Imagine paying for an exclusive music festival where you get to party with celebrities and supermodels on a private island, only to find out upon arrival that you got scammed.
In part one of our mini-series on Great American Con Artists, we’ll learn about Billy McFarland and Fyre Festival, the festival in the Caribbean that went terribly wrong.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it is the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on The Great American Con Artist.
[00:00:29] In today’s episode we are going to be talking about a festival that went horribly wrong, next up we’ll learn about a man who made tens of millions of dollars by convincing his followers to follow an ancestral lifestyle, which it turned out he wasn’t following himself.
[00:00:47] And in the final episode we’ll meet a young girl from Russia who managed to convince the creme de la creme of New York City that she was someone completely different.
[00:00:57] These are all wonderful stories where we’ll look closely at what happened, the people who actually did the conning, and their motivations for it, and look at why so many people fell for it.
[00:01:10] OK then, without further ado, let’s learn about the story of the Fyre Festival.
[00:01:18] December 12th, 2016, was an unremarkable day in terms of world news.
[00:01:25] On Instagram, however, something peculiar happened.
[00:01:31] At exactly the same time, 63 people posted exactly the same picture. The picture itself was unremarkable, it was strange, even. It wasn’t even a picture, it was just the colour, orange.
[00:01:48] These 63 people weren’t just your random, run-of-the-mill Instagram user. They were some of the most glamorous and famous people on the platform. Supermodels like Bella Haadid and Emily Ratajkowski, and celebrity influencers like Kendall Jenner.
[00:02:06] Within 24 hours, these cryptic orange Instagram posts had been seen 300 million times.
[00:02:15] What were they all about?
[00:02:17] Well, the picture itself held no clues, it was just an orange square. The text, the caption, however, did.
[00:02:27] It announced a festival, “Fyre Festival”, with a link to a website. On that website was a video with supermodels dancing around on an idyllic desert island in the Bahamas, having the time of their life.
[00:02:42] They were all going to Fyre Festival, or so the social media posts would have you believe.
[00:02:49] But the celebrities weren’t the only attraction. There would be amazing music, with Major Lazer and Blink-182. There would be celebrity chefs and mouth-watering food.
[00:03:02] It would be, so the marketing video claimed, "an immersive music festival on the boundaries of the impossible".
[00:03:10] No wonder all of these celebrities were lining up to go.
[00:03:14] It was hyper exclusive, but the good news was that you too could go to the festival, for as little as $500 for a day pass.
[00:03:25] Sure, that was the cheapest ticket. Prices got as high as $12,000 for the full VIP experience, but, for a small fee, you too could party with celebrities and supermodels on this wonderful Caribbean island and have the time of your life.
[00:03:43] As you might expect, it was an attractive proposition, and within 24 hours the festival was sold out.
[00:03:52] The festival was scheduled to take place at the end of April the following year, so the organisers had just over four months to prepare for the most exclusive festival in the world, and deliver on their promises.
[00:04:08] As you might imagine, given that this is a mini-series about Great American Con Artists, it didn’t quite go to plan…
[00:04:17] Now, before we get into exactly what happened, I must tell you about the man behind this festival, The Fyre Festival, because, as is so often the case, there is one individual at the centre of the con.
[00:04:32] This man’s name was Billy McFarland.
[00:04:36] He was 25-years-old, and already had a number of entrepreneurial ventures behind him.
[00:04:42] When he was 22, he had founded a company that sold an black card that gave you access to exclusive bars, clubs and restaurants.
[00:04:52] And he had gone on to found another app called Fyre, which allowed people to book artists, musicians, directly, without having to go through middlemen or agents.
[00:05:04] And in fact, Fyre Festival was first intended as a way to promote this Fyre app, but the festival would come to overshadow the app it was meant to promote.
[00:05:17] The thing to understand about Billy McFarland is that, from an early age, and for all of his failings, he had a keen understanding of the value of exclusivity, and he knew how much people were willing to pay to get it.
[00:05:34] A key part of this strategy was to involve celebrities. You heard at the start about how he used supermodels to announce the festival, but he also brought in a celebrity business partner in the form of the rapper, Ja Rule, who you might remember from hits like “Always on Time”.
[00:05:53] Having celebrity endorsements gave Billy McFarland and the festival credibility and exclusivity. After all, if Ja Rule was involved, the music would be great, and if the most famous supermodels in the world were going, well it was surely going to be a luxurious experience.
[00:06:12] The problem was, behind the scenes, McFarland didn’t actually have anything organised yet.
[00:06:20] He didn’t, it would later transpire, even have an island.
[00:06:24] He had initially promoted the festival as taking place on a small Caribbean island called Norman's Cay, which was where the promotional video was filmed.
[00:06:34] Norman's Cay is an idyllic place. I mean, it’s a tiny Caribbean island.
[00:06:40] And he had managed to persuade the owners of Norman's Cay to lease him their island for the Fyre Festival, but on one condition.
[00:06:50] See, Norman’s Cay was used as a base by a man called Carlos Lehder, a business associate of the drug lord Pablo Escobar.
[00:06:59] The owners said, “Billy, you can use the island but you are not allowed to mention this connection”.
[00:07:07] But McFarland, as a marketer at heart, couldn’t resist.
[00:07:12] Telling people that they could go to a festival on Pablo Escobar’s private island just sounded so good, and marketing materials for the festival continued to mention Pablo Escobar, despite the fact that, firstly, Pablo Escobar never actually owned the island and secondly, more importantly, that the current owners of the island has expressly told McFarland not to do this.
[00:07:39] The Escobar reference might have sold tickets and helped build up buzz for the event, but it meant that the island’s owners simply cancelled the contract with the festival, leaving McFarland without an island to hold his event.
[00:07:56] Importantly, McFarland and the festival’s organisers never told any of the ticket holders about this, and continued to mention Pablo Escobar, even when they had no idea where the festival would actually take place.
[00:08:11] He did eventually manage to find another location for the festival, but it was not quite the idyllic desert island that people thought it would be.
[00:08:21] He managed to come to an agreement with the government of The Bahamas to hold the festival in a part of an island called Great Exuma.
[00:08:30] Now, Great Exuma looks like a lovely place. I mean, it’s an island in the Bahamas, it has lovely beaches, crystal clear waters, and wonderful weather.
