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

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 all along like you just like make so much more money being legit how on earth did you not learn that lesson earlier alright today's pod is interesting we just had billy mc he's famous for the fire festival thing which basically was this like huge coachella type event that went viral four years ago and handed ended up committing a ton of crimes that he admitted to and was a charge and convicted of like twenty five or thirty million dollars with the fraud we just had him on the pod very confusing pod sean i think not confusing but but like mixed emotions yeah yeah i i mean he's an interesting guy he's also complicated like most people and you know i don't i don't know i think we i think it was pretty interesting we talked about a bunch of things we talked about kinda his origin story how he got to the fire 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 a little bit hard on his new idea i would say look to the point of if this was a normal if this was just a normal person ran a person on the street i would not have been as harsh but i felt like i i don't know for whatever reason felt like i had license to be a little harsh on this one we talked about that yeah we talked about other ideas about what he could do or other there business opportunities he sees pretty fascinating guy very fascinating guy the thing that like that sits bad with me is or makes me confused 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 and he seems a little a little coached in the sense that he's like right up front will 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's who understands okay i this is the message i gotta stay on this message and yeah i i gotta make it really clear where i stand on that it's like when you have like a star football player star athlete in in high school and you see them like doing bad shit off the field and you're like dude do 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'm i say this in the end but i'm eager to see how the story ends i'm gonna be following it and i think it was a good pod ben our pretty producer ben thought it went great he was messaging us during it but i i think people will like it yep alright enjoy alright let's just get right into this so it sounds like you have like staff like you ask somebody to get you a coffee so are you like are you back mean you're you're you're in the mix again you're working yeah broke his health and taking advantage of you know anybody i can get to help me try to rebuild and start making things right and do you have like a crazy restitution thing so i we should explain kind of what the so this is billy billy created fire festival most notably you may have seen that i don't know the documentaries or whatever you just got out of prison but one of the things that's associated with it is you have like more than twenty million or something that you have to pay back in restitution to some combination of investors creditors people like that how does that work you do you have to give them like every dollar or is it a certain percentage like how does that work because that's a deep deep hole yeah and it's brutal i'm like i just can't think about that that big number because then you know i'll sort of lose track about like what's happened today end tomorrow so how it works is that i have to pay a percentage of all of my personal income you know directly back to restitution like after taxes they they calculated on like gross income so totally pre tax so it make like a thousand dollars this week i have a set percentage i have to pay on that thousand dollars but what is in addition to that what's the yeah what's the percent is it like crazy or is like five percent it it's more than five i'm not sure like where it's gonna end up with varies based on income so i know what i have to pay right now but i think it gets readjust every couple of months and then in addition to that pirates giving ten percent all its revenue back to restitution as well so if pirate gets a hundred k sponsorship deal like it'll pay ten k right away and then whatever i get as my like salary or income i'll pay an additional percentage on top of that so i'm just trying to pay more than i have to why are you doing this right now why are you i mean like you know you're in a different situation i i i firmly believe that i i i listen to your pot the deposits that you've done i've watched the documentary read a little bit like you made a massive mistake so yeah i think that you you you deserve to be punished and so i don't feel sorry for that i don't feel sorry for you for having to do that i think five years is or four years how much you serve that's that's a lot so mh my my current stance is like everyone deserves a second chance and if you if you do the crime and you have to do the time like you you there should be a point where it's like alright you screwed up you get a you can try again i feel that but when i see you doing this podcast push right now i'm like should we is he taking advantage of us like why is this guy doing this right now why is he what what is he gonna what's he trying to sell or or is this therapeutic or are you just trying to make a living which you know what what's what's your motivation between this recent push yeah so like first of all totally deserved what i got and sorry i think there's like days where i felt like i got too much time there's days where felt like i didn't get enough just like based on everything else happening in the world so deserve was coming and like definitely not looking for sympathy i think there's two things here one is that by doing these podcasts i'm getting great like inbound deal flow so if three or four companies are listening to this they're like oh wait he actually does know how to market can get us attention and they'll come and hire me like that's amazing that's my entire purpose about doing this small media run right now i think was like looking at your twitter comments a little bit this morning before it i came on the show a lot of people and other hosts gotten the same feedback is like why the hell would you give a ton artist like any time of day love your love your response but i think the response to all those people is like what did i say which which just what for you you said like maybe an interesting conversation that will get us money so like i want that transparency i said i said an interesting person or a an interesting person that would have an interesting conversation and it will get us a lot of views i think that's cool and like i think other people haven't been able to say that i think that's great but i think to them is that anybody who's has taken life to the extreme or too far has learned like a lot of good and bad lessons from that so like they can use me right and if there's like one entrepreneur here who's trying to raise money and he she thinks like shit this is a little harder and i thought sixty days ago and they're about to send out that monthly investor update don't fuck up your numbers like don't go over the top to to raise that cash and like if i can stop one person really cool but i mean they're the spectrum if there's somebody who's going about it honestly and they're scared to kinda take that leap like if i can inspire them to go and try to make their brand pop off really cool as well so i think there is lessons to be learned and people could kind of be use all of my mistakes to help them wherever they are in their entrepreneurial journey and you you are kind of a hustle so you we'll kind of go fast through it but you you basically when you're in middle school start creating projects i don't even wanna say company because like you know i don't know how much how much of a company it is when you're in middle school but like you were building products and launching them as websites that's right is that right like in middle school yeah just basically started doing super basic html css and like fifth and sixth grade and so this is what twenty twenty one twenty two years ago i it was pretty much like the wild wild west days of the internet and started a couple like web hosting companies and basic social networks and that was really my foray into the world of entrepreneurship and technology so you you bake those sites you end up selling them or you just sold at least one of them for like what like a a a big way and a small win what what would you do when you were kind of like you're probably i great yeah yeah these are a couple thousands of dollars so like life changing to you know kid just wants to buy candy but and at this point kind of irrelevant but i think like kinda got me into the game started a little bit of a bigger media site called twenty four scene in high school and sold that twenty company one yes sold to a company called buddy tv out of seattle when i was sixteen what what what that to what what was twenty four scene it was a content network and i love the tv show twenty four so was basically clipping you know snippets of the twenty four show and this is before streaming so it's hard hour or twenty four yeah exactly so it's hard to get like actual media of the shows this is all based on i'm like you know fox like air it and then it really was very little media afterwards so i was taking like the show that air aaron and clipping it up and ended up doing it for a half a dozen tv shows and i had this business partner at the time who's was in his mid thirties in michigan well i never met and he like orchestrated the sale and then he paid me out on western union every two weeks for like the remainder of my high school so that was pretty crazy how how much did you how much you make during of that it was like tens of thousands of dollars like but at the time it was it was wild for me and from there is you you went to school and you yes you graduated but you never had a a