
Josh Clark
Yeah. So the first verifiable company that he started was while he was attending Bucknell University or Bucknail. He dropped out in 2011 to work more on a social media platform. It was an online Ad platform that actually had some pretty big advertisers. He called it spring S P L I N G. And he dropped out, but not before he got like, a $5,000, like, essentially a little scholarship prize, I guess, for venture capital. Like $5,000 venture capital seed from Bucknell University. He said, thank you very much. I'm dropping out. And he started generating investment from investors as diverse as the CFO of a pharma company to actual, like, private equity companies.
- [05:37]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Yeah.
- [05:38]
Chuck Bryant
I mean, the guy had a knack for drawing investors, that's for sure. I think if I'm doing quick math, 450, 475, plus a little juice from Cornell. Like, 400. Close to 500 grand he got for this spring startup.
- [05:56]
Josh Clark
Yeah.
- [05:56]
Chuck Bryant
And, you know, he did that for a little while. I guess that was a couple of years, because in 2013, he started something new. He abandoned spling and started, and this is covered in the documentary, the credit card company Magnus'm a G N I S E s, which was a credit card. He was like, hey, I'm gonna start a new credit card. No one's done that in a while. And it's gonna be metal, and it's gonna look cool, and we're gonna kind of, you know, take from what the Soho House did, kind of literally in that. They opened a loft in SoHo in New York and said, you've got a membership here. You can come to these cool parties and you can get like. The whole. The thing was beyond just having this sort of fancy credit card that made you stand apart from the crowd. In that crowd, you could also supposedly get, like, advanced reservations when they were impossible to get or get into the club. That was impossible to get into if you had this card.
- [06:55]
Josh Clark
Yeah. It was like the players with yourself card.
- [06:59]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah.
- [07:00]
Josh Clark
So here's. Here's the first flash of what you need to know about Billy McFarland. The Magnus's card. It was very cool. The whole thing was set up pretty neatly, but it was not a credit card. What it did was you took your bank of America or Wells Fargo debit card and copied the information from the magnetic strip onto the magnetic strip of your Magnuses. So essentially, what you had was a cool, metal, I believe, black version of your Wells Fargo debit card. And that. That's. That was it.
- [07:35]
Chuck Bryant
Well, aside from the membership in the soho loft and the supposed perks that came along to getting into the clubs and things, that's why people got it.
- [07:43]
Josh Clark
Here's the problem with that. They. They weren't able to deliver on what those perks were.
- [07:51]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, not at all. And this is, you know, kind of the first in a series of stories about over promising and under delivering, to
- [07:59]
Josh Clark
say the least for sure. So here's also where it starts to become a bit of a Ponzi scheme. Magnus seems to have been like, his heart was in that one. So he was really. He was spending a lot more money than he was taking in. I think I saw at its peak, it had 700 members, and that was it. But so he was just. Just spending way too much money to keep that company afloat. So he's like, all right, I'm going to start another company, and then I can use the revenue from that company to keep Magnus is afloat and keep my investors happy. And I'm going to call this new company Fire Media. F Y R E. Yeah. And it actually was kind of a clever idea. It was a talent booking app for anybody. Like, if you had the money, you could get in touch with, say, off the top of my head, rapper Ja Rule and say, hey, man, I'm throwing a really ill party and I want you to perform there. How much do you want? He would say, this is how much I want. And you would pay him and book him. And you didn't have to use any promoters or you didn't have to know anybody. All you had to do was have this Fire app. And, like, I think it was a good idea. But he created that almost exclusively to keep Magnuses propped up. Keep that in mind.
- [09:16]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna withhold judgment on whether or not I think that was a cool idea.
- [09:22]
Josh Clark
Okay.
- [09:23]
Chuck Bryant
But I'm glad you did.
- [09:24]
Josh Clark
Sure. I said clever. I don't think I said cool. Did I say cool?
- [09:28]
Chuck Bryant
Oh, you said cool more than once, pal.
- [09:29]
Josh Clark
Okay. Oh, it's a cool idea. All right, I'll stand behind that.
- [09:33]
Chuck Bryant
All right, great. So you're right. He was doing that to keep Magnus afloat. He was using those corporate cards, which, again, were just reskinned debit cards of his own employees, of the employees of Fire, to fund the Magnus events, and they were left to foot the bill. There was this one guy in the documentary, I think his name was M. David Lowe, and he says that he was left $200,000 in debt, and he was an employee. So that should give you an idea of how this guy's going to end up treating concert goers that he doesn't even know, which is what would kind of, you know, happen next. Essentially when he said, all right, I need some more cash, basically Fire Media really needs to take off in order to save Magnus'. And so a music festival, those things make tons of money, right, guys? That's a great way to make dough. So that was the next big idea.
- [10:32]
Josh Clark
Yeah. So essentially, this Fyre Festival, which is the crux of our story, was an idea that was meant to promote the Fire app, which was created to fund and keep afloat the Magnus fake credit card.
