The Fyre Festival Fiasco

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of iHeart Radio. 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. That's right. Today we're discussing the fire festival.

The festival that never happened.

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

Who allow, I only saw one. Which one did you see? I saw the Netflix one. Yeah. I think I saw both of them because I was like, I don't want to miss anything.

Right. Right. Yeah. I think I got the gist of it from the Netflix one. It was, I saw 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. 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. Yeah. Mr. William Z. Billy McFarland. This guy. Yeah.

This guy. That's another way to put it. Yeah. 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 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 fire festival.

And she, she chronicles Billy McFarland creating his first company in the fifth grade.

A web posting company, whatever that is. Not web hosting. No posting. Yeah. 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. That's right. Apparently in that same book. And the name of the book, by the way, is hype colon inside the fire festival.

And the golden age of grift. And in that book, she also says that he claims that he sold. Start and sold three companies while still in high school. Although, that has been verified, but I wouldn't be surprised because this guy. Well, starting companies, it seems like.

Yeah, so the first verifiable company that he started was while he was attending Bucknell University or Bucknell. 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.

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 then he started generating investment from investors as diverse as the CFO of a farm company to actually, like, private equity companies.

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 and close to 500 grand, he got for this spring startup. Yeah, 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 Spring 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 going to start a new credit card. No one's done that in a while, and it's going to be metal, and it's going to look cool." And we're going to kind of 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 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 advanced reservations when they were impossible to get or get into the club that was impossible to get into if you had this card." Yeah, it was like the players with their self-card. Yeah.

“So 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 copied the information from the Magnus strip onto the Magnus strip. So essentially what you had was a cool metal, I believe black version of your Wells Fargo debit card, and that was it. 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. Here's the problem with that. They weren't able to deliver on what those perks were.

Yeah, not at all, and this is kind of the first and a series of stories about over-promising and under-delivering to 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 that it's peak it had 700 members, and that was it. But so he was just spending way too much money to keep that company afloat, so he's like, alright, I'm going to start another company.

And then I can use the revenue from that company to keep Magnus afloat and keep my investors happy. And I'm going to call this new company Fire Media, FYRE. 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, jaw, rule. And say, hey man, I'm throwing a really ill party, and I want you to perform there. How much do you want? You 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 is 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. Yeah. Yeah.

“I'm going to withhold judgment on whether or not I think that was a cool idea.”

Okay. But I'm glad you did. Sure. I said clever, I don't think I said cool. Did I say cool?

Oh, you said cool more than once. Okay. Oh, it's a cool idea. All right. I'll stay in behind that.

All right. Great. So you're right. He was doing that to keep Magnus's afloat. He was using those corporate cards, which again, we're just rescind 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 just one guy in the documentary.

“I think his name was him, David Low, and he says that he was left $200,000 in debt.”

And he was an employee. Right. So that should give you an idea of how this guy's going to end up treating

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. So that was the next big idea. Yeah. So essentially this fire 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 a float, the Magnus's fake credit card. 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. I actually don't really know much about throwing a music festival either, but I did see in a few articles covering this that experts essentially, people who have thrown them say you want 12 months minimum 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 fire 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. Yeah, so he, you mentioned job rule, he was involved in this as well, hip hop artist job rule. He was sort of the main face of the thing, like definitely the biggest name that he got involved, I think, and less like you're really in the know as far as models and influencers go.

And his co, I guess his business partner was another guy named Grant Margalin. 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 got to get something out there that people can actually see. Right. So we contracted with Matt MATTE projects to film a promo video in the Bahamas where it was going to be held.

“And that's how the only thing he ever actually created.”

Yeah, and like they really threw a lot at this. They hired a bunch of like he said, Instagram models, Kendall Jenner, Hayley Bieber, Chanel Amon, and several others. I think there was like six like legit millennial super models who came out to the Bahamas to shoot this this promotional video and the Matt projects company like showed up.

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 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. Yeah, you know, what you obviously don't see in that hype video or the promo video was the reality of that which the documentary is 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 for all looking in the beautiful Bahamas. Right. They promised an immersive experience on a private island. Once owned by Pablo Escobar, which would turn out to be a pretty faithful 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 accent at that point. No, so if you look at this very slick video, none of all of the music excerpts 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 way that they were promoting this.

They were saying that fire festival will be a quest to explore beyond boundaries. It's like that. And the whole thing, the whole thing was essentially publicized as a complete luxury event top to bottom.

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. That's because that's all they had. Right. Literally. Yeah. A good time for break, I think. Yeah, for sure.

