The Fyre Festival Fiasco

What happens when a career grifter tries to throw a "luxury" music festival in only six months? Not much it turns out. This was the Fyre Festival. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:43Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:53Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here with us too. So this is a straight ahead episode of Stuff You Should Know, the podcast.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  That's right. Today we're discussing the Fyre Festival, the festival that never happened, F Y R E.

• 2:11Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Of which there were two documentaries made and I'm pretty positive I saw both of them back when they came out.

• 2:19Josh Clark?

  Ooh la la. I only saw one.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Which one did you see?

• 2:23Josh Clark?

  I saw the Netflix one.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I saw both of them because I was like, I don't want to miss anything.

• 2:29Josh Clark?

  Right, right. Yeah, I think I got the gist of it from the Netflix one. It was, 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.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  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?

• 2:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, Mr. William Z. Billy McFarland.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  This guy?

• 3:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah, this guy. That's another way to put it.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah, 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.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:37Josh Clark?

  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, she chronicles Billy McFarland creating his first company in the fifth grade. A web posting company, whatever that is.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  Not web hosting.

• 4:05Josh Clark?

  No, posting. So putting stuff on the web. That was his business model, I guess. And he had, 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.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  That's right. Apparently in that same book, and the name of the book, by the way, is Hype: "Inside the Fyre Festival in the Golden Age of Grift."

• 4:27Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  And in that book, she also says that he, he claims at least that he sold, start and sold three companies while still in high school.

• 4:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Although that hasn't been verified, but I wouldn't be surprised because this guy loves starting companies, it seems like.

• 4:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So the first verifiable company that he started was while he was attending Bucknell University, or Buck Nail. He dropped out in 2011 to work more on a social media platform. It's, it was an online ad platform that actually had some pretty big advertisers. He called it Spling, 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."

• 5:23Josh Clark?

  And then he started generating investment from investors as diverse as the CFO of a pharma company to actual like private equity companies.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. 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 Spling startup.

• 5:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  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's, 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

• 6:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it was like the players with yourself card.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:55Josh 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 it, it copied the information from the magnetic strip onto the magnetic strip of your Magnus's. 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.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:39Josh Clark?

  Here's the problem with that. They, they weren't able to deliver on what those perks were.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, not, not at all. And this is, you know, the kind of the first in a series of stories about over promising and under delivering, to say the least.

• 7:55Josh Clark?

  For sure. So here's also where it starts to become a bit of a Ponzi scheme. Magnus's seems to have been like, um, his heart was in that one. So he was really, um, 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. Um, 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's afloat and keep my investors happy. And I'm going to call this new company Fire Media, F Y R E.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:33Josh Clark?

  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 Magnus's propped up. Keep that in mind.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna withhold judgment on whether or not I think that was a cool idea.

• 9:17Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  But, but I'm glad you did.

• 9:19Josh Clark?

  Sure. I said clever. I don't think I said cool. Did I say cool?

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Oh, you said cool more than once, pal.

• 9:24Josh Clark?

  Okay. Oh, it's a cool idea.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  All right.

• 9:27Josh Clark?

  I'll stand behind that.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  All right, great. So you're right. He was doing that to keep Magnus's 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's events. And they were left to put the bill. There was this one guy in the documentary, I think his name was M. David Low, and he says that he was left $200,000 in debt. And he was an employee.

• 9:58Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  So that, that should give you an idea of how this guy's gonna end up treating

• 10:04Speaker 02

  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's. And so a music festival, those things make tons of money, right, guys? That's a great way to make dough. And so that was the next big idea.

• 10:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So essentially this Fyre Festival, which is the crux of our story, was a, an idea that was meant to promote the Fire app, which was created to fund and keep afloat the Magnus's fake credit card.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  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. He, that's about six months to throw a major music festival in the Bahamas. 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.

• 11:08Josh 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

• 11:18Josh Clark?

  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.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So he, you mentioned Ja Rule. He was involved in this as well. Hip hop artist Ja Rule. He was, um, 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. Uh, 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 you said, he wanted to create this hype. So he got legit companies. He got an ad agency named Jerry Media, a PR firm 42 West and a media company called Vayner Media. And in December of 2016, he was like, I gotta get, you know, something out there that people can actually see.

• 12:40Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  So he contracted with Matt, 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.

• 12:51Josh 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 Matt 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

• 13:34Josh Clark?

  don't you take some of these pics from the shoot and, you know, put them up, post them on your Instagram account just to kind of get people hyped up about the hype that we're creating for the festival.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. 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 in swim in the ocean at night, you know, for the, for the shot. 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.

• 14:14Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:33Josh Clark?

