Stuff You Should Know - The Fyre Festival Fiasco

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

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

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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. podcast. That's right. Today we're discussing the fire festival, the festival that never happened, F-Y-R-E, of which there were two documentaries made, and I'm pretty positive I saw both of them back when they came out. Ooh la-la, 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. Uh-huh. 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 he was, his family was pretty well to do. They were real estate developers in New York, which is really kind of all you need to know. But he was brought up in like a nice suburb in New Jersey. And he seemed to have had, So what you need to know about this guy is he is a business-minded cat. Yes. That's what he wants to do. He wants to create successful businesses, startups. He's got the whole dot-com bug, essentially. And apparently, so there's an author, a journalist named Gabrielle Bluestone, who wrote a book on the Fire Festival. And she chronicles Billy McFarlane creating his first company in the fifth grade, a web post.

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 in the golden age of grift.

And in that book, she also says that he claims at least that he's, start and sold three companies while still in high school. Yeah. Although that has been verified, but I wouldn't be surprised because this guy loads 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. He called it Spling, S-P-L-I-N-G. And he dropped out, but not before he got like a $5,000, like, essentially a little scholarship prize, I guess, for venture capital, like $5,000 venture capital seed from Bucknell University. He said, thank you very much, I'm dropping out. Then he started generating investment from investors as diverse as the CFO of a pharma company to actual 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,

close to 500 grand he got for this Spling 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 playing 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, you know, take from what the Soho house did, kind of literally, in that they opened a loft in Soho in New York and said, you've got a membership here,

You can come to these cool parties, and you can get, like, the whole thing was beyond just having this sort of fancy credit card that made you stand apart from the crowd in that crowd. You could also supposedly get, like, advanced reservations when they were impossible to get or get into the club that was impossible to get into if you had this card. Yeah, it was like the players with yourself 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 magnetic strip onto the magnetic strip of your Magnus's. So essentially what you had was a cool, metal, I believe black version of your Wells Fargo debit card. that's 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, you know, kind of the first and a series of stories about overpromising and under delivering, to say the least. For sure. So here's also where it's starting. to become a bit of a Ponzi scheme. Magnus seems to have been like his heart was in that one. So he was really, he was spending a lot more money than he was taking in. I think I saw at its peak it had 700 members, and that was it.

But so he was just spending way too much money to keep that company afloat. So he's like, all right, I'm going to start another company. And then I can use the revenue from that company to keep Magnus's afloat and keep my investors happy. And I'm going to call this new company Fire Media, F-Y-R-E. 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 was have this fire app. And 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, pal. Okay. Oh, it's a cool. idea. All right. I'll stand behind that. All right. So you're right. He was doing that to keep Magnus's

afloat. He was using those corporate cards, which again were just re-skinned debit cards of his own employees, of the employees of fire, to fund the Magnus's events. And they were left to put the bill. There was this one guy in the documentary, I think his name was M. David Lowe. 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 concert goers that he doesn't even know, which is what would kind of, you know, happen next

essentially when he said, all right, I need some more cash, basically. Fire Media really needs to take off in order to save Magnus's. And so a music festival, those things make tons of money, right, guys? That's a great way to make dough. 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 afloat, 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 a few articles covering this that experts essentially people who have thrown them say you you want 12 months minimum to to do this. Or maybe they said you need usually on average 12 months. From the outset, from the time that he decided to do this, he gave himself the six months. And then as we'll see, he actually gave himself way, way less than that to actually organize this thing because the fire festival was built entirely on hype in 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 Jha Rule. He was involved in this as well. Hip-hop artist J-Rourl. He was sort of the main face of the thing, like definitely the biggest name

that he got involved, I think, unless like you're really in the know as far as like models and influencers go. And his co, I guess his business partner was another guy named Grant Margolin. He was the VP of Marketing. And right out of the gate, he started hiring PR companies because like you 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, you know, something out there that people can actually see. Right. So he contracted with Matt M-A-T-E projects to film a promo video in the Bahamas where it was going to be held. And that's about the only thing he ever actually created.

Yeah. And like, they really threw a lot at this. They hired a bunch of, like you said, Instagram models, Kendall Jenner, Haley Bieber, Chanel Iman, and several others. I think there was like six, like, legit millennial supermodels who came out to the Bahamas to shoot this 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, 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, and, you know, what you obviously don't see in that hype video or the promo video was, the reality of that, which the documentaries both cover,

it was pretty chaotic. There was some pretty funny scenes in there where they were trying to get these models to get and swim in the ocean at night, you know, for the 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 frolicing in the beautiful Bahamas. They promised an immersive experience on a private island, once owned by Pablo Escobar, which would turn out to be a pretty fateful mistake to say that. But what they didn't include was stuff like, hey, who's actually going to be playing because they hadn't booked any musical acts at that point.

