The Jordan Harbinger Show - 422: Billy McFarland | From Fyre Fest Fiasco to Federal Prison

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

Billy McFarland co-founded the ill-fated 2017 Fyre Festival, and is currently serving six years in federal prison for defrauding investors of $27.4 million. What We Discuss with Billy McFarland: The ideas that sparked what Fyre Festival was trying to achieve on an epic scale and the shortcomings that transformed it into a fraudulent, failed mess. The countless things Billy would do differently if he could have a do-over. The numerous ways in which prisons are warehouses of unmet potential. How Billy stays safe and sane when he's in solitary confinement. Billy's biggest regrets and what he hopes to have a chance to accomplish after he's served the time he agrees he deserves. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/422 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. The magical thinking wasn't where I went wrong. It was how I embarked on that. And I embarked on it by lying and trying to take the shortcut. One thing JL has taught me is like our brains are constantly trying to give us excuses or reasons not to take the hard path, not to put in the hard work and not to make ourselves suffer. And that's we need to embrace. You need to acknowledge that and say, you know what, the hard path is the right way.

It's not worth it to take this shortcut to go faster because things don't work. So I made the bad decision to lie to try to get what I wanted faster than I deserve to get it. And that's where I totally fucked up. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. If you're new to the show, we have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Astronauts and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional con man. Each show turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice you can use to build a deeper understanding of how,

the world works and become a better critical thinker. Today, like I said, the occasional conman. Look, he's serving his time in prison. I'm going to give the guy a little bit of a break. Maybe you've heard of the absolute catastrophe that was Firefest. Maybe you even had tickets. You know, that event with job rule and a ton of Instagram influencers who swear they'd had no idea that any of this was going on. The whole thing was wrapped in sex appeal. It was supposed to be the woodstock of our generation. People quit their jobs to go. People were selling their possessions to pay for these tickets, and this ended up being a bunch of rich millennials stranded in the Bahamas sleeping in FEMA tents.

Yeah, that Fire Fest. Few events, especially events that never even happened, weren't not one but two documentaries. So many things had to go right to make it this big of a failure. Today, Billy McFarland, the man behind Firefest is on the show today. Well, he's not here here. He's actually serving a six-year sentence in federal prison for fraud, among other things. He's speaking to us today here on the Jordan Harbinger show before the New York Times, before Vanity Fair and everyone else.

So I'm pretty excited about this, especially as he's pretty candid in today's conversation. Or is he? I'll let you be the judge. Again, we did this one remotely while he's in a federal prison, so the audio quality is not what you're used to here from the Jordan Harbinger show. That said, well, I think it adds a little something, don't you? If you're wondering how I managed to book all these interesting guests, many of which are not behind bars, well, it's because of my network.

And for this one, let's just say I get friends in low places. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, many of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course in the newsletter, unless of course they are locked up with no internet. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. All right, here's Billy McFarland. You will not be charged for this call.

This call is from an inmate at a federal prison. This call is being recorded and is subject to monitoring. Hang up to decline the call or to accept Dial 5 now. This is Jordan Harbinger from the Jordan Harbinger Show. How you doing? Jordan, nice to meet you. I'm laying in the bed a mid-mid here, Jordan. So how's your mood these days?

How are your spirits? It's just super up and down here. We've been on some sort of lockdown since March due to corona, and that basically consists of just getting stuck in this giant warehouse room with like 160 guys and not being able to go outside too much. So that kind of sucks. I think I've just made the situation far worse to myself than I had to. By messing up on bail, I went to solitary confinement for three months, got transferred to a higher security facility much further from friends and family.

Comedy of errors caused by my mistakes. But I am thankful for that solitary experience, and I think it really changed my perspective on a daily basis, which will try to dedicate myself towards helping everybody that I let down. Where are you right now? I know you got transferred. So I'm in Elkton, Ohio, and what some friends told me when you Google Elkton, Ohio, the Google description of the town is pretty nice except for the razor wire views. So I think the jails entire town, and certainly not nice. How come you moved from Club Fed in New York to Otisville to Ohio?

What happened there? I had my bail revoked and was sent to Brooklyn, MDC, where I was for seven months. and that was just awful, you know, full of violence, or you're stuck inside. It was really kind of a brutal place. And then from there went to Otisville, which was an upstate New York. And the good thing about Otisville was I was relatively close to New York, so close to family and friends who were able to come. And then once again got in trouble there after only being there for six months and was sent

to solitary confinement, which they call this shoe in Otisville. So after three months in solitary, I was flown on Conair towards a couple places and then finally ended up in his higher security place. and compared to where I was at in Elton, Ohio. So it was kind of a crazy journey that I did to myself. But ultimately, it was like three months I spent in solitary, which we can hopefully talk about. I think we're just like the best thing to happen when you're just reduced to absolutely nothing, the forced reflection and confrontation with reality about the seriousness of my mistakes.

I think really improved my mindset and was able to help me understand just how seriously they hurt people and hopefully dedicate myself towards helping them in some small way. And why did you get transferred? You didn't say what that was. Do you mind sharing that? I had a USB device. USB device. So like a flash drive?

Exactly. I was working on my memoir. And it kind of gets back to the overall theme of I was just trying to go too fast, you know, once again. So you've written a book or you're writing a book. And are you writing it by hand now? Yeah, I wrote two books. I wrote one fiction book in the memoir, wrote it by hand and then nailed them out to different friends and team members. And then, of course, typed it up and are getting those books in it is.

And it kind of gets back to the overall theme of I was just trying to go too fast. you know, once again. What's it like being moved to a new prison? Because it kind of sounds like the first day of school only the consequences. It's not necessarily bullying we're worried about, or maybe it's bullying turned up to 11. Getting is a distance from getting everybody on the same page. Communication is just so tough from here. And just like hearing the calls from family and loved ones where they need you and you

need to talk to you, they need you to be there. And you just can't be there and you're so far away from them physically. so it's harder to come and actually see you, that's tough. And it just gets back this bigger theme that every mistake hurts a lot more people than you would think when that mistake is being made. So the distance is in the overall toughest thing. On the less important level, getting moved around sucks, and due to COVID, we've been moving around different housing units.

So I felt like I've had five different introductions to prison over the past three months here. And obviously it's getting along with new groups of people and new groups of people, you know, jail is jail and that all sucks. But at the end of the day, the worst punishment is just like hearing those calls for help or for love or support from family and loved ones and not being able to be there for them. And that's just, it really sucks. When you say getting along with different groups of people, are you talking about, like, I mean, everyone knows there's prison gangs and stuff, but how prevalent is that where you are?

