 What's up everybody, once again, it's Brandon Shawn and we got to talk about the fire festival. More specifically, I have eight lessons that I learned from watching that thing and thanks everybody who asked me to watch it, told me to watch it because I was procrastinating on watching it and I'm glad I did. The thing was just fascinating. It was fascinating from a social experiment standpoint. I mean, these guys were basically dropped in the middle of an apocalyptic scenario. A post-apocalyptic, they were out there without food, water for the most part. That shit was wild. But it also showed a lot from a business and marketing standpoint and that could be appreciated as well. So let's go ahead and get to it. The number one thing I learned when it comes to the fire festival is toxic culture. Toxic culture is bad for business. What do I mean by toxic culture? Well, let's just look back near the very beginning of the documentary if you haven't seen it, right? So this whole festival is going to be on an island if you guys don't know about it. Well, early on, there was this guy. Don't remember guy's name, but he was like, hmm, looking at this map. I'm doing all these mathematical equations. I'm focused on some logistics and I'm like, yo, hey you guys, this isn't really going to work out. I don't think that there's enough room on the island for all these people. And they were like, hmm, yeah, I don't think you have a positive attitude, man. You're going to have to get out of here. That was essentially what it came down to now that it was a little bit longer than that. But basically he came up with a plan that he thought would be a backup will take these people to a cruise ship. There's not enough established sewage system to actually handle all the bio waste from people using the bathroom, things like that. He came up with legitimate issues and they got rid of them because he came up with legitimate issues. And we all know that, yes, man, yes, people, the sheep. That is a very serious part of why certain things fail. Artist, business people, whoever you are, you don't need a lot of yes people around you because it comes to your life. You are the leader and culture starts at the top. This leader, he was the one basically saying these people got to get out of here. Whenever somebody was saying anything that made sense, but was against his vision. Numero 2-0. Incompetent teams. When you look at this documentary, you're going to see that it's a lot of people that had not done the positions that they were in before. And this was not like a small event. This was not a small task. This was something being done on a huge scale. When it's time to execute, you need people who can execute. Eventually they did get somebody who was involved in festivals before. They had experience, but they really should have been involved at the very beginning or at the very least brought in far earlier. Numero 3-0 is easy to sell shit, but there is a caveat for that. This dude has so many people excited about this festival. So many people that were hype about it. It was a great display of marketing and just putting stuff out there and putting a brand out there that drew people in and got them super hyped, spread the word, major product, a viral product. Seriously, I think there's a lot of positive things that people can take and rework from how he marketed the situation. However, of course, it's super easy to sell shit when you have these unlimited resources. You have so much capital and so many of these people with influence and names that are pushing the product and a lot of what you're selling. You have no moral obligation, seemingly, to actually deliver on what you're actually selling. You can probably just walk up to an artist and tell them you're going to make them the biggest person in the world. And actually get some people to really believe you and hop onto your bandwagon regardless of if you actually can do what you say you're going to do. And that's what a lot of people are doing somewhat in today's social media landscape in general. Not like music or real estate, whatever business or whatever just random popularity. People are standing next to things or getting just enough to make themselves seem legitimate and then trying to sell people and scamming people, scheming people. And if they're not taking money from them, it's still just tricking people into thinking that there's somebody or they have a better life than they have. Fire Festival is really a real world display of our culture today. Number four, you can solve problems if you put your mind to it. Now, I know it sounds like it's obvious, but it is important to look at the fact that a lot of times this guy had this, we're solution oriented man. This is our mentality. He had one of those things that you hear so many people say because it sounds positive. And in a lot of ways it did force people to try to solve problems than any other case they probably would have stopped trying to solve. So it is always important to remember you don't have to stop right here. Like look deeper and get creative in figuring out how you can rework a problem into some other form of solution that can work for the ultimate goal. However, you do want to make sure that you solve the problem legitimately because in many scenarios, the guy himself, I can't even remember his name. We're just going to call him by his last name McFarland. McFarland might have a money problem and when that money problem occurred, he would go scam to be able to solve this legitimate problem over here. Not the best idea. Number five, start small. Now, these guys didn't have to start super small. However, like you started on such a huge scale that it made it ridiculous and very difficult to execute on. I mean, it's by and large, a hard task to expect somebody to deliver on when you have so many people, especially that have not been involved in this phase before. And want them to work to achieve this huge goal, which is a