Who Was John McAfee? With Mark Eglinton & Chase Geiser | OAP #56
Mark Eglinton is a well known author and friend of the late John McAfee. His new book, "Do Domain" about McAfee is coming out this fall.
Here are some details about the book taken from Simon & Schuster:
An exhilarating and uncensored account of the maverick tech titan’s wild life, a breakneck journey from Silicon Valley to his sudden, mysterious death in a Barcelona prison.
“John McAfee is an American original—bold, brilliant, unpredictable. Characters like him came from a different era—not the woke, soy boy, non-confrontational culture of modern high tech. You meet McAfee head on in No Domain—in his raw energy and spit-in-your-eye cussedness. Buy this book, read this book, and understand—could anything, even John McAfee, kill John McAfee?” —Stephen K. Bannon, White House Chief Strategist, Host: War Room
Delete everything you think you know about tech pioneer John McAfee, whose antivirus software operates on millions of computers around the world. Uninstall any impressions you have of the man depicted in the news, the man in disguise and on the run in Central America, even the man who reinvented himself as the Libertarian Party’s candidate in the 2016 presidential election. Move these images to your brain’s trash file. The real John McAfee is far more complex.
Drawn from hours of conversations between Mark Eglinton and John McAfee in 2019—while he was hiding in an undisclosed location—No Domain: The John McAfee Tapes provides startling insight into the extraordinary life of one of America’s genuine renegades. McAfee shares his life story like it’s his last will and testament, providing revelatory details on the abusive father who shot himself when John was a young boy; the life-changing LSD overdose in St Louis, during which he was nearly convinced by voices in his head to try to kill his first wife and daughter; the unexpected government clearance that led to him working on CIA dark programs; the combined affinity for mathematics and hallucinogens that informed the hedonistic nature of his software company in Silicon Valley; the attempt to find a quiet life in Belize only to become a pariah in the eyes of the local militia, from whom he’d later flee, having been framed for the murder of his neighbor; and the subsequent years on the run in the US, evading a cast of pursuers, including the Sinaloa Cartel, while burying bags of money and valuables in marked locations around the Southwest, before fleeing the country on his yacht.
John McAfee has lived a life that defies description. This larger-than-life biography documents it all.
EPISODE LINKS:
Chase's Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/RealChaseGeiser
Mark's Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/MarkEglinton
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My name is Chase Geiser, and I am one American.
Music by Ben Thede.
This is Chase Geyser with Mark Eglinton on One American Podcast.
Thanks for coming on.
Did I pronounce your name correctly?
Absolutely, you did, yeah.
Okay, awesome.
I really appreciate you uh agreeing to come on.
I found you on Twitter, and I saw some of the work that you've been doing with McAfee.
And I've been a McAfee fan for a long time, but not a very well-informed fan, just sort of someone who um in a passing way just kind of appreciates his personality and his attitude.
Uh just as a kind of a fun uh um in the gutter guy.
So as the article you shared with me kind of writes, but not in a disparaging way.
And um, I wanted to have you on to sort of um learn about you, who you are, and then talk about McAfee after that.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's great.
I mean, you hit the nail on the head there.
He is an in-the-cutter guy, uh, which is something that people don't really know.
I think a lot of people have this kind of idea of McAfee and thought he was this corporate guy, uh, which for a very brief spirit uh period of time he was, but his his life really did not exist in that in that space at all.
He was definitely a guy who was comfortable with the sort of underbelly of society, drug dealer, prisons, that whole world's him.
And uh that always fascinated me.
Yeah, so you just randomly got a call from him on Skype in 2019.
Wasn't quite as random as that.
We did we communicate on Twitter.
I sent him a message and said, You ever fancied writing a book?
He sent me a whole lot of abusive messages, words for the effect of who the fuck are you, and what have you ever done that I would be interested in?
Uh so I sent him an article that had recently come out about me in a newspaper in the UK, and he sent it back and said, I couldn't give a shit what someone else thinks about you.
I want to see some of your work.
So I thought, whoa, this guy is serious.
And uh he said, if you don't send me a link to your work, you will never hear from me again.
So uh I sent him a link to uh a book I'd written, and he came back to me and said, You're the guy.
And from there we pretty much we took off.
And yeah, I mean, as you said, he randomly called me on Skype while I was driving, and I had to literally pull over at a gas station and answer a call for McAfee on my phone.
It was crazy.
What book, what book did you send him that he was impressed with?
I wrote him, I sent him uh a PDF of a book I wrote about uh or wrote with uh a Texan heavy metal musician called Rex Brown, who was in the band Pantera, uh who's his autobiography called Official Truth, which was really kind of grimy and gritty, and it was it was really the kind of thing I thought McAfee might uh sort of resonate with.
And it turns out that he really liked the pages he read, and he came back to me and said, Yeah, let's do this.
Well, that's awesome.
And so, how did your relationship from then move forward?
Really well.
I mean, he told me that uh he'd worked with tried to work with other guys in the past.
He'd had two guys on board for autobiographies, both of who'd kind of flaked on him.
He told me that one guy just didn't understand his world and was always saying, Oh, I can't believe that would have actually happened.
And then some other guy he just said wasn't a good writer.
So he said he'd kind of abandoned the idea and uh was really happy to get this sort of application from someone who who he could work with.
And from then we just got onto daily Skype calls.
Uh, really the next day after that first Skype that I mentioned in the car, we were on Skype every day thereafter, and we just talked through his entire life.
So, um so I I know just sort of in passing what his life was like.
My understanding based on what I've read, and it's hard to know these days what's true and what isn't true, but my understanding is that his career sort of started at Lockheed in 86, and that that was when he was uh uh sort of became aware that viruses were going to become a problem for technology.
And that's when he made the McAfee antivirus, which of course he's famous for.
And then that's also, you know, the result of or the contributing factor to his major early financial success that was sort of able to fund his later escapades and eccentricities.
Is that right?
Is that so?
