Fyre Festival's Billy McFarland Tells Us His Next Move, Lessons Learned In Jail, and More

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life. And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have. Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales. You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.
Most internet entrepreneurs, when they get into starting businesses, they do things that are either black hat or gray hat. And then they realize, I gotta do things legit because I don't wanna go to jail and I can make more money doing things ethically and not breaking the law. Like you just like make so much more money being legit.
How on earth did you not learn that lesson earlier?
All right, today's pod is interesting. We just had Billy McFarland, and he's famous for the Fyre Festival thing, which basically was this huge Coachella-type event that went viral four years ago, and he ended up committing a ton of crimes that he admitted to and was charged and convicted of 25 or 30 million dollars for the fraud. We just had him on the pod.
Very confusing pod, Shaan, I think. Not confusing, but mixed emotions.

**Shaan Puri** (1:56)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, he's an interesting guy. He's also complicated, like most people. And, you know, I don't know. I think it was pretty interesting. We talked about a bunch of things. We talked about kind of his origin story, how he got to the Fyre Festival, and almost like where it all went wrong. So where did he start making, you know, mistakes and then eventually committing crimes?
We talked about life in prison and what that was like in solitary confinement and things like that. We talked about what he's doing now, how he's trying to come back. And me and Sam are a little bit hard on his new idea, I would say. Well, to the point of if this was a normal, if this was just a normal person, random person on the street, I would not have been as harsh. But I felt like I, I don't know, for whatever reason, I felt like I had the license to be a little harsh on this one.
We talked about that. We talked about other ideas about what he could do or other business opportunities he sees.
Pretty fascinating guy.

**Sam Parr** (2:53)
Very fascinating guy. The thing that like, that sits bad with me is, or it makes me confused is he's very likable. He's a very likable person, incredibly charming, very charismatic, and I want him to win, but he did a lot of really bad shit.

**Shaan Puri** (3:12)
And he seems a little, a little coached in the sense that he's like, right up front, we'll say, what I did was terrible. I deserve no sympathy.
You know, I was wrong and I was an idiot, right? And he's very quick to kind of own that, which is great. You want somebody to own it, but it's also, I think, that's somebody who understands, okay, this is the message. I got to stay on this message. And yeah, I got to make it really clear where I stand on that.

**Sam Parr** (3:39)
It's like when you have like a star football player, star athlete in high school, and you see them like doing bad shit off the field, and you're like, dude, you have it all, man. You've got the talent. Please don't blow this. It hurts us all to see someone with so many gifts do such bad shit.
And that's a little bit how I felt with this. And yeah, I say this in the end, but I'm eager to see how this story ends. I'm gonna be following it. And I think it was a good pod. Ben, our producer, Ben thought it went great. He was messaging us during it, but I think people will like it.