  No. So if you look at this very slick video, none, all of the music acts are generic. It's all stock footage of like raves or something like that. Really well-produced, good-looking.

• 14:45Josh Clark?

  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 will be a quest to explore beyond boundaries. Like they used 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, that photo shoot and video shoot.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  That's because that's all they had.

• 15:30Josh Clark?

  Right, right.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Literally.

• 15:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Uh, a good time for a break, I think?

• 15:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  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.

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• 16:56Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 16:59Josh Clark?

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• 19:05Speaker 02

  All right. So in order to promote this video that they had shot, they needed, they needed people to see this. They needed tons 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 12th, 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. That was actually a pretty good idea. And people started buying tickets, like thousands of people started plunking down money.

• 19:46Josh 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've 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, 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?

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:28Josh Clark?

  And of course Kanye West never had anything to do with it, but if you word things a certain way, then 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, this is great. We're going to do this and let's start figuring this out.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. And by figuring out, it was February and remember, they were trying to do this thing in the spring.

• 20:51Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:01Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Uh, it's late February and that that's when they started planning the actual logistics of this festival. Like, how are we actually gonna do this? Um, they didn't have accommodations at all. They promised luxury accommodations.

• 21:15Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Um, 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, uh, mentioned that it was Pablo Escobar's island at one point. This was Norman's K.

• 21:30Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  And the owner of that island was like, I don't like you mentioning Pablo Escobar in association with my island. See, you can't have it here. So they didn't even have a place in February.

• 21:40Josh 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.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 21:55Josh Clark?

  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. Um, there was another thing too, like the, the, um, 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.

• 22:35Josh Clark?

  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 K. And they finally found one on the charming, uh, area known as Roker Point on Great Exema Island in the Bahamas.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  That's right. It's not a private island at all. So out of the gate, they've already, uh, under-delivered.

• 22:53Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Um, it was an undeveloped plot of land. Uh, apparently it was pretty, pretty rocky. It was been, it's been described as a gravel pit. And if you see the documentaries and the actual footage, you know, 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. Uh, and they had 45 days to do it to build this like, you know, village essentially. Uh, they're, you know, they're trying to replicate like the Coachellas and all these things that literally kind of go out in the middle of nowhere and build a, or like Burning Man and build a village.

• 23:24Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  And they had 45 days to do this. Uh, so he hired hundreds of locals, um, to put up, you know, Ikea furniture essentially, and try and get these things going, get these tents built, these glamping tents. And I think what, uh, one of, uh, McFarlane's big errors that, um, well, he started way too late, first of all.

• 23:44Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  And, and who knows if he ever even, you know, planned on getting this thing off the ground to begin with, but he didn't realize there's something called island time. Uh, if you've ever been to the Caribbean, or it's probably like this at islands all over the world, or, or, uh, just beach towns in general.

• 23:59Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Things just move slower.

• 24:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Like, you can't go into a, a restaurant on a Caribbean island and like 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.

• 24:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah, you're meant to kind of downshift a couple of, um, gears as well to kind of mellow out.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  You're supposed to.

• 24:20Josh Clark?

  That's the point.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:21Josh Clark?

  Don't bring the agro like city stuff there.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Not to island time.

• 24:26Josh 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. Um, just as a little aside that'll come up later, there's a woman named Mary Ann Roll, who owns a local catering company that the Fyre Festival hired to feed those workers. And she made as many as a thousand 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.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Um, 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 are supposed to be pop up concerts to promote the festival.

• 25:18Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  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. Uh, so, you know, he's, he's left without um, a, a source of income, basically, leading up to the festival.

• 25:33Josh 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. It'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, um, you have to have this little bracelet, kind of like Disney world or something, right? Um, and they suggested you put at least $300 for each day that you're going to be at

• 26:17Josh Clark?

  the festival and in the hopes that people would just start loading the, um, 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 the, what the investors had put in and apparently even to cover the, the, the, anything that the festival had delivered, except for there is a place in the Bahamas that, um, we will try to get you to, and when you show up, that place will be there.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  And it will be lit.

• 26:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah, ill.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  All right. So the festival is very close to, you know, the, the date is impending and people start noticing, tickets holders start noticing like, you know what? I haven't seen, um, anything on Instagram, like, you know, usually when there's something like that, it's like, hey, look at how great, 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, uh, in, I guess, early part of the year. Um, 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.

• 27:26Josh 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 shady things that were going on, or like, questions people had. People started leaving comments on posts about 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 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

• 28:11Josh Clark?

  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 shuttled down to the Bahamas."

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you're telling the staff not to come, but you've allowed the ticket holders to come, then you're doing things in the wrong order. And that's just my opinion. Again, I've never thrown a music festival.