Yeah, that's what I thought as well when we first started talking, but it turned out there was actually a lot before that.
In fact, the most informative years of his life were long before Lockheed.
I mean, we're talking about we're going back to the late 60s, early 70s.
He worked for NASA, he worked for numerous other companies, uh, some in Europe, some in Brazil.
And he had this kind of way of working for people whereby he completely took liberties.
You know, in the first day, he'd basically say, Listen, I will not be able to work from an office.
I will work from home, I will deliver what you need once a week.
And basically, if you don't like that, that's just the way it's going to be.
But he was so brilliant.
He could deliver the work for these people.
You know, normally take people six months to do stuff, it would take him two days.
So for the duration of these contracts he had with companies, he just did what he wanted.
And he started this in order to do what he did his whole life, and that was to make money, not to be wealthy, but to live his life.
Money was just a vehicle by which to live his life, and he did that from the early days.
Lockheed was, as you say, absolutely pivotal, but it was tons before that.
Okay.
Okay, that makes sense.
And so, how was he able to pull off that kind of leverage?
Um prior to sort of having a reputation, right?
Because traditionally, especially like in tech, you know, it's a very Silicon Valley corporate culture.
And you you sort of have to play ball unl until you've done something remarkable.
How how do you think it was that he was able to walk in there and say, now I'm working from home?
I think NASA was the job because he basically he lied in the resume for NASA and said, Well, I'd assume they wouldn't check.
And they didn't check.
But he was he was confident enough in his in his mathematics and his programming that if he got the job, he knew he could deliver.
And he told me the story.
He said, you know, for the first few days, I just wandered around New York uh high on drugs, just thinking, extrapolating, figuring it out.
And then all of a sudden he had this Eureka moment to do the pr the project that they'd hired him for.
And he basically cranked it out in 24 hours.
And he said, from that point on, I was a king of programming.
I could write my own ticket, I could work for anybody.
If you work for NASA, he said at that time, you could work for anyone.
And from there, that's how he wrote his that's how he kind of wrote his career out.
He could go anywhere, and people just thought, yeah, this is John McAfee, he knows what he's doing.
So, what did he really do after he worked at Lockheed?
And uh, I mean, obviously, I know that he moved around a few times.
There were a couple of kind of bizarre controversies, um, like with his neighbor and stuff.
And uh, I know that he ran for president a couple times, I think on the libertarian ticket.
But uh well, can you can you s give me a little bit of insight into what McAfee was actually doing with his time?
Yeah, well, I mean, uh the thing to know about McAfee Associates or McAfee Antivirus is he didn't want any power of it.
He know he wasn't really interested in having a company.
He enjoyed the challenge of fighting off hackers.
He enjoyed the whole battle.
He said when the battle was over, which it was after basically two years, maybe even a year and a half, he said he wasn't interested anymore and certainly didn't want to be in the boardroom.
So he just walked away.
He didn't sell his share.
People always say, Oh, yeah, McAfee sold his share.
He didn't.
The company got floated.
No, the company got floated after he left and he got his proceeds.
It's as simple as that.
And from that point onwards, he l he was literally kind of blown around by the wind.
He built houses in well, Colorado was a main one.
He got into something called aero trekking, which is kind of like micro light planes.
Uh he built property in Hawaii, built properties all over all over America and South America, sometimes for 25 million dollars each.
Some of them he never set foot in.
This all happened because he felt like it.
He just thought, well, I can build this house, I can spend this money, and that's what I'm gonna do.
And he had no, he wasn't answerable to anybody whatsoever.
And this all took, you know, I'm kind of a bridging these whole years, but this ultimately took him up to let's say he left McAfee Association 1990.
In 2006, he went to Belize, and that's where life got complicated for John.
Uh, and that's where a lot of the people who don't know anything about John at all know the about the Belize years when he went down there uh as a white guy going into a black country, and basically I said to him, Listen, this just sounds like heart of darkness, what you were doing down there.
And he said, Oh, that's absolutely preposterous.
Uh, of course it wasn't that heart of darkness was some guy in psychosis, that whole thing.
I said, It's exactly that's what you did.
You went down there as a white guy trying to fix problems, and he said, actually, you're right.
That's what I did.
So that's where it all went really chaotic.
And from 2006 onwards, his life was chaos.
Absolute and total chaos.
You know, for the duration of the six years in Belize, and then another six or seven years in the US until he went on the run, just absolute chaos.
So was Belize where his neighbor died of gunshot wound.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I and I I did thoroughly read that article that you sent.
So I I trust you and I appreciate the fact that you're able to distinguish and admit when McAfee is honest versus when he isn't.
And you're adamant that he did not commit that murder.
I am, yeah.
I I always have been.
Uh for a number of reasons, not just my dealings with him, but a lot of people sort of go to the documentary that's out there, it's called Gringo, uh, the something like the insane life of John McAfee, whatever it is.
That I always saw that as a hit job for want of a better expression.
Uh it was two people who were very keen to present a very slanted picture of John.
I'm not saying that John didn't have faults.
I didn't agree with everything John did.
I didn't agree with him living with loads of underage girls.
Wasn't my thing at all.
But I don't think he killed anyone.
I know he was framed by the Belizean government.
And uh, as he said to me in our conversations, why would I kill someone?
It would be the stupidest thing I could ever do in my position.
I just why would I do that?
He said, I'm many things, I'm not stupid, and that is true.
Well, it it seemed to me just reading about it.
So this is just you know, one guy's a random interpretation.
And I know that you know, in the article that you shared with me, and I'll and I'll link to it in the in the project description or the video descriptions rather.
But it seemed like though McAfee said that he thinks it was a failed hit on him, it seems like maybe they didn't want to kill him and they just wanted to frame him.
So they so they put the hit on his neighbor.
Well, yeah, this goes back to the sort of heart heart of darkness stuff that I talked about.
Because John went down there, uh lived in a very white touristy area to start with, got bored as he always did, decided I'm gonna go into the jungle and see how that works.