- [10:50]
Chuck Bryant
All right, so here we are in the fall of 2016, and he wants to throw this thing in the spring of 2017. So keep that timeline in mind. Um, he. That's about six months to throw a major music festival in the Bahamas. Um, I don't know anything about throwing a major music festival, so I'm a novice, but that seems like a pretty short time span to me.
- [11:13]
Josh Clark
I actually don't really know much about throwing a music festival either. But I did see in a few. A few articles covering this that experts, essentially, people who have thrown them say, you. You want 12 months minimum to. To. To do this. Or maybe they said you need usually, on average, 12 months. From the outset, from the time that he decided to do this, he gave himself the six months, and then, as we'll see, he actually gave himself way, way less than that to actually organize this thing, because the Fyre Festival was built entirely on hype, and the first several months of the project were given exclusively to figuring out how to hype this project that hadn't even been planned or organized yet. This is so fiery.
- [12:01]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. So he. You mentioned Ja Rule. He was involved in this as well. Hip hop artist Ja Rule. He was. He was sort of the main face of the thing, like, definitely the biggest name that he got involved, I think, unless, like, you're really in the know as far as, like, models and influencers go. And his co, I guess his business partner was another guy named Grant Margolin. He was the VP of marketing. And right out of the gate, he started hiring PR companies because, like, he said, he wanted to create this hype. So he got legit companies. He got an ad agency named Jerry Media, PR firm 42 west, and a media company called VaynerMedia. And in December of 2016, he was like, I gotta get something out there that people can actually see. So he contracted with Matte M A T T E Projects to film a promo video in the Bahamas where it was going to be held. And that's about the only thing he ever actually created.
- [12:56]
Josh Clark
Yeah, and, like, they really threw a lot at this. They hired a bunch of, like you said, Instagram Models Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Chanel, Iman and several others. I think there was like six, like legit millennial supermodels who came out to the Bahamas to shoot this, this promotional video. And the map projects company like showed up. They, they did a really good job creating this incredibly slick video. But by hiring these Instagram models, they also had a built in way of just generating tons of hype when that video was done. And actually even before the video was done, they're like, hey, why don't you take some of these picks from the shoot and you know, put them on, post them on your Instagram account just to kind of get people hyped up about the hype that we're creating for the festival. Yeah.
- [13:50]
Chuck Bryant
And you know, what you obviously don't see in that hype video or the promo video was the reality of that which the documentaries both cover. It was pretty chaotic. There was some pretty funny scenes in there where they were trying to get these models to get and swim in the ocean at night, you know, for the, for the shot. But Billy referred to the attendees as your average losers. And it was just, you know, it was kind of a mess. But obviously the result was, you know, beautiful people frolicking in the beautiful Bahamas.
- [14:19]
Josh Clark
Right.
- [14:20]
Chuck Bryant
They promised an immersive experience on a private island once owned by Pablo Escobar. Which would turn out to be a pretty fateful mistake to say that. But what they didn't include was stuff like, hey, who's actually going to be playing? Because they hadn't booked any musical acts at that point.
- [14:38]
Josh Clark
No. So if you look at this very slick video, none of all of the music acts are generic. It's all stock footage of like raves or something like that. Really well produced, good looking, like stock footage, but not real stuff. Right. But so it was all just kind of suggested. And to give you another idea of the, the way that they were promoting this, they were saying that Fyre Festival would be a quest to explore beyond boundaries. Like they use words like that. And the whole thing, the whole thing was essentially publicized as a complete luxury event. Top to bottom. It was going to be the most amazing, luxury, exclusive music festival anyone has ever thrown. And that promotional video really kind of looked like it. So much so that that was what they used for marketing from that point forward through the end of the festival. That was it. Everything came from that photo shoot and video shoot.
- [15:34]
Chuck Bryant
That's because that's all they had.
- [15:35]
Josh Clark
Right, Right.
- [15:36]
Chuck Bryant
Literally.
- [15:36]
Josh Clark
Yeah.
- [15:37]
Chuck Bryant
A good time for a break, I think.
- [15:39]
Josh Clark
Yeah, for sure.
- [15:40]
Chuck Bryant
All right. So that's a little setup of what's coming or not coming your way. And we'll be right back after this. Just like the number of stars in the sky, there is so much stuff you should know.
- [16:01]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [16:08]
Chuck Bryant
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Josh Clark
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- [16:28]
Chuck Bryant
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- [16:40]
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- [16:56]
Josh Clark
Dupixent helps heal your skin from within. Talk to your eczema specialist about Dupixent or visit dupixent.com to learn more.
- [17:06]
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- [18:13]
Josh Clark
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- [18:24]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, for sure. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority skills, even company revenue. So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.
- [18:33]
Josh Clark
Yep. That's why LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B ROAS of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them.
