sup you beautiful bastards hope you're having a
Fantastic Monday Welcome back to the Philip Defranco show and let's just jump into it, and the first thing
I want to talk about today was one of the most requested things for a long time now
And that is the Fyre
Festival and the fallout from it. Now the original fire festival story is one I missed out on on my week away from the show
but luckily, oh the story's so juicy it keeps getting updates.
Now for those who don't know fire festival was billed as Coachella on a private island
offering the premium of the premium, supposed to be the cultural experience of the decade.
Ticket packages reportedly ranged from $1,500 to a whopping quarter of a million dollars.
It was co-created by Ja Rule, it was advertised heavily by a bunch of Instagram models.
They were expecting between six and seven thousand people and it turned out to be one of the most astonishing failures I have ever seen.
The primo accommodations turned out to be -This is amazing- turned out to be the same kind of tents that FEMA uses in a disaster relief situation.
Reportedly, there wasn't a single thing in the general store for sale - the the concierge booth was half built
Tons of people start freaking out trying to figure out how the hell they're gonna get back home
A bunch of other people who hadn't gotten to the island yet had gotten stuck in Florida
and I could go on for another ten minutes of how much of a shit-show this ended up being, but there's more to get to
Main point - colossal failure, they have to cancel. And so the big question became: Why did this happen?
Many started shouting that this was a scam - it was Ponzi Scheme of some sort, while others said they were just grossly unprepared
Ja Rule took to Twitter to say "it was not a scam as everyone is reporting
I don't know how everything went so left, but I'm working to make it right by making sure everyone is refunded
I truly apologize as this is not my fault, but I'm taking responsibility. I'm deeply sorry."
How even - "I truly apologize," "This is not my fault" ALL CAPS. "But I'm taking responsibili-" What?
Also Ja, how is it not your fault if you co-created the festival that was being run by a company you co-owned
Because it wasn't just a festival - it is a company called Fyre Media. And the way I came about finding out fyre Media was a company it
was actually two things. The first being that because of this spectacular failure
let's give them the benefit of the doubt, that it wasn't a scam
it was just a failure. They are the target of a massive class action lawsuit
LA Defense Attorney Mark Geragos filed a 100 million-dollar class-action lawsuit. Now keep in mind, that's obviously not the only
lawsuit. There are smaller groups of individuals that are suing. Fyre Media is even being sued by the company they hired to provide
medical care. Their lawsuit has this lovely line: "When NES arrived on the island it immediately discovered that the accommodations were uninhabitable including bug
infestation, blood-stained mattresses and no air conditioning."
There's also now the murmurings of what's going to happen with the people that loaned Fyre Media money for this event.
We'll have to wait and see as more of that develops. But wait my friends, there is more. Not only was the event a
disaster that screwed over thousands - not even including the Bahamas themselves -
Not only are they the target of massive lawsuits they have now been
exposed for - oh my God - are now being exposed as a company that seems to be screwing over their employees
I'll let you be the judge
Vice News came into possession and published audio from a Fyre
Media phone call. And what we hear from the audio is it sounds like there's several employees on the line along with
co-founders of Fyre Media Ja Rule and Billy McFarlane
Now Billy does most of the talking here and what he tells them is a - let's have a listen.
"So, after conferring with our counsel and all financial people, uh, unfortunately we are not able to proceed with
payroll immediately for the Company.
I understand that this is not an ideal situation for everybody, and this will likely cause a lot of you to
resign - which we totally get and understand. That said, if you want to stick with us
we'd love to have you and we'll have to work together and get us to hunker down and get back to a place where
everything resumes
to business as usual." So what he essentially just said is
Payroll the people who make sure you get paid, there's just gonna be none of that. We're not firing you,
it's just if you choose to stay on you won't get paid. I just want you to imagine that your boss comes up to you
and he's like "Ugh Gary, here's the thing. This is hard news. Now don't worry,
I'm not firing you, but the part of the business that pays you. They're just, they're, they're not
going to. Now if there's new set of circumstances
which is you not getting paid for the work you're doing is just, is not
cool with you, you can resign, but just know that if you are willing to do the same job for me, but for free...
I'm good with that." And then just hearing the employees disbelief - it would be hilarious
if it wasn't the reaction from people who are just doing their job
but then because of upper management - the failure to actually follow through on this - they're the ones getting screwed.
