Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 957: Fyre Festival- The Story Netflix did Not Tell with Marc Weinstein

Episode Date: January 31, 2019

In this episode, Sal, Adam, and Justin speak with Marc Weinstein, who was featured in Netflix's just released documentary Fyre. Marc goes into detail about what led him to work with the festival, why he stayed to the disastrous end and what he learned from the experience. This is a very interesting conversation with a behind the scene look at the music festival business, the power of social media and the damage that one charismatic sociopath can inflict. What Marc does for a living, his background and how he connected with Mind Pump? (2:06) What are some of the most profitable music festivals and the challenges you would face starting one? (8:50) Did he know what he was getting into when he switched from finance to event production? (14:50) How he ‘fell’ into the music industry. (18:09) Why the events industry is always a mess and the need to just ‘figure it out’. (21:10) How did he meet Billy McFarland and the founders of the Fyre Festival? (23:45) How did he deal with the coordination and stress of trying to accommodate the festival guests? (38:40) What were the conversations like with the other members of the production team while this debacle was going on? (42:37) Was there a thought process to postpone? (45:27) How did he coordinate the festival guests off the island and when did he discover that Billy had committed wire fraud? (48:40) Was he afraid at any point the locals would get violent? (52:50) Who owns the footage from the documentary? Are we contributing to this sociopath? (53:48) How Fyre is just a microcosm of how social media portrays our lives. (58:55) What is the aftermath from this? (1:01:23) Does he find it cathartic to talk about it? Make amends with GoFundMe pages? How we could use social media for good. (1:03:40) How does he feel he has evolved from this? His take on the social media revolution. (1:09:00) Does he see an advantage of events like Burning Man unplugging from technology? (1:17:00) What practices does he implement to cope with social media addiction? (1:18:37) What is he currently pursuing? (1:20:57) Featured Guest/People Mentioned: Marc Weinstein (@warcmeinstein)  Instagram Brett Kincaid (@bretthendersonkincaid)  Instagram Ja Rule (@Ruleyork)  Twitter Billy McFarland (entrepreneur) Tristan Harris (@tristanharris)  Twitter Products Mentioned: January Promotion: MAPS Anabolic ½ off!!   **Code “RED50” at checkout** FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened | Netflix Official Site Lesson from the Fyre – Marc Weinstein – Medium Prime Social Group Live Nation Adds Governors Ball to Its Music Festival Lineup What Really Happened at the Sweetlife Music Festival TomorrowWorld: festival will have a bright future despite SFX bankruptcy XLIVE – Las Vegas The Matts Productions, LLC Insight Venture Partners: Venture Capital Firms NYC FYRE FRAUD Streaming Online | Hulu UNREAL-SYSTEMS Exuma Foundation for the locals impacted by Fyre Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked - Book by Adam Alter iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us – Book by Jean M. Twenge PhD BRICK Siempo  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Man, that was a good call, Adam. Yeah, man, it was Mark in here. Yeah, that was a great conversation, and I love where it went. I think at the beginning it takes a minute. So I think if you're unfamiliar with who he is,

if you're unfamiliar with the documentary fire that is on Netflix, it's also on Hulu. You're definitely gonna wanna go watch it after this. Yeah, 100%. So if you're not familiar with it, hang in to the entire episode. We kind of let him tell his story to how he got into the industry in the space

and then he does get into the whole documentary and what happened, and then ties it all in with social media. And I thought that was really cool because that wasn't something that we knew he was going to do or that he felt strongly about, and it's something that we all felt very strongly about and are connected to with him. That's right. Now, you can find him on Instagram at workmindstein. So that's W-A-R-C-M-E-I-N-S-T-E-I-N. He also writes blogs. He wrote one called Lessons from the Fire

where he kind of goes into depth about what he learned from the whole incident. That's the member fire was that huge music festival that went bat shit crazy and lost a lot of people money. And so he writes all about it, you can find it on medium and that's Mark Weinstein. So it's M-A-R-C and then W-E-I-N-S-T-E-I-N. And oh, also before we get into the interview, you have one day left for the 50% off maps and a Bolic promotion that's our foundational program if you want to take advantage of the promotion go to maps fitness products dot com

Use the code red 50 R E D 5 0 again one day left. So that's it. All right. Here we are talking to Mark Weinstein So mark I got to tell you how this all came about. So I'm Netflix and then chilling with my girl. And we all do. And we're going through and I had recently got, you know, people on the show, we typically talk about, you know, all kinds of shit, but we always talk about whatever we're watching on Netflix or Prime or whatever. We always share what shows that like, oh wow, this was a really good show.

So it's great because the audience sends me stuff in the DMs, all the time you gotta watch this stuff. Well, I've been getting bombarded lately with this documentary fire. And I don't know anything about it whatsoever. And so at any time I get like multiple, then I'll actually go do it because you know, there's always that one off kid who thinks that we're alike. And so he's like, Oh, you should watch this and say, not my taste at all, right?

It was terrible. But this is a lot of people. So I get on there and I'm watching it. I'm about 15 minutes into the documentary, which I know nothing about this whole situation. And pops your face. And I'm like, what the fuck? I know that guy. Yeah, I said, I had the same thing. Yeah, right away I paused it and I look at Katrina, I said, why do I know him really well? Where do we met? Where have we talked? I know I know Mark, I know I know Mark.

And she's like, are you sure? I said, no, I'm for sure. I don't forget a face and his voice, everything I remember. And then I watched for a little bit longer and then it dawned on me. Oh my God, that's we met at the Spartan race. So for the audience, you got to tell us what you do for a living.

And then maybe give them up to speed how we met at Spartan and then we'll get into the other shit. Yeah, so the what I do for a living is probably a little bit different than the way it was portrayed in the documentary because it's been about a year and a half since I recorded it. I recorded it probably right around the same time that we met at Spartan. So it's happening all at that same time? Yeah, it was all around the same time. Actually, it's a

little bit of an interesting, not interesting, but a long story. I got introduced to Spartan through Fire Festival. So someone at someone that had invested in Fire Festival, whose name I won't disclose, worked with Spartan and connected me to them. And said, this guy did good work at Fire Festival, didn't work out, but you should work with him on whatever event you have coming up, and then I ended up at the World Championship like five months later.

So was doing this event consulting, had produced my own music festivals for two years, and actually recently just moved to an adventure capital. So, totally, what was it? Total 180, kind of just done with events for the time being. What were those music festivals you did?

They were called 90s Fest. So it was all 90s theme music festivals. We did five cities between 2016, 2017, starting in New York, Salt and Pepper had lined. It was basically like an opportunity for, yeah, it was fun. It was just a kitschy music festival, not at all cool or kind of driven. It was driven by social media in some ways, similar to fire, but more about just kitschiness and like being a kid again. And we did 5,000 attendees in New York in the first year. Nickelodeon sponsored. It was a lot of fun. But events is a really, really tough business. How did you, how did you even get into that? So before the event stuff, I was working

in finance. I was in investment banking for two years at Jeffries and Morgan Stanley. And really never to do that with my life and after two years was like, okay, this is not what I'm interested in Started my first company You know really wanted to build things the first company was still in finance. We won't go into that one too much but um, then I came across a friend who's been in the music industry since like 2008 He was promoting concerts in University of Michigan. He has a company called Prime Social Group, Shoutout to Adam. Sure he's going to love that promotion right there. And I helped them raise money in 2012.

And I was like, oh, this business is so fun. It's concerts. It's literally the business of fun, right? And it's kind of simple, you know, it's you pay artists, you promote sell tickets It's not easy, but it's simple and is it a very profitable business? Festival festival promotion can be profitable, but you need to be unprofitable before you get there, if that makes sense. So usually a music festival lifecycle, like the first two years, you'll lose money.

You know, the people think if they see a sold-out show that it probably made a lot of money, but the thing is that agents know exactly how many tickets their artists are going to sell. So they price that in when you're building a festival and so what do you mean explain that what do you mean by that? So like the agents have perfect information on how much how many tickets their artists have sold in every single city over any number of years. So they know how much they're worth essentially? Yeah, exactly. So they're like if you're gonna price a ticket at say like $25 I know that you're gonna sell whatever I expect you to sell 5,000 tickets for this artist, let's just say. And that's priced in. And so, you know, they often will leave maybe like a 10% margin for

a good promoter who does the job right? Oh, wow. It's not a lot of room. It's not a lot of room at all. So it's a really, it's actually a really challenging business. And, you know, actually, so Kevin Lyman produces the Warped Tour. He's been doing it for 25 years, 40 shows. And he, I, I still don't speak like, I think actually at X live, where I saw Joe Rule speak. And he said he only made money on tickets once out of 25 years, once in 25 years.

So how do you make money? Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, so sponsorships, it's just like any other media business, right? Like you make money on sponsorships, and then because it's events, you make money on food and beverage. So you want people to go and to order a lot of food to drink a lot, essentially.

And then media, of course, and that's a huge aspect of the industry today is promoting after the show, doing these promo videos and pre-promotion videos and whatnot. And so, yeah, so if you can figure out a way to make money on sponsorships, by kind of having a demographic, that's aligned in some way, shape or form,

then you can be profitable. And then the other way to be profitable is to be early always. And so like festivals like Governor's Ball, where they've been doing it for, I think Governor's Ball has been around for almost a decade now, I wanna say. Yeah, almost a decade, I think 2011 was the first show.

You know, they're the first major festival in a major market. So then you can scale up by actually just adding days and going bigger. But if you can't get to that size, it's really challenging. Do you know what some of the most profitable ones are? I would say governor's ball is definitely up there,

Tom Russell and his team do a fantastic job out in New York. And I'm familiar with that. I'm like Lala Paloza and I'm thinking like, something like that. Lala Paloza is probably up there as well. Yeah, I'm not. The coach of the CQS Coachella. I mean, once you have that, so all the polus is probably up there as well. Yeah, okay. The cello. The C2, yeah, it's Coachella, yeah. I mean, once you have that,

so if you have a festival that after, you know, say a certain number of years becomes a name in and of itself, like the ones you guys just mentioned, then, you know, you have a lot more leverage with the artist, first of all. Because it looks good for them to go to be one of the right artists at this place.

Yeah, exactly. It's really good for them to go. And then agents are often representing a really big name. And then they have a few undercard names that they really want to get on a show like Lollapalooza. So then you have the opportunity to start leveraging a little bit, right? Yeah, exactly.

So you can trade. You can trade. They'll be like, OK, fine. I'll give you this artist. And of course, it's important. They want to get the full price for their artist because they're working for them. So it's not as explicit typically,

but I think that it definitely helps from a pricing standpoint, and all artists want to play, most artists want to play Coachella. It must be really tough then to launch one then, because if you don't, you know, you're... If you're a big name artist and some mark guy calls you up and says,

Hey, come down to my festival. It's going to be badass and you're like, fuck you. I've never even turned it a single before. You're going to be on this island. So I imagine that's a good idea. It's actually really challenging. I bet. And it takes years to build relationships with agents.

And oftentimes, first year festival promoters or even any concert promoters will not succeed in paying the artist the full fee. So if you call up an agency and you say, hey, I'm, you know, Mark, I want to produce this random show in Kalamazoo, Michigan, you know, and I really want chance the rapper to play. They'll be like, okay, you have to pay 100% of his fee right away. So that's another thing, not only your festival's really challenging to make money, but it also requires a ton of upfront capital, especially for a first year festival,

because the majority of your expenses are your artisves. You have to pay down all upfront to prove the model. Exactly. And so you have to be able to get a lot of investment before you even approach anybody if you launch one out. Yeah, the first step is raising capital, which is like a grueling multi-month process because you don't have a group of investors

that really want to invest in events. You have on the larger end, you have Live Nation and AEG. Those are kind of the two 300 pound gorillas in the industry and live nation owns pretty much every venue across the country that you've ever wanted to go to. And then AEG owns a number of others, large amphitheaters, etc. And then you have some large private equity firms that are getting into it, but they're really late stage. So venture capital doesn't invest in festivals because it doesn't give you that large 100x return

on your investment that they're looking for with a tech company. So what you're left with is really high net worth individuals and private investors or friends and family who believe in your vision. And oftentimes, the high net worth individuals that will invest in concerts are really ones that are just trying to have fun.

Right. So it's like a vanity investor. Right. Right. Like, I want to hang out with Diplo. You know, and so you're like, I'm going to have Diplo at the show. Like, all right, great. I'll be backstage with him. Yeah. So, so, Nordic, sell it to them because you're saying that they don't typically make money for the first couple of years. These investors, are they expecting not make any money? I think, I think often they're expecting, you know, if you're up front with them,

they're expecting to make money after three years. There are buyers like even just three or four years ago, a live nation, an AG went on a huge buying spree. This is public, I think, but Governor's ball was acquired. Well, let's say SFX was a public company, and they acquired a business called Made Events, which does electric zoo in New York for I think like $45 million or something between $30 and $50 million.

There's earnouts in there and stuff, but yeah, it's, so there's exit opportunity after three years. And I think that, you know, in the interim, there's a lot of businesses that lose money in the first couple of years, but even venture back companies, I think it in the interim, there's a lot of businesses that lose money in the first couple of years. But even venture-back companies, I think it was like five years before Uber made money. I don't know if that's 100% accurate, but it takes years to kind of scale up. And festivals are no different. The problem is you have to keep reinvesting. Every time you make profit, then the next year you go out, and even if you can reduce your artist fees,

let's say to 50 percent. You need to put that 50 percent deposit up front. You need to get the venue. Oftentimes the venues change on you, right? You know, with 90s faster, we had this incredible venue in the heart of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, like right on the river. And it was a New York City kind of park-zoned space, but it was really just an empty lot. And we had a great event there, we wanted to do it again. And the New York, there were actually probably around like 20 events that summer in that same space. And then the parks department said, no, we want to turn this into a shared space on the weekends for, you know, for every citizen, not just people that are paying to go to concerts.

And so they put a skate park in there. And then we had to scramble to find a new venue and the venue is everything. So we did our second 90s fest on Governor's Island and you have to take a ferry to get there. So all of a sudden, you know, your attendance cuts and you have to really go big on artists to get people to say, okay, I'm gonna take a ferry

to go to an event. So it's really challenging. You know, even if you make money in the first year, you're not guaranteed to do it in the second year. And I think it's really a labor of love, the events business and the music business in general. I think people do it because they love music, they love creating, they love the shared experience. It can be lucrative, but it's really a very, very small number of events and individuals that are making real money on festival.

Now, did you know that when you made the leap from finance over into event planning? Did you kind of know what you were getting into beforehand? Yeah, I did. I wanted something simple. So, my first business was like this really kind of like high-falute and finance idea. It was about inflation and was kind of me and my partner thought we were super smart. We were like, oh, we're so smart. This is great. And then it's like, that's not a business.

We got fell in our face pretty much. And then I really wanted something simple. And the thing about a festival is, if you can figure out a way to reduce your artist's fees and bring people together for a shared cause, then you can expand your margins. So economically, it made sense and then from the stance of like, wow, this is actually really fun. You know, I wanted to get into it. And the concept behind 90s Fest was, there's these acts that are all touring, but they're, at that point, they were 20 years out of their kind of prime.

Many of them would take offense to that, but it's probably true. And my feeling was 90s are coming back. It's kind of this nostalgia cycle. Buzz feeds like releasing these, which full house character are you, take the quiz here. Janko jeans were coming back. That's all I suppose.

Oh, those are the shit, man. Yeah, I feel like I think all three of you could fit in with our own tanker. Oh, together. Let's try it out. They hit my release I can do a summary thing with those on. Yeah, exactly. Hockey sacks and pugs and whatever. I really think you can do so many things with those on. Exactly, hockey sacks and pugs and whatever.

And for some reason this was coming, I think every 20 years people get nostalgic about their childhood. So this was coming back online. And my feeling was if we created something around this brand of everybody wants to be a kid again, or a teenager wherever you were in the mid 90s, the 90s were like, boom times in the US. It was fun. And it was kind of cheesy. Like we had Nickelodeon

there. As I mentioned, and people were getting slimed and, you know, doing obstacle courses and nickgames and sports or gas or whatever, the agro crag. And if you guys remember that thing. And so the idea was if we can bring people together on this concept, then we can get artists for much less. So your typical artist fees are like, let's say, 85% to 100% of your projected ticket sales. And that's if everything goes right. We felt we could get our artist fees down to 50% by building a shared interest. And you see this a lot with fitness, with health and wellness, actually, the festival that we modeled ourselves off was Sweet Life, which is produced by the owners of Sweet Green.

I don't know if they do it anymore, but they started in DC. They were really small talent budget, and they sold out because people wanted to go somewhere with thousands of others that have shared interest. And so we were like, OK, the 90s is something that they can be interested in. And so we were like, okay, the 90s is something that they can be interested in.

And so we produced the festival and it kind of worked. The first year it worked. And people were excited about it. And our artist fees, I think were 55% of our ticket sales. And it was a success. We had great sponsors. People had a really good time. We had great press.