- [18:40]
Chuck Bryant
And get this, if you spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads, you get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com sysk that's LinkedIn.com sysk Terms and conditions apply. All right, so in order to promote this video that they had shot, they needed, they needed people to see this. They needed ton of eyeballs so they could sell tons of tickets. So they got together with Jerry Media and they convinced all these influencers at the same time on December 12, 2016 on their socials to post an orange tile, just an orange square. I think they got like 400 plus people. And that would direct people to the website and the promo video and everything. And a lot of people did this, like athletes, musicians, models. And it actually went viral. Like it really, really worked. It was, that was actually a pretty good idea. And people started buying tickets. Like thousands of people started plunking down money.
- [19:51]
Josh Clark
Yeah, I think I saw that they were like 98% sold out like almost immediately. So it really was a great idea paying all those influencers to do that. And so great. Now we've got the Fyre Festival ready to go. Like you got tickets sold, you've got the promo materials out there. You have all these influencers generating all this buzz. And he got one more boost. He paid Kendall Jenner a quarter of a million dollars to put one post on Instagram about it. And I didn't see the post, but apparently she intimated that the pot, like she left it open to people's imagination, the possibility that Kanye west would be performing there. Because remember, he was her brother in law at the time.
- [20:32]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah.
- [20:33]
Josh Clark
And of course Kanye west never had anything to do with it. But if you word things a certain way, then you can leave it to people's imagination and let them think what they want kind of thing. Right. So that was like the nail, the final nail. They're like, this is great. We're going to do this, and let's start figuring this out.
- [20:51]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. And by figuring out it was February, and remember, they were trying to do this thing in the spring.
- [20:56]
Josh Clark
Right.
- [20:57]
Chuck Bryant
Which I don't know if that means I don't know when spring is in the Bahamas. I don't know if they consider May spring, but let's generously say they even consider May spring.
- [21:06]
Josh Clark
Okay.
- [21:07]
Chuck Bryant
It's late February. And that's when they started planning the actual logistics of this festival. Like, how are we actually gonna do this? They didn't have accommodations at all. They promised luxury accommodations. These were gonna range from glamping tents to private villas. None of these things existed yet because they didn't even have a site secured because they had mentioned that it was Pablo Escobar's island at one point. This was Norman's Cay. And the owner of that island was like, I don't like you mentioning Pablo Escobar in association with my island. So you can't have it here. So they didn't even have a place in February?
- [21:45]
Josh Clark
No. They shot themselves in the foot and just not putting it on Pablo Escobar's private island or formerly belonging to Pablo Escobar. However they said it, if they just had not done that, this might be a completely different story. Maybe at least it would have been a little bit of a different story. It actually could have been worse, frankly, now that I think about it. But they finally found a spot. There was another thing too. Like if the web archive, like, has some of the pages of the original Fyre Festival site, and if you go on like the packages thing, they're like up to a quarter of a million dollar packages for like three nights on yachts and stuff. And they even named the yachts. They had no bargains, deals, talks whatsoever with the owners of any of those yachts. And these guys were selling quarter of a million dollar packages involving these yachts that they had no access to. Right. So they were really scrambling for all this. And one of the first things they had to do was find a replacement for Norman's Cay. And they finally found one on the charming area known as Roker Point on Great Exuma island in the Bahamas.
- [22:53]
Chuck Bryant
That's right. It's not a private island at all. So out of the gate, they've already underdelivered. Sure, it was an undeveloped plot of land. Apparently it was pretty rocky. It's been described as a gravel pit. And if you see the documentaries and the actual footage, it doesn't look like anything that's capable of hosting even if you knew what you were doing hosting a concert event like this. And they had 45 days to do it, to build this village, essentially. They're trying to replicate the Coachellas and all these things that literally go out in the middle of nowhere and build. Or Burning man and build a village. And they had 45 days to do this. So he hired hundreds of locals to put up IKEA furniture, essentially and try and get these things going, get these tents built these glamping tents. And I think one of McFarlane's big errors that. Well, he started way too late, first of all. And who knows if he ever even planned on getting this thing off the ground to begin with, but he didn't realize there's something called island time. If you've ever been to the Caribbean or it's probably like this at islands all over the world or just beach towns in general.
- [24:04]
Josh Clark
Sure.
- [24:04]
Chuck Bryant
Things just move slower. Like you can't go into a restaurant on a Caribbean island and start complaining that the service is slow. And that's from like restaurants all the way to everything. Everything just moves a little slower and at its own pace.
- [24:18]
Josh Clark
Yeah. You're meant to kind of downshift a couple of gears as well, to kind of mellow out at the point.
- [24:26]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah.
- [24:26]
Josh Clark
Don't bring the aggro, like city stuff there.
- [24:30]
Chuck Bryant
Not to island time.