Like, do you fear for your safety or is it more like, is it just hard to connect with people in general because you're behind bars? It could wake up and make it, et cetera. You just never know what's going to happen. If you told me that my opening. and I definitely felt like I was sheltered in terms of my perspective and exposure to how some things actually happen. Where I am is, it's safe. It's definitely safe personalities, and it's just like the human aspect of that family and friends.

How was solitary confinement? I mean, I know that's a ridiculous question. It's not like how was your vacation, but how is essentially being locked in a box? Like, that sounds terrible. Kind of like this transit solitary place, which basically means guys who couldn't be placed in a regular jail facility, you know, of any security level from the highest to the high to the low to the low were put there. And, you know, there was one guy who's serving a 30-year sentence, and he was already locked in the same room for over three and a half years when I was there.

He wasn't allowed to have a cellmate. He couldn't, like, go outside with anybody. And it really just helps put things in perspective, where you realize, one, just how fortunate you really were, which makes the mistakes all the worse. And two, it helps you re-centered. And it's like if you just can't do something to make one of these guys days a little bit better, who were just locked in the hole for decades,

then you're really worthless. So I really appreciate how it's just kind of re-centered and refocused the mindset on creating value through good. Whereas I think I lost track of that in the days leading up to my mistakes before. What do you do to stay sane when you are in a solitary confinement situation? Are you doing push-ups every day? I mean, what do you even do just to not lose it? I tried to teach myself to write, so I wrote a couple of books.

and really just started the thinking through the apology process and what's that like. I wrote a lot of letters to people that I hurt. And I think I learned just as much writing to them as they did from their response. And that really just helped me understand the gravity of this and how we need to approach it moving forward. What kind of responses did you get from people who you reached out to since you were in there? I've spoken with some members of the team. And I think the concept of now being in jail for, what, 27 months, I'm really surprised by who I speak with and also surprised by who I don't speak with.

And some people were furious that it took so long and said, what were you waiting to hear from you? Others said, we're just not ready to hear from you yet, and we never want to hear from you again. So it's kind of like a mixed bag. And that made me realize the apology process is just so different for everybody. And I need to respect that. I need to realize, you know, some people are just based on what I did or just hurt so much. And what I really did was beyond any financial damage or reputation.

damage, which is obviously terrible of itself, is I violated trust. And now being in a situation for the past couple of years where, you know, I live by trusting other people and being in jail and what that entails, just how serious it is to violate trust. And it kind of stings me in your core realizing what you actually did and then why it was so bad. Who are you surprised is not talking to you anymore? When people were around for a lot of the good, a common kind of game people will play, oh, this person's only there for the fun or this person's there for everything. And some of the people who I expect to only be there for the good times have been really, really dedicated and gotten out of their way to help me as much as they could, even though I

hurt them in so many ways. And some of the people who I expected to, you know, still be there, aren't there. And that's kind of been an eye-opening experience where it was just, it's really hard to tell. But none of this would have happened if I didn't mess up. So it's totally my fault. So in the past Firefest fell apart. There have been two documentaries, which I guess you haven't seen. those, right? The documentaries? No, and if I had the chance to, I don't think I could bring myself to watch,

but you don't think you would watch them. You're not curious? The curiosity would get to me, man, I'm telling you. I think it's kind of cool how much prison, like, keeps away from you in terms of developing a clear mind. But at the same time, like, nothing is harder than, you know, hearing a snippet, you know, what's going on with your family, it's not going well, or what's going on in the world or a negative story or somebody getting hurt. Because then you hear this, like, little stint of information and you just can't act on it. We have 15 minute calls and during normal times we're limited to 300 minutes a month. So it's only 20 calls a month. So if you use a call or two to hear about like an hailing family member or something negative going on in the

world, then you just walk away and you're just stuck. And it really took me a while to realize that both family and friends that you speak with as well as like me being here have our emotional needs that we try to get out of those 15 minutes. And it took me a while to realize like, It needs to be calibrated from both ends, and we're both going through different experiences, and arguably it's harder on the family, it isn't in the inmates, but how to, like, calibrate all of our needs that we have into 15 minutes, you know, a few times a week. And it's hard as hell, man, but that's kind of what we're going through. I've heard you've been busy in prison teaching music entrepreneurship.

What's that all about? So when I got to Brooklyn, I taught a class under vocation of music, and we actually finished the class with a talent show where we brought in speakers and everything and had the students performed to the cell block. So that was pretty cool. And then since coming to Elkton, I launched a project with Mike called Project 315. When coronavirus was first hitting, they cancel all the visits here, and a lot of people's families are struggling, and they weren't able to talk to them. So we fund the little initiative to provide phone calls between inmates and families.

And then like five days after we launched, the BOP made phone calls free for everyone. And that was certainly the first time I'd ever seen or heard of that. So that was pretty cool to see that the problem we were going after was real. And that, good solution was provided. What draws you to teaching? There are just so many people who have gotten to meet here who just have the craziest life stories who are serving just absurd amounts of time. We're talking 20, 30, 40 years. And at the end of the day, they all still have some good in their hearts. And a lot of them have talent, too. And I was a big believer before jail. I guess I would argue that everybody in America had opportunity. And while that still might be true, I think I was

totally wrong. Just opportunities so far from equal across the board. And I just felt like so many people lack exposure. And that just completely limited the opportunity and chances to have in life were. And seeing this talent, you know, go unused, it just sucks, man. And it makes you feel for a lot of people and a lot of families who are struggling from this cycle. And I think for the first time in decades, just talking to inmates, the system is starting to change. Something called the First Step Act was passed a couple of years ago, which aims to provide, you know, more programming and more education for a lot of people, which is great. And now the BOP is taking a proactive approach to population control to, you know, making these places more manageable. So I think the political

administration has taken an approach that hasn't been seen in many decades, and a lot of inmates here are fortunate for that. And I think if it's given the proper opportunity, some will grasp it. And that's all you can really ask is if you can change one or two families by giving everybody here a chance, that's really cool. So if all these changes, you're just, you know, changes that are happening to the prison system can give you to make the chance. Like, that's going to change the family's lives. And some people are going to take those opportunities and take them seriously. And I think that's really cool.

That's finally being seen and changed from the administration, the BOP. What will teaching music entrepreneurship, for example, what will that help you achieve, if anything, after a release? So there's so many guys in Brooklyn who I just never would have come across in my life and vice versa. And, you know, I'd a lot to learn from them. And hopefully I could teach them a little bit too. And we came together.