real job did you went to college basically started living off of my twenty fourteen capital under this little suitcase entered my bed my fresh year of college and for the first time my started going out like going at nightclubs clubs going to dinner is like exploring what every eighteen year old i think man like wants to see what's out there in the world and flew on my cash in a couple of months so i'm like shit now i'm broke sitting in my college in this like small town i can't afford to like try to find a car take in the new york city anymore like what can i do so got back to what i knew which was basic programming and started a social networking website called spring during my freshman new year of college and that introduced me this entire world of like venture capital and angel investing and essentially dropped out of school halfway ish through my freshman year to to work on spring and then i started this whole like run of venture capital backed startups my my wife through friends of friends somehow had some run ins with you at penn like like a pair she would she would like good run ins or you know she someone you you must have dated someone who her friends was of someone and she and she they would tell me stories of about they're like yeah we knew him and he would always rent like these fat cars and drive us all and pay for everything to go to new york city from philly and like he we just thought like he just had some business and no one knew what it was no it wasn't anything inappropriate but it was yeah just like he just like just we all do is this guy who must have had some money for through some internet companies and he he treated on all of us on a regular basis yeah so went to went to philly for a company called dream ventures which is kind of like this accelerator incubator program and yeah it was dating and girl at the time who is i think it's a sophomore now at pence so i should have been a sophomore in school so all my like peers and friends were were in college and like so i'd be like at dream at trying to raise money by day and then like at the terrible like college parties by night and then obviously trying to take him to new york so what what triggered the switch from like i'm a kid programmer who likes to make hobby websites like you know scenes for my favorite tv show twenty four to like i'm trying to be the man because it seems like at some point you all all your business venture switch to like things that were super cool right you did the black card credit card thing you did fire obviously which was like you know the next coachella so at some point you switched from like kinda hobby websites to how do i be the cool guy you know the big man campus type of thing what what triggered that that switch for you yeah i think that's a good question and it was almost like i was living these alternative life's and not really fitting in either one i was a college kid but trying to raise money from venture capitalists when you know at my little school majority of the students haven't heard of the word like venture capital in their life and so i would go hang out with these venture capitalists who are titans of industry or you know successful angel investors kinda go back to the college realm so i was always kind of interested in merging the two worlds so but i'm hanging out with the vcs the college kids all want access to this and they would hire me to help like market or consult so i was i kind of hustling and trying to make side income to to fund a lifestyle and trying to kinda keep up with this new world that my basic programming had been giving me access to and then at what point so the was like your first kinda it wasn't a real win like it you didn't exit but you raise i think for or six million dollars was that the the mag is it called mag yes so turn nineteen graduated from the dream ventures moved spring to the second ever we work labs down on barr street in new york and i was there at we work now around he's like thirty ish you know hustling entrepreneur all trying to make it i'm a kid and went into dinner with just like a group of these friends are starting to meet in new york who a little bit older a little bit more established and one of them pulls out this black american express centurion on card and kinda slams it on the table to show off and i'm like fuck i have forty dollars in my chase account like how how can i do this so it went back to my we work office went online to alibaba before alibaba was really like a mainstream thing particularly like in new york and the us bought these black metal cards and bought a credit card copier they kinda came in the mail took my chase blue debit card copied it onto this black card went to the pizza place across the street from the we work guy was treating me like i was royalty went back into the office and just sold these cards to all the entrepreneurs in that we work office and then mag niece was born and how big that business get before it before it went south so my niece did total like eleven twelve ish million in revenue over three years and my biggest mistake was getting distracted by fire in the fire festival and i understand this is forwarding like years in advance but in the run up to fire festival for the four or five months i just started trying to get money from anywhere and everywhere and basically milk the magazine's customer base as much as i could and then when fire crashed maggie just went down with it so and it's not seeing it through with such a fuck up but mag was just it was just literally like it's not a bank account it was just literally a physical card as well as some perks like you would get like discounts to certain concerts i guess is wear fire kinda got inspiration from yes discounts to certain clubs i guess or like a discount to like a private jet service so you just must have negotiated the deals or probably even white labels like some other company that had found cool deals and you for three hundred dollars you got the sick card like literally physically just a card with your same bank account you had access to like a townhouse i forget what you called the a townhouse mh and you gotta go to some parties and you got some perks is that basically the model exactly then what was really interesting though was the members were bringing all the perks and benefits so initially i sold these cards and so now let's say we sold a couple hundred cards i'm like wow our member base is super interesting whether they're entrepreneurs there are people all these different industries that my friends don't really have access to like let's get a space they can all come and connect so went and rented a series of loft in townhouse that i couldn't afford where basically members can come and hang out anytime and then as mag grew we just built an app where members would come to us saying hey i work at this brand whether it's like this playing company this fitness studio this fashion brand let's do something special for the rest of the members and they would basically pay us to advertised and give access to cool shit to the members and the members of pay us an annual fee to get access to these perks it's kind of interesting where we're making money from both sides and then relying on the actual member base to create the offering was it profitable so i was just so bad with financial management that we raised you know a few million bucks for magna but we never had more than two months of runway in the entire history of the company so i'd raised around and like eighty percent of that round was already spent in terms of like bills owed to employees contractors agency agencies as whatever so it was like always a kiss a death like okay raise a million bucks but fuck i owe eight hundred grand and now we have two months to around my left i think my biggest inability was to communicate like that problem to investors i just kept saying like things are great you know they'll raise a million bucks and we're off for the races i couldn't just like really explain how much we needed and why we needed it and that caused us to have to basically become profitable super early on so just started monetizing the user base way more than i should have which i think diminish the value of the brand and for like the last year and a half years of magna is like we weren't profitable but we were paying all of our bills just based on revenue just like try to monetize too quickly and too fast to keep up with my crazy expenses but even mag mag had issues like there's like stories of like mh you know the the members saying we thought we were buying tickets to blank but turns out like we didn't actually have them or maybe like hamilton tickets i think there's was a story around that like you even had issues then what what what what were the what were those issues so when fire festival came and i just started going down this terrible rabbit hole i needed money from everywhere and anywhere and that included overs selling and trying to over promise things to my niece members to get that capital and it just like took everything down and like i i was wrong and i was like lying everywhere thinking i could make these miracles happen and sometimes we did but more often than not we we crashed and burn at the end so it just like totally just like lost track of all the good that was happening and i know you you feel bad and you probably feel you know some shame and all all all these negative things do you ever just laugh at like wow what the hell like what did i do where did this go how great how far did this thing go it's like there's a reason there's documentaries about it it's so it's literally like a movie is there any part of you that just sort of looks at this and says i can't believe how far i let this thing go and how far it went totally and like i was like looking and try to think through the spf scenario you know for the past couple of weeks and i think at the end of the day like he's obviously in a completely different stratosphere but it's really in his position it's really hard to say no to someone with ten billion dollars right i don't care like how smart or how wealthy you are so much of our decision making process is based on social proof and when you need someone with that kind of capital it immediately checks off all these like subconscious boxes that create this phenomenon on and social proof and i think that like to a much larger scale that's what happened to him but has also happened to me where thousands of customers or thousands of members and all these talent and artists who are promoting the brand that was a position where i was just like way too young way too immature and people who should've have helped me were almost scared to say no and i kinda like re and thrived off of that and let's let me down this terrible terrible rabbit hole and when they started saying no i was too like in my own head where oh you know i pulled pulled this off and proved you're wrong before i just like didn't know how to press that red button to stop and that was like one of my biggest issues i think the reason you're interesting because every entrepreneur we have a lot of i people who like listen of this powder like entrepreneurial and everyone like most internet entrepreneurs when they get into starting businesses they do things that are either black hat or gray hat and then they realize they realize like okay this is sick i know how to make money like i'm proficient at this skill set but like i gotta do things as legit because i'm gonna make way more money if i and i do the same thing i used to do these like i mean i'm i've done criminal shit as well and i'm like what the hell am thinking i should do things the right way because i don't wanna go to jail and i can make more money doing things ethically and not breaking all along like you just like make so much more money being legit how on earth did you not learn that lesson earlier i think just craziest thing is i didn't know really what failure was until i failed on such a massive scale i think part of what let me go so far so i obviously had as many losses if not more than every other entrepreneur along the journey but i was really good or i guess really bad at blocking out that noise i was so focused on like this end goal of nothing else matters like let me put my blind on just like keep running forward and i just kept getting jade to failures until the failure became so big that i'm i'm locked in solitary confinement and what was the goal like for for for me it's like i wanna make a certain amount of money so i can have a certain house so i don't have to worry anymore so i could spend my monthly however how much i want and yeah then there's there's i i me and i mean all of us have some ego thing of like i wanna prove to people that i'm legit yeah what what what was your and but i like had a certain money goal in mind i'm and imagine sean's the same way like i want this lifestyle i want this what what's what's your motivating factor and all this like and you say i wanna have a hundred million dollars in net worth by a certain age or i want girls to have sex with me which is like we all mh obviously do like what's like the motivating factor i wanna fit in i think i i had two big like insecurities and drives one is those initial investors who back when i was eighteen i wanted to prove to them that they were right and fire was seven years later from that seventy years later after that so one i wanted to prove they were right and i was too insecure to to show any kinks to my armor to them and two is i wanted to be the guy that just like took you to a wild crazy experiences and i'm like wow like this whole programming thing is taking me into this world of entertainment i'm hanging out with like wrappers and models and comedian and my friends don't believe me like i wanna be that guy who can take you from your shitty college or from your like shitty desk job to this private island where the who's who over the world is plugging in their guards and having the blast so it was partly like proving myself to investors and to partly prove myself to friends like i'm the guy that made this life experience happen that you just can't get anywhere else and we should explain the origin so you you go from mag i don't know what's in between but at at some point you create this app called the fire app and the fire app was meant to like let you book a artist right so you could be like oh i want you know whatever timber to perform a at a party and i can send a booking request and he can accept a reject and there's no middle men or middle yeah you know less middle men in the middle and so you know sort of create a marketplace for you know people to book these artists that was the core idea and fire festival was a marketing stunt to promote the app right but at some point yep the two kind of almost flipped in importance and fire festival became the the overarching thing fire festival starts from what i understand because you meet a guy who's like you know i have this little plane and i fly to these random caribbean islands and you used to go on your weekends you know in this like fourth person plane hang out come back and you were like wow this is so dope people are like wow that sounds so dope you're like yeah you should come do this too and somehow your experience of like flying to these remote islands and having having a good time became what if we fly three thousand people down to this island and we do this like festival this coachella like festival did i get that right so far i think you told the story there are the okay perfect but but somewhere along the way you get something wrong fast forwarding this because i think you know it's documented in other places but i do wanna explain it for somebody who's listening so somewhere along the way you're like alright we're doing this we're doing fire festival and you start promoting this thing and your method of promoting was what what was the marketing game plan to promote fire festival so like it all kind of stems down too i was for all of my terrible flaws i was really good at taking a tangible asset and that most people didn't have and using that to launch a business so bag visa had this physical card that would cost me like two dollars to make per card and then a crazy townhouse so my entire target demographic didn't have access to a black card they didn't have access to a multi million dollar townhouse in downtown manhattan and they're twenty three years old so i took these two like inaccessible things gave it to my customers and used that to launch a business on top of fast forward to fire now i'm trying to cater to these you know b list rappers and comedian who need small bookings these people aren't j z they aren't drake they don't have their own private island so here's where i come in okay now guys we have her own private island you wanna be involved with me and i use that to hopefully build the fire booking app so all of my marketing strategy came down to taking a tangible good or service that wasn't available to a certain audience giving it to them making them feel like it's theirs and they own it and using that to build a business so that was the entire logic behind like the fire app and fire festival component and as you perfectly said the importance quickly flipped as we launched the marketing for fire festival and fire festival became it and fire app became you a second thought for that period of time it's not like a bad plan it's not a bad idea i guess like like said like on the pod i think when the documentaries came out we were like honestly it was a dope idea and some like if it had just been done like and it wasn't even like it's not like the where you're like that was a dope idea if somebody had just done it right it's like well maybe it's technically impossible your shit your thing was possible you just had shitty like logistics and operations and poor planning you just threw you just threw like the the idea of the event and then the actual the actual event did not live up to to to to the hype but your thing was totally possible what what went wrong there why why were you not able to to pull off what you had sold the dream that you had sold were you had bella had that you had fucking i don't know kendall jenner and all the all these people promoting that hey we're going into this thing it's gonna be you know whatever the party of this century you sold the tickets so you got that part right it's just you didn't deliver the party doing what the craziest thing is i think lying and unable to show weaknesses made the festival fail and i truly believe that my backers at the time were well connected and smart enough where it came to them and said hey look guys we did this great marketing campaign but i have no idea what the fuck i'm doing they would have found like the best best people in the world to come and actually execute this but i was so scared to show that i couldn't handle it that i kept saying everything is great and everything is perfect and that pushed away the people that would helped me so like literally lying i think doom the festival from day one post announcement who are the bigger backers was it vcs or or or family offices or what handful of venture funds then you know twenty five individuals everywhere from like the larger family offices down to just smaller angels who is the biggest fund or most well known fund i just don't anybody near the bus so yeah oh okay i thought i would serve it was public i i i think that some of the investor list was a good portion of the investor i believe was sealed in the court files and i didn't ask for it to be sealed i think other people did so i just don't wanna yeah sure don't wanna do that our software is the worst have you heard of pub hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous i think i love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better and so you you're like okay i i could have asked for help from or organized people and this where i think things get a little tricky so mh you brought up sb spf yeah i've i brought up there nose we're talking about fire festival i think there's always a question of like was as intentionally supposed to be a fraud like oh mh i'm just gonna trick people and run away and you know like with right now that's a question like did something happen that you weren't really paying attention to and then things out at of hand or from the beginning oh you were like i'm just gonna trick people and take their money for you where did it where did it start it like was it well intention at the beginning and where did it turn at what point did you realize oh i'm i'm i gotta just say this because i gotta get to the next dollar i gotta get to the next the next milestone so truly try to execute the event and literally up until people were arriving to the festival i thought it was gonna work and obviously that's so stupid looking back yeah how they was gonna say that you you knew you had like fucking you know tents and like grilled cheese sandwiches for for people who ordered villas like what how could you could you still believe that right up to deliver are you sober the this entire time by the way might drugs but like drinking a lot but no drinking way too much never like i've smoked weed maybe six times in my life but i think it's like a common you know people were saying i on coke whatever never tried coconut in my life so they could've have hard okay so yeah back so you're you're you're at a sober ish mindset and yeah you actually think it's gonna work the day of or the day before and i'm like here's my thought process the island is so beautiful we have this like a local team who you couldn't script these characters they have the boats they have the jet skis they're gonna take people out like we know how to do these experiences they ask crazy pilots like it's just gonna be like a wild weekend that you've never had before and we have thirty artists who are paid so you're gonna have like a list talent one of the most beautiful places in my opinion like in the atlantic ocean and amazing group of these like movie scripted local characters who have toys for you to play out so i thought that like okay they'll go and i'll have a shitty tip we don't we don't have food and sheltered bathrooms but we got nature john rule oh yeah yeah yeah who needs food when you have too big but actually i think the craziest thing is if we market it like that it would have been amazing they would been better hey guys i can't figure out the logistics i can't afford to to build like five hundred houses but i somehow came up with the five million bucks for the artist we have these great people we have this great island like bring the sleepy bag and figured the shit out i think that that mindset shift was marketed people would have been a more excited and they would have been like felt like they're owning the adventure and it would've have been almost like yeah how twenty man years were and like the marketing like killed me at the end like the marketing sold tickets but it also made it fail what would the ideal outcome had been let's say that like it just so happened to work how much revenue and profit would it had made and like what would the ideal situation had had been so i have no idea and like my entire are you fucking kidding me how do you i know this so like i i we had a budget for ten million dollars to the festival i didn't have ten million dollars been like okay i can reasonably raised ten million dollars just off of this brand if we're building right now for the festival ended up spending way more than that and it got to the point where i would go to sleep with no money in the bank wake up and know that like that day i had to raise a certain dollar amount just to survive and some days it was fifty grand some days it was four million dollars so i'd wake up at you know nine am and know that i have until two pm to get x dollars in the bank then rewire it out before the before the day ended so my life is fucking hell and i just couldn't like zoom out so i was stuck okay say two million dollars i can call this guy i can call this guy and like at the end of the day things keep getting bigger the brand is gonna be so big if this festival works everybody's gonna get paid and it just didn't like know how to really run the numbers at that point so how much did you end up spending we've raised twenty six or twenty seven but we were making money from other sources like we were selling tickets on top of that we were getting sponsors mag was making money i was doing consulting jobs so it's like literally like every day which is a different angle for money so you like the thirty billion plus i would say in this six month period it was probably closer to forty so well and the tickets yeah so you sold seven thousand tickets is that right i think was probably just under six thousand it was just like around three thousand people per weekend some were giving away for free and some sold we sold a little under six thousand let's call it if five was that revenue if five thousand times what well how what's the average ticket here what what were you selling these for so the average the the the the median ticket price is like twelve to fifteen hundred however we sold like a handful of outlier tickets for like a couple hundred thousand dollars plus per ticket so so then it was in five thousand times two thousand your what's that ten million you're at ten million yep in sales and then did you have another couple million from sponsors or anything like that yeah and like the issue is that some of the ticket money was held in escrow some of it was for like these yachts and boats so it wasn't like pure ten million dollars of free cash flow it was like everything was held up or not held up in certain ways i think like my strength account got frozen with like seven grand in the the day the festival about canceled it's you know money was held in a bunch different sources scenarios so the the event itself didn't make any sense right it was like we're gonna make ten million dollars to spend forty but but the brand makes makes brand makes sense afraid is gonna carry the way you but you could have gotten so much more profit just by running a ten million or forty million dollars of facebook ads you know what i mean like this is just like a a better or a slightly different version of cameo or something like that like these marketplaces are tried and true yeah an event would have been cool if it were like a breakeven or a slight loss but that yeah but but put it this way like as far as wrong the things are like i can't do this tomorrow but if i did fire festival again in three years i think almost all the first group as well as the rest of like pop culture would buy tickets just to be there to see how bad it is right like like the the brand the brand value is there it's just like how can i do it appropriately and are you tempted pick the right time do you mean i have to do it again i just can't do it while i'm on probation i can't do it this year and next year but you know it has to be done again and i think no matter what success or failures i find along the way in tech like until i execute fire five have you seen this new company pirate go to the website so it's website let's let's do dude trust me go to it it's p y r t dot com billy like this is the same shit that you're doing a little bit like it's it's all like you said you could program like like when i see what you're doing and i you had you did the met gallo thing where where you got trouble for scamming people out that i'm like a just do a fucking course dude just create of course and make two million like me and sean makes seven figures a year from this stupid stuff and not to provides value but i mean it's like insignificant compared to an event or like you said you like the program and you like content sites like just do something like boring and great why are you doing this pirate thing it's like the same shit there's so many things that's gonna go that could potentially go wrong it's just the the the stakes are so much higher than just creating some boring ass software i hear you i think pirate is actually is that what you're suggesting time no yeah billy we have a three thousand people coming tomorrow i hear you no you you're you might very well be right and i think the thing that we're getting back to with pirate is like i'm not trying to host a thousand people on an island that's not gonna work i want to get back to those trips on the small planes with a dozen people or dozen people that did work well for a couple of years and i have to be like a tour guide for a few years of my life and like each shit like i'm gonna go do that but i can give a couple of dozen people this amazing adventurous experience and then while i'm doing that i'd like to find interesting ways to broadcast those experiences to all of their followers and then give their followers a way to get involved so i'm not trying to figure out the logistics to host thousands of people i know they can host two dozen people and if i can take five years to build like really interesting like virtual reality es tech that allows anybody like watch it actually influence what's happening i think that's like a really cool win and way to kinda get back to what i'm good at this is a horrible idea yeah do idea it it's i i actually don't think it's a horrible idea if it like i think you potentially are you're you're you rank so high in capability and so high in and ignorance like and that's like a perfect combination i think of starting a business which is like this like confidence of like i think i could pull this off and i'm capable of something that's actually a beautiful combination but you also have this third