- [24:31]
Josh Clark
No. So, yeah, I think what you're saying in a very roundabout way is that the. The things that needed to get done for the festival did not get done. Just as a little aside that'll come up later. There's a woman named Marianne Roll who owns a local catering company that the Fyre Festival hired to feed those workers. And she made as many as 1,000 meals a day during these, I think 45 days while these workers were working from day one up through, I think up to like the day before the Fyre Festival. So just put that in your hat and smoke it later.
- [25:05]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, for sure. So they are having big cash flow issues, despite the fact that all these people had paid all kinds of money for these tickets already. And so he starts what he calls the Fire Tour, these little pop up concerts or supposed to be pop up concerts to promote the festival, but most of those don't even go off. These are supposed to be in cities all over the world. Most of those end up canceled. So he's left without a source of income basically leading up to the festival,
- [25:37]
Josh Clark
which is crazy because they were selling tons and tons of tickets, but he had raised so much money from investors for this and they were Burning through so much money that he was like, it was gone before it went to him, or like, it was gone as soon as it came in. From what I can tell, he came up with another idea. He's like, okay, we need a new instant form of cash flow. How about this? We'll say that you have to use a RFID bracelet to spend money there, and you have to preload money on it, and you better do it now. So if you want to be able to buy anything, say, like booze or whatever on the island, you have to have this little bracelet, kind of like Disney World or something. Right? And they suggested you put at least $300 for each day that you're going to be at the festival, and in the hopes that people would just start loading their wristbands up. And I think it worked to some degree, but there was no amount of cash coming in at this point to cover what the investors had put in, and apparently even to cover anything that the festival had delivered. Except for there is a place in the Bahamas that we will try to get you to, and when you show up, that place will be there, and
- [26:49]
Chuck Bryant
it will be lit. Yeah, ill. All right. So the festival is very close to, you know, the date is impending, and people start noticing. Tickets holders start noticing. Like, you know what? I haven't seen anything on Instagram. Like, you know, usually when there's something like that, it's like, hey, look at how graceful great this place is coming along. Look how awesome it looks. It's still just that one video that they had shot, you know, back in, I guess, early part of the year. They can't get worse still. They can't get information about their flights and their accommodations, like, what tent am I actually going to be in or what villa am I actually going to be in. I want to pick out my room before I get there.
- [27:31]
Josh Clark
Right, Right. So people start questioning this. There's a guy on Twitter named Calvin Wells who set up fire fraud and just basically tracked all these, like, shady things that were going on or, like, questions people had. People started leaving comments on posts about, you know, hyping the Fyre Festival, questioning the whole thing, and just basically saying, this doesn't sound legit at all. Those things got deleted by Jerry Media, who is running social media for the. For the Fyre Festival. And then starting finally, the day before the festival, the Fire Media people essentially reached out to their VIPs and said, you should skip the first weekend come the second weekend. Because there was one weekend at the end of April, and there Was the next weekend at the beginning of May. That was the Fire Festival. Two weekends, they're like, just come to the second one. The first one's going to be a little. We're figuring out the kinks. So don't come to the first one. Their employees, too, were told, like, don't come. But the employees were like, we already are in Miami waiting to be shuttle down to the Bahamas. Yeah.
- [28:36]
Chuck Bryant
If you're telling the staff not to come, but you've allowed the ticket holders to come.
- [28:41]
Josh Clark
Yes.
- [28:41]
Chuck Bryant
Then you're doing things in the wrong order. And that's just my opinion. Again, I've never thrown a music festival.
- [28:47]
Josh Clark
Yeah, and that's a really good point, Chuck. They didn't tell the ticket holders not to come.
- [28:52]
Chuck Bryant
No, they didn't. The night before the festival, their biggest act, or I guess their biggest rock act, at least Blink 182 pulls out of the festival. Somebody smartly in their camp was like, you don't want to be. You're already unfortunately associated with this, but you don't want to be any more of a part of this than you already are.
- [29:11]
Josh Clark
No. And their statement was classy, too. They just said they're not sure that they would have all the resources they needed to put on a quality show for their fans.
- [29:20]
Chuck Bryant
So they pull out and it starts to rain really heavy. It was sort of one of those moments in the documentary where insult to injury starts happening and employees are still. I mean, bless their hearts, they're still trying to set this stuff up. I felt so bad for the people that work for this, for fire media, because they're trying to set up these tents still. They're unpacking, loading shipping containers. They're unpacking mattresses, all this cruddy furniture that they had bought at the last minute. And work eventually halted because it was just, you know, it was a rainstorm. It was too bad. So there were soggy mattresses left out on the ground everywhere. And it was. You know, it looked like. It looked like a hurricane had come through and wiped out what was once a promising thing.
- [30:08]
Josh Clark
Yeah. Yeah. So like, imagine like a whole work site of people getting ready for the festival the night before, and they were really behind, and everybody's working hard, and then a whole monsoon comes, and everybody runs for cover and then never comes back. That's what the Fyre Festival looked like when the first guests started to show up.