It was pretty cool. Some guys there want to be on the management side. Some guys want to be artists and just sharing less experiences and really just creating a group setting where people who have made mistakes and are serving really greatly for those mistakes that come together and try to create some good. It was fun and it created a way where days are meaningful for a lot of people who didn't have a lot of look forward to and me included.

So is this the new Billy that we're hearing or are you the same Billy that tried to pull off the fire festival? Like is this Billy V2? because a lot of what we're hearing right now, it sounds a lot like what we've heard and seen before. And even when I asked before on our first call, if you were at Conman, we had 10 seconds of silence. When I think about the mistakes that were made and what happened, there's no way I can just describe it other than what the fuck was I thinking.

And I think that applies to so many people and just so many decisions that I made. However, I tried to justify it at the time or shortly after that or for the period after that is wrong and it doesn't matter. And there's just no way to say I was wrong. and I hope now that I can in some small way make a positive impact and hopefully actually bring help to those people who I let them. But a lot of people are going to go, ah, you know, he lied before. How do we know this is something different? You know, how do we know that he's not just saying this because he's in prison?

If the fire vessel was the success and everything that I believed or I hoped, it's probably a better word, that it was going to be, came true, I'd still be in jail. I was still guilty. and what I did was I lied to my investors and other partners about the status of our company, how much money we had, how much money we were making to get money that I thought we needed for the festival. So regardless, I was wrong, but through all these mistakes, I think there was some positive takeaways, and that really was this theme that I'd like to harp on now, that when different people connect who wouldn't usually meet, there's a lot of good and value and innovation that happens there. So there's no way around my mistakes and how bad and serious they were.

But if I can use the positive aspects that I learned to do something good, and I think that's a big one. You believe in the value of different types of people meeting that would normally never meet. How do you feel that has happened for you in the past few years? I mean, I assume you never thought you would be spending your days with convicted drug dealers and violent criminals and also people that probably have done similar things as you have, depending on which location you've been locked up in.

So my friend here is serving a 26-year sentence. He's 11 years in, and he started a sentence at the famous ADX prison in Florence, Colorado. And I think he is one of the most genuine people that I've met in my entire life, and he has a heart made of complete gold. And it's so ironic. On paper, he just seems like the worst person in the world when you really get to know him. You realize how much good is there. The lessons that I've taken from this are really amazing, but it also shows you that someone who I probably wouldn't have met before, just has so much to offer in terms of like a friendship and a relationship and a bond and just so much

good and generosity in his heart. I was a big believer before jail that everybody in America had opportunity. Wow, that's probably true. It's just completely unequal across the board. And there's so many little things that could be done to give more people a chance. I'm curious what you think could be done with some of these folks that you've met. I volunteer a little bit in prisons as well and I meet a lot of inmates. And honestly, I think it's a, I say this all the time. It's a warehouse of unmet potential. I mean, I do resume screening and I help them prepare for jobs when they get out. And some of these guys, they have ideas and I go, they go, oh, it's probably a dumb idea, but, and then they tell me their business idea. And I often am in the position where I have to

tell them that not only is that not a dumb idea, but that the company exists and is worth $300, 400, $400 million already. And, you know, it was a franchise company. 1-800 got junk is one of those companies that I heard the concept first from an inmate and then looked it up and said, oh, this is a very successful company. I assume you've had similar experiences in there where you think, but for this guy being born in the hellish inner city of Brooklyn, Detroit, wherever, this person would have been a very successful business owner. I think the one goes to different options, different people, and really just exposed to different career paths. And so my friend and I were talking here about how was a kid, if he could be exposed to other opportunities, how he thought

that would have dramatically changed his life. And then around the same time, George Floyd was killed, and the entire world started realizing about all the racial injustice that exists. And then I realized that exposure just isn't really from one side. It's not just showing guys like who I'm friends with here different things when they were kids. It's also about showing now white people, what black people have gone through for the past X hundreds of thousands of years.

And so I think the topic of exposure could really help both sides. And just being here, it really helped me see from a ground level, how, A, we're only seeing it from one side and be just how important it really is for the world as a whole to understand each other and to acknowledge what's going on and to improve on it. Going back to Firefest, a lot of people are thinking,

okay, you tried to plan a festival, it didn't really work out, it's happened before, a lot of things get canceled, a lot of events don't work out, but once you knew that the festival wasn't going to go as promised or as planned, why didn't you call it off? It seemed like there were just so many opportunities to say the bands aren't going to make it, the stage isn't going to make it, the toilet plumbing,

whatever isn't there? Why not stop then? So I think the first thing, absolutely no way around that. I lied to people. I lied to investors, I lied to sponsors, and the lies were around this idea that I had where I needed to raise more money or I thought I needed to raise more money to execute the festival. I did everything I could to try to pull that festival off. Looking back, there were thousands of management decisions I'd made that were totally wrong and totally incorrect, that of course contributed to the failure. At the end of the day,

I lied to a lot of people who were supporting me, were supporting the vision, and that's inexcusable. But for the actual event, so a lot of people don't know, but the decision to cancel the festival was made when I was told that three people had died at the event. Thankfully, no one was actually physically hurt in any way.

But up until, I guess, the last minute and the arrival of people, we thought it was going to work, and 27 of the 30 artists were fully paid, and the other three were paid for the first weekend. It wasn't the fact that artists weren't paid or certain people weren't there. It was due to people getting hurt and not being able to manage a situation. And this stems from a larger overall problem and a lot of management decisions I made leading up to it. But up until the last second, I believed incorrectly we could pull it off and obviously I was wrong. So before you got the notification, the fake notification that people had died from pig bites

and gunshots, you saw a lot of problems. I mean, you even said, and I believe this is from the Hulu documentary, that every day we'd wake up to an issue, would solve it, and there'd be another one, which is, by the way, any business that is throwing any kind of event or doing any project runs into issues like that, and you're playing whackamol, right? That's literally every entrepreneurial endeavor ever. At what point did you realize that there was a problem that you could not solve? When I heard Pierce with Magnetis, and I was so used to at that point, people running to me with these problems. We can't do it.

We can't proceed for X, Y, and V reason. And every time we figure out a way to pull off the event and make it worthwhile. So it's kind of in this mode where every problem was surmountable. And I definitely didn't realize how difficult it was to essentially build a city out of nothing in five or six months. And I was totally wrong. And also they made a lot of really, really bad management decisions along the way, which were underlined by lies to investors. While I was wrong, every kind of intent was there, and I wrongly thought that it could be pulled off until the news of those desk came.