No. So if you look at this very slick video, all of the music acts are generic. It's all stock footage of like raves or something like that. Really well-produced, good-looking, like, stock footage, but not real stuff, right? But so it was all just kind of suggested, and to give you another idea of the way that they were promoting this, they were saying that fire festival would be a quest to explore beyond boundaries.

Like, they used words like that. And the whole thing, the whole thing was essentially publicized as a complete luxury event top to bottom. It was going to be the most amazing luxury exclusive music festival anyone has ever thrown. And that promotional video really kind of looked like. get 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, right.

Literally. Yeah. A good time for a break, I think? Yeah, for sure. All right. So that's a little setup of what's coming or not coming your way. And we'll be right back after this. You know, Roaldol.

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on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so in order to promote this video that they had shot, they needed people to see this. They needed tons of eyeballs so they could sell tons of tickets. So they got together with Jerry Media

and they convinced all these influencers at the same time on December 12th, 2016 on their socials to post an orange tile, just an orange square. I think they got like 400 plus people and that would direct people to the website and the promo video and everything. And a lot of people did this, like athletes, musicians, models, and it actually went viral. Like, it really, really worked. That was actually a pretty good idea. And people started buying tickets, like thousands of people

started plunking down money. 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. He paid Kendall Jenner a quarter of a million dollars to put one post on Instagram about it. And I didn't see the post, but apparently she intimated that the pot, like she left it open to people's imagination the possibility that Kanye West would be performing there because remember he was her brother-in-law at the time. Yeah. And of course,

Kanye U.S. never had anything to do with it, but if you word things a certain way, then you can leave it to people's imagination and let them think what they want kind of thing, right? So that was like the nail, the final nail. They're like, this is great. We're going to do this and let's start figuring this out. 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. 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 Kay, and the owner of that island was like, I don't like you mentioning Pablo Escobar in association with my island. 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 it on Pablo Escobar's private island or formerly belonging to Pablo Escobar, however they said it, if they just had not done that, this might be a completely different story.

Maybe. At least it would have been a little bit of a different story. It actually could have been worse, frankly, now that I think about it. But they finally found a spot. There was another thing, too. Like, the web archive, like, 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 Exama Island in the Bahamas. That's right. It's not a private island at all, so out of the gate they've already underdelivered. Sure.

It was an undeveloped plot of land. Apparently, it was pretty rocky. It's been described as a gravel pit. And if you see the documentaries and the actual footage, you know, it doesn't look like anything that's capable of hosting, even if you knew what you were doing, hosting a concert event like this. And they had 45 days to do it to build this, like, you know, village essentially. They're trying to replicate like the Coachellas and all these things that literally kind of go out in the middle of nowhere and build a or like Burning Man and build a village. Okay. And they had 45 days to do this. So he hired hundreds of locals to put up, you know, IKEA furniture essentially and try and get these things going, get these tents built, these glamping tents. And I think what 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 to begin with. But he didn't realize there's something called Island Time. If you've ever been to the Caribbean, or it's probably like this at islands all over the world, or just beach towns in general. Sure. Things just move slower. Like, you can't go into a restaurant on a Caribbean island and, like, start complaining that the service is slow. And that's from, like, restaurants all the way to everything.

Everything just moves a little slower and at its own pace. Yeah, you're meant to kind of. downshift a couple of gears as well to kind of mellow out. That's the point. Yeah. Don't bring the 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 Marianne Roll who owns a local catering company that the fire festival hired to feed those workers. And she made as many as a thousand meals a day during these, I think, 45 days while these workers were working from day one up through, I think up to like the day before the 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 tour, these little pop-up concerts. are supposed to be 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 canceled. 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 before it. went to him or like it was gone as soon as it came in from what I can tell. He came up with another idea. He's like, okay, we need a new instant form of cash flow. How about this? We'll say that you have to use an RFID bracelet to spend money there and you have to preload money on it and you

better do it now. So if you want to be able to buy anything, say like booze or whatever on the island, you have to have this little bracelet, kind of like Disney World or something, right? And they suggested you put at least $300 for each day that you're going to be at the festival and in the hopes that people would just start loading their wristbands up. And I think it worked to some degree, but there was no amount of cash coming in at this point to cover what the investors had put in, and apparently even to cover anything that the festival had delivered except for there is a place in the Bahamas that we will try to get you to. And when you show up, that place will be there.

