957: Fyre Festival- The Story Netflix did Not Tell with Marc Weinstein

Jan 31, 2019

In this episode, Sal, Adam, and Justin speak with Marc Weinstein, who was featured in Netflix’s just released documentary Fyre. Marc goes into detail about what led him to work with the festival, why he stayed to the disastrous end and what he learned from the experience. This is a very interesting conversation with a behind the scene look at the music festival business, the power of social media and the damage that one charismatic sociopath can inflict.

What Marc does for a living, his background and how he connected with Mind Pump? (2:06)
What are some of the most profitable music festivals and the challenges you would face starting one? (8:50)
Did he know what he was getting into when he switched from finance to event production? (14:50)
How he ‘fell’ into the music industry. (18:09)
Why the events industry is always a mess and the need to just ‘figure it out’. (21:10)
How did he meet Billy McFarland and the founders of the Fyre Festival? (23:45)
How did he deal with the coordination and stress of trying to accommodate the festival guests? (38:40)
What were the conversations like with the other members of the production team while this debacle was going on? (42:37)
Was there a thought process to postpone? (45:27)
How did he coordinate the festival guests off the island and when did he discover that Billy had committed wire fraud? (48:40)
Was he afraid at any point the locals would get violent? (52:50)
Who owns the footage from the documentary? Are we contributing to this sociopath? (53:48)
How Fyre is just a microcosm of how social media portrays our lives. (58:55)
What is the aftermath from this? (1:01:23)
Does he find it cathartic to talk about it? Make amends with GoFundMe pages? How we could use social media for good. (1:03:40)
How does he feel he has evolved from this? His take on the social media revolution. (1:09:00)
Does he see an advantage of events like Burning Man unplugging from technology? (1:17:00)
What practices does he implement to cope with social media addiction? (1:18:37)
What is he currently pursuing? (1:20:57)