And then we kind of kept trying to scale that out across multiple cities. How are you getting in contact? At this point, you don't have any connections with agents and artists, do you? How do you get these things? Oh yeah, so that's kind of, I kind of fell into the music industry. My friend Adam, who I mentioned earlier, started, I guess in 2008, financial crisis colleges started to cut their budgets and they start with entertainment. So Adam was going to University of Michigan and he saw that they weren't doing many concerts

anymore and he produced a Nas show at Summer Reenan nearby. And this was, I guess, 2009. And so he just fell in love with the business and he's been doing it ever since. I think it's been, yeah, it's been a decade now since he started. Did he have a relationship with Naaz heading in or how did he, he did the cold call. You know, he did the, he just found Naaz a great time

to get the cold call and book Naaz. And I think, I actually think he lost a ton of money on that show, which is, you know, kind of like the, it's the right of passage in this industry or in the music space. And I think the number one quality of a successful promoter, I think, is durability. You know, to keep taking the punches and coming back and producing again and again and again.

And then you build the relationships with the agencies, you start to pick up talent early on and help them grow through your events. And agents start to route their artists and help them grow through your events and agents start to route their artists through your venues or through your events because they like you. And so Adam met his partner Zach who was doing the same thing at University of Wisconsin and they ended up moving to Columbus, Ohio because I think that's where Zach is from. And so right when I quit my job in banking, Adam contacted me and was like, hey, we wanna raise money for our company.

SFX had just gone public and that flamed out. They went bankrupt. This was like a $1.5 billion company when it went public. In a year and a half, they were bankrupt. SFX, not Prime Social Group. And so I think people underestimate just how hard it is to produce events and to throw concerts.

There's really two major players. And then a bunch of small independents like C3 who did La La Paloza, they sold to Live Nation, Paul Tolet and Golden Voice, sold to AEG, they do Coachella, even Bonarou, which has been successful for a number of years, just two years ago, had a terrible year. SFX's big event was called, what was it called, they did it in Atlanta. And this is another interesting thing, this event was like, something like 30,000 attendees and it started pouring rain in Atlanta and the attendees got trapped in the rain.

The buses couldn't run on the streets, mud was everywhere, and they got stuck and it was cold, you know. I forget the name of this event, but that was SFX's largest festival. Oh wow. Man, I'm blanking out, I'll remember it later. But anyways, there's often kind of stories in the events industry about this crazy stuff happening.

Well, now this is starting to make more sense to me how you could get strung along in the fire thing for so long. Yeah. Because I was watching the documentary and I'm going to myself or thinking to myself, wow, you know, Mark seems like a smart guy. How did he get, you know, into this for this long?

Like, I'm obviously the way the documentary unfolds and they tell you, I mean, a quarter way in, I'm already like, what the fuck get out, you know what I'm saying? But now that you're, the man in ship. Now that you're telling the stories the way you are with what it is. For the course. Yeah, it's kind of like, it's probably pretty normal

that you're stressed the fuck out all the way up until the day goes. Yeah, lose money. So this is starting to make a little more sense to me how you could, how so many of these people, because if you're a viewer, like we were watching it on TV, you're going like, how did all these people just get fucking bamboozled like this?

But it makes sense though, now like with what you're saying. So I'm assuming that at one point you go to, I think it was the X, the Xumas. Yeah, we're jaw roll spoke and X live conference. Yeah. Is that where you, is that where you got made connection? So that's a great, that's a great bridge. I think, you know, I've had people reach out to me, people close to me and ask like, why did you stay? And maybe we can answer that later, but I think what you hit the nail on the head, like the events industry is always a mess.

Even the best events are a mess. Right, it's what you're saying right now. It's putting, literally putting out fires. My first event, I think I ended up declogging the Port of Johns backstage by myself. Like, I just grabbed a plunger and was like, you know, you're just like literally, yeah, it's a dirty business and you roll up your sleeves and you just keep on kind of finding solutions. And you know, in the documentary, I mentioned Billy kept saying that it's a mantra of a

lot of event producers. You know, we just need to figure it out. And so I think that's kind of why many of us stayed for as long as we did, because even though it was messy, there was a sense of, okay, maybe we can still pull this off. And there's a lot of pride.

People take pride in their work. Well, historically, one of the greatest examples of a music festival that where everything went wrong, but when we talk about it, it's talked about as one of the greatest events of all time as Woodstock. And everything literally went wrong with Woodstock. And they even talked about it on the documentary. So I can see how easy it would be to get stuck in that, like, okay, we're going to do this. We're going to do this.

Did you contact them or did they find you? Because it sounds like you might have made a name for yourself after your 90s festivals. Yeah, so I wouldn't say I made a name for myself, but I had some relationships in the space and you're right, Woodstock, just to mention that, Woodstock was brought up in the documentary and people actually, I believe, died at Woodstock, right?

So it was massive, it was a huge mess. But how did I meet Billy? Okay, so, you know, we went to X live and I was there with Adam Zach, my partners in Prime Social Group, N90s Fest, and Zach was actually on stage with Jaw Rule. So we're watching the panel and I'm sitting with my friend Joe who's now producing the Shaquille O'Neill Shax Fun House events. Okay. And Shax actually doing one down in Atlanta before the Super Bowl. I think on Friday. And we're sitting there and Joe rule starts talking about this like this festival that's coming in May and it's going to be massive and it's on

this island and it was like they're kind of coming out party to the industry and we look at each other and we're just laughing. We're like, yeah, right. It's just so challenging to produce these events and it sounded so just too good to be true. And so first impression, negative. Fast forward around two months and the promo video comes out. And it's, you know, the top models in the industry in the Bahamas, it's beautiful, the marketing campaign, genius with the orange blocks from all these influencers. What is this mystique?

You go on the website, it's like these beautiful renderings of beautiful villas and I'm like, oh man, like this is interesting. And even then, you're kind of, is this real? People are talking about it, private jets to an island. And so I'm a little, peak my curiosity. And I ended up knowing the guys that produced the video. Oh, okay.

These guys' mat productions and Brett Kincaid is in the documentary as well. And they actually ended up producing the documentary. It's on the screen right now. They produce that video and they do great work and they do a lot of work for major brands. They also produce events. They produce a festival in New York called Full Moon Festival. They do Halloween parties.

Really cool guys, really above bar, honest, hardworking and do big things. And so I sat down with in New York just catching up with Max, who's from the Matt Productions team, Max Pollock. And I was like, so what's the deal with this fire festival? Like the video is incredible. You guys crushed it. He's like, yeah, thank you. I'm like, what's the? Are they real? Or what? And he said, yeah, they're real. You know, they sold out, they sold out both weekends already. And like two days, right? It was crazy. Like, unheard of, right? Unheard of, right? To sell out your music festival in the first year is, is a huge, huge accomplishment. And of course, we now know that it was because they were just lying about what was available. Right.

A private jet was a charter jet. A villa was a tent. So, you know, so, I'm like, my entire details. I put in, I feel like what did Jauril say on that call? False advertising. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. So, you know, so then I hear that. I'm like, okay, that's kind of interesting and I'm actually thinking about going at this point. Like maybe my friends and I will go and I was trying to see if I can, you know, ask Max for a favor to get me right for Nagle. For Nagle, take it or something like his belly button. Sounds awesome. You can be there. Sounds great.

And then about like two weeks, I'm back in LA, and my friend Harley calls me and Harley works at one of the largest venture capital funds in the country. It's called Inside Venture Partners. They manage like $1.6 billion, maybe more. And he's like, dude, what do you think of these fire guys? I'm like, I don't know.

It sounds cool. They're producing a good event. He's like, they're doing this app. They're making $20 million a year. And of course, later it's discovered Billy was faking a lot of the numbers for the app as well to investors. That was a different company, right? He was bridging that.

That was his, the media company. And the festival was meant to be a come-out party for Fireapp, which was a booking app for talent. So if you had a wedding and you wanted to get, you know, which all in all is a great concept. It was a great concept. It's a great concept. It's a great concept.

And, you know, that's how Billy inspired a team of legitimate engineers to come on board for little pay and equity to try to build this thing. Now, anyone that knows the music industry knows that it's intentionally opaque. So, opaque, so there's not perfect information, you're not able to get artists. So even if you were booking through fire, you were getting a manager, or the manager's manager.

So that was imperfect to start, but people were interested in the app, and of course, with the revenue numbers that Billy was claiming, he got a lot of interest from these venture capital funds. So two venture capital funds submitted a letter of intent, which means they wanted to sign a term sheet for, you know, we're going to invest in fire. And we're talking 20, $20 million, $30 million check sizes. And these are legitimate companies. And I'm introduced to Billy through one of them.