You will not be charged for this call. This call is from. An inmate at a federal prison. This call is being recorded and is subject to monitoring. Hang up to decline the call or to accept Dial 5 now. Look, you're really good at solving problems. One particular stroke of genius was when you're running out of funds, you decide to make the event cashless, so people have to preload wristbands with thousands of dollars. So you got another influx of cash from the attendees

outside of the ticket prices. I'm sure you've reflected on this since now that you're behind bars. I mean, if you were running something that was any sort of regular business, you would have been well suited to that. I mean, this is exactly what a lot of entrepreneurs who are flying by the seat of their pants do. It's just you took some steps over the line. Do you see it anyway as a shame that you weren't running, I guess, a real company that did something that didn't turn out to be vaporware? Where a push, let alone, if you draw, cash is reasonable. The timing of the... ...existent far before that.

When you solve problems in a business, do you get a sort of thrill from that, or was it just pure stress? I know a lot of business owners, and it's stress and they're freaking out here and there, but there is, from personal experience, a little bit of a thrill about playing whack-a-mole, maybe not necessarily one problem after another, but solving a problem. problem that comes up and just blasting through obstacles. It gives you a sense of confidence. Did you feel that at all? Looking for the company. We're impacting the livelihoods of hundreds of people. You know, if you're supporting families and their children and everything comes along with that, and you need to take

every management decision a lot more seriously. And I totally fucked up on that. And that's not fair to those people. In terms of handling problems, I think I got a personal level. I handle bad news really weirdly. I, like, shut down for 30 seconds when receiving the news and kind of feel like the world was over, but then convince myself pretty quickly that all of a sudden this bad news can actually be used as a positive and to turn into a good thing. I think that's really good in a lot of situations, but it's also really bad in a lot of situations where I feel like no matter how bad things are or maybe how bad the past I was going down, that could actually make a positive out of that. That's something I've grappled with and thought through a lot. But the

end of the day, nothing, you know, overcomes the fact that people's well-being were rooted in the decisions I was making and beyond the lies to investors, even on the decisions where I thought it was doing the right thing for the company. I need to be more mature and thoughtful about how I handled them. With all the juggling, such as finding one investor to get a quick infusion of cash in order to pay off, another investor or a vendor whose loan or invoice had come do, what's your level of stress like at that point? We had something called the urgent daily payments document. And basically it was this Google Excel sheet that I'd wake up to every morning and essentially was a list of payments that we had to make that day or else the festival couldn't

proceed. That was kind of the instructions that the team had in that document. So bank wires closed like outgoing at 4 o'clock. So wake up at 9. I have a few hours to get the money in and a few hours to get the money out. And in the couple of months leading up to the event, it went from a couple thousand dollars a day to a few million dollars a day where I had to wake up at 9 in the morning, find $3 million by noon, and then make the payments by four. I just went totally wrong and how I raised that money. And there's no excuse. And I wish I could have just woke up one of those mornings in the beginning. You just said, stop. You know, you can get help. You have a lot of smart people who are helping you. Things would have been okay. But I didn't have the patience,

and I lost my morals with my impatience and that's fucked up. Were you feeling the stress? Or are you kind of, do you feel like you're almost immune to that sort of thing in some way? I think it sucks. The stress is awful, and I kept looking for ways to find excitement, I think, is the best way to put it, make it seem like distress is worthwhile. So whether it was doing crazy free dives or trying to create explanations or doing things in the air flying that we shouldn't have done, I think I was looking for ways where I could justify distress that I was enduring, and that's just a road to one place, and it's not a very good place.

And I think I just learned so much from how awful and terrible that feeling my style is. And if you just have like transparent motives and purpose of everybody, life is so much better and nothing beats that. What happened to the fire app? You have any idea? So the concept behind the fire app was trying to add transparency to the booking process in the industry. Through my previous company, Magnusus, I was booking a lot of music artists

to perform for our members. And it found like the entire process to be so antiquated and just full of smoke and mirrors. We had all these offers for artists And they weren't getting there They were going through all these layers And middlemen who were tacking on fees And not really even understanding what the artist wanted

And the idea for the fire app came When I was talking with Jha After he performed at a man Euse's concert Asking why he had rejected our previous offers And he had no idea what I was talking about So it built the fire app as a way To allow buyers just contact artists and talent Directly through technology

Where the app is now I'm not sure the fire festival company was forced into bankruptcy. So I'm going to, you know, let that play out and, you know, hope for as much recovery as possible for everybody who's owed. Of course, yeah. Do you ever regret jumping from the app business into the festival business? I think the biggest mistake before I went to arrive was just setting an unrealistic time frame for the festival. Had we given ourselves a year or two, and had I, you know, obviously not made the terrible decision to lie to my backers, I think we could have been in a better place. but regardless the mistakes that I made or what made things go wrong.

So that's where things started and ended. So did you at the time knowingly lie to the backers to get their backing? I knowingly lied to them to raise money for the festival, yes. And that's what the crime was. The crime was just inexcusably lying about the status for a company to get money I thought I needed for the festival.

What is the plan for restitution? I think is the total $26 million? Am I on point there? It's around there, yeah. Yeah. So most people work their whole lives. they never even get a fraction of that, right? Well, they technically get a fraction of it.

They never get close to that, I guess you would say. What's the plan for that? How are you going to do that? I think the wrong approach for me is to look at the actual dollar figure. And the most important thing is realizing that I violated one of the most intimate things that I was given. And that was trust. Before anything happens, I need to rebuild that trust. And, of course, rebuilding trust includes making financial amends.

But I think more importantly is how it's done. So I'd rather do things the right way and have the financial figures be, you know, smaller or less successful than do things inappropriately and try to rush to pay off that amount. So I have no idea how long it will take, but I do know I will dedicate myself towards doing it and I'm going to do it properly. And what happened to the merch? Like there was all this merch, the Fire Fest T-shirts and hats and all that stuff. Where did that end up? The authentic Firefessel merchandise that I had in my possession that was handed over to them. what we did was go ahead and design a fire line that was inspired by my time in solitary confinement.

So it's almost like prison solitary meets fire key. Each piece that we designed accompanies a story of something totally unexpected that happened to me in solitary. And really something I was exposed to, they never thought I would be exposed to, and then taking the stories to design a piece of merch. All the proceeds are all my proceeds are going to restitution. but they're like a line inspired by solitary confinement, you know, fashion plus island wear. What's an example of a fashion trend that comes from prison? Sagging pants.