[00:08:40] But it’s far from private. There are lots of other hotels and resorts, and the only place that McFarland could find for his exclusive festival was in an abandoned parking lot on the edge of the island.
[00:08:55] This would only be something that festival-goers discovered after they got there.
[00:09:01] So, McFarland had the location, but how does one actually put on a luxury festival in an abandoned parking lot in the Caribbean?
[00:09:11] People were scheduled to be flying in, some had paid $12,000 a ticket for luxury accommodation, they would be expecting…something.
[00:09:22] It turned out that actually putting on a festival, building the accommodation, bathrooms, stages, all of that kind of boring but necessary stuff, well it was complicated, and it was expensive.
[00:09:35] In fact, it was far more expensive than McFarland had planned.
[00:09:41] The festival had sold out in record time, and the tickets were expensive. But it was not cheap to organise. It would later transpire that the influencers who had posted the cryptic orange tile and told all of their followers how excited they were to go to Fyre Festival had not done this out of the goodness of their hearts.
[00:10:02] They were paid, and paid handsomely.
[00:10:06] One, Kendall Jenner, was paid $250,000 for that one Instagram post.
[00:10:16] Most of these influencers, in fact, seemed to have no intention of going to the festival.
[00:10:22] But their invoices needed to be paid, and McFarland was running out of money, all before he needed to figure out how to actually put on this festival he was promising.
[00:10:34] McFarland was told that putting on the festival would cost around $50 million, but that was far more than he had anticipated and budgeted for.
[00:10:45] In fact, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the organisers hadn’t really anticipated anything other than the marketing launch, and one report has McFarland figuring out how to rent a stage by Googling it.
[00:10:59] He was scrambling for cash, taking loans from anyone who was prepared to give him money, at times at extortionate rates of interest. By his own omission, he would wake up in the morning and need to get millions of dollars into his bank account by the afternoon to cover his costs.
[00:11:17] As the date of the festival approached, McFarland and the festival organisers started to get more and more desperate. The cash was running out, and they still had a luxury festival to organise.
[00:11:30] Budgets were slashed, they were cut dramatically. There was originally $6 million earmarked for catering, for food for the event, with, and I’m quoting directly, “uniquely authentic island cuisine...local seafood, Bahamian-style sushi and even a pig roast”.
[00:11:50] Six million quickly turned to one million as McFarland realised there simply wasn’t enough money left to deliver on his promises.
[00:12:00] There were suggestions that the festival be postponed, pushed back a year, but these plans were rejected.
[00:12:08] Fyre Festival would go ahead on the last weekend of April, 2017.
[00:12:15] With two weeks left to go, and the festival’s bank balance hovering around zero, McFarland turned to the people who had bought tickets.
[00:12:25] The festival would be "cashless [and cardless] ", he informed ticket holders. To buy food and drink at the festival, you would need to add money to a digital wallet.
[00:12:36] How much money should you add?
[00:12:37] Well, McFarland recommended between $300-$500 a day for every day that they were there.
[00:12:47] A good idea, perhaps? Maybe it meant that people could frolic around in the crystal-clear water with supermodels without worrying about their wallets getting wet.
[00:12:56] And, of course, this money would be kept safe, deposited in a ring-fenced account so nobody other than the ticket holder could use it, and anything remaining would be returned to them, right?
[00:13:08] Well, not quite.
[00:13:10] In reality, McFarland was planning on using this money to pay his bills, he was scrambling for cash, and it would later transpire that around 40% of all of this money that had been deposited by ticket holders went straight into paying McFarland’s bills for Fyre Festival.
[00:13:29] This wasn’t the only warning sign, though. In the days leading up to the festival, many ticket holders had got increasingly nervous as there was very little information given to them about the festival - no information about when their private planes were leaving, no pictures of these luxurious villas they had been promised, nothing.
[00:13:48] What’s more, there was no way of contacting the festival organisers. People who emailed got error messages saying that their email couldn’t be delivered, and Fyre Festival turned off all commenting on its social media handles.
[00:14:04] One website leaked a picture of what looked like a hurricane tent being assembled on a rocky beach, and posted an anonymous warning that the festival was going to be a disaster.
[00:14:17] And Blink-182, one of the headline bands of the event, pulled out the day before, announcing on their social media that they weren’t convinced that they would have what they needed to put on a good performance for their fans.
[00:14:32] Yet, there was no announcement from the organisers; the festival would go ahead as planned.
[00:14:39] When the first batch of ticket holders arrived at Miami airport, ready to board their exclusive private planes, they found that it wasn’t a private plane, but one large commercial airliner.
[00:14:52] A slight disappointment, perhaps, but it was nothing compared to what was to come.
[00:14:59] When guests arrived at this exclusive island, they firstly realised that the island wasn’t so exclusive at all.
[00:15:07] It was a large island that was shared with lots of hotels and resorts, Fyre Festival was only going to take place in one corner of it, in a deserted development.
[00:15:18] But they weren’t even allowed to go to the place where the festival was supposedly taking place. The first batch of people was sent to a restaurant where they were greeted by an open bar, free food and alcohol.
[00:15:33] Great, some might have thought, it’s an amazing start to what will be an unforgettable weekend.
[00:15:40] However, this diversion was not part of the plan.
[00:15:45] The reason the organisers had diverted them to the restaurant was because there was no festival, nothing was ready.
[00:15:54] In a mad rush to try to get everything sorted in time, the organisers had managed to find hurricane tents, the tents used after a natural disaster, and were assembling them on the beach.
[00:16:07] To make matters worse, the night before the guests arrived there had been a huge storm, and the mattresses that had been left outside were soaking wet.
[00:16:19] Now, the festival goers didn’t know this yet. Many of the guests thought that this first “free bar” stop was simply part of the plan, a quick stop before the party really started.
[00:16:31] But they were kept there for six hours, without any information about what was happening next.
[00:16:40] Finally, buses were arranged to take them to the festival, and what they saw was perhaps the polar opposite of what they had seen advertised on social media.
[00:16:51] Half-assembled hurricane tents, wet mattresses strewn across the tarmac outside, a handful of portaloos and a grand total of zero supermodels.