So he went to the jungle despite all the warnings from people who said, Don't do it, you'll need security.
Uh, and then went in there and discovered that the jungle was full of drugs and prostitution and tried to clean it up.
Now, if you're a black guy in Belize trying to do that, the government's not going to be very happy.
But if you're some gringo turning up with loads of money in Belize trying to clean up the drugs problems, you're gonna make some enemies, not least government officials who, as it turned out, ran the drugs business.
So we're like, oh minute, this guy's a massive problem for us.
He's coming, he's trying to cut off our stream of income.
We need to get rid of this guy or get him in jail.
And that's what was happening in Belize.
Uh basically he was being set up.
And you're right, they might not have wanted to kill him, but they certainly wanted him in jail.
Um they would have done anything to do that.
Man, it's so fascinating.
It's it's hard to know these days, uh, particularly in the I guess everywhere, but you know, it seems like the United States has gotten radically worse over the last few years.
It's uh as far as knowing what's true and what isn't.
And you know, I know that um uh you know, McAfee is he's gained a lot of attention from the sort of QAnon uh community.
Um I don't mean that in like a negative sense.
I I actually have more more um uh affinity toward them than most, despite the fact that I don't agree with a lot of the the predictions and and beliefs of them.
Okay.
So I don't, but I don't think they're stupid, you know, insurrectionist evil people.
I just think you know, there's there's a lot of reason not to trust what the official narrative is, and so that's why people are starting to you know follow fringe sources of information.
And uh a lot of the Q community defends McAfee as you know, only associating with underage girls so that he could, you know, get the goods on uh on bad people of maybe in the United States or politicians, and that he sort of hung out in these communities and with questionable people in order to basically be like a mole uh on uh people who are perceived as legitimate leaders in other communities, so that he could, you know, one day leverage that against them and try to fix injustice.
Do you think that he was just in underage girls, or do you think that he was just sort of uh involved with these people uh in an effort to sort of uh um uh get get the the bad guys playing good.
Yeah, it's an interesting question.
Uh I'll tell you a really funny thing I often think about with this, particularly in the last few months since he's passed away.
I've had a lot of people come and talk to me from kind of QAnon and you know, people who are obviously in that world and very nice people and follow a lot of them and all of that.
Equally the hacking community and the Bitcoin community, and they want to talk to me about this side of John.
And the the honest truth is I never was in that world with John.
That that is what I always describe as the kind of peripheral world of McAfee.
McAfee liked like to create this whole sort of surrounding chaotic world around him, of which these were all uh components.
But we were never really in that.
I was always in the inner world of John McAfee, which was his feelings, his thoughts, his philosophies.
We never really got into the I mean the dead man switch theory, which I'm sure you've heard about, you know, there was this theory that John had a dead man switch which he would activate on his death that would release all this information on the web about people.
We never ever touched on that stuff.
Uh it was never a conversation we had.
Um What do you think about the McAfee official telegram channel?
I I I don't have any opinion on it.
All I would say is that I don't think he's still alive.
I mean, uh there's a lot of people that think it that think he is.
I I just don't subscribe to that at all.
Uh I don't I didn't have to say I wasn't convinced that he committed suicide because a lot of my dialogue was with John only sort of affirmed the fact that this guy had huge life force, even up until last year when I was communicating.
This is a guy who spent his whole life trying to stay alive.
Just didn't strike me as somebody who would commit suicide.
Uh but equally he might have he might have got to the point and they thought, you listen, I'm 74 years old, the odds are way stacked against me, I'm gonna get extradited sometime.
Just want to go, I just don't want to go on.
Maybe he thought that, I don't know.
But uh the telegram channel, I I I people have asked me about that every day.
I just don't know.
I don't know what it is, don't know what the agenda is, and I honestly don't know who's behind it.
That's interesting.
All I would say about it is a lot of the material that appears on there isn't new.
There if you if you want to have you want to have a dig at some of this, there's some of this stuff been out there for a few years.
Yeah, I noticed that too.
I you know, I still follow it and I'm interested to see what happens.
And whoever's whoever's running it is doing a very good job of um of uh uh maintaining the integrity of the vibe of McAfee.
It's really cool that you know it's I I it's gotta be a major fan or family member, or you know, I guess it could be you know the intelligence community just uh coming in and but I don't you know I'm I'm not subscribed to that idea of it, but yeah, I think I think whoever's who whoever is running it is doing a good job, despite the fact that you're right, you know, there's nothing there's nothing new that seems to be getting leaked, just you know, old ideas regurgitated.
I mean, my my my thought on it is that that like they've got to run out of road at some point.
That's the way I feel.
I mean, there's been lots of, you know, the day is coming, you know, cutting down to such a day, cutting down to another date.
Sooner or later, nothing materializes after all these dates.
Yeah.
Well, then the in the in the wise words of Jim Morrison, the future's uncertain and the end is always near.
Yeah.
So we just we'll just wait and see.
But as you say, I mean, in terms of channeling eyeballs, it's it's really gathered a huge number of of people who are viewing it.
And if that's doing somebody good, okay.
I mean, I don't see any problem with it.
I mean, it's it's training interest, but what the end game is, I've no idea.
So let me just ask you this straightforward and uh before we get into some more more details, if you don't mind.
Uh would you say in retrospect, and I know this is sort of touchy because I'm I'm sure to some extent you became a friend.
But would you say in retrospect, just as objectively as possible, that McAfee was a good person or a bad person?
Fundamentally good.
I'll let that hang there in the air for a second.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, I thought he was a fundamentally good person.
Uh tons of reasons why.
Uh I thought John had real honesty, and that's an i that's a real irony, uh, because this was a guy who liked to create misinformation and liked to project all kinds of misinformation around his life.
But I think face to face, and I think this is where the separation between the sort of wider McAfee world and the world that I was in with him.
I think that's where they diverge because I've spoken to his wife since actually, and she said uh John showed you a part of him that he's never shown anyone before.