All this, yeah, the derivation isn't very good, but it comes from jail. Yeah, you know, you hear about that coming from jail, but I think the, I'm never sure how accurate those kind of, especially when you hear something like that from a 65-year-old white guy in the news, you're like, is this coming? What kind of source am I dealing with right now? you're going to be doing a podcast, which is, it's going to be called dumpster fire, from what I understand. I love the title. You're going to donate those proceeds, or not donate, but those proceeds are going to go towards the people that were harmed by Fire Fest, correct? So I own a podcast, and my entire stake will be given to restitution. I know from personal experience, podcasting can be a great living, but it's going to be a stretch to hit 26 million.

Do you have other ideas for how you might go about restitution? I think the first thing I need to do is take responsibility for all of my actions and really train myself to operating properly, following all the rules, and just giving complete transparency. That's where things are going to start, but there's definitely a bigger picture. So it's kind of giving you some more background. The fire festival was never supposed to be about expensive ticket packages or promises of top food and glamorous accommodations. It really just took a life of its own. It started because it was about this desire I had really a need to share this little island paradise that I stumbled upon and all the magic that I was finding on this island. I was just so desperate to share it with as many people as I could.

And what people don't know is that the fire festival was really the culmination of dozens of trips or really many festivals that I ran to these islands in the years before fire. It started first with magnesium, where we took these small old propeller planes and flew them from New York to the first. the small islands of the Exumas and eventually grew to taking a lot of fire apse talent. And it was during these trips where a childhood friend said, you should totally do a treasure hunt on these islands for Magnetius members if the real fire festival was spawned. So I'm sure people have seen highlights or videos or clips from the various talent or entertainers or people or Magnetius members who have come to these islands.

But what those trips were really about was, what if you bring 12 people, 24 people, 3,000 people, to this one little remote island and have them to spend three or four days together with adventure and trying to make the inaccessible accessible and just spending time, quality time with people they wouldn't usually spend time with

and seeing what kind of relationships come by way of that. And as this worked on a small scale and as it grew, the idea for the fire festival was to expose thousands of people to this. And along the way, I obviously totally messed up

and more importantly, I heard a lot of people. So I think before we get to the real dream and vision that I've been putting together, I need to take full responsibility, and I need to take the first steps towards rebuilding trust. I think it really starts and ends with trust. So while this podcast will focus on connecting different people, it's really about the foundation of using the podcast to build trust and doing good.

I'd love to almost tell people what I'm going to do on the podcast and then do it, and that's the only way to build trust. The documentaries would have us believe that all the artists and laborers, suppliers never got paid at all. I can tell that that's not true by the bank statements. And I know that you're not in a position to do so now, but if you could go to the Bahamas, what would you say to the people there who worked to build the festival grounds, suppliers, vendors, etc.? Close friends who were made in the Bahamas. And I spent a lot of time talking to understand the damage of who was heard and what really happened.

one of our most critical team members in the Bahamas actually died of a heart attack like six months ago, and he had put a lot in the line to make the event of success, and I feel completely indebted to him. And that news just, it crushed me for a while, and it's kind of like as much as I can talk about making plans or trying to make amends. It needs to go so much deeper with that, and I don't think I have the answers right now other than I'm sorry, and I feel the pain, and I'm living with the pain. And I don't know if they could ever be made up for it, but I'll certainly try. And I don't think I appreciated trust enough. I was young and took it for granted, this idea of trust where people just put their blind trust into me. And I took it too far and I ran too far.

And sitting on the other side of the coin now from jail where trust is really like life or death, trust is everything in jail and realizing that I was a one who violated trust for thousands of people. and now I'm asking for others to trust and really needing others to trust. It's kind of a fucked up situation and really brings to light what actually happened. I think one of the hardest things as well is realizing that you put people in situations that legitimately impact their life. For your two examples, and unfortunately, I don't know the exact numbers and stuff like that for everything that's out there.

And I know the overall total is just a little amount. And I think the only thing I can do is by doing the right thing every day trying to pay that back. you know, one step at a time. And it's not going to happen in a week or a month or even a year operating with the NELAA boundaries and trying to create some value and dedicating all of that value back to everybody that was hurt. That's not enough, but I think the only appropriate response to spend my time and spend my life to spend the next couple of years doing nothing but that. I dream of being in a place where I could provide some sort of help or value or good back to the various people that were hurt, and I know that means something different for a lot of

people who were hurt, but like that's a dream, that's the motivation, that's the goal. It's really too many a thing. You've heard the expression, fake it till you make it. It's pretty popular in Silicon Valley. Did you feel like you were just this close, or was there something else going on here? Because you kind of, you tried for Bezos and you ended up with Theranos instead. So one thing I had learned through my earlier companies years before fire was, like I tried to instill myself the idea of to be comfortable, being uncomfortable. And I think that had a lot of good, also a lot of bad with it, where it always led me to push for more.

So whenever I was at a certain point in my career or my company, it quickly felt inadequate, and I wanted to do more. And I felt like I owed it to everybody around me to do more. And I was kept finding that what seemed like a total fantasy or far-fetched dream one day, a week later, would have been surpassed and then seemed almost like boring or irrelevant. and needing to then once again push the next level to keep things pushing. And this whole idea of living where things were never enough, that wasn't going to end well. And ultimately, I, you know, lied and compromised my morals, which is awful and uniffusible. But I think it started with this constant push for more. And acknowledging that and recognizing that, I think it's really important towards moving forward to do things the right way.

I need to understand what the intentions and motives are behind daily actions and, you know, find happiness in doing things properly and taking the appropriate steps rather than as being completely, you know, unsatisfied and looking for more. What was going on with that sort of the second arrest while you were on bail, right? Most people are on their best behavior when they're out on bail, not selling tickets to events that they don't even have, right? So what was the plan for that? What was the strategy behind that?

Was there a strategy behind that? The longest self about what really happened. I think I was just in denial for so long that I could have possibly followed up such a fucked up event with another mistake, especially while being on bail, as you said. And there's no excuse. I was just so wrong, man. I was desperate and thought I could take myself out of a hole when, you know, getting arrested and being on bail is the exact opposite time where you should be doing anything. And I should have sat down and shut up and reflected.

my mistake sooner rather than trying to correct them with potentially even worse mistakes. And the only way to proceed is to operate completely differently. And I'm kind of like on this extreme transparency kick where I want to publish everything, all the numbers, all the stats, all the motivation, and just be open. And beyond the right thing, I think it's the best way to live. If people are bonding over just knowing what each other are thinking and what we're trying to accomplish, like that's one of the best relationships and I think are forearmed and values created and like that's being human that's what life is about. I think that's where happiness is

found. So it was totally wrong. That was awful and I'm sorry for that. It was bad. But if anything, it helped me take that complete 180 and understand how it should be living. You had a big vision. I mean, it was huge. And you got so close to something great that everyone wanted to be a part of and people still want to be a part of it. I mean, there's making a podcast about you. They make TV shows. we did a interview for ABC a couple of weeks ago. I mean, people are still interested in this. I have to wonder if there's going to be a Fire Fest version two. I assume you wouldn't call it that.