So of course, I'm like, okay, this is legitimate. So you're at this point. So of course I'm like, okay, this is legitimate. So you're at this point you're like bought, like okay, this is for reals. Yes, and I hadn't spoken to Billy yet, but I'm like this is, this sounds cool. And if they pull it off, it could be one of the biggest events in ever in recent history.

Yeah. So you're not only thinking it's cool, you're thinking you're excited about it. Super excited. And I was thinking, you know, I was thinking like, being a part of something like this could be incredible. From a career standpoint, from a fun standpoint, excitement, it's adventure,

I have the opportunity to go live on an island in the Bahamas to work. Wow, what a dream, right? And so I get on my first phone call with Billy and we start talking about the festival and whatnot and the app, and it was kind of pitched to me as, I was kind of rolling off of 90s fest at this time, and it was pitched to me as, we really need good people at the company, know you have event production experience,

and I was kind of trying to move out of events into media at that time, which is one of the reasons I worked with Spartan even though it was an event we produced all of this content. Oh, okay. That's that. So really interesting the content space, new media, podcasts, whatever. And you know, Billy kind of hung over the carrot of, you know, we'll work on this, it'll be a test run.

And then you can join the company. And so, you know, we can talk about this later as well, but I think there's certain things that con artists do, that's like a pattern, and, you know, I've had the unfortunate experience of being very close to at least one of them. And, you know, hopefully now I can start to see these patterns and maybe help others to recognize them. But that carrot, that little excitement, that kind of pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is a part of it. And so... It's what gets us to look, to ignore that little voice.

Yeah. You know, when that happens and that's with all relationships, when they dangle that carrot, you end up ignoring that voice that says, this might not be good. Something's wrong. Yeah. I mean, exactly, right? Had I trusted my intuition from the start, I never would have touched this thing. But it's got to be hard though at this point because as someone who's in the event planning space like yourself, the things that you know that are probably the most difficult are getting handled right out the gates, which is ticket sales selling out and capital behind

there. I mean, you have big companies that are saying that they're going to throw millions of dollars at it. If I'm in your spot, I'm probably going like, and didn't they bring you in just a little bit later than they had somebody previous? So they had hired two production companies before the third group, which were a bunch of independent contractors. And I only later discovered this, but they had hired, I forget the name of the first company. First company came in and said, okay, we're gonna build you a budget.

They're like a festival in a box kind of business. I think they do events at MSG, you know, massive business. So they said, we're gonna build you a budget, whatever. And they flashed the budget, big presentation, $54 million to get it done, fired. Next company comes in a few months later and someone from that company actually wrote an article about this, but they saw the site, the new site. At this point, it was no longer on that Pablo Escobar

or private island. It's now in Exumus and they come in and they see the site, and I think it's now like four or five months out from the event, and they go, we need a year, and it's $35 million. Fired. No chance, tried to negotiate down, say we need to get it done in time, fired. They leave, I think the company was called CIE. So then now we're three months out and all of a sudden,

I think one person from that company stayed and there were a number of other independent promoters brought in from, I'm producers brought in from Miami. And so then it's just like the network. I know this person does transportation. I know that person does hospitality. And all of a sudden you have all these individuals now coming together who have never really worked together before. And coming back to why people didn't leave, everybody's working on their own little silo and working around the clock, trying to solve their own problem.

And it's hard to see the big picture that way, isn't it? Yeah, and intentionally kind of upfiscated. You know, the big picture is kind of held back from every individual and is really just funneled up to the top, which was a couple of individuals, Billy, of course. So I get brought in, when I first connected with Billy, it was the last weekend in March,

and then I go to Exuma's to meet Billy and John Rule. I think it was the first week in April, And then I go to Exuma's to meet Billy and John Rule. I think it was the first week in April. And the event is May 5th, 6th, 7th, I wanna say. So we're one month out. Oh my God. And that's another thing. I'm in this documentary so freaking much. I was there for a month.

I'm not. You know, they've been working on that for a year, but it's all good. And so I get down there and again, right? Like, it's a little bit messy. I can't get a hold of Billy. We're supposed to be down there negotiating and figuring out what I'm going to do. He has this other gentleman whose name,

I can't remember this guy's name. He's done a really good job of staying out of all this. So maybe it's for the best. But he was a former private equity vice president at a big fund, like really legitimate dude. If you look up his LinkedIn, you'd be like, okay, it adds more credibility. Corolla's down there, she's an extremely

well-connected investor, her husband is an massive finance company. And so now there's these kind of positive signals, but also I can't get Billy to talk to me. And I literally just flew from LA to Exumus, and it's like we're supposed to talk, and he's just talking to everyone, and people are grabbing him,

and he's trying to solve these problems. And I remember seeing him kind of, you know, looking at the big map, there's maybe 10 people in the kind of production house, which was at this resort called Grand Isle at the time. It was just like a condo. And he's looking at the big map and they're like, we don't have enough room on site for enough tents for all the guests that we have sold tickets to. And I see him kind of like trying to figure it out. And all of a sudden, he's like, okay, we're gonna do a second site here

where we're having this party and we're gonna build tents there. And you know, some of the producers are like, well, pushing back and he's like, no, no, no, like that's it. And they're like, okay, well, I think we can make this work. And so my first impression of Billy was like,

oh, maybe this guy's a problem solver. Mm-hmm. You know, and that's how he got this far. But what I later realized was he just didn't really think through the kind of details of what it would mean to then do that, right? So now you're building tents in a completely different area. There's tide, there's wind, you need more security staff, you need more hospitality. It's just every decision you make in a festival

or in any business has a ripple effect. And if you just make these quick decisions, yeah, it seems good at first, but then also you have new consequences that you have to deal with. And so we're three to four weeks out from the festival, and finally I get a hold of Billy that night. He's like, yeah, talk to, I think his name's Kenal.

Talk to Kenal. So I go for a walk with Kenal and we get into a handshake agreement. He's like, look, we are covered with the site. We're covered with production. We really need help with booking houses for all these influencers that we need to house and for production staff and for investors and for press.

And so I'm like, okay, cool. You know, I can do that. And so my job became the housing guy. And, you know, it was interesting about what I was doing is it sounds simple, but like this island has a population of 5,000 people. I needed to find 500 beds, individual beds. Oh my God. And it's the busiest weekend. You're like knocking on doors or what? Actually. Oh wow.

Actually, we had two local women who weren't featured in the documentary, kind of similar to Marianne, haven't been paid. One of them actually has had to leave the island because she recruited so many of the laborers to work. And she hadn't really, she had just moved there, settled her family, she was from a different island. And people were after the festival, we're banging down her door for payment.

So she had to leave. So we had two women literally going door to door. There's another funny thing is there's no addresses on this island. So we had to build a map of our own map where we're literally drawing this house, that house, and all the houses of names. There's no addresses.

There's one, one, maybe two sets of keys. Anyway, so I had to find 500 beds for an island with 5,000 people and what's really kind of brushed over in the documentary is when they made the decision to change from little island, Pablo Escobar Island to Exuma's, they kept the weekend against the island's kind of advice.

The government said, this is the National Regatta weekend. The National Regatta is a big sailing event down there. It's like the Super Bowl. So the island's hotels are all booked. So there's no hotel rooms, I gotta sit up. I'm so happy for it. It gotta sit up. I'm so crazy. Oh, okay, you're stressing me out, man. It's like really tense in here right now. So, yeah, so 500 beds, islands over booked, we're

literally renting houses from locals and they're going to leave for the weekend. So what's that conversation look like? You knock on the door and say, hi, I know you live here. Can I pay you X amount of dollars to get the fuck out so I could put somebody in the car? I mean, what the fuck do you say? So that was like, most of the houses were kind of rental properties.

But towards the end, it was like, it was like, yeah, hey, this is gonna be a crazy weekend. There's all this stuff going on. You know, they're going to pay you. And I'm not the one having the conversations directly with the homeowners. I'm coordinating everything the two local women are, because they're friends with that, right?

You can have the conversation. And it just came down to money in the end. A lot of people were getting paid. What Billy would do was he would throw money at problems, but often money that he didn't have. That's another reason why he got such great people because they were being offered fees that were in far, you know, inaccessible what they would usually get. These houses were getting rented for more than they would normally get, you know, and so

people would stick around and they thought, oh, this guy has money. And in the end, it turned out he didn't. They spent a lot of money on the festival. I think all in, they spent somewhere on $15 to $20 million. So real checks were being cut and whatnot. But yeah, it was just a mass scrambling, scrambling, every day. And another thing is it's a huge coordination effort.