festival, which are highly complicated events when you think about all the logistics and just small nuances that you have to think about. Having a festival is like having a lot of kids because really when you throw a festival, you're trying to make sure these people are safe. You're trying to make sure these people have a good time in all these small nuances. It looks cool, but on the back end, it's a headache. So again, if they started small, they could at least give themselves some time to learn some things. They didn't have to be very small, but they could have started smaller. Maybe even limited the amount of attendees and also a limited the amount of overhead they would have had to spend so many things like that. But if you're going to spend this endless money, at least hire somebody else who started small, took that time to actually learn the craft. It's so wild, they spent like 30, 50 million dollars, whatever it was, and had so few people that were highly competent involved. Number six, we're about to see a lot of wild stories that never could have been seen before. What I mean by that is because we're in a time when people document so much, right? Everybody has camera phones and everybody's putting things on social media. So so much of this stuff is tracked. You can go back and find these results. When people are putting together documentaries, it's not going to be just telling stories and people who were there talking about how it was. There was so much video footage that we could watch. It actually made that documentary feel like a legitimate movie almost. As a matter of fact, I think I prefer it this way than I would have preferred a movie. It was even more entertaining to know that this was actually happening, not people re-enacting what they thought was happening or were told was happening. Number seven, get the details. So many people had their face on this thing, but really had no idea what was going on. They had no idea the validity or the legitimacy of what was going on with this guy. A lot of these models had to actually report to court. There was so much that people did not expect. They probably said, hey, I'm going to take this big check, this ridiculous check. I don't even get paid this much in most cases. So I have to take this opportunity. However, at the end of the day, now their brand was associated with something that actually put a small little tarnish on it. It's helped that this documentary that came out and it made it feel like a scam and so many other people were tricked. But at the end of the day, now fans can necessarily trust you as much as they did before when you put your face on something. Especially when people see that, yo, we thought you were going to be here. You were going to be involved. But now they just see that, oh, you were just putting your face on it. It was like a cheap little sale. And that same even goes for Jairul because at the end of the day, a lot of people tried to say, oh, Jairul is scamming people and things of that nature and really try to accuse him and make it his fault because obviously he had the biggest name of most of the people who were involved. But at the end of the day, when you looked at the documentary and just everything I've seen involving it, I don't think Jairul really looked past his face being associated with that brand and maybe some money opportunity. But he was just a face of the brand. He wasn't really heavily involved in those operations. I don't think he was aware of a lot of things that were going on. I could be wrong, but either way it goes, watch where you put your face. And if you do put your face on something, pay attention to the details, stay on top of things. And if there's a reason that your brand is being tarnished or you see something that's in conflict of interest of who you are and what you want to represent, then you need to pull out. Curtis King actually did a video on some great examples of how he was working with some companies. But then there was a conflict of interest in terms of his values and his brand and some of the things that the companies were getting into. If I could find those videos, I'll put them in the description below. But other than that, we got to move on to number eight. Last but not least is focus on what's important. Now, if you watch the fire festival documentary, there was probably a point where you completely forgot that this was supposed to be a marketing thing for a technology company. At the end of the day, the festival had nothing to do with the actual product. And it's the perfect example of how a lot of times people can let some cool ideas spiral out of control and they can be spending more effort on actually doing this other thing that was supposed to initially be a good idea to help the first thing. And the next thing you know, you completely forget about the core thing. It's like when an artist is so busy trolling or getting into that part of the personality when they forget about actually their music or the actual fan base that cares about their type of music. You have to be disciplined and stay focused on the thing that is your lane, the thing that is important to you. Because even if this other thing becomes successful, sometimes its success can be at the detriment to the initial values and the initial product that you intended to create. And that's it. I would love to know you guys thoughts on the fire festival. It was so many things. There were a lot of funny things out there. I just, I didn't get a chance to talk about that. But I wanted to definitely make sure I covered these lessons that I learned because I didn't expect it to be like that valuable and that much substance to it at the end of the day. I don't know what I was thinking, but either way it goes, I want to hear your thoughts. If you liked this video, go ahead and hit the like button. If you like your minds, well share it and if you're not subscribed, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe.