No Domain: The John McAfee Tapes With Mark Eglinton | OAP #68
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.
“This is the only possible book that could have been written about John McAfee.” —Stephen L. Miller, Washington Examiner
“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.
Because they are easy, but because they are hard, Mr. Gorbachev tears down this wall.
A date which will live in infamy.
I still have a dream.
Good night and good luck.
Hey, it's One American Podcast Live with Mark Eglinton.
And we are going to talk again.
This is the second time he's been on the show.
We're going to talk McAfee.
The only difference between this time and the last time that we spoke is I have had a chance to read the amazing book, No Domain, The John McAfee Tapes by Mark.
And man, I got to tell you, dude, I finished it this morning.
What great work.
Absolutely.
I'm not just saying that because you're on the podcast because if it sucked, I just wouldn't have you on the podcast.
It's actually good.
I'm that desperate.
I probably would come on.
I appreciate it.
Really appreciate it.
Man, I tell you what.
And not only was I impressed with the story and hearing John's responses to all your questions and your conversations, but the actual writing was so good.
It was so easy to read.
I loved the experts, excerpts, rather, throughout the book, at the beginning of many of the chapters and at the end.
And I just think that you really put together something really timeless and special here, man.
You did a lot of honor to his life.
And, you know, it's regretful that he can't read it, but I know that he would be proud of what you've done, man.
Yeah, I think so.
And, you know, one of the difficult things to explain is that when I was doing this, I didn't know that I'd be in this position.
I think I discussed this with you last time I was on.
I wasn't writing this book thinking John won't be here.
In fact, I was writing this book thinking he would.
And that's not to say that there's anything I would have changed.
I mean, people have asked me, would you have done anything differently if you knew that John wasn't here anymore?
I.e., would you have left some stories in, some details in?
I don't think I would have.
I've pretty much done the same book I would have done if John was going to be here and promoting it, which was the plan.
And, you know, what you said about it in terms of kind of capturing his voice and also giving a bit of the narrative to guide it all is more or less what I've heard from everyone.
So I'm really excited about how it's gone down so far.
Mostly, you know, you'll get the occasional.
Well, we'll come into that.
There are a few angles flying around.
But I mean, in general, for people who are interested in John, the feedback's been great.
Well, and it sounds like, you know, at the end of the book, that it was pretty explicit that he gave his blessing for you to just do your thing, you know?
That was how it was.
And I never deviated from that.
At no point did I want it to be a hit job.
At the same time, I didn't want to let him get away with murder either.
And no pun intended.
But, you know, I didn't want to, I mean, one of the criticism, it's not a criticism, but one of the things that people have said is, you know, if John had done an autobiography, it would just been, he would have just run away with it and spun all the stories he wanted.
And you would have very little pushback on that.
I now think that the format that we ended up with, whereby I could at least challenge him on some of this stuff, was vital to this book, because without that, you're in his hands.
And as everyone knows, John's hands are John's hands and he does what he wants.
So I'm very happy with the way the format turned out.
And, you know, I have to say, the publisher did not like the format at the beginning.
I mean, he'd be the first to admit.
He said, I don't see how this can work.
And I said, I promise you this can work.
It's the only way that it can be done.
And here we are.
Well, publishers are always wrong.
Well, I wouldn't like to say that, but so I'll have to work with him again, probably.
But, you know, I believed it enough to say, listen, this is the way it has to be done.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and I want to talk about John, but as I was reading this book, I couldn't help but think about the famous con artist, for lack of a better term, Frank Abigale, who's famous for the movie Catch Me If You Can.
Of course, he wrote the book, Catch Me If You Can.
And I just think, and I don't know if you'd ever have the opportunity or even the interest in doing something like that, but you would be an awesome biographer for that man's life because, you know, so much of his autobiography is now known to be bullshit.
Is that right?
I didn't know that.
I mean, I mean, you'd almost expect that.
You'd almost want it.
Yeah, there were some things that he, there were some cons that he claimed to have done, like passing the Louisiana bar.
And there's no record of him even like ever have taken the bar.
He just said that he passed the bar, like shit like that.
Not even important.
That's the really fun thing about that kind of stuff.
And I'm not justifying it.
It's just like throw away a lie for no reason.
And I find that sort of mildly tipwit in some respects, but I'm not saying that lying is a good thing.
But yeah, I get it.
I get that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So in John seems like he was the same way.
You know, I couldn't point out like any explicit lie or anything.
And I wouldn't even describe him as a liar, though.
He lied a lot.
I wouldn't say that he was a liar.
That's not how I characterize him in my head.
But he seems like somebody who really has a lot of fun massaging the truth to make better stories.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, 100%.
There is one sort of editorial review out there by Stephen Miller in the Washington Examiner, which when I read it, it actually made me feel good, not because he said it was a good book, but because he kind of explained the McAfee style better than I possibly could have.