- [30:29]
Chuck Bryant
Maybe a second break. I feel like we're right at the precipice.
- [30:32]
Josh Clark
I think so, too.
- [30:33]
Chuck Bryant
Man, I can't wait to hear blink. Oh, they already pulled out. I can't wait to hear the other musical acts, so we'll be right back after this. Just like the number of stars in the sky, there is so much stuff you should know.
- [30:56]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
This message is sponsored by Regeneron and Sanofi. Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant do not have direct experience with the product advertised or the disease.
- [31:03]
Chuck Bryant
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Josh Clark
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Chuck Bryant
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- [31:51]
Josh Clark
Dupixent helps heal your skin from within. Talk to your eczema specialist about Dupixent or visit dupixent.com to learn more.
- [32:01]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [33:10]
Josh Clark
Hey, everybody, get this. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers. And that's where it stands apart from other ad buys.
- [33:21]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, for sure. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority skills, even company revenue. So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.
- [33:30]
Josh Clark
Yep. That's why LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B ROAS of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them.
- [33:37]
Chuck Bryant
And get this. If you spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads, you get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.comSYSK that's LinkedIn.comSYSK terms and conditions.
- [34:07]
Josh Clark
Okay, Chuck, so it's festival day. It's April 28th. And on the morning of April 28th, some of the people started showing up. There was supposedly private jet service, but actually it was just a small airline that was shuttling people from Miami's airport down to the Bahamas. And the first group showed up the morning of April 28th. And the festival organizers were like, we have to figure out what to do with these people. It's not ready yet. So they got them on a shuttle, like a bus. They drove them to a local bar and said, the bar's open, everybody help yourself.
- [34:43]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, it was a school bus, too. Just keep that in mind. Not that it matters. A bus is a bus, but there are nicer buses than others.
- [34:50]
Josh Clark
True.
- [34:50]
Chuck Bryant
Especially in the Caribbean. And this was a school bus.
- [34:53]
Josh Clark
Okay, maybe a Bluebird.
- [34:54]
Chuck Bryant
Who knows? Those are pretty nice.
- [34:56]
Josh Clark
The Bluebirds are. Yeah, they're top quality.
- [34:59]
Chuck Bryant
So they send them there. They tried in vain, I guess, to initially at least actually assign tents to people because it wasn't like there wasn't one tent set up. They had gotten a little bit done, but there were hundreds of people there kind of wondering what to do and where to go. And so much so that Billy, who was there, Billy McFarna, actually got up on a table and said, just go find a tent. Pick up your own tent and take it to a place and set it up. And some of those people were game enough to like, well, it's not going off well, but at least we can get a tent and find a good spot. And so they tried starting to do that.
- [35:37]
Josh Clark
Yeah, I don't remember from the documentary, but apparently there was like, that just opened the floodgates for people making a mad rush to grab a tent before somebody Else grabbed it for sure. And the tents, by the way, we should say so. Remember you mentioned glamping. Like, not everybody was buying the quarter of a million dollar yacht package that you could get tickets for, you know, several hundred dollars. And that's what these tents were. But they were supposed to still be like really nice tents. I saw that they were leftover FEMA tents from Hurricane Matthew and that that's what had been set up for these people. And not even set up in most cases. Like you said, they kind of had to finish setting these things up themselves and drag the wet mattresses into their tent. So this is how the Fire Festival is starting at this point.
- [36:24]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. They didn't have their luggage, so they started inquiring about that. And so they started, you know, just dumping their suitcases out onto the beach from the shipping containers and just other supplies. And basically it turned into complete chaos. They just started dumping supplies on the ground and saying, because people were revolting and saying, take care of yourself. Like, there's the stuff. Have at it.
- [36:48]
Josh Clark
It's frequently compared to like rich millennial, Lord of the flies.
- [36:53]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah.
- [36:54]
Josh Clark
So one other thing that the festival organizers were doing was they were getting everybody super drunk. There was one thing in great supply for free, and that was booze. They had like shot girls walking around getting. Getting everybody super wasted on tequila. Like, everyone was starting to get really, really drunk and they were doing that to kind of keep everybody distracted from just how horrible this thing was.
- [37:19]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, but it's also not a great idea to add alcohol to a volatile situation.
- [37:23]
Josh Clark
Exactly. No, it's not. It was a very irresponsible thing to do. And it just shows all of the incredibly short term thinking that went into every stage of this, including the actual festival itself.
- [37:37]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, for sure. So maybe the worst part about all this is they couldn't. A lot of people were like, this is a disaster. I want to get out of here. They couldn't just get out of there because it was the same weekend as something called the National Family Regatta. It's a really big event and most of the hotels were booked up, most of the flights were booked up. So people were basically stranded down there. I think eventually they were even like locked in the airport overnight, like when everything was closed. It wasn't like one of those airports. It still has stuff open overnight.