That's what keeps it from being funny to me and just makes it infuriating. "So I'm unclear as to how
you're asking us to remain employed while not paying up."
"Uh - we're not asking anybody to remain employed.
We're saying that we can no longer continue
payroll. But we also understand if that means you're leaving the company. If these people want to stay and help out, then
we're of course going to do that. And there's nothing that prevents everybody to decline to help out."
"Billy, I understand that. But that's a breach of my contract that I signed with you. So are you firing me?"
"Uh, we're not firing anybody. We're just letting you know there'd be no payroll in the short term so,
there's no more official employment."
"So you're not going to lay us off, which will allow us to file for unemployment benefits.
You just are not gonna pay us anymore, and then making us quit ourselves. Is that kind of what you're saying?"
"I - sorry - what was the question?"
"It was this - you are not going to lay us off so that we can't, like, file for unemployment benefits?
What you're going to do is just not pay us
forcing us to then quit. Is that kind of what you're saying?"
"I'm not aware of how this impacts the employee benefits." And the final bit of fallout
I've seen around this story seems to be revolving around the Instagram models.
It turns out that a good number of the models promoting Fyre Festival didn't follow FTC guidelines
To oversimplify it - If I am being compensated for a promotion
I need to make it very apparent to you that this is an ad. You need to say sponsor - certain places
you need to put #spon #ad. On top of the legal reasons, it just seems kind of scummy. You know that lawyer
I was talking about earlier Geragos, he's talking about suing the models.
And what's crazy to me is a lot of the models haven't even deleted their past pictures promoting the event. You look at the caption
there's no mention that it's an ad, the lawyers start getting thirsty. Although
I think that if the lawyers go after anyone they're going to go after the Kendall Jenner types. There were reports that Kendall Jenner was
paid $250,000 to promote the Fyre Festival on Instagram. The post has since been deleted,
but there are reports that this was not labeled an advertisement. And so right now
it looks like that's what the lawyer is gonna do -
they're gonna try and find screenshots of the posts that are now deleted to see if they were labeled as
advertisement. Of the big models promoting to the event the only one I saw have #ad was Emily Ratajkowski.
And we're just gonna have to kind of wait to see what happens
but I feel like we can get some lessons out of this. One, let this be a lesson out there for anyone that
wants to jump into business
do not spend all of your money and time on the marketing of an idea, all of the front,
fluffy bullshit if you can't actually execute on your product. All you're guaranteeing is the largest audience possible to witness your colossal
failure. And the second, is just like we always recommend with a news story where you're
skeptical of it - someone is promoting something whether it be an Instagram famous
person or even my stupid ass face - be a little skeptical of why. For a lot of you you have a relationship with me and
my show for years
and so there is a built in trust there. I'm just saying be a little bit skeptical if the person promoting to an event that's going
to cost you thousands of dollars
and they're saying that's going to be awesome -
be a little bit skeptical if that's the same person that's telling you to drink Skinny Tea and any of that other stupid Instagram bullshit
I'm just saying and actually I'm going to pass that question off to you:
When do you trust what's being put in front of you?
I mean obviously the advertising must work because a lot of these people who promote, uh, somewhat sketchy products
they keep getting those deals. And those companies giving those deals seem to stay in business. When it comes to sponsorships
what makes you trust some and not others? That is if you trust anyone at all.
But from there, I want to share some stuff
I love today, in Today
In Awesome. The first bit of awesome is we got a trailer for the new Marvel series called The Gifted and it is fantastic.
If you excuse the fact that some parts that seem oddly familiar to season 1 of Heroes... like, literally the blond
cheerleading-looking girl, her dad is the one that tries to capture mute, really? Mm.
Whatever side note - I like to imagine that there's an alternate timeline where the writer strike never happened and Heroes continued being a good series.
Ah there was so much potential. Then we got a trailer for the new Netflix series
Glow which stars Alison Brie. And as far as Indie plots go it checks off the box.
1980s businesswoman decides to join a women's professional wrestling circuit. Also we get Marc Maron
and I think that's a good thing. Then I just have to share this amazing drone footage of Apple Park being
created. Apple Park is this insane,
futuristic-looking facility. It's going to be apple's new headquarters. To me, it's just amazing seeing that being made.