[00:17:03] What they did see, however, was Billy Mcfarland, the genius behind the entire festival. As the sun was going down, he emerged and told people that there had been a bit of a mix up with the accommodation, and people who had booked a villa could go and grab a tent.
[00:17:22] As you might imagine, chaos ensued. People ran to try to grab a tent for the night. The lucky ones that managed found that there was basically nothing inside, some wet mattresses if they were lucky.
[00:17:37] All of the tents quickly filled up, and by this point only a third of the total expected guests had arrived.
[00:17:46] It was chaos, complete pandemonium, and if it hadn’t been clear before, it was now blindingly obvious that the festival could not go ahead.
[00:17:58] The organisers of Fyre Festival put out a message claiming that, “due to circumstances out of our control”, the festival couldn’t go ahead.
[00:18:08] But now there was the not-insignificant question of what to do about everyone who had already come. This wasn’t a case of saying, “ok, sorry everyone, it’s time to go home now”. They were on a Caribbean island, everyone had been told it was a cashless and cardless festival, so many simply didn’t have any money on them.
[00:18:31] What’s more, the festival had been organised during one of the busiest weekends on Great Exuma. It was the island's Grand Regatta, meaning that all of the other hotels and accommodation on the island were fully booked up.
[00:18:45] The organisers managed to get a few hundred people back on a plane to Miami at 1.30am, while the remaining ticket holders had to wait until the morning.
[00:18:56] And by this time, much like the festival was originally born from social media, it was killed in the same way. People were posting pictures of the chaotic situation on the ground, with one particularly viral post showing a picture of a very sad looking cheese sandwich. Remember, that they had been promised luxury food prepared by celebrity chefs, and what they were given was something very different.
[00:19:25] Now, while it is perhaps slightly amusing to think about how so many people fell for this, and you might argue that if someone is prepared to pay $12,000 to party with celebrities, then they don’t deserve much sympathy, there were plenty of people who were badly impacted by being involved with Fyre Festival.
[00:19:46] Most of all, it was the people of Great Exuma, the locals on the island. The organisers hired hundreds of people to put up the tents and build the festival infrastructure. They were told that they would be paid after the festival, but they never saw a penny. The restaurant where the guests enjoyed their free bar, its owner was also never paid, and only managed to recover its losses after a public fundraising campaign. And all of the Fyre Festival employees also went without their last paychecks, although McFarland informed them that they could continue working without being paid, if they wanted.
[00:20:27] And as for the ticket holders, Billy McFarland and the festival organisers promised that everyone who bought a ticket would receive a full refund or they could get a VIP ticket to the festival when it took place the following year.
[00:20:42] But, of course, there was no more Fyre Festival, and Billy McFarland had bigger problems than trying to organise another festival.
[00:20:52] The following month there was a criminal investigation, and both McFarland and Ja Rule were the targets of several lawsuits. Ja Rule got off scot free, he wasn’t prosecuted, but Billy Mcfarland was arrested. He was charged with wire fraud, for defrauding investors out of $26 million, and sentenced to six years in prison.
[00:21:18] He served four years, he was released in 2022, and is now a free man.
[00:21:25] At the start of 2023 he went on something of a publicity tour, going on talk shows, podcasts and doing interviews, where he portrayed himself as being a young guy who got out of control, made a mistake for which he was very sorry, but was not inherently a bad person.
[00:21:44] He is, he says, launching a new venture, a new company, which will be “Fyre Festival Lite, without the capacity issues".
[00:21:54] Who knows what will come next for Billy McFarland, but his critics have pointed out that if he thinks the only thing that went wrong at Fyre Festival was “capacity issues”, he may well still have a few more lessons to learn.
[00:22:09] OK then, that is it for Billy McFarland and Fyre Festival.
[00:22:14] As a reminder, this is part one of a mini-series on The Great American Con Artist.
[00:22:20] Next up we are going to learn the story of a man who promised health and happiness by returning to a diet of liver and cow testicles, and after that we’ll meet a German heiress who, it turns out, wasn’t a German heiress after all.
[00:22:35] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:22:38] Had you heard the story of Fyre Festival before?
[00:22:41] Do you think that Billy McFarland deserves a place in a series on con artists, or do you think he was just a young entrepreneur who got in over his head, who got carried away?
[00:22:51] If he organised another festival, would you go?
[00:22:54] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:22:58] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:06] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:11] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it is the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on The Great American Con Artist.
[00:00:29] In today’s episode we are going to be talking about a festival that went horribly wrong, next up we’ll learn about a man who made tens of millions of dollars by convincing his followers to follow an ancestral lifestyle, which it turned out he wasn’t following himself.
[00:00:47] And in the final episode we’ll meet a young girl from Russia who managed to convince the creme de la creme of New York City that she was someone completely different.
[00:00:57] These are all wonderful stories where we’ll look closely at what happened, the people who actually did the conning, and their motivations for it, and look at why so many people fell for it.
[00:01:10] OK then, without further ado, let’s learn about the story of the Fyre Festival.
[00:01:18] December 12th, 2016, was an unremarkable day in terms of world news.
[00:01:25] On Instagram, however, something peculiar happened.
[00:01:31] At exactly the same time, 63 people posted exactly the same picture. The picture itself was unremarkable, it was strange, even. It wasn’t even a picture, it was just the colour, orange.
[00:01:48] These 63 people weren’t just your random, run-of-the-mill Instagram user. They were some of the most glamorous and famous people on the platform. Supermodels like Bella Haadid and Emily Ratajkowski, and celebrity influencers like Kendall Jenner.
[00:02:06] Within 24 hours, these cryptic orange Instagram posts had been seen 300 million times.
[00:02:15] What were they all about?
[00:02:17] Well, the picture itself held no clues, it was just an orange square. The text, the caption, however, did.
[00:02:27] It announced a festival, “Fyre Festival”, with a link to a website. On that website was a video with supermodels dancing around on an idyllic desert island in the Bahamas, having the time of their life.
[00:02:42] They were all going to Fyre Festival, or so the social media posts would have you believe.
[00:02:49] But the celebrities weren’t the only attraction. There would be amazing music, with Major Lazer and Blink-182. There would be celebrity chefs and mouth-watering food.