part of the of the pie chart where it's just like reputation and like past and owing money i just don't understand why you're doing this it just you can you you are brilliant at a lot of things that just seems like such a start just a boring ass agency that makes twenty million and ten million dollars in profit yeah if you just did like an event like a stunt marketing agency or or something we we have that we're not to get today actually trying a pirate collective and that's how we're fun that's what we're trying to find i guess our tech is so so i just went through this okay so i'm on the just see on the pirate website and it says there's a picture of a private island so we're we're already getting flashbacks of fire gosh yeah and then it says join the group pirate to somebody who turns the impossible to adventure it says give me your phone number and and then it says join the treasure hunt virtual reality so what you're saying from what what i just gathered of what you just described is that you're gonna take you know six to fifteen people at a time on those like little planes to the islands like you used to do where it's not such a heavy logistical lift yeah those people are gonna have a great time they'll pay five grand or ten grand or something i'm just guessing here they'll pay a lot of money to have this really cool adventurous experience and then you're going to use you know video plus maybe virtual reality to broadcast that experience to other people who can't afford to go and or maybe their friends and their social media yeah and they get to maybe buy a virtual ticket to kind of attend the party that way and you're gonna do that a bunch of times did i describe it right or did i i'm just guessing based on what you what you said absolutely so so the last thing that you're missing is that the people who are basically so essentially we're gonna partner with this total hotel they'll handle all the hospitality and logistics will host artists there on regular basis will rig the hotel with these three sixty cameras livestream stream everything that's happening then give the people who are watching the livestream stream the ability to buy in and affect what happening on the island so they could like have one of the artists scored of the recording studio and impact the creative process when they're making their song or they can buy the talent like a drink you know and make them take it to tequila a shot because you should just have you you gone for being mister beast like we we hung out with mister beast and yeah your wired just like that nut and and i feel like if you just channel your energy towards how do i do the craziest thing that's gonna make the craziest video that twenty million people are gonna watch and then continually one up yourself of i'd feel like that would work that's my suggestion to too you and you absolutely have the you have the charisma and you have the storytelling ability to like yeah just dude just do just just make you and like a small team doing the crazy shit and do add dollars but it sounds like you're share you wanna share your screen you could share your screen i i if you clicking around i bet you share i don't know around supposed to share this but okay but wanna get back to though i like that attitude i like that so this was an island we were working with unfortunately saying about i'd lot to go to the bahamas so this is just pure like demo purpose but the idea is to take like a one to one virtual representation of a property track where all the talent is in real time track where all the toys are in real time and then people can click into various live streams once they're watching a live stream hopefully watching their favorite talent they could actually choose these actions to affect what's really happening there so it could be as crazy as me swimming in the reef and the users are starting to chu the water and given the sharks in the area i think a lot of people wanna see see that happen or as simple as buying somebody you drink but and what what what would the financials of this be like mean i'm i'm sure you've now thought about that more you're like what would the p and l what what would what does the here thinking can no surely has it looks like one day one day it could do this what what's that one day so a million people paying twenty cents to ask a talent to do something or to contribute an action towards like the real world so if everybody pays twenty cents to chu the water and a million people are chu the water then that's kinda where the financials come in that's sorry i i can't do that math just tell me like in in in five years are are you are you your head you're like i think we could do like a hundred million dollars in eight year like what what what's the arrested sam i i don't wanna promise any revenue but no sorry no promise i'm just saying like when you're laying in bed you're like i think this could become like a hundred million dollar company by doing this i think what's the way i think about this in my logic could be wrong is that once again i we're not confusing the bahamas but for example the bahamas gets around four ish million tourists a year and if we're doing these really interesting broadcast we can have more than four four million people in a single day like virtually come to the island so if we can just like totally destroy their tourism members in a virtual scale i think it's a big revenue opportunity oh okay so where did you come out with this idea were you're in prison or was it once you got out that you were like i gonna start my brainstorm no i was solitary confinement and it's like totally totally confined and i know a lot of it was just like reflection and then a lot of it too is i wanna get out outside of these walls and just like get back to adventure and then find a way to share this it we should say by the way that's kinda weird you got into solitary because you attempted to do a podcast from inside prison yeah terrible what the well first did you know that was not allowed was i didn't even realize that be such a faux pas like that that was that would be such a that would be a faux pas i think pot biggest thing like that's a great dude they read your mail shit you you can't like and like each each inmate you have like different rules for you like if a journal your calls you and you to do an interview is that allowed that's allowed i was wrong the toughest part those like it was a gray area i think if it was like clear violation of the rules my punishment would have been like less strict i use the pay phone like they're available pay phones but at the same time like you can't cause attention to the jail right and that's what i did so i understand like why it was like so incredibly stupid but i think if i had a clear violation of the rules i would gone to solitary flow forty five days and not seven months you basically had a podcast host call you on the pay phone and then you did your side of the podcast from the pay phone in like ten minute or fifteen minute increments right because that's what you were allowed exactly inside okay yeah i mean i understand why you think that's great it's like what's the difference between prostitution and and pornography you know it's like oh no there's a camera there it's like you're you're safe like you know i mean like you're like playing this like like i don't know if i would be if i would be risk things at that moment i mean i i've when i was in college i did stupid stuff and i got in trouble and i remember getting in trouble and thinking can like i don't ever wanna come back to jail again and more so it solitary confinement it seems like i would kill my i i think i would wanna commit suicide like that sounds like that's like the seven months in a box it seems like the worst that's the worst possible outcome let alone like you know getting life you know like i'll chop on some of these guys in in these like florence and all these like high high level security what was that like seven months being in that so i get anxious to thinking about it i actually think that it's counterproductive in terms of reform if that kinda makes sense and the other time in jail like i don't think it's going to have like long lost long lasting negative impacts in my life i did ten months total and solitary one time for three one time for seven i think like that actually makes it more likely that i make a mistake in the future and obviously if i do make a mistake it's totally on me but like the mental hangover that i have where it's like somebody out there could snap their fingers and put me into a concrete box like that's scary like that's what gives me the nightmares at night and i think that like if anything that makes you know ideas bigger or different because you're you're kind of fearful of that outcome so i don't know it's fucking hard and like there are guys who have done way more than ten months and i imagine what they feel like but i think that's like the worst part of the experience and actually just just just counterproductive up did you know it was gonna be seven months or is like do do you know there's an end point or you didn't know no and i think if they said hey this is seven months then you're getting out and then you're going home a year after that it would would've have been totally different but the fact that they kept fucking with me basically saying hey you're never getting out of if you're you're gonna get in trouble more like that was the biggest mind fuck you just like wake up every morning be like this is never gonna end why like you mean the the guards were were just assholes yeah in the jail they literally in response to the podcast they tried to send me to a a terrorist facility called the the c the c in marion illinois you can like look at their inmates and with wikipedia like i'd be one of two non terrorist that facility and they would come and fuck with me and like pass like program