- [38:10]
Josh Clark
Right. They were locked in with a chain and a padlock and there was no ac. They weren't left with any water or food. And remember, everybody by this time who's made it to the airport has been drinking all day. So now they're starting to sober up and they're hungover, locked into this hot airport without any food or water. So it's a really bad jam. By this point, even before that, when they started, when it became clear, like, wait a minute, there's some. A lot of stuff wrong here. Remember, these kids are, like, all on Instagram and Twitter and all sorts of social media, and they immediately started alerting the world. Fyre Festival is a total fraud. And one of the most iconic photos that came out of this is a Styrofoam to go container opened up with a slice of bread, a piece of cheese, a skew on that slice of bread, another slice of bread askew on the piece of cheese, a pile of lettuce, a tomato, and some sort of oily condiment covering the lettuce and tomato. And they said, this is the star catered food that we were supposed to get. This is the food that they're giving us at Fyre Festival.
- [39:22]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. You know, by this point, they had already officially postponed the festival. They came out and said it's due to circumstances out of their control. They had. Which the only thing of which that happened that was out of their control was the rain, I suppose. But they officially did postpone it. But word had gotten around via social media, and at least I think a lot of people, you know, canceled their plans and didn't actually make it down there. But, you know, people started poking around about Billy McFarland and what really happened. The media got involved and they were like, hey, this is more than just an idea that, you know, good idea that didn't work out. Like, we think actual crimes have been committed. So over the course of a couple of years, they realized that he had committed actual financial crimes, and that's what he ends up going to prison for. Billy McMahon. Farland served prison time for this.
- [40:18]
Josh Clark
He did. So the ticket holders, and I said before that they are generally portrayed as rich millennials who like to go to music festivals. There are definitely plenty of those there. This is, like, meant to be an Instagramable event, but there are also plenty of people who, like, just weren't rich and they went because actually, in some cases, it was a good deal. For, like eight or nine hundred dollars, you could get eight friends together and cover air travel, food, accommodations, and three days of music at a music festival. It's actually not a bad deal. So some people, like, really spent, like, money that they needed on this, and they got screwed over. All the vendors, the people who Worked. All those people went unpaid, but it was the investors who were the ones who the court ordered people to pay or court ordered McFarland to pay back.
- [41:12]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. And, you know, I know at the time it was. It was. Seemed funny to make fun of this, and the people that, you know, these, like you. What'd you say they were rich millennials. But, like, they spent money and they deserved to have a thing go off like they wanted to, if that's the way they wanted to spend their time. It's not my deal, but, like, I don't think it's funny that anybody gets scammed out of money, you know?
- [41:35]
Josh Clark
Yeah, no, there was a tremendous amount of schadenfreude by people who are not rich millennials or on Instagram or just hate that whole Instagram life kind of thing. There were a lot of memes that came out of it that basically portrayed this as, like, it immediately descended into anarchy and they started eating each other. And yeah, again, kind of Lord of the Flies esque. But again, it was just the investors who were meant to be paid back, which I think says quite a bit about a lot of stuff. He actually was taken down on securities and Exchange Commission SEC charges. So he had a federal beef against him. And essentially what the court concluded is that he bilked 80 investors out of $24 million just for the Fyre Festival. I saw that he was on the hook for another. Another 10 million. $12 million for the other stuff, including the Magnesis scams, essentially. So this guy is basically like, you have the rest of your life to pay this back, and that's what you're going to have to do. And on top of it, he was sentenced to six years in federal prison.
- [42:51]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. So, you know, he did this by allegedly lying about almost everything financially related to this whole thing, including himself. He said he had $2 million in Facebook shares. Personally, he had about $1,000 worth. He said the Fire Media app was taking in millions of dollars a month. Over the whole lifetime of the Fire Media app, it made about $60,000. So in addition to him being on the hook, like, you know, with the law and like the sec, he's on the hook with personal lawsuits. So a lot of people, there was a class action lawsuits for $100 million. Like, everyone got together, of course, and sued them, ticket holders. And then they were like, hey, we should sue these ad agencies too, because they're collaborating with these people. They're putting out, like, literal, false information. And in some cases, they're deleting negative comments about the truth of this thing. So a lot of these lawsuits got dismissed. Others did go through and were successful. I think the class action. The ticket holders were reimbursed. Who knows if they ever got it, but at least they were awarded $7,000 each, which is, you know, pretty good.
- [44:03]
Josh Clark
Yeah, they did not get it, and they probably never will get it because as part of the federal sentencing guidelines, the investors are to get every penny of their $24 million back first before anybody else starts to get paid. Vendors, ticket holders, anybody else. So one question that I saw that was not asked almost anywhere, I think I found one article that asked it because I was looking to find out what happened. Where did all the money go? He certainly did not spend $24 million on the Fyre Festival, not by a long shot. And in the documentary, they basically portrayed as like, well, he was just living it up. And he was for sure, I still would guess, not $24 million in six months, living it up. So I can't help but wonder if he's got money stashed somewhere or if he really did just blow through $24 million in six months creating this Fyre Festival. That was totally fraudulent.