• 28:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and that's a really good point, Chuck. They didn't tell the ticket holders not to come.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  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're already unfortunately associated with this, but you don't want to be any more of a part of this than you already are."

• 29:06Josh 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.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  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, you know, 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

• 30:00Speaker 02

  had come through and wiped out what was once a promising thing.

• 30:03Josh 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 Fire Festival looked like when the first guests started to show up.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Uh, maybe a second break. I feel like we're right at the precipice.

• 30:28Josh Clark?

  I think so too, man.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:51Josh Clark?

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• 33:39Josh 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 that'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."

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's 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.

• 34:22Josh Clark?

  True.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Especially in the Caribbean. And this was a school bus.

• 34:25Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Maybe a bluebird. Who knows? Those are pretty nice.

• 34:28Josh Clark?

  The bluebirds are, yeah, they're top quality.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  So, uh, they, they send them there. Uh, they tried in vain, I guess, to initially at least actually assign tents to people. Um, cause it wasn't like there wasn't one tent set up. They had gotten a little bit done. Uh, 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 McFarlane, 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 to, starting to do that.

• 35:09Josh 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.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 35:20Josh Clark?

  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. Um, 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. Um, 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.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, they didn't have their luggage. So they started inquiring about that. And so, uh, they started, you know, just dumping their suitcases out onto the beach, uh, from the shipping containers and just other supplies. And basically it, it turned into complete chaos. They just started dumping supplies on the ground and saying, cause people were revolting and saying, take care of yourself. Like there's the stuff, have at it.

• 36:20Josh Clark?

  It's frequently compared to like, um, rich millennial Lord of the Flies.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:26Josh Clark?

  So, um, one other thing that, that they were, that the festival organizers were doing was they were getting everybody super drunk. There, there was one thing in Great Supply and 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.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's also not a great idea to add alcohol to a volatile situation.

• 36:55Josh 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.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. So, uh, maybe the worst about, about all this is they couldn't, um, a lot of people were like, this is a disaster. Uh, I want to get out of here. They couldn't just get out of there because it was the same weekend as, um, something called the National Family Regatta. It's a really big event and all, you know, most of the hotels were booked up. Most of the flights were booked up. So people were basically stranded down there. Uh, I, I think eventually they were even, um, like locked in the airport overnight, like when everything was closed. It wasn't like one of those airports that still has stuff open overnight.

• 37:42Josh Clark?

  Right. They, 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 hung over locked into this hot airport without any food or water. So it's a really bad jam by this point. Even before that, uh, 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.

• 38:22Josh Clark?

  And one of the, the most, um, 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, a skew 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, um, catered food that we were supposed to get. This is the food that they're giving us at Fyre Festival.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  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 a, an idea that, you know, a 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 McFarland served prison time for this.

• 39:50Josh 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 were definitely plenty of those there. This is like meant to be an Instagrammable 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 $900. 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.

• 40:31Josh Clark?

  All of the vendors, the people who, 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.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  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?

• 41:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah, no, there was this tremendous amount of schadenfreude by, by people who are not rich millennials or on Instagram or just hate that whole Instagram life kind of thing. There was a, 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. 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

• 41:46Josh Clark?

  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 dollars for the other stuff, including the Magnesys 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 gonna have to do. And on top of it, he was sentenced to six years in federal prison.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, he did this by allegedly lying about almost everything financially related to this whole thing and including himself.

• 42:32Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:46Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  So in addition to him being on the hook, like, you know, with, 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 a hundred million dollars. 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.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  Who knows if they ever got it, but at least they were awarded $7,000 each, which is, you know, pretty good.

• 43:35Josh 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 it as like, well, he was just living it up. And he was for sure.

• 44:15Josh Clark?

  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.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not going to speculate. I don't want to get sued.

• 44:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm not speculating. I'm questioning. I really do wonder what happened.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  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 in my name by this point. So he hired a guy named Frank Tribble to kind of be the face of the company. And he used the Fyre 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. Uh, but he actually used the Fyre Festival mailing list, uh, offering tickets to things that don't even sell tickets a lot of times, like the, the Met Gala and New York City Fashion Week.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  And, uh, I think that Fyre Festival mailing list may have been his undoing there because, uh, that was added to his list of criminal charges as well, that VIP access scam.

• 45:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it was, again, it was another scam. And, um, this guy who he hired to front at Frank Tribble, he still lists himself as the CEO of New York NYC VIP access, um, on Instagram, I believe. And he also offers discounted AirPods in the bio of his Instagram account.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Nice. Get a good deal on some AirPods.

• 45:57Josh Clark?