And it will be lit. Yeah, ill. All right. So the festival is very close to, you know, the data's 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. Right.

Look how awesome it looks. It's still just that one video that they had shot, you know, back in. I guess, early part of the year. They can't get, worse still, they can't get information about their flights and their accommodations, like what tent am I actually going to be in or what villa am I actually going to be in? I want to pick up my room before I get there. Right.

Right. So people start questioning this. There's a guy on Twitter named Calvin Wells who set up fire fraud and just basically tracked all these like shady things that were going on or like questions people had. people started leaving comments on posts about, you know, hyping the fire festival, questioning the whole thing, and just basically saying this doesn't sound legit at all. Those things got deleted by Jerry Media,

who was running social media for the fire festival. And then starting finally the day before the festival, the fire media people essentially reached out to their VIPs and said, do you skip the first weekend? Come the second weekend. Because there was one weekend at the end of April and there was the next weekend at the beginning of May. That was the Fire Festival, two weekends.

They're like, just come to the second one. The first one's going to be a little, we're figuring out the kinks. So don't come to the first one. Their employees, too, were told, like, don't come. But the employees are like, we already are in Miami waiting to be chuttled 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. And that's just my opinion. Again, I've never thrown a 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, or I guess their biggest rock act, at least, Blink 182 pulls out of the festival. Somebody smartly in their camp was like, you don't want to be, you're already unfortunately associated with this, but you don't want to be any more of a part of this than you already are. No, and their statement was class. They just said they're not sure that they would have all the resources they needed to put on a quality show for their fans. So they pull out and it starts to rain really heavy. It's sort of one of those moments in the documentary where insult to injury starts happening.

And employees are still, I mean, bless their hearts, they're still trying to set this stuff up. I felt so bad for the people that work for this for fire media because they're trying to set up these tents still. they're unpacking loading, you know, shipping containers or unpacking mattresses, all this cruddy furniture that they had bought at the last minute. And work eventually halted because it was just, you know, it was a rainstorm. It was too bad. Right. So there were soggy mattresses left out on the ground everywhere.

And it was, you know, 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. site of people getting ready for the festival the night before and they were really behind and everybody's working hard and then a whole monsoon comes and everybody runs for cover and then never comes back.

That's what the fire festival looked like when the first guests started to show up. Maybe a second break. I feel like we're right at the precipice. I think so too, man. I can't wait to hear blink. Well, 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. You know Roaldahl, the writer who thought up Willie Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roll Doll, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life.

His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay. I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. I was a spy.

Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's? Played poker with Harry Truman and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids. The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to the secret world of Roll Dahl on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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a Formula One Culture podcast that dives into the under-explored pockets of the sport. In each episode, a different guest and I will go deeper into the wacky mishap, scandals, and sagas, both on the track and far away from it, that have made F1 a delightful, decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to No Grip on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A silver 40-caliber handgun was recovered at the scene. From IHeart podcasts and Best Case Studios. This is Worshack, murder at City Hall.

How could this have happened in City Hall? Somebody tell me that. July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest. Both men are carrying concealed weapons. And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead. Now, everybody in the chamber's duct. A shocking public murder. I scream, get down, get down.

Those are shots. Those are shots, get down. A charismatic politician. You know, he just bent the rules all the time. I still have a weapon, and I could shoot you. And an outsider was a secret. He alleged he was a victim of flat down. That may or may not have been political.

that may have been about sex. Listen to Roershack, murder at City Hall, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so it's Festival Day. It's April 28th, and on the morning of April 28th, some of the people started showing up.

There was supposedly private jet service, but actually it was just a small airline that was shuttling people from Miami's airport down to the Bahamas, and the first group showed up the morning of April 28th, and the festival organizers were like, we have to figure out what to do with these people that's not ready yet. So they got them on a shuttle, like a bus.

They drove them to a local bar and said, the bar's open. Everybody help yourself. Yeah, there's a school bus too. Just keep that in mind. Not that it matters. A bus is a bus, but they're nicer buses than others. True. Especially in the Caribbean.

And this was a school bus. Okay. Maybe a bluebird. Who knows? Those are pretty nice. The bluebirds are, yeah, they're 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, Billy McBarne, actually got up on a table and said, just go find a tent, pick up your own tent. and take it to a place and set it up. And some of those people were game enough to like, well, it's not going off well, but at least we can get a tent and find a good spot.