- [45:01]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, I'm not going to speculate. I don't want to get sued.
- [45:04]
Josh Clark
Yeah, yeah. I'm not speculating. I'm questioning. I really do wonder what happened.
- [45:09]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah. Who knows? But that's a lot of dough, that's for sure. After he was arrested while he was out on bail, he started another company called NYC VIP Access. He was like, I can't be the face of this thing because everyone knows what I look like and my name by this point. So we hired a guy named Frank Tribble to kind of be the face of the company. And he used the Fire Festival mailing list. You know, a mailing list can be a very valuable thing. Sometimes companies are bought just because they have an extensive mailing list and they'll just shutter the company and use that contact point. But he actually used the Fyre Festival mailing list, offering tickets to things that don't even sell tickets a lot of times, like the Met Gala in New York City Fashion Week. And I think that Fyre Festival mailing list may have been his undoing there because that was added to his list of criminal charges as well. That VIP Access scam.
- [46:04]
Josh Clark
Yeah, it was. Again, it was another scam. And this guy who he hired to front it, Frank Tribble, he still lists himself as the CEO of NYC VIP Access on Instagram, I believe, and he also offers discounted AirPods in the bio of his Instagram account. Nice.
- [46:23]
Chuck Bryant
Get a good deal on some AirPods.
- [46:24]
Josh Clark
So Billy McFarland, I think he served four of his six years. He was definitely let out early. He was also transferred to a low security prison in Ohio.
- [46:36]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, he tried to get out of prison when Covid happened is what they call it like a medical benevolence release or whatever. Because he said he had asthma and that Covid would probably kill him. And so they moved him into solitary during that time. Did not let him out then. And he did get Covid.
- [46:54]
Josh Clark
Oh, really?
- [46:55]
Chuck Bryant
While he was in prison. But he didn't die.
- [46:57]
Josh Clark
He did some other solitary stints for breaking the rules. Like he smuggled a recording device into the prison and then used it to launch a podcast, I guess assuming that the warden didn't listen to podcasts.
- [47:12]
Chuck Bryant
Low hanging fruit.
- [47:13]
Josh Clark
Yeah. And he was released early. I don't know how many years early. He was sentenced to six years, and I think he did four, maybe five. But he definitely got out early. And the first thing he did when he got out, almost the first thing was he announced that there would be a Fyre Festival 2.
- [47:30]
Chuck Bryant
Yeah, Fire 2 has not happened, but he did finally host and organize and I guess successfully pull off a music festival last year on Utila Bay. He loves these shortened, sort of misspelled things. I guess he chose Phoenix P H N X. Assuming because the Phoenix rose from the ashes.
- [47:54]
Josh Clark
Oh, yeah.
- [47:55]
Chuck Bryant
Much like Billy McFarlane did. But that one actually went down. I went and looked at it and I hadn't heard of a single performer. But that doesn't mean that they were not noteworthy. It's just there's tons of music out there now that I don't know about, so they may all be great.
- [48:10]
Josh Clark
Well, so the one that I saw that I recognized the name of was French Montana. And he's a pretty big name. He was a big, big fish land. And he did show up and he did perform. But I was checking it out too. There was a live stream that you could pay 4.99 to watch this music festival. And so it's all very highly documented. And you can see there's like handfuls of people who, who are attending this music festival. Like when French Montana is like, you know, somebody say, yeah, like he gets nothing in response. And like it was just. Yes, it was not good. They were apparently letting in locals. This is in Honduras. Letting in locals for free and encouraging them to come for free just to kind of fill out the, the crowd a Little bit. So. But like you said, he did successfully hold a music festival, but I saw that he's out of the Fyre Festival game because he sold the brand. Did you see anything on that?
- [49:09]
Chuck Bryant
Well, I saw that he sold the brand.
- [49:10]
Josh Clark
He sold it on ebay, Chuck, for
- [49:12]
Chuck Bryant
like a couple of hundred grand or something.
- [49:13]
Josh Clark
Yeah, like, I think 240 grand. He sold it on ebay and he sold it to Limewire, I think one of the original music download disruptor apps.
- [49:25]
Chuck Bryant
Oh, yeah.
- [49:26]
Josh Clark
So, yeah, Limewire owns the firebrand now. And if you want a firebrand mug or a firebrand hoodie, you can go look up Fyre Festival and Limewire and their site will come right up.
- [49:38]
Chuck Bryant
I am quite sure that to wear a Fyre Festival hoodie at this point, this many years later would be a very ironic sort of fun thing to do.
- [49:47]
Josh Clark
Definitely. I think that's kind of what Limewire is going for. It's.