All right. So that's a little set up 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.”

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 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, and it really, really worked. That was actually a pretty good idea. And people started buying tickets like thousands of people started plunking down money. Yeah, I think I saw that they were like 98% sold out, like almost immediately.

So it really was a great idea of paying all those influencers to do that. And so great, now we've got the fire 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 to 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.

Yeah.

And of course, Kanye West never had anything to do with it,

but if you were 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.

Yeah, and by figuring out it was February, and remember they were trying to do this thing in the spring, 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. Okay, it's late February, and that's when they started planning the actual logistics of this festival. Like how are we actually going to do this? They didn't have accommodations at all.

They promised luxury accommodations. Right. These were going to 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 K and the owner of that island. I don't like you mentioning Pablo Escobar in association with my island. Right. You can't have it here, so they didn't even have a place in February.

No, they shot themselves in the foot, and just not putting 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. The Web Archive has some of the pages of the original fire 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 K. And they finally found one on the charming area known as Roker Point on Great Exima Island in the Bahamas.

That's right. It's not a private island at all. So out of the gate, they've already under-delivered. Sure. It was an undeveloped plot of land.

Apparently it was pretty rocky. It was been described as a gravel pit. And if you see the documentaries in 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 like village essentially. They're trying to replicate like the Coachella's and all these things that literally kind of go out in the middle of nowhere or like burning man and build a village.

Okay. And they had 45 days to do this. So he hired hundreds of locals to put up, you know, IKEA furniture essentially. And trying to get these things going,

get these tents built, these glamping tents.

“And I think what one of McFarlane's big errors that,”

well, he started way too late first of all.

Sure. And who knows if he ever even, you know, planned on getting this thing off the ground and 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. Sure. Things just move slower. Yeah.

Like you can't go into a restaurant on a Caribbean island and like start complaining that the service is slow. And that's where I'm like restaurants all the way to everything. Everything just moves a little slower and at its own pace. Yeah, you're meant to kind of downshift a couple of

years as well, the kind of mellow out to post to point. Yeah. Don't bring that agro like city stuff there. Not to island time. No.

“So yeah, I think what you're saying in a very roundabout way is that”

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 Mary Ann Roll, who owns a local catering company that the fire 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 fire festival. So just put that in your hat and smoke it later. 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 to where these little pop-up concerts are supposed to be a pop-up concerts to promote the festival. Right.

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 cancelled.

So, you know, he's left without a source of income basically

leading up to the festival. 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 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,

“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 wrist bands 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 have put in. And apparently even to cover the 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 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 great this place is coming along. Great.

Look how awesome it looks. It's still just that one video that they had shot, you know, back, and 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 up my room before I get there. 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 we're going on

or like questions people have. People started, um, leaving comments on posts about, you know, hyping the fire festival questioning the whole thing. And, um, just basically saying this doesn't sound legit at all. Those things got deleted by Jerry Media who is running social media for the,

um, for the fire festival. And then, um, starting finally the day before the festival, the fire media people essentially reached out to their VIPs and said, teach, 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 or figuring out the kinks. So don't come to the first one.

Their employees too were told like, don't come, but the employees are like, um, we already are in Miami waiting to be chuddled down to the Bahamas. Yeah, if you're telling the staff not to come, but you've allowed the ticket holders to come.

Yes. Then you're doing things in the wrong order. Uh, and that's just my opinion.

Again, I've never thrown up music festival.

Yeah, and that's a really good point, Chuck. They didn't tell the ticket holders not to come. No, they didn't. The night before the festival, their biggest act, uh, or I guess their biggest rock act at least.

Uh, Blink 182 pulls out of the festival. Um, somebody smartly in their campus like you don't want to be. You're already, unfortunately, associated with this, but you don't want to be any, any more of a part of this and you already are. No, and their, their statement was classy too.

They just said they're not sure that they would have all the resources they need to put on a quality show for their fans. So they pull out and it starts to rain really heavy. It's sort of the one of those moments in the documentary where, uh, 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 worked for this, uh, for fire media. Uh, because they're, they're trying to set up these tents still. They're unpacking, um, loading, you know, shipping containers or unpacking mattresses. All this credit, uh, 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, uh, there were soggy mattresses left out on the ground everywhere. And it was, you know, it looked like, uh, it looked like a hurricane had come through and wiped out what was once a promising thing. Yeah, yeah.

So like imagine like a whole work, um, sight of people getting ready for the festival tonight 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, uh, guests started to show up.”