  So, um, Billy McFarland, I think he served four of his six years. He was definitely let out early. Uh, he was also transferred to a low-security prison in Ohio.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, he tried to get out of prison, uh, when COVID happened, um, is what they call it, like a medical, uh, benevolence release or whatever, uh, because he said he had asthma and that COVID would probably kill him. And so they moved him into solitary, uh, during that time, did not let him out then, and he did get COVID.

• 46:27Josh Clark?

  Oh, really?

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Uh, while he was in prison, but he didn't die.

• 46:30Josh Clark?

  He did some other, um, solitary stints for, for breaking the rules, like he, um, smuggled a recording device into the prison and then used it to launch a podcast. I guess, assuming that they, the warden didn't listen to podcasts.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  Low-hanging fruit.

• 46:45Josh 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.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, uh, Fire 2 has not happened, but he did finally, um, host and organize and I guess, um, successfully pull off a music festival last year on Utila Bay, uh, the, he loves these shortened, sort of misspelled things. He, I guess, he chose Phoenix.

• 47:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Uh, P-H-N-X, uh, assuming, because the phoenix rose from the ashes.

• 47:26Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Much like Billy McFarlane did, but that one actually went down. I went and looked at it and I 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.

• 47:43Josh 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 to 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, they were apparently letting in locals. This is in Honduras, letting in locals for free and encouraging

• 48:24Josh Clark?

  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, I saw that he's out of the Fyre Festival game because he sold the brand. Did you see anything on that?

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Uh, well, I saw that he sold the brand.

• 48:43Josh Clark?

  He sold it on eBay, Chuck.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  For like a couple of hundred grand or something?

• 48:46Josh 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.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  Oh yeah.

• 48:59Josh Clark?

  So yeah, LimeWire owns the Fire brand now. And if you want a Fire brand mug or a Fire brand hoodie, you can go look up Fyre Festival and LimeWire and their site will come right up.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 49:20Josh Clark?

  Definitely. I think that's kind of what LimeWire is going for.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  It's they they acquired the Mad Magazine of music festivals.

• 49:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. If you um, I don't know about that. Now that I think about it, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  We don't want to sell Mad Magazine?

• 49:36Josh Clark?

  No, wait. Um, but yeah, they um, they do offer those hoodies are $240,000 apiece.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a good price.

• 49:45Josh Clark?

  Uh, you got anything else?

• 49:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 49:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Uh, because they both, uh, I think one of them paid Billy McFarland for an interview, which everyone thought was pretty untoward to give that guy any money. Uh, and the other one was partnered by, uh, 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.

• 50:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and I the the Netflix documentary didn't have Billy McFarland. 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.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:31Josh Clark?

  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.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  I'm gonna promise this is the last MacGuffin email. Just because I like to torture you, but uh, I think this one had the best definition that it finally clicks in for everybody.

• 50:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Uh, 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 a pretty good definition. Uh, that 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. Uh, if the plot is centered around something, it isn't about that thing, it is a MacGuffin. And 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.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Uh, I just thought I'd throw in my two 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 Hellcamp.

• 51:48Josh Clark?

  Thanks, Anna. Thank you very much. I saw that definition, essentially something like that here or there. Still don't understand.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Really?

• 51:57Josh Clark?

  No, it doesn't. Okay, well, then what isn't a MacGuffin? What is not a MacGuffin? I have to know.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 52:11Josh Clark?

  What? 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.

• 52:24Speaker 02

  All right. Well, I'll have to go do some research on that then.

• 52:26Josh Clark?

  All right. So we will do another MacGuffin email somewhere.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Or maybe, you know, 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?

• 52:39Josh Clark?

  Yes, but how does?

• 52:41Speaker 02

  No, that's it, dude. We're searching. 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.

• 52:51Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  And you can't substitute that for a can of Coke.

• 52:54Josh Clark?

  But, okay, then how is the, where again, does that Maltese Falcon fit in? No one is doing anything if the Maltese Falcon isn't there.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  I've never seen the Maltese Falcon, so I can't comment on that.

• 53:04Josh Clark?

  But you can replace the Maltese Falcon with a giant ruby or a flash drive, which would have been weird in that era, but.

• 53:11Speaker 02

  I think that's why everyone calls it a MacGuffin.

• 53:14Josh 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?

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Uh, that's from Anna.

• 53:21Josh Clark?

  All right. Thanks, Anna. I do want to hear a specific example from a movie of what is not a MacGuffin. Okay?

• 53:28Speaker 02

  All right. I'm going to find a movie where someone's searching for a murder weapon because that's a great example, I think.

• 53:33Josh Clark?

  Uh, in the meantime, if you want to be like Anna and send us an email where you try to crack through my thick skull, I'm down for that kind of thing. You can send it off to [email protected].

• 53:49Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, MyHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 54:04Josh Clark?

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