Then we have a bunch of creators from the high quality gif
subreddit doing their thing - which actually is not specific. One of the things that they do is they high quality
gif-a-fy certain music videos. This time they did it with Eminem's music video for Rap God.
And it was just a beautiful melding of two things I love. And if you want to see the full version to everything
I just shared, the secret link of the day, anything at all links, as always, are in the description down below. Then let's talk about
Wanna Cry/WannaCrypt ransomware, If you haven't heard yet, this was first noticed Friday. There is ransomware that is affected now over
200,000 computers and has spread to over
150 countries that have been locking owners out of their computers until they paid bitcoin. There are reports that the ransomware demanded between $300 and $600
dollars worth of Bitcoin. And this didn't just affect everyday people - the people that were hit the hardest seem to be the National Health Service, the NHS
in England and Scotland. In Russia there were reports that domestic banks, the interior ministry,
they were hit as well. You know, what makes this story enraging for many
is that WannaCry reportedly "uses a vulnerability in old versions of Windows that was originally discovered and
exploited by the United States National
Security Agency as an offensive cyber weapon." Now reportedly, the NSA tools that exploited this weakness were stolen by hackers. Originally
it looked like they were going to auction it off, and then they just gave it away.
And so we have a lot of people saying this is why we were scared about the Vault
7 leaks. If you don't know what the Vault 7 Leaks are, I'll link to it down below,
I did a whole video on it. But one of the big things is they would find and exploit any
product and then just stockpile it and use it as a weapon. Obviously there is a difference between the CIA and the NSA,
but it's the same kind of idea.
This is something Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, really hammered home on Sunday. He issued a statement saying: "This attack provides yet another example of why
the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem.
We have seen
vulnerability stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world.
Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage."
Adding: "The governments of the world should treat this attack as a wake-up call.
They need to take a different approach and adhere in cyber space to the same rules applied to weapons in the physical world. We need
governments to consider the damage to civilians that comes from hoarding these vulnerabilities and the use of these exploits.
This is one reason we called in February for a new 'Digital Geneva
Convention' to govern these issues.. including a new requirement for governments to report vulnerabilities to vendors, rather than
stockpile, sell or exploit them." And I 100% agree with that statement, and not to take away from it,
I think we also need to talk about personal and organizational responsibility.
Reportedly, WannaCry exploits a vulnerability in old versions of Windows.
So there's the core, basic advice that if you have an operating system
you should update it to the one that's still supported by the company that put out that
operating system. On top of updating the operating system,
you should also make sure that you are downloading and installing patches. Microsoft earlier this year released a patch that protects against this specific
vulnerability. But so many organizations that didn't make sure to patch their computers.
Also I have to give a little tip of my hat over to Microsoft who are reportedly assisting customers
even though these operating systems are no longer supported.
And then of course the final, basic advice is if you get an email and you're like
"What is this attachment?" probably don't open that attachment. But a big thing
I want to note is I say all of this noting that still there going to be ways that you end up getting hacked.
I feel like it's less of a situation of if you are going to be affected
but just when. And if you can at least take the steps to make it
harder, or so that you are affected a smaller amount of time. But where I do want to end this story,
and it's on kind of a positive note, even though
we may see a resurgence of a problem. I have to give props to a user by the name of MalwareTech. To
oversimplify it he took a sample of the malware, found that it was connecting to a certain domain that turned out was not registered.
He then registered that domain
and effectively created a sinkhole that was capturing all the malicious traffic. Thus preventing control of the infected
computers by the person that put this out there.
And I really want to give this guy props not only because he did it
but because it looked like a lot of media was covering him in a, you know, in a not as gracious way. And also because at
least one outlet decided to dox this guy. He wanted to remain anonymous
but a certain tabloid that I will not name
dug through everything he's done and found out who he was. Seems like a pretty shitty way to thank a guy who
protected a ton of people. But that's where I'm going to end that story, if you want a better
understanding of the whole situation I'll link to MalwareTech's blog on this. He obviously explains it much better.
Yeah
That's where I'm going to end today's show. And remember if you life this video, you like what I do on this channel hit that like
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That said of course as always my name's Philip Defranco. You've just been phill'd in. I love yo faces, and I'll see you tomorrow.