And basically what he said was that, you know, you give John an opportunity and he turns it into a sort of Terence Malik movie.
And you've got no control over what you do with that.
You just let John spin tails.
Now, that's not to say that the fundamentals of those stories weren't true, but I'm pretty sure that John gathered up some details and maybe some tweets here, here and there along the way in these stories to make them better.
And he did do that.
He loved to entertain the room.
And for those months, I was the room.
So I think it was a big part of him that was thinking, hey, this is going to be great.
We're doing a book.
But also, I'd like to give this guy a bit of a ride as well in terms of the stories.
And we spent a lot of time laughing.
There were some stories that we laughed out loud at for like minutes.
There's one in particular about a guy that was on a jet ski who came from Venezuela.
And John thought he'd done really well by traveling sort of 10 miles on his jet ski and this guy had been in one for four months or something.
Anyway, that might not be true.
It doesn't matter if it was true, but it was really, really funny.
So yeah, that's the kind of thing it was.
And I had to be on guard the whole time and say, well, I don't know about this story, John.
And he was very convincing.
And that's just how it had to be.
And, you know, as Stephen Miller also said, and I don't want to date him too much in this thing, but he said, does it matter if it was true?
And well, I don't know.
That's for people reading the book to work out.
Are you willing to give him a pass on some of this stuff?
I was.
I also pushed back on a lot too.
Well, and even if it isn't true in the literal sense, it could be true in the capital T sense.
Yeah.
You know, like the Bible.
No, I'm just kidding.
But it kind of took the weight off.
It took this kind of weight off me.
It kind of freed me when he said these things.
He said, because at the end of the day, who cares?
Who cares?
And that sounds really sort of amoral, like I'm sort of being sort of deciding what's right and what's wrong.
It's not like that.
It's a story and it's somebody's life story.
And I think, you know, there has to be some license there, particularly with somebody like McAfee.
Yeah.
And well, and one of the things that I found so interesting about the book is when you think about American business moguls.
Yeah.
You typically think about not a psychopathic, but like a sociopathic, sort of without conscience type person who just makes a shit ton of money, incredibly narcissistic, not necessarily evil, just totally apathetic to the well-being of others.
And when I, when I captured, when I was reading this book, I just couldn't get over how obvious it is that McAfee was an incredibly sensitive human being.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's for sure.
And I think that's why he didn't belong in that world.
You know, he made the point on more than one occasion, the whole idea of being a Bill Gates or a Richard Branson, something like that, just didn't appeal to him whatsoever.
And the reason it didn't appeal to him, I don't think was anything to do with the business.
I think the point he made to me was that if you only operate at that sort of narrow band of the stratosphere, you only ever deal with people in that narrow band.
So you end up in board meetings, you end up in sort of charity events.
You're talking to the same kind of people.
And he said, basically, these kind of people are fucking boring.
And these are not the kind of people I want to spend my life talking to.
I want to spend my life talking to the guys in the street.
I want to spend my life talking to people in Mexican jails.
I want to, you know, literally, he was attracted to the underbelly.
So he was always pushing against this sort of career path.
And it wasn't even a career path.
It was unintentional.
He created this position.
And then when he got there, he was like, I don't want to be here.
He was the antithesis of these kind of cold killer type mega business types.
You're absolutely right.
Well, and his life, it reads like On the Road by Kerouac or something.
I mean, it's just, it's just wild.
It's like a Hunter S. Thompson story or something almost.
And, you know, I knew that he was a partier because it was made apparent when he like ran when he ran as a libertarian candidate for president.
That was like part of his brand.
But I didn't realize how overwhelming the drug use was throughout his life.
I mean, starting in the 60s.
This is somebody who was using psychedelics to solve major problems at IBM, right?
With the with putting the old data through the new machine.
And then, you know, later on in his life, he said, you know, if I was on drugs, then there's no way I could have figured X, Y, and Z out.
And so it's funny how he was like, at one part of his life, drugs were like a fundamental necessity in order for him to solve critical thinking problems.
But then later on in his life, they sort of got in the way.
I don't know.
It was just interesting to see that change over the decades.
Yeah, I think that the interesting point he made to me, I was quite fascinated by the whole idea of when sort of how Silicon Valley came to be and that whole world.
Yeah, I mean, it never occurred to me even once that speed and amphetamines and all these things were almost vital to this stuff happening because he told me that there was so much to do and so little time to do it.
If you weren't amped up on something that was keeping you up for 18 hours a day, you just never would have never got this stuff done.
He said it went, it was fundamental to be on some kind of stimulant throughout those years.
And, you know, just like anything gets out of control, guys became dependent on it as he did.
He got to the point where he couldn't function anymore and he was drinking as well.
But you know, I was interested by his relationship with drugs because he talked about it a lot.
And I often wondered whether it was that sort of age-old addict thing where they say, well, you know, I can stop at any time and I decide when I'm on it and when I'm not, because he gave me a bit of that.