But are you thinking of doing something similar with maybe a little bit more of a game plan in the future? Are you good to come? I mean, I'm not going to say no, right? I mean, I've almost said I missed the first one, although spoiler alert, it didn't work out so well. So maybe I'm lucky I stayed home and watched it on Hulu and Netflix. But yeah, I mean, as long as I got a place to sleep

that's not a FEMA tent, yeah. I mean, look, I'll be on the early enrollment list. So is there going to be a Firefest 2.0? I mean, there's a lot of brand equity in Firefest. So you kind of rebuild that trust before I go out and do any of that. And I know a lot of people have been saying they have plans to do another one or this or that. I just think with so many people who have been hurt or left out, kind of left out to dry, I think it's probably the best way to say it.

The most important thing to do is to take steps to help them and to establish. that those steps can actually be made. But if there's anything that makes you want to create and build and do, it's being locked in a cage for months or years. What people don't really understand is that the dream of the fire festival was never about these expensive ticket packages or crazy planes or boats. It was about sharing this little island that I thought created this ultimate magic when different people would come and spend some time there.

I really just wanted to share that magic with as many people as possible. So my plan moving forward is more about how I can use technology to connect as many people around the world as possible. And then through those connections, allow them to kind of create good and value. And then through that, if I can help everybody find their own little slice of magic, I think it's really, really cool. So whether it's a festival, a treasure on hotel, that can be part of it. But the real theme is, how can I take this time to learn how to dedicate myself towards helping everybody a let down? and then take the steam of connectivity and exposure and use that to connect as many people around the world as the country.

This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Billy McFarland. We'll be right back. You will not be charged for this call. This call is from William McFarland. An inmate at a federal prison. This call is being recorded and is subject to monitoring. Hang up to decline the call or to accept Dial 5 now. When you were building the festival and the app, did you feel that as an entrepreneur, as a salesman,

that you maybe had to sell something that didn't even exist yet in order to create it? And at what point did you go from selling something that you'd intended to build to selling an illusion or a fabrication? I think I was more worried about failing people who backed me and put in the effort. So whether that's working full-time, whether that's investing, advising, I always had this one track mind where I needed to make everybody win and I thought my kind of like myself importance and worth will be determined whether I can make all these people who had put their faith in they win. To me, the illusion was telling investors that our company was way better off than it was. And that's where the crime was committed. There was never a point where I thought, okay, we're doing

a festival that we can't actually build. I was wrong. And I totally separate from the crime, I failed at building the festival. But I'm not in jail for failing to build a festival. a festival. I'm in jail for lying about our company's numbers. I got in over my head. I tried to make it too big, too many people, and it was too much, and that led to the real problem, which is the line. What would you recommend? What advice would you have for somebody who finds themselves in over their head, as it were, and attempted to stretch the boundaries of what's legal, what's morally acceptable, either because they're in business or they've found themselves in some other venture. What would you tell that person to do? I had really smart people around me. I could have just sat everybody

down and said, look, guys, here's the reality of the situation. But I had this inflated concept that I can keep figuring it out. And the fact that we did keep figuring it out somehow or some way is what made the failure, the failure that it was. But I should have had the, you know, understanding. And I guess I lacked in maturity to take a step back and say, you know what, this is getting ridiculous. Yes, it might have worked the past 20 days, but it can't keep going on forever. Looking back, when I found myself not telling everybody the full truth and the full lay the land, that should have been the first red flag. If you feel like you have to hide things from your team members or your partners, your investors,

you're doing something wrong. And not only is it wrong and immoral, it's just like you're adding unnecessary complications to your life. There's no reason why everybody who's working towards the same goal should know everything and just make it all the more likely that that goal is actually accomplished when people are wrong the same bitch. Tell me where you think people have gotten you wrong. How have you been misunderstood?

Have you at all been misunderstood? You know, where do you think the media and the public have gotten something wrong about you? I think from what I've heard, there's just been a lot of stories told that aren't accurate in terms of what we have or didn't have at the festival or what we tried to do. And then next is just from getting a list of people who I think spoke. I hadn't even heard of some of them. I think the person who said he was a creative director of the company of like fire. I never met in my entire life or never heard of. But I think there's a whole audience who, for whatever reason, just decided didn't want to interview.

I'm really diving into the real stories about the work that was done, but also how I made mistakes against all of that positive work. I think the lessons and the entertainment can go there's so much deeper than the narrative that's been told so far. Take me back to that particular week, right? Like, you're there on the island. People are coming in two days. There's not enough accommodation. There's not enough food. There's not enough water.

There's not even enough toilet. It's no plumbing. How is it that you had villas when the site we see in the documentaries, it looks like, I mean, it's a vacant construction site. So addressing the villas first, there was the festival site, which we spent a little over a million dollars on the tents, you know, plus furniture, plus, you know, mattresses, plus everything else. Then outside of that, we had the cruise ship plus a couple hundred villas all over Great Exuma.

And as we got up to a little before, we had literally villa rental street teams in their entire job for the months of the festival was to go to every single villa or a large house they could find in the island and try to rent it. So we would take families, give them money to send them on vacation, and rent their house for two weeks. And we do this in hundreds and hundreds of instances. But then there were also like, ask questions arose. We kept having small winds along the way. Like, oh, we need more housing.

Oh, shit. We just found this empty cruise ship, like on two days notice, where to the odds? Boom. Cruise ship arrives. People get excited. Then the stage goes up, and the stage is fucking awesome. We got a really, really high quality stage. They're blasting the music.

They're playing the lights. And all of a sudden it feels really real. So along the way, all these great little wins did happen. But that has just covered up for the poor management I had overall, which, you know, overrode all the good things that were being done. Like, what's going through the mind of Billy McFarland? Paint that picture for us. So a number of accommodations or number of the bathrooms was actually the problem. I think it was a management decision I made.