[00:03:02] It would be, so the marketing video claimed, "an immersive music festival on the boundaries of the impossible".
[00:03:10] No wonder all of these celebrities were lining up to go.
[00:03:14] It was hyper exclusive, but the good news was that you too could go to the festival, for as little as $500 for a day pass.
[00:03:25] Sure, that was the cheapest ticket. Prices got as high as $12,000 for the full VIP experience, but, for a small fee, you too could party with celebrities and supermodels on this wonderful Caribbean island and have the time of your life.
[00:03:43] As you might expect, it was an attractive proposition, and within 24 hours the festival was sold out.
[00:03:52] The festival was scheduled to take place at the end of April the following year, so the organisers had just over four months to prepare for the most exclusive festival in the world, and deliver on their promises.
[00:04:08] As you might imagine, given that this is a mini-series about Great American Con Artists, it didn’t quite go to plan…
[00:04:17] Now, before we get into exactly what happened, I must tell you about the man behind this festival, The Fyre Festival, because, as is so often the case, there is one individual at the centre of the con.
[00:04:32] This man’s name was Billy McFarland.
[00:04:36] He was 25-years-old, and already had a number of entrepreneurial ventures behind him.
[00:04:42] When he was 22, he had founded a company that sold an black card that gave you access to exclusive bars, clubs and restaurants.
[00:04:52] And he had gone on to found another app called Fyre, which allowed people to book artists, musicians, directly, without having to go through middlemen or agents.
[00:05:04] And in fact, Fyre Festival was first intended as a way to promote this Fyre app, but the festival would come to overshadow the app it was meant to promote.
[00:05:17] The thing to understand about Billy McFarland is that, from an early age, and for all of his failings, he had a keen understanding of the value of exclusivity, and he knew how much people were willing to pay to get it.
[00:05:34] A key part of this strategy was to involve celebrities. You heard at the start about how he used supermodels to announce the festival, but he also brought in a celebrity business partner in the form of the rapper, Ja Rule, who you might remember from hits like “Always on Time”.
[00:05:53] Having celebrity endorsements gave Billy McFarland and the festival credibility and exclusivity. After all, if Ja Rule was involved, the music would be great, and if the most famous supermodels in the world were going, well it was surely going to be a luxurious experience.
[00:06:12] The problem was, behind the scenes, McFarland didn’t actually have anything organised yet.
[00:06:20] He didn’t, it would later transpire, even have an island.
[00:06:24] He had initially promoted the festival as taking place on a small Caribbean island called Norman's Cay, which was where the promotional video was filmed.
[00:06:34] Norman's Cay is an idyllic place. I mean, it’s a tiny Caribbean island.
[00:06:40] And he had managed to persuade the owners of Norman's Cay to lease him their island for the Fyre Festival, but on one condition.
[00:06:50] See, Norman’s Cay was used as a base by a man called Carlos Lehder, a business associate of the drug lord Pablo Escobar.
[00:06:59] The owners said, “Billy, you can use the island but you are not allowed to mention this connection”.
[00:07:07] But McFarland, as a marketer at heart, couldn’t resist.
[00:07:12] Telling people that they could go to a festival on Pablo Escobar’s private island just sounded so good, and marketing materials for the festival continued to mention Pablo Escobar, despite the fact that, firstly, Pablo Escobar never actually owned the island and secondly, more importantly, that the current owners of the island has expressly told McFarland not to do this.
[00:07:39] The Escobar reference might have sold tickets and helped build up buzz for the event, but it meant that the island’s owners simply cancelled the contract with the festival, leaving McFarland without an island to hold his event.
[00:07:56] Importantly, McFarland and the festival’s organisers never told any of the ticket holders about this, and continued to mention Pablo Escobar, even when they had no idea where the festival would actually take place.
[00:08:11] He did eventually manage to find another location for the festival, but it was not quite the idyllic desert island that people thought it would be.
[00:08:21] He managed to come to an agreement with the government of The Bahamas to hold the festival in a part of an island called Great Exuma.
[00:08:30] Now, Great Exuma looks like a lovely place. I mean, it’s an island in the Bahamas, it has lovely beaches, crystal clear waters, and wonderful weather.
[00:08:40] But it’s far from private. There are lots of other hotels and resorts, and the only place that McFarland could find for his exclusive festival was in an abandoned parking lot on the edge of the island.
[00:08:55] This would only be something that festival-goers discovered after they got there.
[00:09:01] So, McFarland had the location, but how does one actually put on a luxury festival in an abandoned parking lot in the Caribbean?
[00:09:11] People were scheduled to be flying in, some had paid $12,000 a ticket for luxury accommodation, they would be expecting…something.
[00:09:22] It turned out that actually putting on a festival, building the accommodation, bathrooms, stages, all of that kind of boring but necessary stuff, well it was complicated, and it was expensive.
[00:09:35] In fact, it was far more expensive than McFarland had planned.
[00:09:41] The festival had sold out in record time, and the tickets were expensive. But it was not cheap to organise. It would later transpire that the influencers who had posted the cryptic orange tile and told all of their followers how excited they were to go to Fyre Festival had not done this out of the goodness of their hearts.
[00:10:02] They were paid, and paid handsomely.
[00:10:06] One, Kendall Jenner, was paid $250,000 for that one Instagram post.
[00:10:16] Most of these influencers, in fact, seemed to have no intention of going to the festival.
[00:10:22] But their invoices needed to be paid, and McFarland was running out of money, all before he needed to figure out how to actually put on this festival he was promising.
[00:10:34] McFarland was told that putting on the festival would cost around $50 million, but that was far more than he had anticipated and budgeted for.
[00:10:45] In fact, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the organisers hadn’t really anticipated anything other than the marketing launch, and one report has McFarland figuring out how to rent a stage by Googling it.
[00:10:59] He was scrambling for cash, taking loans from anyone who was prepared to give him money, at times at extortionate rates of interest. By his own omission, he would wake up in the morning and need to get millions of dollars into his bank account by the afternoon to cover his costs.
[00:11:17] As the date of the festival approached, McFarland and the festival organisers started to get more and more desperate. The cash was running out, and they still had a luxury festival to organise.