That that feels great.
No, not least for the purposes of the book, because I I genuinely think that people will get a glimpse of uh certainly a part of the real John McAfee.
But people will look at the sort of the documentary that you referenced earlier.
They'll look at some of the outlandish stuff he's done before and say, oh well, this guy's a bad person.
That's just John playing.
John was a very playful person in terms of his image.
He liked to put all kinds of stuff out there.
But I do think face to face, staring at someone in Skype with no clothes on, which he often didn't have, certainly no top on.
Yeah, I thought he was real.
I genuinely did.
I genuinely did.
And he was very, I mean, he was very honest about his own faults.
I've rarely met someone who was quite as willing as he was to call out his own failings, and he has many.
So yeah.
What would he what would he say about his failings?
Like specifically what he said, what do you think of himself?
Why'd you get married so often?
I used to say to him.
He said, I'm um fundamentally two people, you know.
Uh one part of me is very attentive, you know, when I'm with someone that I like.
Uh, you know, I want to please her, I want to make her happy.
But he said, then there's the other part of me that you know, when I'm bored and I'm sitting around and I want some, I want sex, I'll go looking for it.
He said, I said, which one is you?
And he said, Both are.
That's the point.
You know, we're all fundamentally, you know, we have the push and pull of good and bad, or whatever you want to call it.
He said, people that try and sort of present perfection or anything like that, they're they're lost.
You're you're wasting your time.
You're always dealing with a dichotomy of your personality, and it's just a matter of what you can keep in check.
So he he gave me a lot of wisdom in that respect in terms of uh the human of human nature.
He was a real real student of human nature.
He could tell people lying, he could tell people who were not genuine or or whatever.
I think he had a real level of wisdom that I've not experienced in many people before.
So, from what I've seen of him, and like I said at the beginning of this conversation, I'm not somebody who has spent hours researching McAfee, though I am interested in him, of course.
But from what I've seen from you know, viral TikTok videos and shorts of him, he seems like a person fundamentally genuinely bothered by injustice.
Do you think that he felt a greater sense of responsibility to do something about it because he had sort of attained this certain this level of success that put him in a unique position?
Uh I think he had that anyway.
I think the the uh the quest of of defeating computer hackers back in the 80s was part of that.
I think you know, obviously that collided with his incredible ability in programming at a time when the computer age was dawning, all of these things collided, but I think there was part of him that really wanted to win this battle, sort of good versus evil, you know, the the anti-virus versus the hackers.
Uh I should also say, and this is typical of John, John has enormous respect for hackers to the extent that he actually hired some at McAfee.
Uh he hired a couple of the guys who designed some of these viruses, and he said these were the most eccentric people I've ever met.
But he figured once the battle was won, these guys weren't making any money.
I might as well hire them and give them a salary and get them on our side.
So I mean, he saw both.
Uh, but I do think from the beginning he was always somebody who did not like injustice.
Indeed.
Uh John was the first guy to talk to someone on the street who might have been begging or a vagrant, something like that.
He told me so many stories about, you know, he was in Mexico one time on on vacation in 1970, and there was this American guy in a campsite who looked like he was down in his luck, he was sleeping under a tarpaulin or whatever.
And John had a motorbike that he had hooked up to the back of his uh RV, and he couldn't take this motorbike any further, so he just gave this American guy a randomly who he'd never met really, didn't know anything about it, just handed him a $5,000 motorbike and said, There you go, you got a vehicle now, you know, you can sell it, you can do what you want with it.
That was what John was all about.
And I said to John, I said, What why'd you Do that.
I said, Well, I didn't need it anymore.
Why not give it to someone who doesn't have anything?
And that was what he was that was what he was like.
And I don't need to get into the sort of the sort of details of sort of his and my business relationship, because we did have one.
But he was extremely generous to me.
And I know, and I've said this publicly in newspaper articles.
John had no money when he died.
He was broke, convinced.
I'm absolutely convinced of that.
And he scratched into it.
He just spent it all on houses.
People say, Oh, you know, McAfee had all this money, you know, he had the anti virus company.
He told me, listen, have you any idea how how easy it is to spend 20 million dollars?
And I said, Well, I guess if you're building houses, no, if you're building houses in Ecuador for 30 million dollars that you never stand in, I guess that money just disappears.
And he said, absolutely.
He said the other thing is when you're wealthy, you've got no end of people trying to have trying to get money from you.
You know, whether it's you know, people wanting to borrow, whether it's people in trouble, people trying to sue you for this or that.
He said your money, you it just disappears, absolutely disappears.
Right.
And you know, he had nothing or very, very little.
And there's a chapter in the book that explains the details of that and what his arrangement was with someone who I don't need to name here, but he was extremely generous to me, and he didn't have to be.
Well, that's that's that's an interesting thing to know about about McAfee.
And it's you know something that I don't find hard to believe.
He just seems like that person.
And um uh that's interesting.
So why is it that the US government went after him?
No, yeah, I mean, that's simple.
I asked him that question.
I mean, he didn't agree with tax, he thinks tax is unconstitutional, he references 1913 and all of these kind of things, and he said these kind of things should have been wound back, just like lots of other laws should have been wound back that were they were created for a specific purpose and then should have should have disappeared when that purpose was gone.
He said tack income tax was one of them or an element of income tax was one of them.
He said, I paid income tax for years, paid millions of dollars of income tax.
He said, When I left the country to go to Belize, I wasn't driving on US roads, I wasn't getting the benefit of any of the abilities that the US were offering me for my tax.
I just thought, fuck it, I'm not paying anymore.
That that's one thing because plenty of people don't pay, plenty of people don't file.
Uh and for a long time, the fact that he didn't file taxes or any returns for eight years, I think it was, everything was okay.
Or let's put it this way, no one was turning up at his door.
But when he went out on a yacht in 2019 and started turning up at conferences saying, I don't pay tax, and here's how you don't have to, as well.