That was the problem and didn't properly handle the arrival of the guests. I think the biggest wrong decision I made on top of all the illegal stuff, which by far is the worst, was the night before the festival, a storm came through and we had this kind of checklist of like the four or five final things that had to get done and I just remember waiting hour by hour like when does the rain going to stop

when's the wind going to stop, it couldn't finish building everything we needed to do with the storm and people started arriving early the next morning and I think at that point I made the decision that put the straw in the gallows back which is that instead of having people come to the festival site

which would have probably worked we set them to a different part of the island to this restaurant and dock area where we sent over all of our boats and jet skis and alcohol and essentially gave like an open bar and you know free rein in the boats to the jet skis and tried to use that last 10 or 12 hours to get everything up to snuff during that time one of our trucks ran over the water line which took out our piping and I made a lot of other management mistakes but by the time everybody got back it was dark and there wasn't enough light and a lot of the guests were drunk and that's all the rumors of people getting killed started happening and it became too

overwhelmed and that's the event was actually canceled but the fraud was it was so blatant right i mean in the fire app you'd claim 35 million dollars in bookings and it was more like a million and a half you'd said you generated millions in revenue is more like 60,000 dollars like that's not rounding up right that is blatantly making shit up were you thinking at the time all right this isn't right this isn't in the realm of reality that this is an actual crime it was totally i'm a shell for it man i deserve to be go for it. My, you know, ill thought process was, I'm building a lot of, a brand of a lot of value here, and I set a time frame that is way too close to make this stuff still happen. I know at the end of the day, or I thought that at the end of the day, the brand would gain enough value to, you know,

make everybody whole and make everybody financially successful. So I thought that the shortcut was to say, fuck it, let's do whatever it takes to build this, because I actually know I'm creating a lot of value, and I'll pay everybody back and make it all worth their while. I was totally wrong and wish I scheduled a festival for two years in advance, and it'd be completely honest along the way. And if that meant we couldn't do it, then okay, we can't do it. And I totally fucked up, but that was what the thought process was. It was certainly fraud and illegal.

Do you think you're drawn in by the status that came with celebrities and Instagram influencers because Magnesis, right, the card brand, that was a pure status play. It even sold status in the form of you can buy this card. You can buy this membership. you can get elite perks. Fire app was also a business that made sense and had legs, but it clearly didn't come with as much potential for status as a festival like Fire Fest.

I'm trying to get to the heart of what's the draw that led to the obsession or the magical thinking that got out of control in the first place? You had your eye on a prize. You know, you've had a lot of time to reflect on that. What was it that really got you unhinged? Fire Festival started by running Magnususus' member trips on something they called Magnesis Air,

which is this little propeller airline that we launched to fly people to essentially uncharted territory. And the reasoning behind that was, and the reason why I started magnesium was because I wanted my friends who worked in certain industries to meet people outside of their industry. So if they worked in tech,

I wanted them to meet the people who worked in fashion or finance or entertainment. Because when those meetings did happen, that's when a lot of really cool things kind of came to be. And I felt like just by leaving college, and moving to New York as an 18-year-old running a tech company, I was just experiencing so much that I never thought I would experience.

And every time something new or different would happen or I would go through an experience something, I wanted to share it with everybody. I wanted to show my friends, my family. And guys, like, look what's out there. You have no idea what we found or what we're doing. And that's for how fire festival started. I just wanted to show everybody in Norman's key. I was bringing all my friends down.

And I know there's all these stories about who came up with the idea or whatever it was. The reality is it was a high school friend who said, You should totally do a treasure hunt on Normans for your many members. And that's how the fire festival started. It was just this dream of sharing it with people. A lot of people have said, and even the court documents have said, Billy McFarland is subject to magical thinking. He's prone to magical thinking.

What do you think about that? What do you have to say to those people who think that you're thinking too big? I texture medicine. Physical thinking wasn't where I went wrong. It was by lying and trying to take a shortcut. One thing JL has taught me is, like, our brains are constantly trying to. to give us excuses or reasons not to take the hard path, not to put in the hard work and not to make ourselves suffer. And that's what, we need to embrace. We need to acknowledge that and say,

you know what, the hard path is the right way. It's not worth it to take this work out to go faster because things don't work. So I made the bad decision to lie to try to get what I wanted faster than I deserve to get it. And that's where I totally fucked up. So you think moving forward when you get out, I mean, are you going to start a business venture? I know you're barred from having a C-suite or director position in a business, but if there's one thing I know about entrepreneurs and business owners, it's that you're hardwired that way most of the time. I mean, you, of all people, any entrepreneur, it's like a fish out of water if you have to go get a job in an pre-existing organization and stick with that kind of thing. It's just not the way,

it's just not your nature. Do you see yourself having problems with that upon release? The first thing I need to operate within the boundaries and show that I'm dedicated through whatever venture it is to dedicating all those value or good helping those I hurt. But, of course, I have a plan and I have a vision that I'm looking forward to creating. And once again, nothing makes you want to build more than being locked in the gauge. A lot of people think that you were scamming from the get-go, right? I was getting a haircut the other day, and the barber's like, there's money stash somewhere. So I'm not totally sure about that. I heard you had your family on the island.

And if this whole thing was a con from the get-go, rarely would you expect somebody who's doing that from the jump to bring their family to the scene of the crime if the whole thing is just one big lie? I legit did it in a week or so before, which you'll go through and see the statements. There's been a lot of talk about housing. We needed more housing.

So we actually found and chartered a cruise ship in like the week before the festival and had that parked right off site. And it got to a point when we were running these cargo bar, barges almost like two weekly between Fort Lauderdale and Great Exuma. And I believe our last barge got there Tuesday and the first guests were scheduled to arrive on Thursday.

We still needed to bring over more mattresses and more materials. So we started chartering cargo planes that would take a container and fly it from the U.S. to the Bahamas. And then we trucked that container over to the festival site. So you're going to see a lot of those cargo plane charges in there as well. And like finally, we couldn't wait for mattresses to get chipped from China. We literally went on Amazon and bought a million dollars of mattresses, had them shipped to Fort Lauderdale and brought those over on the boat and the planes. So we were doing everything right into the last minute. And should I have seen, absolutely?

More importantly, was I committing fraud to my investors and partners? Yes, and that's a big issue. But the attempt and the effort was to put everything I had. Unless what I'm looking at from the bank statements is not legit somehow. You know what I'm seeing here? It seems like a lot of work to fabricate something like this just for little old me. but I'm getting a little stressed out, just looking at all the money going in and out of these accounts. And I can imagine how you felt spending $5.4 million in a manner of weeks.

I see that you're paying for flight service. I see that you're paying for wireless service. There are other charges on here that are significant that I can only imagine are to vendors. It's very clear that you were trying to do something, pull something off here. when I've done other investigative reporting to put a very fancy spin on looking at a PDF. When I look at other scams, they just look different. I'm not saying that this didn't turn into something that it wasn't meant to be, but it's clear from what I'm looking at right now that this wasn't all empty promises.