[00:11:30] Budgets were slashed, they were cut dramatically. There was originally $6 million earmarked for catering, for food for the event, with, and I’m quoting directly, “uniquely authentic island cuisine...local seafood, Bahamian-style sushi and even a pig roast”.
[00:11:50] Six million quickly turned to one million as McFarland realised there simply wasn’t enough money left to deliver on his promises.
[00:12:00] There were suggestions that the festival be postponed, pushed back a year, but these plans were rejected.
[00:12:08] Fyre Festival would go ahead on the last weekend of April, 2017.
[00:12:15] With two weeks left to go, and the festival’s bank balance hovering around zero, McFarland turned to the people who had bought tickets.
[00:12:25] The festival would be "cashless [and cardless] ", he informed ticket holders. To buy food and drink at the festival, you would need to add money to a digital wallet.
[00:12:36] How much money should you add?
[00:12:37] Well, McFarland recommended between $300-$500 a day for every day that they were there.
[00:12:47] A good idea, perhaps? Maybe it meant that people could frolic around in the crystal-clear water with supermodels without worrying about their wallets getting wet.
[00:12:56] And, of course, this money would be kept safe, deposited in a ring-fenced account so nobody other than the ticket holder could use it, and anything remaining would be returned to them, right?
[00:13:08] Well, not quite.
[00:13:10] In reality, McFarland was planning on using this money to pay his bills, he was scrambling for cash, and it would later transpire that around 40% of all of this money that had been deposited by ticket holders went straight into paying McFarland’s bills for Fyre Festival.
[00:13:29] This wasn’t the only warning sign, though. In the days leading up to the festival, many ticket holders had got increasingly nervous as there was very little information given to them about the festival - no information about when their private planes were leaving, no pictures of these luxurious villas they had been promised, nothing.
[00:13:48] What’s more, there was no way of contacting the festival organisers. People who emailed got error messages saying that their email couldn’t be delivered, and Fyre Festival turned off all commenting on its social media handles.
[00:14:04] One website leaked a picture of what looked like a hurricane tent being assembled on a rocky beach, and posted an anonymous warning that the festival was going to be a disaster.
[00:14:17] And Blink-182, one of the headline bands of the event, pulled out the day before, announcing on their social media that they weren’t convinced that they would have what they needed to put on a good performance for their fans.
[00:14:32] Yet, there was no announcement from the organisers; the festival would go ahead as planned.
[00:14:39] When the first batch of ticket holders arrived at Miami airport, ready to board their exclusive private planes, they found that it wasn’t a private plane, but one large commercial airliner.
[00:14:52] A slight disappointment, perhaps, but it was nothing compared to what was to come.
[00:14:59] When guests arrived at this exclusive island, they firstly realised that the island wasn’t so exclusive at all.
[00:15:07] It was a large island that was shared with lots of hotels and resorts, Fyre Festival was only going to take place in one corner of it, in a deserted development.
[00:15:18] But they weren’t even allowed to go to the place where the festival was supposedly taking place. The first batch of people was sent to a restaurant where they were greeted by an open bar, free food and alcohol.
[00:15:33] Great, some might have thought, it’s an amazing start to what will be an unforgettable weekend.
[00:15:40] However, this diversion was not part of the plan.
[00:15:45] The reason the organisers had diverted them to the restaurant was because there was no festival, nothing was ready.
[00:15:54] In a mad rush to try to get everything sorted in time, the organisers had managed to find hurricane tents, the tents used after a natural disaster, and were assembling them on the beach.
[00:16:07] To make matters worse, the night before the guests arrived there had been a huge storm, and the mattresses that had been left outside were soaking wet.
[00:16:19] Now, the festival goers didn’t know this yet. Many of the guests thought that this first “free bar” stop was simply part of the plan, a quick stop before the party really started.
[00:16:31] But they were kept there for six hours, without any information about what was happening next.
[00:16:40] Finally, buses were arranged to take them to the festival, and what they saw was perhaps the polar opposite of what they had seen advertised on social media.
[00:16:51] Half-assembled hurricane tents, wet mattresses strewn across the tarmac outside, a handful of portaloos and a grand total of zero supermodels.
[00:17:03] What they did see, however, was Billy Mcfarland, the genius behind the entire festival. As the sun was going down, he emerged and told people that there had been a bit of a mix up with the accommodation, and people who had booked a villa could go and grab a tent.
[00:17:22] As you might imagine, chaos ensued. People ran to try to grab a tent for the night. The lucky ones that managed found that there was basically nothing inside, some wet mattresses if they were lucky.
[00:17:37] All of the tents quickly filled up, and by this point only a third of the total expected guests had arrived.
[00:17:46] It was chaos, complete pandemonium, and if it hadn’t been clear before, it was now blindingly obvious that the festival could not go ahead.
[00:17:58] The organisers of Fyre Festival put out a message claiming that, “due to circumstances out of our control”, the festival couldn’t go ahead.
[00:18:08] But now there was the not-insignificant question of what to do about everyone who had already come. This wasn’t a case of saying, “ok, sorry everyone, it’s time to go home now”. They were on a Caribbean island, everyone had been told it was a cashless and cardless festival, so many simply didn’t have any money on them.
[00:18:31] What’s more, the festival had been organised during one of the busiest weekends on Great Exuma. It was the island's Grand Regatta, meaning that all of the other hotels and accommodation on the island were fully booked up.
[00:18:45] The organisers managed to get a few hundred people back on a plane to Miami at 1.30am, while the remaining ticket holders had to wait until the morning.
[00:18:56] And by this time, much like the festival was originally born from social media, it was killed in the same way. People were posting pictures of the chaotic situation on the ground, with one particularly viral post showing a picture of a very sad looking cheese sandwich. Remember, that they had been promised luxury food prepared by celebrity chefs, and what they were given was something very different.
[00:19:25] Now, while it is perhaps slightly amusing to think about how so many people fell for this, and you might argue that if someone is prepared to pay $12,000 to party with celebrities, then they don’t deserve much sympathy, there were plenty of people who were badly impacted by being involved with Fyre Festival.
[00:19:46] Most of all, it was the people of Great Exuma, the locals on the island. The organisers hired hundreds of people to put up the tents and build the festival infrastructure. They were told that they would be paid after the festival, but they never saw a penny. The restaurant where the guests enjoyed their free bar, its owner was also never paid, and only managed to recover its losses after a public fundraising campaign. And all of the Fyre Festival employees also went without their last paychecks, although McFarland informed them that they could continue working without being paid, if they wanted.