Everything changed.
He became a problem at that point.
It's one thing not filing, but when you're actually actively telling audiences how via cryptocurrency they can not file and not pay, you become a problem.
And I think that turned the heat up on him.
I that that's my impression.
I don't know that for a fact.
He told me that.
He said, basically, I became a problem at that point.
I said, Did you not want to did you not stop when you felt the pressure?
He said, Fuck that.
I want to keep prodding the Hornets Nest.
He said, If I didn't keep doing that, nobody would.
And I was in a position where I was on the run, I was in hiding, they couldn't get to me.
I thought I'll keep going with it.
He said, you know, maybe one day my situation will be different, and I can uh, you know, I might end up back in normal life again or back in the US.
But for the moment, I'm gonna keep pushing this.
And that's what he did.
Okay, so he fled the United States in order to avoid the tax issue, right?
And so where did he go?
It was a grand jury convened in 2019 uh for him and a few others uh related to his presidential campaign party.
Uh he had a yacht which he bought in cash, sailed to the Bahamas, got into an altercation with an official in Bahamas who tried to have the CIA pick him up in the Bahamas.
Uh John outed this Bahamian official and the CIA agent and started producing invoices and checks showing that money had been paid to try and get him picked up.
Left the Bahamas, went to Cuba where he hung out for a while, did cryptocurrency cruises around Cuba, basically became a problem for the Cuban government who said, Listen, you need to leave because you're just a big problem for us.
Left Cuba after a while, went to the Bahamas.
When he sailed into the Bahamas, the the dot was lined with the military uh on the behest of the CIA who were there to pick him up.
And at that point, he I think he faked a heart attack in the Bahamas.
He's done it a couple of times.
He's faked the throat and faked the heart attack.
I think the heart attack was in the Bahamas.
Have you ever seen his have you ever seen him do it?
So I can show you how good he is at it.
Oh man.
It's so great.
There's so much kind of so much twitching, and he's got all the moves.
So he did it for you.
It's all calculated.
And it's all designed for one thing to buy legal time for someone to file on a people, blah, blah, blah.
He knows exactly how long he needs.
He knows if he fakes a heart attack, someone's gonna have to take him to hospital.
That's all gonna take a couple hours.
Someone will have to do due diligence and check him out, given the full medical.
And in that intervening time, some lawyers got some appeal file, blah, blah, blah.
So that's what happened.
Ultimately, they said, Yeah, we're gonna extradite you to the US.
He said, No, I'm also a UK citizen, because he had a dual passport.
Uh, I'd like you to extradite me to London.
Which they did.
And he was extradited to London and disappeared.
And it was after he disappeared in London that I made contact with him.
And so he basically escaped, right?
Because if he was extradited, was he extradited under guard?
No, he was basically just given escape back to the UK on his own.
He was supposed to basically just check himself into a police station as soon as he got there, kind of thing.
Just disappeared, went dark, and where he went in between, uh, I don't know.
And actually, when I was speaking to him, there's this is a funny story that I should tell because at the beginning of our conversations, he said uh you'll need to come and see us at some point.
And I was like, okay, that sounds good.
I said he'd already told me before that, I'll never tell you where I am.
I was like, okay, so how do I come and see you?
And he said, You will go to an airport, some man will appear, he will hand you a ticket, you will receive this ticket, you will look at it, you will see where your destination is, you will have your passport, and you will board a plane to wherever it is.
And I I thought this sounded like sort of James Bond type things, and it probably was.
Uh, but at that time I had no idea where he was.
And in fact, that never happened.
Because after our first conversation, the whole idea of me going to see him just disappeared.
And I think probably there was two things.
One, I think he thought that Skype worked.
Our conversations were good enough that we didn't need to.
He also trusted me.
Uh, I think he needed to meet me to know if he could trust me, or he thought he did, but I think he realized that when we talked.
And from that point on, I never knew where he was.
I I kind of looked at the background quite often and thought, God, that looks like Spain or Portugal or something like that.
And I worked out by the daylight.
You're in the same daylight hours as me.
You're probably in somewhere like that.
I never asked him, he never told me.
But obviously, when when I heard he'd been arrested uh in Barcelona, I thought, okay, that makes sense.
Then when I saw the pictures of the place he was arrested in, uh, I saw the the balconies of this hotel and thought, yeah, that's exactly where he was sitting talking to me when we had our Skype calls.
So it all made sense.
But in the interim, while he while he was in Europe, he was posting videos on Twitter saying, here I am in Norway, here I am in Belarus, here I am in X, Y, and Z. He was in none of these places.
This was all how did they um how'd they find him?
I don't well, okay.
The the story I heard was that some amateur sleuths in Spain saw some of the pictures and saw a bottle of water on the table at his dining table.
This brand of water is only available in Catalonia around Barcelona.
Oh, someone worked out that he'd bought it in a grocery store in that town, and they basically also worked out I think mapping from a Google map of of uh uh a pier construction that was behind an image in one of his pictures, and somebody found him that way.
Uh that's I would have thought he would have been more careful about that kind of stuff.
100%.
That that never really made sense to me.
And then when he was arrested, uh he was boarding a plane to Istanbul on his UK passport.
And I don't know about Spanish police consigned by the CIA or US authorities, I don't know, but he was arrested by Spanish police, and that was it.
So he seemed uh he was explicitly very antagonistic toward the intelligence community in the deep state.
Do you think that that antagonism or that sentiment that he had was just because they were always on his ass, or do you think that he was aware of a really deep seated problem?
I wouldn't say he was antagonistic towards the CIA and intelligence.
I would say he was antagonistic towards the SEC and the IRS.
He explained to me that the CIA are simply a mechanism of obtaining people who are overseas.
Obviously, the FBI can't, the IRS can't.
It basically gets shuffled down the line to the only body that can pick people up like him, and that became the CIA.
His relationship with the CIA, with the CIA rather, was actually quite uh schizophrenic because he was getting communication from friends of his in the CIA who were telling him and tipping him off about what other people within the CIA were trying to do with him.