So then you need to match people with beds. So it's kind of this giant puzzle. So we have 500 beds. And that grew to 1200 because then we didn't have enough people on site. We ended up having much more staff than they thought originally when we went on when we went into this. There were 150 to 200 influencers that needed to come down. So I was told, four four to 500 beds in four weeks, I was like, okay, I got this, you know, whatever.

Then I find out, it's the regatta, then I find out it's actually 1200 beds. And so we were calling in air mattresses. The air mattresses never came. They got stuck on the last cargo shipment. So as you know, I don't need to rehash this that much because in the documentary, but you can see that we just didn't have enough beds

for the people that were coming, and it continued to be kind of glossed over as we'll figure it out. Even to the point where the solutions that Billy was coming up with was, oh, we'll actually have a private jet because he was paying for the private jet on credit. And not the houses, which needed cash.

And he was like, well, the private jet fly people to NASA, staff. So you work all day, you hop on a private jet, you fly to NASA, you fly back the next day on a private jet. Great, like what? We rented a cruise ship, a 230 person cruise ship, seven days before the festival.

To fit more people. To fit more people. The cruise ship ended up being 20 feet longer than the dock. So we thought we could get a cruise ship on the festival. To fit more people. To fit more people. The cruise ship ended up being 20 feet longer than the dock. So we thought we could get the cruise ship on the dock. We kind of knew we were really trying to work with the Coast Guard to get and make it work in the end there like we can't. So now the cruise ship is tender. You have to tender.

It's like a 20, so it's luxury, but it's a 15 minute tender on a lifeboat in the Bahamas and the ocean was rocky. And this is like for press, right, and influencers. And I think in the documentary, there's a shot of one influencer's, like, I'm not leaving this boat until, you know. And so, yeah, so that little silo, right, that little accommodation silo

that I was spending every single day working on was its own mini disaster. And just trying to solve problems and figure it out. And of course, the simplest solution would have been to cancel. Sure. The next simplest solution would have been to postpone. And the third simplest solution would have been to just cut back the numbers to the amount of people

that we could actually accommodate. But these guys just, they, they just, I don't know, it's crazy. I asked myself why they didn't want to listen. You know, you hired people to kind of be able to tell you, hey, this isn't gonna work. And when they did, you just ignored them or fired them. What were the conversations like between you

and some of the other, the other people in the company who are organized, are you guys, at what point are you guys talking to each other going, my side's fucked up up. What's your side look like and what are we gonna do? Yeah, pretty much every like every day You know, you're chatting with people and it's like everyone's really strong out Everyone's kind of trying to figure their own thing out. I don't even think I went to this site in In like the first two and a half weeks that I was there. Cause my job had nothing to do with the festival grounds. And so I was driving around the island, looking at houses with, you know,

these two women and one other man who I mentioned who's a Navy SEAL, great guy. He trained the, trained Navy SEALs for like 20 years in the bus program. When you, when you fly in, okay, so you've seen the promo video, which we had up on the TV just a minute ago. And so that's, and then you fly in. Okay, so you've seen the promo video, which we had up on the TV just a minute ago. Yeah. And so that's, and then you fly into this new island. What was your initial?

Did you get get a look? Or did you say, Oh, no. I mean, no, I honestly was not at the site. Oh, so you have you flew in and I drove straight to the grand aisle where most people were saying on the production team. And then it was just like, I'm in front of a computer all day. Oh shit, so there's a part of you that thinks maybe we can still make it look kind of like that. Yeah, exactly.

And then of course, as you mentioned, like I start communicating with others, we all become friends, there's a camaraderie in this disaster, which is one of the greatest things that came out of it. For me, it was just like the people. Event producers are some of the most incredible people out there, in my opinion, because they work so, so, so hard behind the scenes,

most of them never get any credit for what they do. Each of them are kind of just blocking and tackling and they don't really get paid that much. And it's just like they're in it because they want to be, again, they want to be creating these events, they want to be participating in the experience, and they love, often they love music. And so building relationships with these people,

and it's incredible, and I know they're all working hard, I know they're all capable, and we all built this camaraderie where it was like the kind of contractors and then the fire full-time employees who had this like group of like five that just were inaccessible, pretentious, everyone thought rich and frankly, you know, treating a lot of the staff inappropriately. I had to pull my first week there. I had to pull the Chief Marketing Officer grant aside. We took a walk, I remember, and he had yelled at me

in front of the group or something, and I literally pulled him a sign, and I was like, you brought me in here to fix your mess. Like, don't talk to me like that. It's crazy to me that, you know, you guys just couldn't postpone. Like it could have. Like so what?

There was a second weekend. Yeah, was there like a thought process of that maybe Billy has this timeline? He's got this timeline to pay all these people off. Like, I think what it is is when you're, you know, let's call it 10 million. I think it was ultimately 19 million, but let's say it's $10 million in the whole.

You, if you cancel an event or postpone an event without some kind of forced, major or natural disaster or whatever, you are on the hook for all of your R's fees, all of your production fees and everything. And you're not getting that ticketing revenue. So people had booked flights, they're gonna cancel, they're gonna want their money.

They're gonna want their flight reimbursement. So I think it was basically like in Billy's mind, if I'm kind of entering the mind of Billy, it's a calculus of, if I cancel or postpone, I'm guaranteed to lose this amount of money. If I keep it, even if it's a mess, I could probably make back wide-dollars. Sure.

Whatever. And so that's his calculus, so no matter how many times people said cancel it or postpone it or cancel guess or remove the influence or whatever, it was like, no, we have to move forwards. And yet he just couldn't see how disastrous it already was. Yeah. Or not give a fuck.

Or not give a fuck. That's what I wanted. When I'm watching it. It's such a good question. Yeah, when I'm a fuck or not give fuck. That's what I want. What I'm watching. Yeah, what I'm watching I'm and then especially with how they kind of end the documentary were you know after this all Unfolds he seems to jump right into another kind of Ponzi scheme Yeah, so it makes me question did he just not give a fuck since day one? Was he just trying to find a way to make put some money in his pocket or launch his big app?

Or was it? Or a sociopath? Yeah, I know. It just has no care, it doesn't care. It's hard, right? Like I don't even want to give him that much credit. Like in the documentary, they, you know, Chris caught a clip of me saying,

he's your genius or mad man. I'm like, I can't believe I said that. You know, he's neither. He's just a, he's a kid that, you know, wanted to be cool and wanted to be Elon Musk meets Richard Branson. And just playing with everybody's money. Yeah, exactly. And just drive around in his Maserati

and take private jets and meet models. And he was willing to go to any length to kind of project that lifestyle to people. And so I really have no idea what was going through his head. I mean, we literally, the writings on the wall, now people will then ask like, what was going through your head? Why did you stay, right?

And I think a lot of it has to do with, we're on this island, we're trapped. You know, you're paying for your own flight out of there if you're leaving and a lot of people are working on, you know, biweekly paychecks. And you want to see something happen. You want to see it come together. And then also as it gets really close,

you're like, if they're gonna go through with this, how are people gonna find their houses if I leave? Like I know that's, I I know that's a little bit, maybe people will be like, that's bullshit, whatever. But it's kind of true. And one thing that I really didn't talk about much in the documentary that I'd like to just mention here is so the day after the festival, after the first guest arrive

and it's clearly canceled and it's mess and whatever, we have 1100 people on that island and Billy and his core team are gone. Like no one knows where they are. The only person that stayed was Grant, his credit. He was hyperventilating in a paper bag but he stayed and I thought that showed some level of integrity on his part. But so now you have 1100 people on an island and remember the charter jets were not scheduled to leave until Sunday, Monday.

So we had no way to get these people off the island. And so there was a team of around 10 production staff who hadn't been paid, who had been working without sleep for a week at least, and were there without direction whose job it was now to evacuate 1100 people off of this island. And one thing that I learned is that a charter company has a legal responsibility to get everyone back if they charter people out of the U.S. I think they have a liability if they don't bring them back. Oh, interesting.

So we worked with the charter company. I wish I knew the name because props to them for getting it done. And we got everyone off the island that was on site in that next day. And that was actually when I discovered that Billy had committed wire fraud because the cruise ship was docked, or not docked to the cruise ship was mored or not docked. The cruise ship was

mored or whatever. The store floating in the person that we rented it from called me and said, Hey, if you guys need help getting people off the island, we have we're in touch with the Coast Guard in Miami. We have enough food and fuel to get people there. It'll be I guess like of a day or two day trip. and we're happy to do it, but Billy owes us 50% of the fee. So if we get the money in the bank account, two day will take 250 people home. So I remember, you know, calling kind of the head of production who was figuring this stuff out, working with the charter company. I'm like, we have this

solution. Let's do this. He gets a hold of Billy. Billy gives a green light. But of course, we don't know where we can get the money in the bank account today. Does a wire confirmation work? So I call up the cruise owner and I say, hey, thank you so much. This is incredible. We're going to send you a wire today.