[00:20:27] And as for the ticket holders, Billy McFarland and the festival organisers promised that everyone who bought a ticket would receive a full refund or they could get a VIP ticket to the festival when it took place the following year.
[00:20:42] But, of course, there was no more Fyre Festival, and Billy McFarland had bigger problems than trying to organise another festival.
[00:20:52] The following month there was a criminal investigation, and both McFarland and Ja Rule were the targets of several lawsuits. Ja Rule got off scot free, he wasn’t prosecuted, but Billy Mcfarland was arrested. He was charged with wire fraud, for defrauding investors out of $26 million, and sentenced to six years in prison.
[00:21:18] He served four years, he was released in 2022, and is now a free man.
[00:21:25] At the start of 2023 he went on something of a publicity tour, going on talk shows, podcasts and doing interviews, where he portrayed himself as being a young guy who got out of control, made a mistake for which he was very sorry, but was not inherently a bad person.
[00:21:44] He is, he says, launching a new venture, a new company, which will be “Fyre Festival Lite, without the capacity issues".
[00:21:54] Who knows what will come next for Billy McFarland, but his critics have pointed out that if he thinks the only thing that went wrong at Fyre Festival was “capacity issues”, he may well still have a few more lessons to learn.
[00:22:09] OK then, that is it for Billy McFarland and Fyre Festival.
[00:22:14] As a reminder, this is part one of a mini-series on The Great American Con Artist.
[00:22:20] Next up we are going to learn the story of a man who promised health and happiness by returning to a diet of liver and cow testicles, and after that we’ll meet a German heiress who, it turns out, wasn’t a German heiress after all.
[00:22:35] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:22:38] Had you heard the story of Fyre Festival before?
[00:22:41] Do you think that Billy McFarland deserves a place in a series on con artists, or do you think he was just a young entrepreneur who got in over his head, who got carried away?
[00:22:51] If he organised another festival, would you go?
[00:22:54] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:22:58] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:06] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:11] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it is the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on The Great American Con Artist.
[00:00:29] In today’s episode we are going to be talking about a festival that went horribly wrong, next up we’ll learn about a man who made tens of millions of dollars by convincing his followers to follow an ancestral lifestyle, which it turned out he wasn’t following himself.
[00:00:47] And in the final episode we’ll meet a young girl from Russia who managed to convince the creme de la creme of New York City that she was someone completely different.
[00:00:57] These are all wonderful stories where we’ll look closely at what happened, the people who actually did the conning, and their motivations for it, and look at why so many people fell for it.
[00:01:10] OK then, without further ado, let’s learn about the story of the Fyre Festival.
[00:01:18] December 12th, 2016, was an unremarkable day in terms of world news.
[00:01:25] On Instagram, however, something peculiar happened.
[00:01:31] At exactly the same time, 63 people posted exactly the same picture. The picture itself was unremarkable, it was strange, even. It wasn’t even a picture, it was just the colour, orange.
[00:01:48] These 63 people weren’t just your random, run-of-the-mill Instagram user. They were some of the most glamorous and famous people on the platform. Supermodels like Bella Haadid and Emily Ratajkowski, and celebrity influencers like Kendall Jenner.
[00:02:06] Within 24 hours, these cryptic orange Instagram posts had been seen 300 million times.
[00:02:15] What were they all about?
[00:02:17] Well, the picture itself held no clues, it was just an orange square. The text, the caption, however, did.
[00:02:27] It announced a festival, “Fyre Festival”, with a link to a website. On that website was a video with supermodels dancing around on an idyllic desert island in the Bahamas, having the time of their life.
[00:02:42] They were all going to Fyre Festival, or so the social media posts would have you believe.
[00:02:49] But the celebrities weren’t the only attraction. There would be amazing music, with Major Lazer and Blink-182. There would be celebrity chefs and mouth-watering food.
[00:03:02] It would be, so the marketing video claimed, "an immersive music festival on the boundaries of the impossible".
[00:03:10] No wonder all of these celebrities were lining up to go.
[00:03:14] It was hyper exclusive, but the good news was that you too could go to the festival, for as little as $500 for a day pass.
[00:03:25] Sure, that was the cheapest ticket. Prices got as high as $12,000 for the full VIP experience, but, for a small fee, you too could party with celebrities and supermodels on this wonderful Caribbean island and have the time of your life.
[00:03:43] As you might expect, it was an attractive proposition, and within 24 hours the festival was sold out.
[00:03:52] The festival was scheduled to take place at the end of April the following year, so the organisers had just over four months to prepare for the most exclusive festival in the world, and deliver on their promises.
[00:04:08] As you might imagine, given that this is a mini-series about Great American Con Artists, it didn’t quite go to plan…
[00:04:17] Now, before we get into exactly what happened, I must tell you about the man behind this festival, The Fyre Festival, because, as is so often the case, there is one individual at the centre of the con.
[00:04:32] This man’s name was Billy McFarland.
[00:04:36] He was 25-years-old, and already had a number of entrepreneurial ventures behind him.
[00:04:42] When he was 22, he had founded a company that sold an black card that gave you access to exclusive bars, clubs and restaurants.
[00:04:52] And he had gone on to found another app called Fyre, which allowed people to book artists, musicians, directly, without having to go through middlemen or agents.
[00:05:04] And in fact, Fyre Festival was first intended as a way to promote this Fyre app, but the festival would come to overshadow the app it was meant to promote.
[00:05:17] The thing to understand about Billy McFarland is that, from an early age, and for all of his failings, he had a keen understanding of the value of exclusivity, and he knew how much people were willing to pay to get it.
[00:05:34] A key part of this strategy was to involve celebrities. You heard at the start about how he used supermodels to announce the festival, but he also brought in a celebrity business partner in the form of the rapper, Ja Rule, who you might remember from hits like “Always on Time”.
[00:05:53] Having celebrity endorsements gave Billy McFarland and the festival credibility and exclusivity. After all, if Ja Rule was involved, the music would be great, and if the most famous supermodels in the world were going, well it was surely going to be a luxurious experience.