So he had this kind of push and pull of people within the organization who were giving him information while at the same time someone else was trying to find him.
So I don't think there was antagonism between him and the intelligence community.
I think there was almost, I wouldn't, I'd almost say there was a sort of mutual respect.
And the reason for that is that John actually supplied the CIA when he worked for, he worked on, well, for McAfee.
McAfee supplied uh the CIA with software at the beginning, but he also worked on a on a on a DART program when he worked for Lockheed.
So I think he understood that world.
I wouldn't say antagonistic, I think it was a bit of mutual respect.
But ultimately he knew that if anyone was anyone was going to pick him up in Europe, it was going to be the CIA.
Whether that was who picked him up or not, we'll never know because no one's ever said.
Uh all we know is the Spanish police arrested him, we don't know the rest.
I'm I'm guessing that it was them, and that was always what he told me.
So what do you think that his I'm trying to frame this conversation?
What I really want is I really want to get a sense of what he was aware of just as the person that he was with his intelligence and experience and um basically every characteristic that around him that surrounds him.
He's he's such an interesting figure that I want to get a sense of what he fundamentally believed was going on because I see him, I see him in these Q his his content in these QAnon communities, and they obviously have sort of like an agenda, and I don't mean an agenda in sort of in like a um compromised or corrupt sense, but they have what they believe, and then you know they they they're drawn to content that reinforces what they believe.
Do you was was McAfee actually on that page in terms of the election was overthrown, um the entire currency is going to collapse?
There's you know, there's massive pedophilia at the in the at the Hollywood and government level.
I mean, was he actually on on page with all that stuff?
Was that a big part of him, or was that just a small part that gets amplified?
That's that's exactly what I said to you earlier.
That's that kind of chaotic static that surrounds him.
We we discussed very, very little of that.
And you know, there's some people I witnessed that when I'm talking about this book and my relationship with him.
I know that people want that, and almost part of the story is that that isn't what it was.
Uh did John think that the political system was fundamentally broken?
Absolutely, he did.
He told me on many occasions that you know any president that's in place there, they might as well just get some vagrant off the street, put them in the chair for four years.
Uh he he didn't take any of that particularly seriously, and he didn't take his own political career very seriously either.
I said to him, Did you were you serious about this libertarian run on two occasions?
He said, of course not.
I was never gonna get elected.
I was just doing it because I felt doing it because I felt like it, doing it because I could.
And that was what John was all about.
Uh the issues he took really seriously were cybersecurity and uh I think financial liberty was one of the the, you know, when when you when you talk about some of the groups that are out there talking about their affiliation with John, the crypto community have latched on to him because he was a champion of financial liberty.
He did believe that the blockchain was the future, that we should be allowed to decide what we do with our own money, that the government shouldn't be able to observe what transactions we do and when that was a very fundamental belief of his.
Uh, much more so than political beliefs.
Uh I almost think John was kind of ambivalent about politics.
He was like, Yeah, you know, it's a mess.
It's an absolute shit show.
And it always will be, and it will never change.
And you know, that's just how it is.
I think he was more interested in the crypto stuff and the cyber security.
As far as pedophilia and stuff, we never discussed it.
So do you think um would you say that he was he was he primarily interested in cryptocurrency just because of the the privacy features of it, or was he was he one of the one proponent of cryptocurrency uh because he was worried about this the status of the US dollar in the in the long term or both.
A combination combination of the two.
Uh you know, we talk about China and you know uh that place.
He actually loved China.
And I told he told me a story, he went out there, and he said on a crypto, he was out there doing a crypto uh presentation.
He said he got out of his car at the wall of China or somewhere, people jumping all over him.
John McAfee, John Magby said he couldn't believe that anyone knew who he was.
He he got a real good welcome out there, but he understood the threat that China poses.
Uh he understood the threat that the world economy was under.
Uh he did he was uh very very cynical about the origins of the coronavirus.
It was one of the conversations.
That wasn't static noise, that was something he firmly was questionable about.
No, no.
Uh and I'll tell you why, because he actually had COVID while we were talking.
Uh and we didn't know it was because I think it was March of 2020.
Yeah, they probably did.
Well, they would they would if we had a death certificate.
Oh, that's crazy.
Yeah.
Which is crazy.
So uh yeah, he was ill, he was in bed, he sent me a picture saying, Oh, hopefully be up in a few days type thing, and he had tubes going into his nose and all the rest of it.
I said, What the hell is this?
This COVID or what is it?
He said, I don't know what it is.
Uh, but it's pretty bad.
I've never felt so bad in my life.
So I am assessing that he had COVID.
What time was this?
I remember having a March 2020, they're exactly right time, right in the right time when people didn't really know what it was, but it was starting to get big.
Uh and he said I said to me, I said to him, What do you think?
What do you think about the origins of all of this?
Is this intentional?
He said, a hundred percent intentional.
This is not some you know, bats or pangolins or anything like that.
He said this is a trial.
Uh and you know you need to understand that this is what this is, and people need to understand this.
This is what this is.
And I at the time I thought, okay, I can believe that.
Even then.
I thought, yeah, I didn't buy the pangolin bat bat species stuff either.
Uh I was thinking this this could be something a bit more sinister.
And he was adamant about it.
So, and and I hate to ask you this question because it's it comes off as um uh um crass because I know you personally knew him, okay.
Just explicitly, do you think that he killed himself?
*Sigh*
Really tough.
Go back and forward on this.
I I go back and forward on it because I I replay our conversations often.
Uh and the one that sticks with me is one where he said, you know, I said, why don't you I was trying to talk to him about what he did in a CIA DART program, and he said, I can't, I promise you I can't.
When I when I signed up to do it, one of the conditions was that I can never ever talk about it.
And I and I will honor that.
And I said, What do you care?
You're on the run, you're in hiding, uh, you've got people chasing you, you say.