Uh, maybe a second break. I feel like we're right at the precipice. I think so too, man. I can't wait to hear it blank. 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.

Just the biggest night in potpastic.

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And the winner is... Createivity, knowledge and passion. We'll all be on full display. Thank you so much. I heard radio.

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“Aquarius is all about freedom loving and different perspectives.”

And I find a lot of people with strong placements and Aquarius are misunderstood. A son and Venus in Aquarius in her 7th house. Spark her unconventional approach to partnership. And he really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms on different houses and different places. But just an embracing of the isness of it.

If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity and real life. This episode is a must listen. Listen to the spirit.our podcast. Starting on February 24th on the iHeart Radio app.

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Hillary opens up about complicated family dynamics, motherhood and releasing our first record in over 10 years.

We talk about what it's taken to grow up in the entertainment industry and stay grounded through every chapter. It's a raw and honest conversation about identity, evolution and building a life that truly matters. You desire in family like this picture and that's not reality a lot of the time it's for people. My sister and I don't speak. It's definitely a very painful part of my life and I hope it's not forever but it's for right now.

Listen to on purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. 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 bars open everybody help yourself. Yeah, there's a school bus to just keep that in mind. I'm not that it matters. A bus is a bus but they're nicer buses than others too. Especially in the Caribbean.

And this was a school bus. Maybe a blooper who knows. Those are pretty nice. The bloopers are either top quality. 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 building the farm 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. Yeah, I don't remember from the documentary. But apparently there was like just open the floodgates for people making a mad rush to grab a tent before somebody else grabbed it. For sure.

The tent, by the way, we should say, "So remember, you mentioned glamping, like not everybody was buying the quarter of a million-dollar yacht package."

“You could get tickets for 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'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. Yeah, they didn't have their luggage, so they started acquiring about that. And so they started, you know, just dumping their suitcase is out onto the beach from the shipping containers.

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." It's frequently compared to like rich millennial load of the flies. Yeah. 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. Yeah, but that's also not a great idea to add alcohol to a volatile situation. 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. 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 you know, 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 still has stuff open overnight. 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 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, 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. Fire 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, 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 catered food that we were supposed to get. This is the food that they're giving us at fire festival. Yeah, and 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 controls, 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 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, 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. 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 Instagrammobile event. But they're also plenty of people who like just weren't rich, and they weren't 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 money that they needed on this, and they got screwed over. 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. Yeah, and you know, I know at the time it was, it was seem funny to make fun of this and the people that, you know, these like you, what do you say they were rich Millennials, but like they spent money, and they deserved to have a thing go off like they wanted to.

“And 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?”

Yeah, no, there was a tremendous amount of shot and fraud by people who are not rich Millennials are on Instagram or just hate that whole Instagram life kind of thing.

That basically portrayed this as like it immediately descended in anarchy, and they started eating each other, and yeah, again kind of lord of the flies ask. But again, it was just the investors who were meant to be paid back to 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 built 80 investors out of 24 million dollars just for the fire festival.

I saw that he was on the hook for another 10 million dollars for the other stuff including the Magnusus 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. Yeah, so, you know, he did this by allegedly lying about almost everything financially related to this whole thing and including himself. Yeah, he said he had two million dollars in Facebook shares personally. He had about a thousand dollars 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 sixty thousand dollars.

So in addition to him being on the hook, you know, with with the law and like the SEC, he's on the hook with personal lawsuits.

So a lot of people, those are 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 worse successful. I think the class action, the ticket holders were reimbursed.

Who knows if they ever got it, but at least they were awarded seven thousand dollars each, which is, you know, pretty good.

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 twenty four million dollars back first before anybody else starts to get paid vendors to get 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 twenty four million dollars on the fire 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 twenty four million dollars 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 twenty four million dollars in six months, creating this fire festival that was totally fraudulent. Yeah, I'm not going to speculate. I don't want to get sued.

Yeah, yeah, I'm not speculating. I'm questioning. I really do wonder what happened. 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, but this point. Right. 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.

His 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 fire festival mailing list 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, and I think that fire festival mailing list may have been as undoing there because that was added to his list of criminal charges as well that VIP access scam.”

And again, it was another scam, and this guy who he hired to front at Frank Tribble, he still lists himself as the CEO of New York NYC VIP access on Instagram, I believe. And he also offers discounted AirPods in the bio of his Instagram account. Nice. Get a good deal on some AirPods. Billy McFarlane, 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. Yeah, he tried to get out of prison when COVID happened, who 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.

Oh, really? While he was in prison, but he didn't die. He did some other solitary stints for for breaking the rules, like he smuggled the 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.

