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 Geyser, and I am One American.
This is Chase Geyser with Mark Eglinton on One American Podcast.
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, in a passing way, just kind of appreciates his personality and his attitude, just as a kind of a fun in the gutter guy, as the article you shared with me kind of writes, but not in a disparaging way.
And I wanted to have you on to sort of learn about you, who you are, and then talk about McAfee after that.
He is an in-the-gutter guy, 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, which for a very brief period of time he was, but his life really did not exist in that space at all.
He was definitely a guy who was comfortable with the sort of underbelly of society, drug dealers, prisons, that whole world's him.
So 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 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.
Yeah, I mean, the thing to know about McAfee Associates or McAfee antivirus is he didn't want any part of it.
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 was literally kind of blown around by the wind.
He built houses in, well, Colorado was the main one.
He got into something called aero trekking, which is kind of like microlight planes.
He bought property in Hawaii.
He built properties all over America and South America, sometimes for $25 million 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 going to do.
And he had no, he wasn't answerable to anybody whatsoever.
And this all took, I'm kind of abridging these whole years, but this ultimately took him up to, let's say he left McAfee Association in 1990.
In 2006, he went to Belize.
And that's where life got complicated for John.
And that's where a lot of the people who don't know anything about John at all know about the Belize years when he went down there 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.
Of course it wasn't that.
Heart of darkness was some guy and 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 U.S. until he went on the run, just absolute chaos.
And I know that in the article that you shared with me, and I'll link to it 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.
Well, yeah, this goes back to the sort of Heart of Darkness stuff that I talked about because John went down there, lived in a very white touristy area to start with, got bored, as he always did, decided, I want to 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.
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 going to make some enemies, not least government officials who, as it turned out, ran the drug.
They ran the drugs business.
They were like, hold on a 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.
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.
And it's hard to know these days, particularly, I guess everywhere, but it seems like the United States has gotten radically worse over the last few years.
As far as knowing what's true and what isn't.
And I know that McAfee is, he's gained a lot of attention from the sort of QAnon community.
And I don't mean that in like a negative sense.
I actually have more affinity toward them than most, despite the fact that I don't agree with a lot of the predictions and beliefs of them.
But I don't think they're stupid insurrectionist evil people.
I just think there's a lot of reason not to trust what the official narrative is.
And so that's why people are starting to follow fringe sources of information.
And a lot of the Q community defends McAfee as only associating with underage girls so that he could get the goods on bad people, 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 on people who are perceived as legitimate leaders in other communities so that he could 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 involved with these people in an effort to sort of get the bad guys playing good?
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 people who are obviously in that world and very nice people, all the laws up 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 honest truth is I never was in that world with John.
That is what I always describe as the kind of peripheral world of McAfee.
McAfee liked to create this whole sort of surrounding chaotic world around him, of which these were all 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.
All I would say is that I don't think he's still alive.
I mean, there's a lot of people that think he is.
I just don't subscribe to that at all.
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.
But equally, he might have got to the point and he thought, listen, I'm 74 years old.
The odds are way stacked against me.
I'm going to get extradited sometime.
Just want to go.
I just don't want to go on.
Maybe he thought that.
I don't know.
But the Telegram channel, people have asked me about that every day.
Yeah, no, I thought he was a fundamentally good person.
Tons of reasons why.
I thought John had real honesty.
And that's a real irony 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, John showed you a part of him that he's never shown anyone before.
That feels great.
Not least for the purposes of the book, because I genuinely think that people will get a glimpse of 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, 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.
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 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 level of success that put him in a unique position?
I think the quest 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 antivirus versus the hackers.
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.
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.
But I do think from the beginning, he was always somebody who did not like injustice.
Indeed, 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 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 RV.
And he couldn't take this motorbike any further.
So he just gave this American guy 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 sell it.
You can do what you want with it.
That was what John was all about.
And I said to John, I said, why'd you do that?
He 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 like.
And I don't need to get into the sort of sort of details 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.
He told me, listen, have you any idea how easy it is to spend $20 million?
And I said, well, I guess if you're building houses, no, if you're building houses in Ecuador for $30 million that you never stand in, I guess that money just disappears.
And he said, he said, the other thing is, when you're wealthy, you've got no end of people trying to get money from you, whether it's people wanting to borrow, whether it's people in trouble, people trying to sue you for this or that.
He said, your money, it just disappears, absolutely disappears.
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.
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 created for a specific purpose and then should have disappeared when that purpose was gone.
He said 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 U.S. roads.
I wasn't getting the benefit of any of the utilities that the U.S. were offering me for my tax.
I just thought, fuck it, I'm not paying anymore.
That's one thing because plenty of people don't pay.
Plenty of people don't file.
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.
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 hornet's 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, you know, I might end up back in normal life again or back in the U.S. But for the moment, I'm going to keep pushing this.
There was a grand jury convened in 2019 for him and a few others related to his presidential campaign party.
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.
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 dock was lined with the military 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.
And actually, when I was speaking to him, this is a funny story that I should tell because at the beginning of our conversations, he said, you'll need to come and see us at some point.
You will have your passport and you will board a plane to wherever it is.
And I thought this sounded like sort of James Bond type things.
And it probably was.
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.
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 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 on the same daylight hours as me.
You're probably in somewhere like that.
I never asked him.
He never asked me.
But obviously, when I heard he'd been arrested in Barcelona, I thought, okay, that makes sense.
Then when I saw the pictures of the place he was arrested in, I saw 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 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.
Well, okay, 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.
Well, this brand of water is only available in Catalonia around Barcelona.