statements under my door for this communication management unit like here's where you're going mc and like i thought i they were bluff and then like a day later we submitted you there and i'm like legitimately tried to send me to a terrorist facility and it's like you're never getting out so what's gonna happen that is fucking crazy i i think that whenever i was thinking of i remember talking to my wife at the time and you were getting trouble i'm like unfortunately i think four or five years probably is a fair is is probably a fair punishment i don't think solitary is a fair punishment and i don't think being like tormented it's fair though you know like i just say the you went to jail not because you threw a bad festival you went to jail for what was the exact reason of lying to lying to investors and like and you lied what about the financials or what did you lie about yes badly financials revenue personal company what were you doing here charge what we're all were you doing wire fraud i think is the the main charge there were a couple couple of surrounding charges as well but basically anytime you lie to get money it's essentially wire fraud in the eyes to the the federal government but you you are making fake documents like you were photoshop things and making fake pdfs i think right yeah i made i just made to fake like excel documents basically saying hey our income is x emailing this month than it wasn't close so i was you know totally guilty it was it wasn't like it wasn't a gray area i was black and white wrong right the festival was better than my advertised which is obviously impossible like don't got to you when you so i remember being like okay wow that's crazy sounds like you know he got kinda in over his head you know and i was having some sort of sympathy in a way and then it there was some story like when do you want probation then you did something else you created something called like vip access or some shit like the gala yeah and then that was also like you know you know little free in some way what was that and how do you defend that part right because that's after the fact now yeah and you're you're already on probation and and was it just like i just had a habit of doing this what what was going on there the only defense i was a fucking idiot like there's no other way to to to get around that yeah i was totally wrong and i kinda got in this mindset where it's all about the money and like that's probably wrong then figured hey i need to find the way to pay everybody back and let's get back to what i was doing at mag at the end to to kind of fund fire to watch to sell these tickets right and you needed like you needed like a like if i was your father i would just i would punch you in the fucking face and i'd be like billy like this is you're you're hurting me you're like you're you're hurt like you needed like a like a like someone just to be like dude you are so talented but you are fucking this up so much it's like these are such clear mistakes i don't understand why i don't understand like did you not have a friend that was like it sounds like you were trying to trying to do a quick fix if i can get the money back if i could pay people back then i'm not gonna get trouble about the other thing that is that accurate as what you were thinking i i was scared of jail like no one one's picking up my calls anymore i'm on you know on bond i guess and like i just couldn't once again i couldn't zoom out and understand the bigger picture where if i sat down shut the fuck up yeah sure i'll be broke for a couple of years but i'll go to jail for two or three years and i'll get out in my late twenties and you know have a chance to pay people back the right way and i just like couldn't understand that but yeah i think they're like going forward a big thought process for me and it's been three months is you know how do i position myself whether like whether it's a company or something else like to get that help i need and do i operate within a bigger company do i find like partners that you know are senior to me and experience and age who i can like trust and vi so it's just all part of my journey right now and i think that like this time around i i think i i prefer those boundaries more and it's just trying to find it and it's been you know super early in the process are you gonna raise funding for this next company i i think a lot of i don't know but if i had a bet i would say you probably actually could raise i bet you there's people that would give you money is that so i i texted a i texted like eight venture funds a few weeks ago and you know was literally like a broken grammar like two line sentence like two told me to fuck off like you know one didn't respond you know one asked for more questions and ford is like responded in like you know with the minutes saying we're in the issue is you know as as i've kinda gone through the process i'm actually not allowed due to an sec deal i'm not allowed to raise securities so i can't go and raise money i think the ironic part is like it's probably gonna it would have been easier this time to raise venture money and like no decks like none of that shit like i said have no decks here's all here's all i have and yeah people want to back it i just can't raise the funds so and i i think that would shock people is that yeah you know you just had a fifty percent hit rate on by a text message butt i how do you explain that to somebody who's listening and they're like you know there's some people who frustrated that that's the case i can't believe people would find them how how would you explain it because it's people people are making this decision they're smart people they're capable people they have other options yeah how would you explain why why somebody do be willing to do that so i started trying to raise money for the first time almost twelve over twelve years ago now and you know as with everybody the first x people told me to fuck off and kinda laughed at me and like so i went through twelve years of shit including ten months of solitary confinement to like get to the point where maybe an investor believes that i've learned enough lessons to focus and what i'm good at and get help to go them bad at so it's not like gonna like wake up one day and can raise money it was it was it's been twelve years of just like totally fucking up to get to this point but yeah and i think that before i raise money and obviously like legally i can't do it i'm not gonna lot to be lot to do it is i need the help break and i need like the system and a structure in place where let me go and market and like come up with his experiences and adventures and you know drive attention but if somebody else who could just help me manage like financials and logistics and operational what other ideas did you have if you weren't gonna do something fire festival did you have like other i'm sure you had a lot of time on your hands so think of other ideas did you think about any other potential potential things you could do with your time maybe not even businesses just other things you might do i think if someone wants to go in and early i really understand a gp three like the what's kind of powering the open ai and just become an expert on that i think you can be like make it killing as a consultant and like teaching all these big brands like what's happening there and like what's gonna happen the thing that's like one option to kinda go and like become a gp three like expert and like you guys provider brands is your experience with gb three since sorry i wouldn't you got out six months ago oh yeah i actually was reading about it for like a year in jail didn't even like know open ai was the name of the company or anything like that but it's like had random books in so i was like oh was super interesting and like have dozens of pages and notes on it maybe i'll post but like cut kinda come out and see what happened recently which is pretty cool oh so i agree i think that could be a great company and i bet you'd kill it because you're pretty good selling yeah you by the way ish i think if i was close with with you i'll be like billy do that mh what yeah what else what else has excited you what other ideas i think the concept of fire app which is providing transparency to a lot of these like legacy entertainment systems is interesting one i think which is really interesting right now is like performance marketing for like social media influencers so i think one the reason why the fire just take a step back the reason why the fire festival marketing i think works so well is at the exact same time we get four hundred people post his orange tile but these four hundred people weren't related right it was some music artists like some comedian some athletes and models so when you're in our target audience and you're scrolling through instagram feed they're like why the fuck are these five people who don't know each other all posting this right now like i need to go check this out so one idea i had is that basically creating like a marketplace for influencer marketing where let's say like starbucks has a new coffee that they wanna advertise they can go and upload all their creative assets and set like a million dollar budget and then anybody around the world could take those assets and post it to their instagram with their tech tiktok of their youtube and then they basically get a score for how much engagement they get in their content and their overall score gets in the percentage of the budget so if kim kardashian posted it and she crush it you know she gets nine hundred grand and hundred thousand dollars is split up to you know another million people who all kinda posted think it's like a fun way to remove all these bullshit middle in this whole social marketing world and then allow a brand to turn all of their followers into advertisers for that company without doing any of the leg