And he said, Well, I hope one day that that situation will not be the case, and that I will be a normal life, etc.
etc.
Everything that, as I said to you before, everything that John said to me and all his actions uh pointed towards the fact that this isn't someone who would kill himself.
I mean, and indeed with this book, he had said to me, I I'd talked through his wife and while he was in prison, and he said, Well, you know, I'm really looking forward to reading it, and I guarantee you my support and you know, promotion and all these kind of things.
So the plan was always, you know, this book will come out, and he's gonna give it a promote and say, This is my life story, you want to read it, this is this is it.
So that was all there.
And for it to be taken away, or for it to disappear because he committed suicide just feels really unlikely to me.
So that's a very long-winded, very long-winded way of answering.
A complicated question requires nuance in the response.
So I understand.
Yeah, what I wanted to give it some nuance because it I didn't want to just say, yeah, I I think so.
I don't I want to explain from my perspective and from actual first hand dealings with him why I it seems unlikely to me.
Uh and it genuinely does feel unlike very unlikely.
But the very small percentage of stuff is the fact that you'd been in prison for a year or however long it was, and nine months, crappy food.
Probably I mean he wasn't going to be extradited immediately.
Would have taken a year.
There was avenues, legal avenues in the UK, there was various legal avenues, but they all knew what they were to possibly do something about it.
It was by no means a done deal.
So it wasn't like there was this imminent threat to getting lifted up, dropped in the US in a prison and disappearing forever.
That that threat was not there.
So you know, did he think have I had enough of life?
I think it's a very slim chance.
I really do.
Uh I I can't get my head around the fact that John will commit suicide.
And I certainly can't get my head around the fact that John would commit suicide and not tell his wife that he was gonna.
That's not John.
John's a really honest person.
The last thing he said to Janice was, you know, I love you, talk to you tonight, talk to you tomorrow, type of thing.
John McAfee, the John McAfee I knew is the kind of guy who would have said, Listen, I've had enough.
Uh, you know, we're apart, I haven't seen you for eight months.
We can only talk on the phone, I don't want to keep doing this type of thing.
He would have done that.
I'd I don't think he would have just checked out.
So what would be the incentive to take his life?
Who would have motive?
I mean, you make a lot of enemies in a world like John McAfee's.
Uh you know, people say, was it the CIA?
I mean, honestly, I I don't really see a reason why the CIA would want to harm John McAfee.
I really don't.
I mean, apprehend him and getting back to the states to face legal charges, I get.
I don't really get the other part.
Uh, unless there's a dimension to his life that he just did not give me access to, which is possible.
Uh there was something I didn't know.
Maybe could it be connections to Belize?
You know, he left there, uh, hacked into their government computer system.
There was very shady people following him around the US when he came back from Belize, uh, related to drug cartels in Mexico.
Uh, he told me this is all just what he told me.
So you add all that up, add up anything else you know about him.
There's a fair chance that there's somebody who probably wants to see some harm come to him.
Whether they can access him in a sort of maximum security prison in Spain with guards and CCTV and all these kind of things, have to say sounds unlikely to me.
Uh take it would take some doing, unless there was some inside involvement, which people have suggested, you know, were the Spanish authorities involved in this.
Who knows?
We're starting to get into sort of deep conspiracy there.
Uh which is something I really actually want to avoid with with my thoughts about it.
Well, I'm not trying to I'm not trying to push you in the past.
I just really want to know what's what's going on, you know.
No, no at all.
Yeah, no, no, I absolutely appreciate it.
I think your questions are great, but you know, there's a few people that that could want to could want harm, but I I don't know.
I I I find it I find it a bit of a stretch to get there, I have to say.
Well, i i I don't know, I don't know if you if you have ever felt this way, but for some reason, I I always when I think of John McAfee, I think of Julian Assange.
It is that is that is that a common thing.
I just think of these people who are really bright that are sort of fighting the system and they have a good case in terms of a reason, like not a good legal case, but a good reasonable case for why they have the position that they have, and they just seem to get locked up all the time for years and chased.
It just seems like a like a motif.
Yeah.
Uh well, it's the kind of easiest way to make them go away, isn't it?
I mean, he John actually did say something to me, he said during our conversations.
He said, I said, what would happen to you if you went back to the States?
He said, I'd I'd go into custody, I'd disappear forever.
I said, I would simply disappear.
I mean, he said, Did you does anyone ever hear anything from Julian Assange?
Yeah, he said those words.
And I said, No, you don't.
And it's true, you don't hear anything from Julian Assange.
He's just in prison.
And we don't know what state he's in.
We don't know what physical, mental state he's in.
We you know, we hear rumors that he's getting maltreated, etc.
etc.
But that seems pretty extreme given that this was a guy who was conducting journalism.
You know, and even Ed Snowden came out when McAfee passed away and said, you know, Julian Assange could be next.
I think that's what uh that's what Ed Snowden said.
That's a lot of respect for Snowden.
No, I don't know what the whole Snowden thing broke 10 years ago, I had mixed feelings because you know nobody knew whether or not any of the information that was compromised was you know resulting in the deaths of agents or anything like that.
So there were he was very controversial, obviously, but I think that history has shown and will continue to show that what he did was quite heroic.
100%.
I agree with that.
And his conduct and the way that he uh yeah, always classy.
It's never kind of headline grabbing.
He he he always comes from that tech background as opposed to any other kind of news grabbing background.
He's always backing up what he's saying with his vast technical knowledge, and a lot of it is stuff we need to know.
I mean, this stuff about the Pegasus uh iPhone hack and all that kind of stuff.
This is stuff we need to know.
And the fact that he's telling us that stuff now suggests to me that the stuff that he was telling us 10 years ago was stuff we needed to know as well.
He's continued down this path of saying, hey, listen, here's the information about what's going on in the world, take it or leave it, type of thing.
The fact that he's doing it from Russia, wherever he is, uh, wherever he is now, is a sad state of affairs, really, for someone who is basically telling us truth.