So someone worked out they bought it in a grocery store in that town, and they basically also worked out, I think, mapping from a Google map of a pier construction that was behind an image in one of his pictures, and somebody found him that way.
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, rather, was actually quite 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 the CIA with software at the beginning.
But he also worked on a dark program when he worked for Lockheed.
So I think he understood that world.
I wouldn't say antagonistic.
I think there was a bit of mutual respect, but ultimately he knew that if 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.
All we know is the Spanish police arrested and we don't know the rest.
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've seen him,
I see him in these QA, 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 compromised or corrupt sense, but they have what they believe.
And then, you know, they're drawn to content that reinforces what they believe.
Do you was McAfee actually on that page in terms of the election was overthrown?
The entire currency is going to collapse.
There's, you know, there's massive pedophilia at the Hollywood and government level.
I mean, was he actually on page with all that stuff?
Was that a big part of him, or was that just a small part that gets amplified?
And, you know, there's some people 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.
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.
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, were you serious about this libertarian run on two occasions?
He said, of course not.
I was never going to 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.
The issues he took really seriously were cybersecurity.
And I think financial liberty was one of the, you know, 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, much more so than political beliefs.
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'll never change.
And, you know, that's just how it is.
I think he was more interested in the crypto stuff and the cybersecurity.
As far as pedophilia and stuff, we never discussed it.
And I remember having a March 2020, exactly right time, right in the right time when people didn't really know what it was, but it was starting to get big.
And he said, I said to me, I said to him, what do you think about the origins of all of this?
Is this intentional?
He said, 100% intentional.
This is not some bats or pangolins or anything like that.
He said, this is a trial.
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 at the time, I thought, okay, I can believe that.
Even then, I thought, yeah, I didn't buy the pangolin bat species stuff either.
I was thinking this could be something a bit more sinister.
I go back and forward on it because I replay our conversations often.
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 signed up to do it, one of the conditions was that I can never, ever talk about it.
And he said, well, I hope one day that that situation will not be the case and that I will be a normal life, et cetera, et cetera.
Everything that, as I said to you before, everything that John said to me and all his actions pointed towards the fact that this isn't someone who would kill himself.
I mean, indeed, with this book, he had said to me, I'd talk through his wife while he was in prison.
And he said, you know, I'm really looking forward to reading it.
And I guarantee you my support and promotion and all these kind of things.
So the plan was always, you know, this book will come out and he's going to give it a promote and say, this is my life story.
You want to read it?
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.
Yeah, I wanted to give it some nuance because I didn't want to just say, yeah, I think so.
I want to explain from my perspective and from actual first-hand dealings with him why it seems unlikely to me.
And it genuinely does feel very unlikely.
But the very small percentage of stuff is the fact that he'd been in prison for a year or however long it was, nine months, crappy food, probably, I mean, he wasn't going to be extradited immediately.
It 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 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.
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 going to.
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.
You know, he left there, hacked into their government computer system.
There was various shady people following him around the U.S. when he came back from Belize, related to drug cartels in Mexico.
He told me this is all just what he told me.
So you add all that up.
I don't 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, I have to say sounds unlikely to me.
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, which is something I really actually want to avoid with my shots about.
I don't know if you have if you have ever felt this way, but for some reason, when I think of John McAfee, I think of Julian Assange.
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.
When the whole Snowden thing broke 10 years ago, I had mixed feelings because nobody knew whether or not any of the information that was compromised was resulting in the deaths of agents or anything like that.
So it was very controversial, obviously, but I think that history has shown and will continue to show that what he did was quite heroic.
And his conduct and the way that he, yeah, always classy.
It's never kind of headline grabbing.
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 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, wherever he is now, is a sad state of affairs, really, for someone who is basically telling us truth.
I think the fact that 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 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 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 whether or not what he said was true and then having no consequences for lying about it, some officials under oath.
And then after it was obvious that the government lied and that Snowden was right, they haven't made any changes to the programs, it seems like.
I mean, maybe they've said they have.
I don't know if they've even said it, but there's no way that the NSA was like, oh man, we're caught.
So now we're not going to listen to Americans anymore.
And everyone acted surprised when it came out that Tucker Carlson was being spied on.
It's like everyone's being spied on.
This is not news, you know, and it just seems like people 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 being spied on, even though they know consciously they are, they won't act accordingly.
They won't respond the way that they need to really pressure our leaders in order to change these things.
Without getting too philosophical about life and the way that people deal with things, I think it's an interesting point to me.
I don't think anyone or very few people actually address the potential consequences of something until it directly affects them.
I always take the example of smoking in the UK.
I'm not judging anyone that smokes cigarettes, but in the UK, they got to the point where they were doing advertisements on the television for cigarettes with like graphic images of lungs turning black and bleeding.
I mean, really gory stuff.
You know, this is what will happen to your heart, your lungs, et cetera, et cetera.
That's not enough for some people.
It's not enough.
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 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 change things.
I mean, we all know our phones are getting hacked.
Have you got rid of your iPhone and gone back to a Nokia 6610?
I had a conversation with someone today saying, oh, yeah, the big corporations are screwing everyone left and right and we should stop buying from them.
I said, 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 selling 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 sad case, majority of people don't want to do it.
The book is called 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.
It'll be on Amazon.
The release date is still soft because obviously when John passed away, the publisher was pretty keen to try and move it up, which they'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 in the first half.
Yeah, the e-books, there's going to be an e-book.
There's going to be an audio book.
I'm hoping the whole everything will be out in November, early November.
Might be a little bit later than that, but it's coming between now and Christmas.
There's also something great coming on the back of it that someone's approached me about.
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 going to do about it if I run away?
Nothing.
What are you going to 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 going to 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.