so almost like cloud you remember clout with a k yeah yeah i do like yeah they they actually overall social score right yeah and it it it they raised a a ton of money and probably sold for less than their valuation of a hundred million dollars or i think they sold for a hundred which is less i think than what they raised that but i actually thought it was a a fantastic idea for some reason it didn't work i don't know why but you you you'd be in that space a little bit it sounds like yeah i think it's interesting it's like providing a a a score to how well your content performs and getting paid off of that but in turning everybody into your promoter yeah i think that's a really cool idea it it also flips the model on its head right now you have to do sort of individual manual outreach and then negotiations and then whatever versus just saying it's in the reverse here's a giant honey pot if you want it go get it you know and and then basically digging it up based on the actual performance versus you know who can negotiate the best you know at at the give moment okay so that's a really cool idea what else you got yeah yeah those are my too so those you two gp three expert and then providing like an open marketplace where brands can up with their creative assets and anybody can kinda publish them and and get paid based and why not do that one yeah and why not why why just settle on the one versus those two i mean that they sound quite reasonable yeah maybe i'll do them i'm just try yeah no you won't i don't think you will i think like i don't know i don't think you will like i don't know i guess you just have this like you must have a fire in you where you're no pun intended where you're like i have to go this event route which is which is baffling i mean but i guess people just passionate people are passionate about certain things i get it yeah but logically i i've just i have such i don't wanna see you fail i guess i wanna see you succeed and like prove people wrong and i i wanna prove that like second chances could work and so when i see this i'm like oh man you're just playing this game on hard mode like yeah yeah i think you're not making the same mistakes on the obviously on the i have no idea but like that'd be crazy if you're making the same mistakes as far as what got you into prison but you're also choosing a business model that's super hard like you know you're talking about a million people paying twenty cents to chu the waters and it's like i don't even know like those words have never even been sent together alright so it's like you know you're choosing to try to pull off a really really really difficult thing yeah and you know it just seems like i i guess like my philosophy is i was like in in business there's no extra points for difficulty in fact you get you get doc points for difficulty the harder or something is you know the less money you end up making and and and so there there are no bonus points for doing things the hard way now on the other side there is one advantage which is when you go do something cool and audacious every day you wake up and you're motivated and maybe you can recruit people who are motivated to pull off something epic because epic things have their own you know motivational draw to actually go and do your best work yeah which which she just did i saw in your twitter and i think tiktok you said hey everyone i'm hiring for my new thing how many yeah applicants did you get yeah so back to a business idea i think it's really interesting is we partnered with a company called bounty hunter world to hire and they're trying to disrupt the whole recruiter model whether they're saying anybody can refer a friend to a job and if you successfully or refer someone you get paid that recruiting fee and as you guys know like those fees could be crazy so i think like their site is super awesome and then we tried to like one up it so we're saying anybody who refers a friend to pirate that we end up hiring we take that person on one of these pirate experiences so trying to like give the island entertain experience like any of our fans and we've had a lot of people apply for jobs i think the craziest thing is like we have no money and i'm probably like paying fifteen to twenty percent of what i was paying for the same role five or six years ago and probably getting like better people so think it all goes to show like your mission and your intention is just so much more important and then i how how big is the list of this like i put my phone number into this thing how big is the list how many people have have signed up to like do the treasure hunt around two thousand okay so yeah not bad i'm shot you didn't get more because the yelp boys thing that got one point five million views have i then we beginning a lot of inbound it's like social like instagram dms i think would just have gone crazy i think the conversions is like a phone number through a platform has been a little bit harder for us but yeah overall like how do we kind of organize all these dms and maybe that's a different business too if someone can build an inbox that takes inbound across like instagram dms linkedin like mail you're like your public email address and organize all of that and like kinda qualify those leads that's something that i would pay for on a monthly basis and you like there's you're you're and you're building all of this right now with i think you said you collected a hundred fifty k in revenue so far from like brand deals or something like that so so you basically yeah november first yeah so you're building this bit since november first well i mean that's a pretty run rate already yeah so but you're you're building this business now you have a hundred and seventy thousand dollars just to to play with that's kinda what your starting point yeah don't worry we spent it already did you really like we're just trying to we're trying to survive so dude have you ever heard of like pilot or bench dude there's these like really good accounting like software companies that you could use it's like a thousand a month and they'll just like tell you like your p and l like yeah you should or like or like a part time cfo like i don't know ma'am maybe that would be a good investment i need i need all of i need like i need help so anybody send you excel license yeah yeah have you ever heard of quickbooks i mean like i don't know man i think you should like really sweat the details on this stuff x x x use quickbooks and what the app shit well correlation not c coordination but i made new what what speaking of that what do you think you you you know i've been following we had we and sean and i have both interacted a bit with martin sk and unfortunately you know you're in the same vein there's you there's martin and then there's now i think sean doesn't like condom him sb spf because winners don't get acr winners don't get nick he's just he's just samuel now but what do you think what's your take on the what's gonna happen with him forty years and then he'll you think forty you after like yeah and then i'll he'll get out after like fifteen to twenty do you think that's fair that's i guess i don't know that's i talked to martin after he got out and i was like what was it like in prison and he had a bunch of stories where he's like yeah i created a cryptocurrency steady club i you know i i had like you know all these like he's yeah we had the system where i was you know selling information about blah i was reading tons of books i had access to the internet mh he's like i would be under the covers at night like basically watching khan academy videos learning about like calculus and what what's it what do you do to pass the time what what was your life like i think the hardest part about prison is it's designed to strip you of your ambition right because like there are great people there and i've bet some really incredible people but there also are a lot of bad people and you can't put bad people into an environment where they're inspired and they have ambition to act on their bad impulses so there's this concept of being institutional and essentially it's meant to just make you a human robot and i think it's like good in a certain way that it makes it time easier but like naturally i was just trying to fight against like all like the set processes as much as possible i think it made my time look really really slow but i was trying to fight to like find ways to stay creative what what's an environment meant to make you robot like they feed you at the same time every day like they turn the lights off at the same time you can only use your phones for a certain period of time like just everything is like structured like this like get to wear uniform to lunch and it's like you're trying to find ways where like you know trying to find my creative periods and just not make every day the same so i can just like keep different ideas flowing and come what were some things you did successfully to kind of like moves yourself what what was little what were your maybe little tactics so little wins you had has to to keep that creative you know spark a lot yeah training a lot of boxing so i like a a sal who is a former puerto rican like professional boxer and he like wrap his hands of towels and like you know train me in boxing which is super fun we didn't have that guys would take like toilet paper rolls and wrapped them in tube socks and use that like for for mitch so yeah it's like finding like creative ways to to go and like exercise and for your mind and like do a little things you're not supposed to that doesn't hurt anybody like you couldn't practice martial arts but you know you go in the back and have the guy hold your midst for you for a half hour you can kinda get away with it it's like a good good way to escape you look like you're in better shape yeah i was spanish as hell so hard hard what are some stereotypes that you