Bad management, yes, but it's hard to look at this and say, oh, he never planned on having a festival on this island at that time. I can't really come to that conclusion. It would be impossible. But it also, you were dealing some pretty high-flying folks looking at the names on these statements. I mean, you are obviously very convincing and well-connected. I want them to know how seriously I take that. And for everybody else, it doesn't matter, you know, who may or may not have lost money or who is involved. I'm probably lying about our numbers

to get more money to spend it, whether I thought it was right or wrong. That's fucked up. And I deserve to be where I am. I know I've learned, and I hope for a chance, but it's going to be a long run to get there to want to acknowledge that no matter how different the picture may be as to what's been portrayed, the underlying crime is bad, and there's no getting around that. What's your biggest regret, 2020 hindsight? Lying and misunderstanding the value and importance of trust. Leading isn't about just foraging and venturing into new ground. It's about being the last person there and being the support system.

So everything you say is happening at the front happens throughout and being the person that things can fall back on, news and ideas. To make them real, you need to own that responsibility. and I lost side of that. I'm sorry. What's one thought you want to leave people with today? I still think I don't know how to do it. I spoke with them on the phone, and rightfully so, everything has mixed results. So it's just kind of in this thought process where I know what I'm sorry for,

I know what I do want to say. It's probably a unique situation for every person, and I need to understand that my apologies probably won't be accepted. And if they do, eventually it'll take years and years. But I hope to show you over the next couple of years through actions and through the transparency of my intentions on making it up to you in some small way. So thank you for believing me at one time. I took advantage for you.

It's fucked up. It's not going to happen again. And I'm going to dedicate myself. I try to show you that you to say I take this. I really appreciate your candor here. I mean, what do you sort of dream about? I mean, of course, freedom. But is there anything like your favorite food or something like that that you're just like,

man, you wake up at night and you're upset you can't get a Philly cheese steak? I'm just curious. Out frozen. I love some truth. I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that, here's a trailer from my interview with Layla Ali, daughter of legendary boxer Muhammad Ali. She's got a great story about how she ended up the only other boxer in her family and how she carries her father's legacy. Whether you're into sports or not, I think you're really going to dig it.

You have to have it in you to want to be a fighter. It's not something that you just go, I think I'll just try boxing, you know, because you're going to get your ass beat. If you're hearing, you don't have it in you, when you get that opportunity, it was a brawl. I mean, it was bloody. It was like crazy. and I was like, I want to do that. You would think anyone punching you would hurt, right? Yeah, sure.

But as fighters, it's like, oh, that person can punch, that person can't. Tap in you, tap, tap, tap. And then every once in a while I was that, bam, that hard way. Oh, okay, I felt that. If you're listening to your camp saying she's nothing and she this or she that. And then you have to get your ass in there and you feel that punch. Like, no, she can punch. No, she's not just a pretty bad.

You see me across that ring looking at you. Like, yeah, remember all that stuff you talk? Now it's about to happen. It's just me and you. Nobody else can get in there with you. You know, and it's like, I'm going to remind you of all the things you said they didn't know that street side of me. Not everyone has that. You don't have to. Sure.

But I do. Now you get to meet someone. You just to see how they walk. See how they hold this stuff. See if there's any fear in their eyes. What was your father's reaction to you wanting to box? He didn't like it. No? No. You guys were sparring before you even put the gloves on. Oh, yeah. He supported me, though. He came to a lot of my fights. He couldn't beat all of them. I could always see that glare in his eyes of him being proud and just to come into that arena and having everyone chanting, Ali, Ali. Did you just see him light up?

to see me in that ring and him just remembering himself. Our boxing styles were similar, the way I'm shaped, my body shaped. So just seeing all of that had to be a super crazy experience for him. For more with Leila Ali, check out episode number 309 of the Jordan Harbinger show. Thanks to Billy for doing the show. Look, I know a lot of people love to hate this guy, and I understand that. But I think there's something to be said. He wanted to get his message out here.

And, you know, there's a part of me that really does feel a little bit for somebody who's in their 20s and is having their 20s and early 30s slash their entire life potentially defined by this and is locked away for a while. I mean, no matter how much you might think somebody deserves a punishment that they're getting, it is sometimes a little bit painful to see a nonviolent criminal in a cage,

even if they might deserve the punishment that they had coming to them. Now, I found it interesting that during a press conference, Jarl Rule introduced Billy as his partner in crime. I mean, that just turned out to be literally the case, although John never actually faced, it's so weird calling somebody job, he never have faced any punishment with this. In fact, he's now all, I didn't know anything about it, which I find almost impossible to believe. They also have merch, merchandise. Among the mementos of Firefest are sweatpants,

shirts, tokens that are emblazoned with, and I'm not even kidding. Quote, a conspiracy to change the entertainment world. I mean, okay, interesting choice of words. Billy really did undergo trial by documentary. And I do wonder, is this the new Billy McFarlane that we're hearing? Or is this the same Billy McFarland that tried to pull off Fire Festival? Is there a Billy version too? Because a lot of what we heard today might be similar to what we've heard before. And look, the guy is convincing. If you saw the documentary, you know there was one guy, Andy, who was literally about to take one for the team in order to clear some containers of water that were shipped to the island for the festival. If you haven't seen the documentary, well, oh, I won't spoil that little tidbit for you. Let's just say you're

going to rewind to make sure you actually understood what he was saying. You might even rewind two or three times because it's that unbelievable. Is he a genius who just got too big for his britches, or is he merely a con man? You be the judge. Also, you can find more from Billy McFarland in the dumpster fire, FYRE podcast. Dumpster Fire. We'll link to that in the show notes. Thanks to Notorious network for making this happen for me. They're the ones who do the dumpster fire podcast. I highly encourage you to go have a listen. I certainly will be doing so. There's a worksheet for today's episode in the show notes, a transcript for today's episode in the show notes. There's no video of this interview. There's a video of me talking on a phone if you want to see it. We'll put some

clips up on the YouTube channel.jordanharbinger.com slash YouTube is where you can find us there. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also hit me on LinkedIn. in. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course that's free. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig the well before you get thirsty. Many of the guests on the show, with a few obvious exceptions, contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. This show is created in association with podcast one. And of course my amazing team. That includes Jen Harbinger, Jay Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, Millie Ocampo, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel,

Rahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know someone who will be interested in this story, FireFest really did make the rounds. Please do share this with them. Hopefully you find something great in every episode of the show. Please do share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on this show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like something you should know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows

that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not, the through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love,

and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that, I want to understand how people in the world really work itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.