And so they tried starting to do that. Yeah, I don't remember from the documentary, but apparently there was like that just opened the floodgates for people making a mad rush to grab a tent before somebody else grabbed it. For sure. And the tents, by the way, we should say, so remember, you mentioned glamping. Like, not everybody was buying the quarter of a million dollar yacht package. that you could get tickets for, you know, several hundred dollars,

and that's what these tents were, but they were supposed to still be, like, really nice tents. I saw that they were left over FEMA tents from Hurricane Matthew, and that that's what had been set up for these people and not even set up in most cases. Like you said, they kind of had to finish setting these things up themselves and drag the wet mattresses into their tent. So this is how the fire festival is starting at this point.

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

Have at it. It's frequently compared to like rich millennial Lord of the Flies. Yeah. So one other thing. 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 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. 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 spot 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 all you know most of the hotels were booked up most of the flights were booked up so people

were basically stranded down there uh i think eventually they were even um like locked in the airport overnight like when everything was closed it wasn't like one of those airports it 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, you know, by this point, they had already officially postponed the festival. They came out and said it's due to circumstances out of their control.

They had, which the only thing of which that happened that was out of their control was the rain, I suppose. But they officially did postpone it, but Word had gotten around via social media. And at least, I think a lot of people, you know, canceled their plans and didn't actually make it down there. Yeah. But, you know, people started poking around about Billy McFarland and what really happened. The media got involved. And they were like, hey, this is more than just a, an idea that, you know, a good idea that didn't work out. Like, we think actual crimes have been committed. So over the course of a couple of years, they realized that he had committed actual financial crimes. And that's what he ends up going to prison for. Billy McFarland served prison time for this. He did. So the ticket holders, and I said before that they were 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 Instagramable event. But there are also plenty of people who like just weren't rich and they went because actually in some cases it was a good deal for like $8 or $900. You could get eight friends together and cover air travel, food. accommodations and three days of music at a music festival. It's actually not a bad deal. So some people really spent like money that they needed on this and they got screwed over.

All of 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, it was, seemed funny to make. fun of this and the people that, you know, these, like you, what did you say, they were rich millennials, but like, they spent money and they deserved to have a thing go off like they wanted to. If that's the way they wanted to spend their time, it's not my deal. But like, I don't think

it's funny that anybody gets scammed out of money, you know? Yeah, no, there was a tremendous amount of shod and fraud by people who are not rich millennials or on Instagram or just hate that whole Instagram life kind of thing. There was a, there were a, there were, a lot of memes that came out of it. That basically portrayed this as like it immediately descended into anarchy and they started eating each other. And yeah, again, kind of Lord of the Flies-esque. But again, it was just the investors who were meant to be paid back.

I think says quite a bit about a lot of stuff. He actually was taken down on securities and exchange commission, SEC charges. So he had a federal beef against him. And essentially what the court concluded is that he, He bilked 80 investors out of $24 million just for the Fire Festival. I saw that he was on the hook for another $10 million, $12 million for the other stuff, including the Magnesis scams, essentially. So this guy is basically like, you have the rest of your life to pay this back,

and that's what you're going to have to do. And on top of it, he was sentenced to six years in federal prison. Yeah. So, you know, he did this by allegedly lying about almost everything financially related to this whole thing, including himself. Yeah. He said he had $2 million in Facebook shares personally. He had about $1,000 worth. He said the fire media app was taking in millions of dollars a month.

Over the whole lifetime of the fire media app, it made about $60,000. Right. So in addition to him being on the hook, like, you know, with the law and like the SEC, he's on the hook with personal lawsuits. So a lot of people, there was a class action lawsuits for $100 million, like everyone got together, of course, and sued them, ticket holders. And then they were like, hey, we should sue these ad agencies too, because they're collaborating with these people. They're putting out like literal false information. And in some cases, they're deleting negative comments.

about the truth of this thing. So a lot of these lawsuits got dismissed. Others did go through and were successful. I think the class action, the ticket holders were reimbursed. Who knows if they ever got it, but at least they were awarded $7,000 each, which is, you know, pretty good. Yeah, they did not get it, and they probably never will get it because as part of the federal sentencing guidelines, the investors are to get every penny of their $24 million back first before anybody else starts to get. paid, vendors, ticket holders, anybody else. So one question that I saw that was not asked almost anywhere, I think I found one article that asked it because I was looking to find out what happened.