[00:06:12] The problem was, behind the scenes, McFarland didn’t actually have anything organised yet.
[00:06:20] He didn’t, it would later transpire, even have an island.
[00:06:24] He had initially promoted the festival as taking place on a small Caribbean island called Norman's Cay, which was where the promotional video was filmed.
[00:06:34] Norman's Cay is an idyllic place. I mean, it’s a tiny Caribbean island.
[00:06:40] And he had managed to persuade the owners of Norman's Cay to lease him their island for the Fyre Festival, but on one condition.
[00:06:50] See, Norman’s Cay was used as a base by a man called Carlos Lehder, a business associate of the drug lord Pablo Escobar.
[00:06:59] The owners said, “Billy, you can use the island but you are not allowed to mention this connection”.
[00:07:07] But McFarland, as a marketer at heart, couldn’t resist.
[00:07:12] Telling people that they could go to a festival on Pablo Escobar’s private island just sounded so good, and marketing materials for the festival continued to mention Pablo Escobar, despite the fact that, firstly, Pablo Escobar never actually owned the island and secondly, more importantly, that the current owners of the island has expressly told McFarland not to do this.
[00:07:39] The Escobar reference might have sold tickets and helped build up buzz for the event, but it meant that the island’s owners simply cancelled the contract with the festival, leaving McFarland without an island to hold his event.
[00:07:56] Importantly, McFarland and the festival’s organisers never told any of the ticket holders about this, and continued to mention Pablo Escobar, even when they had no idea where the festival would actually take place.
[00:08:11] He did eventually manage to find another location for the festival, but it was not quite the idyllic desert island that people thought it would be.
[00:08:21] He managed to come to an agreement with the government of The Bahamas to hold the festival in a part of an island called Great Exuma.
[00:08:30] Now, Great Exuma looks like a lovely place. I mean, it’s an island in the Bahamas, it has lovely beaches, crystal clear waters, and wonderful weather.
[00:08:40] But it’s far from private. There are lots of other hotels and resorts, and the only place that McFarland could find for his exclusive festival was in an abandoned parking lot on the edge of the island.
[00:08:55] This would only be something that festival-goers discovered after they got there.
[00:09:01] So, McFarland had the location, but how does one actually put on a luxury festival in an abandoned parking lot in the Caribbean?
[00:09:11] People were scheduled to be flying in, some had paid $12,000 a ticket for luxury accommodation, they would be expecting…something.
[00:09:22] It turned out that actually putting on a festival, building the accommodation, bathrooms, stages, all of that kind of boring but necessary stuff, well it was complicated, and it was expensive.
[00:09:35] In fact, it was far more expensive than McFarland had planned.
[00:09:41] The festival had sold out in record time, and the tickets were expensive. But it was not cheap to organise. It would later transpire that the influencers who had posted the cryptic orange tile and told all of their followers how excited they were to go to Fyre Festival had not done this out of the goodness of their hearts.
[00:10:02] They were paid, and paid handsomely.
[00:10:06] One, Kendall Jenner, was paid $250,000 for that one Instagram post.
[00:10:16] Most of these influencers, in fact, seemed to have no intention of going to the festival.
[00:10:22] But their invoices needed to be paid, and McFarland was running out of money, all before he needed to figure out how to actually put on this festival he was promising.
[00:10:34] McFarland was told that putting on the festival would cost around $50 million, but that was far more than he had anticipated and budgeted for.
[00:10:45] In fact, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the organisers hadn’t really anticipated anything other than the marketing launch, and one report has McFarland figuring out how to rent a stage by Googling it.
[00:10:59] He was scrambling for cash, taking loans from anyone who was prepared to give him money, at times at extortionate rates of interest. By his own omission, he would wake up in the morning and need to get millions of dollars into his bank account by the afternoon to cover his costs.
[00:11:17] As the date of the festival approached, McFarland and the festival organisers started to get more and more desperate. The cash was running out, and they still had a luxury festival to organise.
[00:11:30] Budgets were slashed, they were cut dramatically. There was originally $6 million earmarked for catering, for food for the event, with, and I’m quoting directly, “uniquely authentic island cuisine...local seafood, Bahamian-style sushi and even a pig roast”.
[00:11:50] Six million quickly turned to one million as McFarland realised there simply wasn’t enough money left to deliver on his promises.
[00:12:00] There were suggestions that the festival be postponed, pushed back a year, but these plans were rejected.
[00:12:08] Fyre Festival would go ahead on the last weekend of April, 2017.
[00:12:15] With two weeks left to go, and the festival’s bank balance hovering around zero, McFarland turned to the people who had bought tickets.
[00:12:25] The festival would be "cashless [and cardless] ", he informed ticket holders. To buy food and drink at the festival, you would need to add money to a digital wallet.
[00:12:36] How much money should you add?
[00:12:37] Well, McFarland recommended between $300-$500 a day for every day that they were there.
[00:12:47] A good idea, perhaps? Maybe it meant that people could frolic around in the crystal-clear water with supermodels without worrying about their wallets getting wet.
[00:12:56] And, of course, this money would be kept safe, deposited in a ring-fenced account so nobody other than the ticket holder could use it, and anything remaining would be returned to them, right?
[00:13:08] Well, not quite.
[00:13:10] In reality, McFarland was planning on using this money to pay his bills, he was scrambling for cash, and it would later transpire that around 40% of all of this money that had been deposited by ticket holders went straight into paying McFarland’s bills for Fyre Festival.
[00:13:29] This wasn’t the only warning sign, though. In the days leading up to the festival, many ticket holders had got increasingly nervous as there was very little information given to them about the festival - no information about when their private planes were leaving, no pictures of these luxurious villas they had been promised, nothing.
[00:13:48] What’s more, there was no way of contacting the festival organisers. People who emailed got error messages saying that their email couldn’t be delivered, and Fyre Festival turned off all commenting on its social media handles.
[00:14:04] One website leaked a picture of what looked like a hurricane tent being assembled on a rocky beach, and posted an anonymous warning that the festival was going to be a disaster.
[00:14:17] And Blink-182, one of the headline bands of the event, pulled out the day before, announcing on their social media that they weren’t convinced that they would have what they needed to put on a good performance for their fans.