I'll get you the confirmation number. He goes, absolutely not. I'm like, what's wrong? He's like, we're not doing it unless the money hits the bank account. The last wire that Billy sent came five days late and the number was different than the transaction ID that Billy had sent me. And so then more stories like that started coming out. The Wi-Fi company, for example, I think,

had been sent to fake wire confirmation number. So the same way that Billy doctored his Apple stock certificate, he doctored wires. So like, you know that moment when you're about to send something, send a wire and there's like that little line. And he just like photoshopped that to my knowledge. Again, this is what I think he did. And just emailed a screenshot of it

before sending the wire. And so that's a federal offense. And so anyway, so yeah, so there's this whole crew of people that stayed, even for, I was there for, I think, 10 days after the festival, or at least seven days after the festival, coordinating with the local government You know we had shipping containers full of liquor which has monetary value full of merch

There was I don't know what happened to that fire merch. I think people are wearing it all over the Bahamas And then it was like it was high quality stuff like they did spend money on certain things Yeah, there's a The dream man the dream of it, you know, get sell it on eBay Yeah, so we were staying and kind of coordinating with customs and security and that was the day that a lot of the workers came down and we're like Pay us and I think in the end we built a camaraderie with them because they realized that we hadn't gotten paid either So it's like there's nothing we can do. We're not the enemy. We want to help you. We were afraid at any point like oh What if these locals turn on us and think that were I was at one point

There was one point the day we were getting everyone off the island where around 30 people Came down. I mean these guys were working in the hot sun for days You know on end and didn't get paid. And they were pissed off. And, you know, there were, I think, five of us in the production house at that point. And Skywalker, who's in the Hulu documentary, took two of his guys and he's Skywalker's awesome. Great name. Great name. I think his name's Daniel, but season production veteran and really calm under pressure and he walks out and kind of helped defuse the situation.

There's one shot in the documentary of someone kind of really in my face, really angry, really upset. And I think again, it's just like they, people are people at the end of the day and I think they realized it wasn't us. Dude, I was just trying to help. I have to ask you, I had this like,

a little bit of a conspiracy theory behind the whole documentary in terms of, you're not the only one I've ever seen. Who's benefiting from this documentary, like who owns rights to these videos, like all that kind of stuff. Like I know you said like a bit of the marketing firm. Yeah, because a lot of the video that was on the documentary was video that was done

when you guys were playing the festival together. Yeah, my contributing to this psychopath. Yeah, so that's a really good question. And I had the same question. So like a lot of people, you know, I asked you guys about social media because I've stopped reading my comments on social media now because there's such a mix of positive outpouring which just gives you a big ego boost for no reason, and then negative outpouring,

which is like, this guy's a con artist, he's just like Billy, you know, he's Billy's frontman, whatever. For the record, I really dislike Billy. He owes me a lot of money, and it was a tough experience working with him. I refused to do any documentary that I knew explicitly would be enriching him. This is public knowledge now, so I'm happy to share it.

The Hulu documentary paid Billy for his life rights, and that pissed me off, and so I didn't do an interview with them. Their argument was, look, the jinx on HBO had a murderer get interviewed. And sometimes you need to kind of, you know, work in that way to get the real story. So I guess to an extent, I understand that I don't blame them, but I just didn't want to participate in that. And so, you know, and then the Hulu documentary attacks the Jerry Media guys because the Jerry Media guys were hired as contractors to promote the festival on social media and to run the social media campaign.

And so, I think Kulu asks, are they culpable? And they asked me that actually when I refused to do it because of Billy, they're like, well, you're doing this other one. And in my opinion, I think they were irresponsible in that you should understand what you're promoting. You guys probably get hit up to promote products all the time. And like, we've vetted the shit out of them. Yeah, I was gonna say, you don't wanna promote a product

and then it turns out that it's like causing cancer or something, right? So it's challenging, but at the same time, I think for them and for the models as well, which a lot of people are going after the models and That's what you think about that. It's kind of crazy. You get hired to do a job. You're going to a photo shoot, right? You have no idea, but again, it's like, I guess if a model did, if Kim Kardashian did an ad for Baby Formula and the Baby Formula turned out to be Carson Egenic, when people go after her.

And maybe if she owned some of the company, I could see that, but if she got paid, I don't see how that could, you know, how that could work. You know, it's, here's some of the benefit I think that came from the documentary because there was a, I remember reading a lot about this festival when it all was going down. And it was getting a lot of hate in the sense that

the people who got ripped off, everybody was like, well screw them, they're rich people. Any rich kids flying in on private jets and who cares and whatever and people were making memes about it, making fun of it. But people don't realize a lot of, and not that, you know, they deserve to get screwed just because they're wealthy.

And they don't, nobody deserves to get screwed. But there's a lot of locals, there's a lot of people like yourself who work there, who I got anxiety watching the documentary. I can't even imagine the amount of the stress that went through that whole process. I get a mild PTSD watching the documentary. Luca who's in the documentary, one thing that I think people don't realize, and now they hopefully do, is that this team came in and built a stage,

like an incredible sound system. The whole stage shipped it over for Miami, worked day in and day out to get it done, stage sound lights. That's Luca's company on real productions. That guy rented equipment. That equipment was, what's the word, embargoed, compounded, whatever it is, by the Bahamian government and was essentially held hostage to get payment

that they were owed, that customs was owed. And Luca was a contractor. So now he's on the hook for equipment. I think the thing went on for at least a month where his equipment couldn't get shipped back and nobody was paying for it. And he owed money to the owner of that equipment. So this is a guy that was coming to do a job. And a lot of us often talk about, and it's mentioned in the documentary, like, how do we

not solve the problems would we have continued? Would this have continued? Right, because it's like you solved the problems enough to continue. Yeah, and Luca, I think Luca asked himself that as well. Like, you know, there were times when they didn't get paid on time. And if it had been like, no, then there's no stage, no sound, no lights, there's no show. So, you know, and the same thing, if there's no housing, there's no show, there's no food, there's no show. So, you know, when Steven Star left, we all were like, okay, canceled seven days out, losing your, your caterer, you're done. Then Andy found

a new caterer, right? And so solving problems. Cheesam. So the cheese. How many? Who does it like a cheese sandwich? I do want to go back to what you mentioned because I think, you know, we could talk all day about how big of a mess it was. And I think both documentaries do a great job of portraying, you know, just that. I think broader theme, social media, how we all interact with social media. One thing that came out of fire is, I think the news mentioning that you're doing a sponsored post,

right, that's important. You need to tell people that you're getting paid to promote a product. I think that's something that is clear now and should have been clear then. I think that's definitely an important aspect of it. And something that I thought a lot about after the festival. And again, it's like it's such a cut and dry story in some ways now because it's clear Billy was fraudulent. It's clear he committed crimes. We talked about why people

stayed, how the events business is messy. Was he really trying to solve problems and get it done? Was he delusional? Those are interesting questions, I guess. But when I left, I kind of thought about, okay, what was I doing when I was there? And I was sitting in front of a computer, kind of going to houses, trying to organize this puzzle of who's sleeping where I was on phone calls with influencers telling them that they weren't getting what they thought they were, they hated me, often hated me, they're like, thought I was screwing them over

because they weren't like a tier one influencer or something like that. You know, hurting cats, but all the while I'm posting these kind of photos to my Instagram account which is like, view from the office, you know, and it's like blue oceans. And, you know, and I did go to the beach and it's beautiful. And we want to share positive experiences, but like, is fire just a microcosm of our current unhealthy relationship with social media where we all share the best snippets of our lives. Oh, I look jacked in this photo.

All right, here we go. Or like, I'm in this beautiful place. I'm traveling with beautiful people. And then really like, you know, it was like the background was my, it might as well have been just like a screensaver on my computer, you know. And I think we're all guilty of that in a lot of ways.

And I don't wanna loop Billy, who's a clear fraud into this. I wrote about this after the festival, and I kind of looped him in as like, you know, maybe we're all just like him. Of course, we're not all just like that, you know, but I think we're all co-bubble. That's a great point.

It's a great point. And with that being said, then, what happens to all of this afterwards? Like, I know, is he gonna serve time? He's in jail. He is six years, I think. Six years in jail, yeah. Right, and so.