And when you're finding it, and I think the fact that it's uh it obviously would have been much easier for him to just keep his mouth shut.
I mean, who wants to leave their family and their country to hide somewhere in Moscow for the rest of their life?
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm sure Moscow is a nice place to visit.
But why would you want to do that?
And I to me it just looks like he made a tremendous sacrifice for his country.
It's unfortunate though that there has been no response to it from a legislative standpoint.
So there's been a cultural response and a cultural awareness here in that he was successful.
But where there was continued where there has been continued failure is in our government just failing, lying about first of all, lying about what whether or not what he said was true, and then having no consequences for lying about it, some some officials under oath.
And then after it was obvious that um um uh the government lied and that Snowden was right, they haven't made any changes to the programs, it seems like.
I mean, maybe they they maybe they've said they have, I don't know if they've even said it, but there's no there's no way that the NSA was like, oh man, we're caught, so now we're not gonna, you know, listen to Americans anymore.
It's uh and everyone acted surprised when when it came out that Tucker Carlson was being spied on.
It's like everyone's being spied on.
This is this is not news, you know, and it just seems like people don't don't see the reality of a situation until the ramifications of that situation actually are felt.
And as long as Americans don't feel like they're gonna they're being spied on, even though they know consciously they are, they won't they won't act accordingly, they won't respond uh the way that they need to to really pressure our leaders in order to change these things.
I think that's a cultural thing in general, without getting too soft philosophical about life and and and the way that people deal with things, but I think it's an interesting point to make.
I don't think anyone or very few people actually address the potential consequences of something until it directly affects them.
You know, I always take the example of smoking in the UK, you know.
I mean, I'm not judging anyone that smokes cigarettes, but in the UK they got to the point where there were they were doing advertisements on the television for cigarettes with like graphic images of lungs turning black and bleeding.
I mean, really poory stuff.
You know, this is what will happen to your heart, your lungs, etc.
etc.
That's not enough for some people.
It's not enough.
Some some people say, oh, yeah, I know, totally get it.
That looks horrendous.
But until that actually happens to me right now or tomorrow or next week, I don't care.
And I think that's a a situation that people have got themselves into, and as you said earlier, unless those consequences are felt directly in your pocket, in your health, in something to do with your family, you don't respond to anything.
You just say, Oh, okay, yeah, it's going on, so be it, type of thing.
I don't know what changes that.
I don't know how we how we change things.
I mean, we all know our phones are getting hacked.
I've have you got rid of your iPhone and gone back to a Nokia 6610.
No, I haven't.
Same thing with Allison.
Conversation with someone today saying, Oh yeah, the the big corporations are screwing everyone left and right, and you know we should stop buying from us.
That's great.
But the moment that you actually stop buying shit off Amazon is the moment I'll take you seriously.
Until you're prepared to do that, same old.
You know, if it's easier to buy something in Amazon and cheaper, and we keep doing it, well, we're just acknowledging there's a problem and doing nothing about it.
And I think that applies to all the kind of stuff that Snowden, Assange, all these kind of people, John McAfee come out with.
They tell us what the problems are.
It's up to us whether we do something about it.
And the the sad case, majority of people don't want to do it.
So tell me about your book.
What what what's it called and where can people get it?
The book is called uh No Domain, The John McAfee Tapes.
Now, it will be available in all good bookstores.
Are there any left?
You know, talking about Amazon.
Barnes and Noble will have it.
All these kind of places.
Uh it'll be on Amazon.
The release date is still soft because obviously when John passed away, we the publisher was pretty keen to try and move it up, which you're trying to do, but because of all this COVID stuff, publishing, paper, printing is all a little bit fluid at the moment in terms of lines, waiting for people to get stuck on the book.
You should do the episode first half.
Yeah, the ebooks, there's gonna be an ebook, there's gonna be an audio book.
Uh I'm hoping the whole everything will be out in November, uh, early November.
Might be a little bit later than that, but it's coming between now and Christmas.
Uh there's also something great coming on the back of it that should that someone's approached me about.
Uh this was a unique situation because not only is it a book, but I've also got these hours of recordings with John, which are my property because we never typical of McAfee, we never had any kind of agreement.
We kind of stared at each other and said, what are you gonna do about it if I run away?
Nothing.
What are you gonna do about it if I don't write a book, nothing whatsoever?
I've got 170 lawsuits out against me, he said, and I was like, okay, I'm not gonna add another one to that.
So let's just kind of shake hands over Skype and say, let's do this.
Consequences of that were that I got all these tapes.
Have you released them anyway?
John's voice, if anyone Yeah, we'll yeah, just wait.
Just wait and see what we do with this.
Uh, there's gonna be some great content for that, uh, which will partner the book in a certain way, but there's there's more to come from this McAfee uh journey that I've been on with him.
Let me know if you need to.
I'm excited about it.
To help with your release in any way that I could, editing or whatever.
Yeah, sure.
Really appreciate it.
But yeah, so everyone just keep tuned out.
I'll advertise it on Twitter, which is the only social media thing I have.
Uh any updates I have for the book, I'll I'll be putting them out there.
And some foreign editions coming as well for people in other countries, some European languages, people have bought the rights, so it's gonna be multi-language.
Well, it's been great having you on the show.
People can follow you on Twitter.
I'll I'll I'll link to your handle in the um in the description at Mark Eglinton.
And um, what's uh but just last thing before we get off.
Uh, what would you say is um uh the one lesson or takeaway that you would like listeners to have from McAfee as a human being and and his life?
Uh get over resentment, uh anger, uh any kind of beef you've got anyone in five seconds.
Very good.
Yeah.
He told me once if you can't if you can't go over an argument with your wife or your husband or a friend or a business partner in about five seconds, you're lost.
He said it's in the past, forget it.
Uh and I always thought, yeah, a few of us could uh take that on board.
Wow.
Well, great.
Thank you so much for um coming on the show and let's stay in touch.