[00:14:32] Yet, there was no announcement from the organisers; the festival would go ahead as planned.
[00:14:39] When the first batch of ticket holders arrived at Miami airport, ready to board their exclusive private planes, they found that it wasn’t a private plane, but one large commercial airliner.
[00:14:52] A slight disappointment, perhaps, but it was nothing compared to what was to come.
[00:14:59] When guests arrived at this exclusive island, they firstly realised that the island wasn’t so exclusive at all.
[00:15:07] It was a large island that was shared with lots of hotels and resorts, Fyre Festival was only going to take place in one corner of it, in a deserted development.
[00:15:18] But they weren’t even allowed to go to the place where the festival was supposedly taking place. The first batch of people was sent to a restaurant where they were greeted by an open bar, free food and alcohol.
[00:15:33] Great, some might have thought, it’s an amazing start to what will be an unforgettable weekend.
[00:15:40] However, this diversion was not part of the plan.
[00:15:45] The reason the organisers had diverted them to the restaurant was because there was no festival, nothing was ready.
[00:15:54] In a mad rush to try to get everything sorted in time, the organisers had managed to find hurricane tents, the tents used after a natural disaster, and were assembling them on the beach.
[00:16:07] To make matters worse, the night before the guests arrived there had been a huge storm, and the mattresses that had been left outside were soaking wet.
[00:16:19] Now, the festival goers didn’t know this yet. Many of the guests thought that this first “free bar” stop was simply part of the plan, a quick stop before the party really started.
[00:16:31] But they were kept there for six hours, without any information about what was happening next.
[00:16:40] Finally, buses were arranged to take them to the festival, and what they saw was perhaps the polar opposite of what they had seen advertised on social media.
[00:16:51] Half-assembled hurricane tents, wet mattresses strewn across the tarmac outside, a handful of portaloos and a grand total of zero supermodels.
[00:17:03] What they did see, however, was Billy Mcfarland, the genius behind the entire festival. As the sun was going down, he emerged and told people that there had been a bit of a mix up with the accommodation, and people who had booked a villa could go and grab a tent.
[00:17:22] As you might imagine, chaos ensued. People ran to try to grab a tent for the night. The lucky ones that managed found that there was basically nothing inside, some wet mattresses if they were lucky.
[00:17:37] All of the tents quickly filled up, and by this point only a third of the total expected guests had arrived.
[00:17:46] It was chaos, complete pandemonium, and if it hadn’t been clear before, it was now blindingly obvious that the festival could not go ahead.
[00:17:58] The organisers of Fyre Festival put out a message claiming that, “due to circumstances out of our control”, the festival couldn’t go ahead.
[00:18:08] But now there was the not-insignificant question of what to do about everyone who had already come. This wasn’t a case of saying, “ok, sorry everyone, it’s time to go home now”. They were on a Caribbean island, everyone had been told it was a cashless and cardless festival, so many simply didn’t have any money on them.
[00:18:31] What’s more, the festival had been organised during one of the busiest weekends on Great Exuma. It was the island's Grand Regatta, meaning that all of the other hotels and accommodation on the island were fully booked up.
[00:18:45] The organisers managed to get a few hundred people back on a plane to Miami at 1.30am, while the remaining ticket holders had to wait until the morning.
[00:18:56] And by this time, much like the festival was originally born from social media, it was killed in the same way. People were posting pictures of the chaotic situation on the ground, with one particularly viral post showing a picture of a very sad looking cheese sandwich. Remember, that they had been promised luxury food prepared by celebrity chefs, and what they were given was something very different.
[00:19:25] Now, while it is perhaps slightly amusing to think about how so many people fell for this, and you might argue that if someone is prepared to pay $12,000 to party with celebrities, then they don’t deserve much sympathy, there were plenty of people who were badly impacted by being involved with Fyre Festival.
[00:19:46] Most of all, it was the people of Great Exuma, the locals on the island. The organisers hired hundreds of people to put up the tents and build the festival infrastructure. They were told that they would be paid after the festival, but they never saw a penny. The restaurant where the guests enjoyed their free bar, its owner was also never paid, and only managed to recover its losses after a public fundraising campaign. And all of the Fyre Festival employees also went without their last paychecks, although McFarland informed them that they could continue working without being paid, if they wanted.
[00:20:27] And as for the ticket holders, Billy McFarland and the festival organisers promised that everyone who bought a ticket would receive a full refund or they could get a VIP ticket to the festival when it took place the following year.
[00:20:42] But, of course, there was no more Fyre Festival, and Billy McFarland had bigger problems than trying to organise another festival.
[00:20:52] The following month there was a criminal investigation, and both McFarland and Ja Rule were the targets of several lawsuits. Ja Rule got off scot free, he wasn’t prosecuted, but Billy Mcfarland was arrested. He was charged with wire fraud, for defrauding investors out of $26 million, and sentenced to six years in prison.
[00:21:18] He served four years, he was released in 2022, and is now a free man.
[00:21:25] At the start of 2023 he went on something of a publicity tour, going on talk shows, podcasts and doing interviews, where he portrayed himself as being a young guy who got out of control, made a mistake for which he was very sorry, but was not inherently a bad person.
[00:21:44] He is, he says, launching a new venture, a new company, which will be “Fyre Festival Lite, without the capacity issues".
[00:21:54] Who knows what will come next for Billy McFarland, but his critics have pointed out that if he thinks the only thing that went wrong at Fyre Festival was “capacity issues”, he may well still have a few more lessons to learn.
[00:22:09] OK then, that is it for Billy McFarland and Fyre Festival.
[00:22:14] As a reminder, this is part one of a mini-series on The Great American Con Artist.
[00:22:20] Next up we are going to learn the story of a man who promised health and happiness by returning to a diet of liver and cow testicles, and after that we’ll meet a German heiress who, it turns out, wasn’t a German heiress after all.
[00:22:35] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:22:38] Had you heard the story of Fyre Festival before?
[00:22:41] Do you think that Billy McFarland deserves a place in a series on con artists, or do you think he was just a young entrepreneur who got in over his head, who got carried away?
[00:22:51] If he organised another festival, would you go?
[00:22:54] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:22:58] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:06] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:11] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