know we would have about your experience that either prove to be true or like that maybe weren't true about the whole experience the whole like racial segregation totally thing yeah yeah totally thing i think like being in new york i'm a little naive and spoiled to i i guess like a lot of what probably exists in other parts of the world but literally being in a place where if you're black you go on this line for lunch and if you're white you go on this line for lunch and you just can't cross over it's like while it just like feels like it's sixty years behind the times that obviously something that like have an experience in in new york and and like probably spoiler to that sense but really kinda getting over the racial issues or i think kind of a weird hard part for me and it's probably like what's weird about it is like when they separate by races it's not always out of a place of hate it's just like no this is just you stay with it us they go with that yeah and it's not necessarily that they're they hate the other group it's just this is how we do things yeah it's always been done this way this is how we're gonna do it and like there certainly are terribly assists on both sides but the majority aren't there's like this is the way it's done so this is the way we're gonna do it and like it doesn't really make sense but if you could go and change one way that the prison system works well while still you know achieving the goal and then the job to be done of of a prison what would you change now that you've kinda saw from the inside i think that i would make sentencing more equal across the board and there are a lot of people who committed the exact same crime who wildly different sentences and this is almost like an interesting problem maybe it's a really cool business is to build some sort of like ai sent thing thing because like right now it's up to one independent judge and that judge like in my case i could've gotten nothing or i could've gotten twenty years i'm like literally one person can decide the fate of your life and i think what i got is fair for me but many other the people senses weren't fair so maybe it's some sort of system that takes in all of the information around someone's crime and their personal life and then studying everybody else who has had similar crimes and seeing who was successful and actually sentencing based on this idea of you know future success well one some examples of of different punishments or different sentences based off different crime or similar crimes so i think for my situation it was a financial crime and typically your sentences is based on what the dollar amount that victim's lost is so the more you lose the more time she get i think like there's plenty of people who were from new york whose dollar amounts were hundreds of millions of dollars who got one or two years and i go out to a jail in detroit where there's people who have lost five hundred thousand dollars we've got thirty years so it's like it's just like they're just total disparity where it it shouldn't be like that and i don't think sentences are based on feature success and some judges are like i think kind enough and smart enough to do that but but some aren't so almost like having this ai system that recommends sentence in addition to the judge or like a different data point i think it could be super interesting yeah that's that's a cool that is crazy because like the it could be like the this happens where a judge at a bad mood or yeah has seen certain patterns that are biased and yeah i mean that is it is pretty wild you know i've had friends like go through some of this stuff and they're like oh the this person was in a great mood today and i just or i just happened to get this person who falls under this political party and this is what happened it is that is pretty crazy it's just tough i'm like look at elizabeth holmes she realistically could have gotten two years or she got she could have gotten thirty five years right and it's like eats up to one person to determine like what that length of time is and that's a it's like a big task for something to take on and yeah unfortunately the system isn't fair so do do they have like a like a like you know if you go to a company and you're gonna get a job is not just up to the manager and just pick a random number for what you get to get paid it's like no we know for this job title with this many years of experience this is the range and the ranges is between this this and this and if you're gonna go outside of that range you gotta have like a pretty strong indicator and it's like people have to be notified that i'm going way outside the range the the the normal like expected range in order to make this offer okay it's almost like they kinda need that or i don't maybe they have some a version of that for judges who are trying to send it yes they have a guideline system that gives you a like a recommended range and that definitely helps and it's good i think the issue though is that it's really hard for the judge to get to know someone to a short period of time and those who have access to great attorneys have an advantage because like your attorney's entire job in the federal system is like you're gonna lose the case it's all about presenting who you really are as a person and why should be afforded a second chance at some point in the future so people who don't have access to quality attorneys just don't really have the same opportunity to explain why this should have a second chance and so i think that the ai probably benefits more of your like lower income defendant which is most of them who can't afford their own attorneys to to show they're more of a human than just like with the premise did you have a fancy lawyer i a good lawyer so like and i just made it impossible form him right like getting in trouble again on bail then it's like nothing you could have done i was just was a moron like i could've had twenty lawyers it wouldn't mattered i would have you know have sean have you ever seen that movie catch me if you can of course great movie and so i read about that guy a lot frank ave nelly junior and turns out most of what like he he made this book about his crimes and turns out it's likely like mostly lies i think like they proved like he's been proven time and time again that he didn't actually do what he said he did in terms of crimes but he like glam it and then he turned it into like a pretty successful consulting business i don't know how big but like i looked up where he lives and he has got like a you know multi million dollar home and he's always wearing these nice suits and he looks like he's he's done a good job when i look at him billy i'm like well that guy is kind of like a good example of like what like you know turning shit in to gold and like turning a situation around what did you ever think about kinda going that route like i think that work i would just yeah i i'd hate to live off of like fire for the rest of my life and there's like a short window opportunity where the attention from it will allow my next business just to start with the spring springboard but i'm much rather be known for and fail or succeed at a new business in being someone who just talks about fire festival for next thirty years like that's boring as fuck i understand why some people i agree it is boring but when you you know are in debt of twenty five million dollars it's like well you know like i unfortunately i have to sacrifice my excitement in order to like make this work on on the other end is got nothing to lose really well what is he have to lose he's got like alright well starting back from scratch reputation was pretty tainted and in a pretty deep restoration hole where you gotta pay back like twenty five to thirty million dollars or something like that why not swing and do what you want with your life versus you know i guess i guess it is there in in a way it is it is good idea to just go for like the most whatever is the most sort of exciting and fun and fulfilling thing for you and how do you find pride right like i think that talking about it like a failed the business when i was twenty four and twenty five when i'm forty i'm not gonna wake up with juice to keep going like i think like i see somebody else doing that and like what a fucking loser i kinda don't wanna be that person so i'd rather go and like try to improve and like whether i fail or succeed just try something new and different and try to build something so so if it all works if life goes the way you want it and you're now sixty five seventy years old what yeah billy mc who who who is he what what happened if it all works out for you yeah he took his failures learn from it used it as a springboard to build something new and like whether it's pirate or something else that i do in ten years from now and and one for but like made good friends and help people along the way and if i can pay back twenty five million dollars amazing if i pay back a million dollars but you know i try it and do it honestly like that's okay too i think and yeah and and actually i think that a lot of the investors listening would probably agree with that if as long as it's kinda done the right way i think at this point it's less about the money and more about how i change well we appreciate you coming on you know this was like when we were i was preparing for this and i was like man i don't know how to approach this i don't wanna like glam someone who's done something bad but like this was a really confusing thing to do but i'm happy we we were able to talk i i'm gonna be fine your story very closely i'm very eager to see how you pull this off and frankly i want you to pull you know i want i i want redemption to be real and and i want it to work everyone is over a second chance so i hope i hope it does thank you guys super cool to finally be here so it's sam thank you guys thanks for coming on