So, just. And, and, and what about all the people that, you know, bought tickets that they, do they just eat that? It's like, that's what you get for getting bamboozled. Like, what happens to all of them? I mean, there are lawsuits. I think the investors sued him. I know some production staff sued him.

Um, and of course, there's like a massive civil lawsuit from attendees. One attendee says he was awarded $5 million in Netflix stock and people are like, why isn't this guy just pay, you know, everyone? And I think a wall getting awarded and actually collecting are two different things. Yeah, if there's no money to collect, there's no money. Yeah. And that's the point. No one's getting anything to my knowledge. There's nothing in that entity anymore. The brand is totally tarnished. It's done, right?

So no one's going to get compensated. How did this affect John Rool? I mean, people hate John Rool right now. They hit it in before and how they really, they really, I'm sorry. That was a bad, this is really. I mean, 50 cents, I kind of, Jarroel came down a couple of times. He wasn't really, you know, involved from the standpoint of like seeing it happen. I think he just really believed

in Billy, you know, that was his guy who was going to, you know, take him to the next level. I mean, I think that's what I think, I think that's what I think, I think, that's what I'm going to do. I think that's what I'm going to do. I think he just really believed in Billy. You know, that was his guy who was gonna, you know, take him to the next level. And so, yeah, I feel, I feel for Jarre Rule in some ways. You know, he's a celebrity people are asking, why doesn't Jarre Rule pay all these people back?

I mean, you know, maybe I don't know how much money Jarre Rule has, you know, maybe I don't know how much money Joe Rule has. You know, it's a lot of money. So, yeah, it's kind of interesting after math. You know, this, I was filmed a year and a half ago for this documentary. I can't believe we were all hanging out. After you filmed it. Yeah, we're all now on this. Yeah, when this was going on. So when you were kind of hiding it, I just really want to talk about it. I'm obviously I almost didn't get you to come down today

Yeah, so I'm sure my parents will be like, why did you do another interview about this? Yeah, they watch the documentary and call me and we're like, why did you do this? No, I mean I find any cathartic any any from from talking about it and you know processing it It's a release. And I think two great things that came out of this. One is Marianne, who's in the documentary on Netflix. So a lot of us who agreed to do the Netflix documentary, Mark Musters, who's in it, and who's in it,

and a few other production people who were in the background, but didn't want to be on screen, have been working with the Exuma Foundation to create essentially a charitable campaign to get locals paid back. Oh, wow. That's awesome. And so Marianne Role has created a go-fun me. It's not linked to Billy. We can talk more about like, there's comments on, you know, on this like, hey, this is just Billy scamming again. It's not linked to Billy. She was owed $120,000 something thousand dollars. And she-

That's the restaurant, girl, right? That's a restaurant owner. She fed it, she broke my heart, man. She fed us every single day, like 30, 40 people, and then 30, 40 people on site. And then ultimately it was like over 100 people during the last two days. Every single day around the clock, it was her full-time job,

and the food was great, honestly. And from what she says in the documentary, she took her savings to pay her people that were actually supplying the food, right? I think she went into debt to be able to finance the supplies and things like that. So there's a go fund me for her, right? So there's a go fund me for her, but it's complete.

She raised over $190,000. And she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said,

and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said,

and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, and she said, Nobody understood exactly as you said the full story. You know that there were people in the background like Mary Ann that were really negatively affected by this. It was more about the shot and Freud of watching

some rich kiddie to cheese sandwich. Right, that's what, that's kind of the feeling that I got too that I feel like, because I remember like it happening and I didn't even think nothing of it. It just, it did. The memes that were made like Sal was saying it was funny. Yeah, it was like it was a jab at rich kids.

It was more of a jab at rich kids. Like, ah, you got bamboozled by a bunch of insta models and shit, that's what you get. Like it was kind of like that. You don't really get to see all the people behind the scenes who got really fucked in this situation. So that's really cool. Now, did she start that on her own?

Or did you guys help? So yeah, Chris, the director helped her set it up. The Matt production guys posted it. The Jeremy Media guys posted it. She started on her own, or did you guys help? So yeah, Chris, the director helped her set it up. The Matt Production Guys posted it, the Jeremy Media Guys posted it. I posted it on my Instagram and it went really well. So she is now $190,000 in that campaign. I believe she said publicly on CBS that she will be donating the remainder to others that were affected.

Now we created a lot of people ask why I just marry in, you know, like what about others? We then went ahead and partnered with the Exuma Foundation to create a second go fund me for the local laborers that weren't paid and anyone that submitted an invoice to the Bahamian government, a lot of the production staff had kept their documentation of all the expenses owed,

submitted it, will be able to get compensated if that's successful. That's raising $400,000. It hasn't really been publicly announced the way Mary Ann's was yet. I think that will be, I'm definitely gonna mention it this week. We'll link it to the show on the show.

Absolutely, awesome. We really appreciate that. Anything we can use our platform to help get these people paid that will help. Yeah, I mean, again, these guys, man, it was hot. And they were working all day, building tents and carrying, heavy equipment and whatnot. So if they get paid back, it's like a happy ending to all this. And so that's part of the reason why I ended up

participating in the documentary and why others did, as well we felt it was a chance to kind of make certain aspects of this right. And I hope and believe that Netflix will be getting behind this new go fund me with their PR department. And I'm waiting for them to do that before, you know, before I kind of jump in, because I want to make sure that it has the right people

behind it, but the Exuma Foundation is very legitimate. You can look it up online. It's going directly to their bank account. It's not a scam. Billy's not involved. He's not getting enriched from this. And I think it could, you know, it shows like, again, going back to social media,

the power of social media for positive change as well. You know, like social media was kind of people foam out into fire because they wanted to be a part of something that made them feel cool and they were jealous of that lifestyle in some ways and then people shot and frighted out of fire because they were excited to see a bunch of rich kids go down. And I think that shows two of the really negative aspects

of social media and it's power to create kind of this angst and the image of the really negative aspects of social media and it's power to create kind of this angst and the image of the other. And I think this coming together for these GoFundMe's actually shows, okay, maybe we can do social media for good and to help raise awareness for different causes. In my personal opinion, I believe social media to be really just a reflection of on a broad scale of our own of human nature. I really do. I think the stuff that

we see on social media that we don't like, we don't like it because I think we see elements of that within ourselves and the things that and it just amplifies everything. You know, I want to ask you a personal question because you said something very interesting. You said in the documentary too, but you brought it up here where you talked about almost taking some responsibility in the sense that you said, you know, I was posting pictures of how beautiful it was outside. And I wasn't really showing people how difficult it was on my own social media. You seem to be very evolved.

Do you have like a personal practice or something that helped? Because I could see how people would just not try to grow from this and be like, I'm out of here, I never want to talk about something like that. Not my fault. But it seems like you're trying to grow from this. Yeah, really evaluate. Where does that come from? Yeah, well, one, thanks to, I'm definitely not evolved. Garden variety neurotic, just like many of us. And I'm addicted to social media. I can honestly say that. It draws me in really strongly.

I think we're all fighting a superhuman battle. Naval Ravicon to someone that I really respect and follow on social media. And he started Angel list and brilliant. He posted this recently that the current battle against the mental battle against these behemoths, like Google and Facebook, who use human psychology to give us little dopamine kicks and kind of keep us coming back to the casino. The human willpower it takes to not participate in that is almost, again, superhuman in some way. So I think we're all susceptible.

Tristan Harris started, I forget the name of what he started. He's an incredible person. I think he used to be involved with Google in kind of building, you know, getting people drawn in and saw the problems with that. He started a campaign against it and he talks about, when you're trying not to turn on your phone or like take that hour or day off your phone, your competing against 3,000 of the best engineers

in the world at Facebook, who sole purpose is to get you to come back. I've seen him do an interview. You have? Yeah, I've seen him do an interview. In fact, in the guys are going to hate me because it's been a while since I've dropped the book Irresistible. There's a matter of. There's a check it out. It's great book. It's a great read. Irresistible, and then so is Igin, and it touches on it was it was mind blowing for me It's almost been almost two years since I read it and I used to just drop it on the show time And these guys used to tease me and the reason I did of of all the books that I've read in the last Oh, I blew your mind. It did it just it will hit home for what we're in the middle of right now that a lot of people just are

Completely oblivious to yeah, and and in the book, they compare it to being addicted to cocaine and heroin. And it was the first four warning really. Yeah. It was out there. Yeah, there were, there's not a lot of books that are out there that are, that are talking against social media. And it was the first one that kind of opened my eyes. And, and even unveiled some of the, the tricks they use, like, for example, I don't know if you know this, but like even like Instagram, when you post a picture,

Instagram does not release your likes all at once. They slow drip. They slow drip, like people that you care about. Yeah, bro, that's like a, that's a, it's sick. Yeah, that's like it, you would, like teasing a drug addict, you know what I'm saying? Giving them a free, a free bump, knowing that they're gonna come back

and get something else from you, you know, that's, that's dirty. It is. And I think we're, I think, in a decade, maybe hopefully soon, or we'll all look at these devices in our pockets in the way that they're used. And it's starting. Like the movement is really, really starting to take shape. The same way that we looked at Big Tobacco. You know, people used to say smoking cigarettes was healthy. Now, again, like, how do we reflect on what our role

in this is as, you know, you guys are quote unquote, I guess influencers, right? I don't know if you can see yourself. I know if you hate that word. I hate that word too. It's the worst. Right, right. It's the worst name to have.