- [49:53]
Chuck Bryant
They acquired the Mad Magazine of music festivals.
- [49:55]
Josh Clark
Yeah, yeah, for sure. If you. I don't know about that. Now that I think about it. No, I'm not going to. I'm not going to want to sell you Mad magazine. No way. But yeah, they. They do offer. Those hoodies are $240,000 a piece. Oh, that's a good price. You got anything else?
- [50:15]
Chuck Bryant
I got nothing else. I highly recommend at least watching one of the documentaries. They're both about the same, I would say. Although we should say that both of those documentaries came under scrutiny because they both. I think one of them paid Billy McFarlane for an interview, which everyone thought was pretty untoward, to give that guy any money. And the other one was partnered by one of the PR companies who had scrubbed social media of negative comments. And they had part. And they don't cover that in the documentary. And they were partnered in that documentary. So that one was also untoward.
- [50:48]
Josh Clark
Yeah. And the Netflix documentary didn't have Billy McFarlane. They approached him to be in it and he's like, you have to pay me. And they're like, no, that's not ethical. But Hulu was like, sure, yeah. So, okay, so that's it. That's all we have to say about Fyre Festival and Billy McFarland. And I think then it's time for listener mail. Chuck,
- [51:09]
Chuck Bryant
I'm gonna promise this is the last MacGuffin email just because I like to torture you, but I think this one had the best definition, that it finally clicks in for everybody.
- [51:19]
Josh Clark
Yeah, we'll see.
- [51:20]
Chuck Bryant
The idea that made it click for me, guys, was that an Item is a MacGuffin. If that item can be substituted with almost anything else without making any changes to the plot of the film, that's pretty good definition. That mistake mysterious briefcase could be a flash drive with important documents, or a diamond necklace belonging to the royal family, or any number of vaguely valuable things. The point of the film is the action that unfolds around that central item. If the plot is centered around something, it isn't about that thing. It is a MacGuffin. In this way, both definitions actually fit. The existence or the state of the object is what moves the whole plot, but the object itself doesn't actually matter. I just thought I'd throw in my 2 cents because before I took this film class that taught me this, I felt the same about MacGuffins, as Josh seems to. Thanks for a great show, guys. Been listening for over 10 years, learned so much and have had so many great conversations inspired by stuff you should know. And that is from Anna Hellkamp.
- [52:15]
Josh Clark
Thanks, Anna. Thank you very much. I saw that definition. Essentially something like that here or there. Still don't understand, really. No, it doesn't. Okay, well then what isn't a MacGuffin? What is not a MacGuffin? I have to know.
- [52:32]
Chuck Bryant
I don't even know what that means. What isn't a MacGuffin then is something that if you could change it, would actually change the plot.
- [52:39]
Josh Clark
But give me an example. What? Give me a real life movie example of what's not a MacGuffin that I will be able to understand the difference between MacGuffins and things that aren't MacGuffins. I demand it.
- [52:51]
Chuck Bryant
All right, well, I'll have to go do some research on that then.
- [52:54]
Josh Clark
All right, so we will do another MacGuffin email somewhere or maybe, you know,
- [52:57]
Chuck Bryant
like the murder weapon that's not a MacGuffin, because that actually matters to the plot. A murder weapon couldn't be just some other thing. You know what I mean?
- [53:07]
Josh Clark
Yes, but how does it.
- [53:10]
Chuck Bryant
We're searching for the gun that killed them. The whole movie. They're searching for the gun that killed the person because that is the central piece that would actually land the person in prison.
- [53:18]
Josh Clark
Okay.
- [53:19]
Chuck Bryant
And you can't substitute that for a can of coke.
- [53:21]
Josh Clark
But. Okay, then how does the. Where again, does that Maltese Falcon fit in? No one is doing anything. If the Maltese Falcon.
- [53:30]
Chuck Bryant
I'm actually the Maltese Falcon, so I can't comment on it.
- [53:32]
Josh Clark
But you can replace the Maltese Falcon with a giant ruby or a flash drive, which would have been weird in that era.
- [53:38]
Chuck Bryant
But I think that's why everyone calls it a MacGuffin.
- [53:42]
Josh Clark
Right? But it's not the MacGuffin. Okay, all right. Maybe it is starting to dawn on me a little bit. Thanks to who?
- [53:48]
Chuck Bryant
That's from Anna.
- [53:49]
Josh Clark
All right, thanks, Anna. I do want to hear a specific example from a movie of what is not a MacGuffin. Okay.
- [53:55]
Chuck Bryant
All right. I'm gonna find a movie where someone's searching for a murder weapon. Because that's a great example, I think.
- [54:01]
Josh Clark
In the meantime, if you want to be like Anna and send us an email where you try to crack through my fix, go. I'm down for that kind of thing. You can send it off to stuff podcastheartradio.com
- [54:16]
Chuck Bryant
Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
- [54:31]
Josh Clark
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Chuck Bryant
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