“Low hanging fruit. Yeah. And he was released early. I don't know how many years early, since 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 fire festival too.

Yeah, fire two has not happened, but he did finally host and organized and I guess successfully pull off a music festival last year on Utile Bay. He loves these shortened sort of misspelled things. I guess he chose Phoenix. Yeah. P-H-N-X, assuming because the Phoenix rose from the ashes. Oh, yeah. Much like Billy McCarland 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 not worthy. It's just, there's tons of music out there now that I don't know about, so they may all be great.

Well, so the one that I saw that I recognize the name of was French Montana, and he's a pretty big name. He was a 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 499 to watch this music festival, and so it's all very highly documented.

And you can see there's like handfuls of people 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 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 fire festival game because he sold the brand.

Did you see anything on that? Well, I saw that he sold the brand. He sold it on eBay. Chuck for like a couple of 100 grand or something. Yeah, like I think 240 grand, he sold it on eBay, and he sold it to lime wire. I think one of the original music download disruptor apps. Oh, yeah.

“So yeah, lime wire owns the fire brand now, and if you want to fire brand mug or a fire brand hoodie, you can go look up fire festival and lime wire and their site will come right up.”

I am quite sure that to wear a fire festival hoodie at this point, this many years later, would be a very ironic sort of fun thing to do. Definitely. I think that's kind of what lime wire's going for. It's they acquired the mad magazine of music festival. Yeah, sure.

If you, I don't know about that. Now that I think about, no, I'm not going to, I'm not going to want to sell mad magazine. Yeah, they do offer those hoodies are $240,000 a piece. No, that's good price. You got anything else? 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 building with Farland for an interview, which everyone thought was pretty untoward and give that guy any money. And the other one that 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.

“Yeah, and 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, it's not ethical, but who lives like, sure?”

So, okay, so that's it. That's all we have to say about Fire Festival and Billy McFarland, and I think then it's time for the listener Mailchuk.

I'm going to promise this is the last McGuffin email, just because I like to torture you, but I think this one had the best definition that it would finally click in for everybody.

Yeah, we'll see. The idea that made it click for me, guys, was that an item is a McGuffin, 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 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 McGuffin. 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.

Thanks for a great show, guys. Been listening for over 10 years.

Learned so much, and if had so many great conversations.

“Inspired by stuff you should know, and that is from Anna Hellcamp.”

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

No, it doesn't, okay, well then, what isn't a McGuffin? What is not a McGuffin? I have to know. I don't even know what that means. What isn't a McGuffin, then, is something that if you could change, it would actually change the plot. What?

Give me an example, what? Give me a real life-movie example of what's not a McGuffin that I will be able to understand the difference between McGuffins and things that aren't McGuffins.

I demand it. All right, well, I'll have to go do some research on that then. All right, so we will do another McGuffin and you know somewhere down there. Or maybe, you know, like the murder weapon. That's not a McGuffin, because that actually matters to the plot.

A murder weapon couldn't be just some other thing. You know what I mean? Yes, but how does it do? 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. Okay, and he can't substitute that for a can of coke.

But, okay, then how is the where again, does that Malty's Falcon fit in?

There no one is doing anything if the Malty's Falcon, so I can't come in. But you can replace the Malty's Falcon with the giant Ruby or a flash drive, which would have been weird in that era.

“But I think that's why everyone calls it a McGuffin.”

Right, but it's not the McGuff. Okay, all right, maybe it is starting to dawn on me a little bit. But thanks to who? That's from Anna. All right, thanks Anna.

I do want to hear a specific example from a movie of what is not a McGuffin. Okay. All right, I'm going to find a movie where there's someone searching for a murder weapon. Because that's a great example, I think. 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 up down for that kind of thing. You can send it off to [email protected]. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Next Monday, our 20216 iHeartPodcast Awards are happening live in South by Southwest. We'll honor the very best in podcasting from the past year and celebrate the most innovative talent and creators in the industry. And the winner is... Creativity, knowledge, and passion will all be unfold display. Thank you so much.

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I'm Amanda Knox and in the new podcast doubt the case of Lucy Letby. We unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? I'd just been face-to-face. The moment you look at the whole picture of the case collection.

“What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe?”

Oh my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to doubt the case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Nackard. In 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor.

But here's the thing. Bachelors fans hated him. If I could press a button and rewind it all I would. That's when his life took a disturbing turn. A one-night stand would end in a courtroom.

The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agreed to date me, but I'm also suing you. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before.

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