It's your podcasters. You're a media company. You as a built-in media company. I hate that word too, right? It's the worst. It's the worst name, but it's your podcasters. Your media company. You as a built-in media company. I understand that, but trying to evaluate the role that we all play and how can we shape the narrative so that we're improving it. And I think part of it, and I mentioned this

in the article that I wrote after fire is a bit about honesty in social media because the challenges, there's multiple challenges with social media, right? There's the addictive nature, which is kind of that engineering challenge that you described in Tim Wu talks about that in the attention merchants and just in Harris is kind of building that up. And there's a number of companies actually out there that I personally support. And I'm gonna mention them here, because why not?

One is called brick, go brick now. My friend Tommy Sobel started it. It's a movement for taking one hour a day for starters to be completely off your phone, off your social media. You literally brick your phone, quote unquote, you airplane mode it, whatever. And go out and do something engaging in the real world with people that you love.

And he's been building this movement through events. And I think that's fantastic. Another friend of mine, Andrew Murray Dunn, started a company called CEMPO, which is now open source software for Android and not iOS yet, because iOS kind of really controls their software development for encouraging mindful use of technology. So like some of the tricks that these companies use, right? Your notifications show up if you keep them on in bright red, right? Your apps are multicolored and beautiful.

So simple fix, grayayscale your phone. Makes it less alluring. Yeah, you're not, you're not as driven by the dopamine kick of looking at the beautiful colors. Interesting, right? Makes sense. Yeah, and I shut off my notifications, but it actually in a way,

I made it harder. Yeah, because I'm like, oh, I'm missing something. I'll like catch myself if I'm sitting, you know, waiting for something, I'm scrolling to reload my emails, you know, and I think it's really a major challenge. I don't know that we have the tools as individuals to really, to truly navigate and, you know, and resist, as you mentioned, these, you know, massive companies who sole purpose it is to captivate our attention. I think it's going to I think my personal opinion is going to take at least one or two generations

for us to figure this out. It reminds me and this is because we're in the fitness and health space. It reminds me of the processed food revolution. You know, when you had all these people who were spending lots of time and money and engineering on making foods hyper-palatable, and the result of that is this obesity epidemic. And we're just now starting to see that start to reverse a little bit. A little bit now, people are becoming more and more aware, but it's taken a couple generations. So I think what's going to happen, I mean, look at it this way, if you don't wanna be obese today,

you have to have structure with your food and you have to structure in activity. Otherwise, it's not gonna happen. I think with technology and social media in particular, you're going to have to have practices. It's just not gonna happen naturally. And I think it's gonna take a couple generations, it's gonna take us seeing our kids, this current generation of children.

What do they call them, the Z generation or whatever? Yeah. It's going to take that generation growing up and seeing all the physical dysfunction, all the attention deficit disorders and all the lack of sleep now. We're seeing what that's causing. It's going to take one or two generations. We're going to look at and go, okay, we need to have these practices put in place because it's not as evident.

I think we all see it. It's the canary and the coal mine, but it's not as evident yet. I think it will be more evident within a generation or two, so it's my personal belief. Do you see any opportunity being an events coordinator with potential things? I know Burning Man is an example that where people are sort of removed from technology and society for a bit. But that being sort of something that people

are gonna really subscribe to. Yeah, I mean, I mentioned brick, Tommy does retreats and GoBrick now. You could follow them on Instagram. They do, they just did an instant choir last night. So when people come together and sing, they did Queen Bohemian rap. Oh, rap, nice.

It actually builds, so instead of serotonin, which is the chemical in our brain, or dopamine I think, or serotonin, which is kind of these more addictive chemicals, it builds oxytocin when you sing with people. So it builds bonding and trust. So they do these events and they're really fun. You know, I just did a weekend in Joshua Tree

with friends, I didn't have my phone on for two days. I think it's really important to take it off your person. I, so some practices that I keep, as far as events, yeah, Burning Man, I mean, you know, it's a great place to connect. I think it's a little bit, you know, it can be a little bit excessive, I think, a little bit preachy, right? There's got to be a middle ground. I love Burning Man personally. I think it's fun, I think a little bit preachy, right? There's gotta be a middle ground. I love Burning Man personally, I think it's fun,

but even I'm kind of like a little bit taken aback by like the Tuluminati and the amount of ridiculous money that's spent and everyone's dressing the same. So it's on the slide. There's still taking pictures and posts on all of Instagram, so we all do. I mean, I do it too, right?

I'm sure if you look at my Instagram, there's plenty of Burning Man photos on there. It's beautiful. And I make some kind of deep comment that's probably not that deep. I'm stored from deep actual. I love it. I love it what you call yourself after. That's great.

But so I guess you asked earlier, so a couple of practices, right, for fixing or fixing for coping with social media addiction or addiction to technology. One, don't sleep with your phone or computer in the same room. Hour before you go to bed, take your phone, take your computer, put it outside in a living room, charge it out there, whatever, and then do something read a book, maybe, or work out, or whatever it is, meditate, just to get your mind right before sleep. Wake it when I wake up in the morning. I like to do something other than check my phone first. So even if it's just as something simple as, I'm going to shower before I look at my phone,

right? Like waking up, the mind is still so malleable. We're kind of in between dream state and consciousness and all of a sudden the first thing you do is look at that screen. It's, I mean, it can be alarming. I have it, right? And I feel, I mean, I feel, I'm holding it. You're building a addictive, you know,

behavior that way, really. Yeah, and I don't know about you guys, but like I actually, if I get in like a hole on my phone where I could go like 30 minutes or an hour You know where I'm just Twitter email text WhatsApp Instagram and also I'm like what just happened booty pics. Yeah, booty pics

Those get me every time They give me every work my girlfriend actually knows when I'm looking at booty pics. I just I just put it out there. I You know why you like Hey, what it? It's gonna kill me for that. I mean, what a great way to kind of wrap this interview all up with you because it's so true that, you know, something like fire could have never happened

to the level that it did without social media. Like that would have never, 20 years ago, that couldn't happen. Fire was 2,000 people, right? Like, it was a small festival. 90s festival was a small festival, it was twice the size of that, right? Coachella is like 120,000 people,

and yet it's huge because of the amplification of social media. Yeah, well, what a great point. So you're out of that business now. I'm out of that business full time. I still work with the prime social group guys. I'm still happy to support other event producers. It's just, you know, it's really challenging

for little, for little upside for me, obviously. And I'm currently working venture capital. I'm focused on crypto, actually in blockchain. Oh, very interesting. Yeah, and it's exciting. It's kind of, I love it because it merges technology in economics and governance. And it's a lot I love it because it merges technology and economics and governance. And it's a lot about people called Bitcoin free speech money.

And there's a lot of talk in crypto about, we're very far off from it, but a decentralized web where your social media feed is not controlled by Facebook, Amazon, Google, Netflix. Not that these companies are inherently bad, but I'm a big believer in owning your own data. After Cambridge Analytica, what happened with them in Facebook, I think crypto is the promise of every individual owning and being compensated for their data because when you use Facebook,

your data is being harvested and monetized. So if it's free, we're the product. And that's what it is. We are little bits of data that get fed into this mega system. And we don't get compensated for what Facebook shareholders do. And so I think crypto has the promise of ultimately creating a decentralized web, going back to the initial promise of the internet where we're compensated for our contribution to this kind of massive data machine that's being built.

Fascinating, very interesting. Interesting. Well, shit, man, thanks for coming on. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Definitely appreciate it.

We'll make sure to record an intro afterwards and we'll make sure to plug all those things you wanted us to plug. And we'll put it in the show notes too. So, thank you so much, yeah, those are, I mean, those are my friends, so you know, want to get them up. Awesome, Mark. Thank you, man. Thank you.

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