Where did all the money go? He certainly did not spend $24 million on the 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 $24 million in six months living it up. So I can't help but wonder if he's got money stashed somewhere. Or if he really did just blow through $24 million in six months, creating this 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 dope.

that's for sure. After he was arrested while he was out on bail, he started another company called NYC VIP Access. He was like, I can't be the face of this thing because everyone knows what I look like in my name by this point. So we hired a guy named Frank Tribble to kind to be the face of the company. And he used the Fire Festival mailing list. You know, a mailing list can be a very valuable thing. Sometimes companies are bought just because they have an extensive mailing list and they'll just shudder 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 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. Yeah, it was again, it was another scam. And this guy who he hired to 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. So Billy McFarland, I think he served four of his six years. He was definitely let out early. He was also transferred to a low security prison in Ohio. Yeah, he tried to get out of prison when he was.

COVID happened is what they call it like a medical benevolence release or whatever because he said he had asthma and that COVID would probably kill him. And so they moved him into solitary during that time, did not let him out then. And he did get COVID while he was in prison, but he didn't die. He did some other solitary stints 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 the warden didn't listen. to podcasts. Low-hanging fruit. Yeah.

And he was released early. I don't know how many years early. He was sentenced to six years. And I think he did four, maybe five, but he definitely got out early. And the first thing he did when he got out, almost the first thing, was he announced that there would be a fire festival two. Yeah. Fire two has not happened.

But he did finally host and organize and I guess. successfully pull off a music festival last year on Utila Bay. He loves these shortened, sort of misspelled things. I guess he chose Phoenix, P-H-N-X, I assuming, because the Phoenix rose from the ashes, much like Billy McFarland did. But that one actually went down. I went and looked at it,

and I hadn't heard of a single performer, but that doesn't mean that they were not noteworthy. It's just there's tons of music out there now that I don't know about. so they may all be great. Well, so the one that I saw that I recognized the name of it was French Montana, and he's a pretty big name. He was a big, big fish to land, and he did show up and he did perform. But I was checking it out, too.

There was a live stream that you could pay $4.99 to watch this music festival, and so it's all very highly documented. And you can see there's like handfuls of people who are attending this music festival. Like when French Montana is like, you know, so much. 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 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 hundred grand or something?

Yeah, like I think 240 grand. He sold it on eBay and he sold it to LimeWire. I think one of the original music download disruptor apps. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, LimeWire owns the fire brand now. And if you want a fire brand mug or a fire brand hoodie, you can go look up Fire Festival and LimeWire 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 is going for. They acquired the Mad Magazine of Music Festival. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. If you, I don't know about that. Now that I think about it, no, I'm not going to, I'm not going to support.

We don't want to sell a Mad magazine? No, well. But yeah, they do offer. those hoodies are $240,000 a piece. Oh, that's a 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. Yeah. Because they both, I think one of them paid Billing McFarland for an interview, which everyone thought was pretty untoward to give that guy any money. And the other one that was partnered by one of the PR companies. 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, that's not ethical. But Hulu's like, sure. Yeah. 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 listener mail, Chuck. I'm going to promise this is the last MacGuffin email, just because I like to torture you, but I think this one had the best definition that it finally clicks in for everybody.

Yeah, we'll see. The idea that made it click for me, guys, was that an item is a MacGuffin, if that item can be substituted with almost anything else without making any changes to the plot of the film. That's a pretty good definition. 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. And this way, both definitions actually fit. The existence or the state of the object is what moves the whole plot,

but the object itself doesn't actually matter. I just thought I'd throw in my two cents because before I took this film class that taught me this, I felt the same about McGuffins as Josh seems to. Thanks for a great show, guys. been listening for over 10 years, learned so much and have had so many great conversations inspired by stuff you should know. And that is from Anna Hellcamp. Thanks, Anna. Thank you very much. I saw that definition, essentially something like that here or there. Still don't understand. Really? No, it doesn't. Okay, well, then what isn't a MacGuffin?

What is not a MacGuffin? I have to know. 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 email somewhere. 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... That's it, dude. 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 you can't substitute that for a can of Coke. But, okay, then how does the...

Where again does that Maltese Falcon fit in? No one is doing anything if the Maltese falcon is in there. I've never seen the Maltese falcon, so I can't comment on it. But you can replace the Maltese 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 Macuffin. Right, but it's not the McGuff...

Okay. All right, maybe it is starting to dawn on me a little bit, 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 MacGuffin. All right, I'm going to find a movie where someone's searching for a murder weapon, because that's

a great example, I think. 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 and down for that kind of thing. You can send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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