And I don't think it was that with him.
I think John genuinely did understand drugs and what the part they could play in his life.
And he just selectively used them for what he wanted.
And that included in later life.
I think he used, you know, later life, he used drugs in combination with sex a lot.
Quite openly admitted to how important that was and how much it enhanced sex and wanted to go into quite a lot of detail with me, which I really didn't want to hear.
I can tell you exactly what drug to take if you want to feel like you're God, right?
In the middle of the sexual act.
I don't want to hear that.
I'd take your word for it.
But you know, he got it all kind of lined up.
And I thought that was good.
And it definitely didn't seem like someone who was kind of living this love-hate relationship with drugs all their life.
It was somebody who almost understood them well enough to know when they're needed and when they're not.
I was fascinated with, and I don't, it's a sensitive subject, so I want to be delicate and thoughtful on how I approach it.
Sure.
But as someone who didn't know him and as just a layman who's interested, when you're reading the story, there's the looming end that you know of his suicide, alleged suicide.
And so, you know, I asked you the last time you were on the show whether or not you thought that you know he actually committed suicide.
And you said that you had mixed feelings about it.
And, you know, having read this book, this was a man who was surrounded by suicide in his life.
Yeah.
With his father, with Dennis.
Yep.
And it seemed to me, and I'm not an expert by any means, but as someone who is totally unattached, and I want to be sensitive to your feelings, you know, since he's your friend, that it seems to me quite plausible that that's exactly what happened.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's been how long since we talked about it?
Seven months.
At the time, I was ambivalent about it.
And if I had to sort of say how I felt, how I've felt since, I would say that my sense has moved more towards what you're saying.
Yeah.
And simply, I mean, the gut feelings that I had at the time, I mean, you know, I know on one hand, I said, oh, John had a life force, didn't want to die, all that stuff.
Totally.
No doubt about it.
But everybody has a kind of breaking point.
And, you know, I just wonder whether eight months in jail, you know, extradition, he did say to me, it's in the book, if I ever end up in jail in the US, I will disappear.
And, you know, John McAfee's not the kind of guy that wants to disappear in the U.S., not a chance.
That would have been his worst nightmare.
End up in the U.S., it'd almost be sort of ignominious, an ignominious end.
Like, you know, giving the U.S. the finger for years, and all of a sudden you're dragged back there and thrown in some super.
He doesn't want to be assanged.
Absolutely not.
I couldn't see that.
So the suicide stuff with his dad was, well, his answer surprised me.
For anyone that hasn't read the book, I don't mind spoiling it by saying that he was happy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
John, how did you feel?
Expecting a sort of outpouring of emotion.
He said, Well, actually, it felt great.
The reason it felt great was because his dad was abusive and his dad controlled him.
And he felt that this was the moment where all that would end.
And it was.
But if you think for a moment that John McAfee wasn't haunted by his father and the sort of thoughts of his father for the rest of his life, I think you're, I think, you haven't thought it through.
I think he was.
I think it was.
And he admits that too in the book.
Yeah, it was a looming thing.
He says his father had been with him every day since he died.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and I, and do you think that ties into his obsession with women?
Because it seems like he had a very trusting and healthy relationship with his mother.
And that throughout his life, he preferred the company of women to men.
Like, he didn't seem like he had a lot of best friends that were like the boys.
You know, like you were pretty much the closest thing to a male friend that was even depicted in the book throughout his life.
He had a really strange relationship with men.
He was almost like, I mean, you would expect looking at him, the way he dressed, the way he behaved for him to be a kind of jock type guy at the bar, drinking, you know, that kind of stuff, the sort of typical male thing, which it's not something I can do, but you know, the type.
He wasn't that type at all.
He was the ante, the antithesis to that.
And again, his company was women all the way through his life, wherever he was.
And, you know, the only men he sort of dealt with were the men he had to deal with, whether that be in business or you know, the guy fixing his roof in Belize or whatever it was.
The rest of the time, he's gravitating towards women.
Whether that was something to do with his maternal relationship, I don't know.
I really don't.
But it seems to make sense.
He reminds me so much.
And I don't know if you've picked up on this, man, but did he remind you of Bukowski?
Yes, of course.
He was like the tech Bukowski.
Yeah.
No, I haven't.
Because Bukowski was the same way.
You know, he lived a very like vagabond sort of lifestyle, always surrounded by women.
And he really, really truly, I took, I gathered anyway, he really, truly loved each of these women, whether it's Olivia, whether it's Janice, whether it's Linda, whatever.
He really loved them deeply.
But in the end, it seems like he was inevitably too difficult to be with.
And they always sort of left.
And he was like, okay, you know, and sometimes they would pop back in later chapters in his life.
But it's just so interesting to see that devotion from him juxtaposed to the inevitability that they would have to just leave.
Yeah.
And he explained it himself because I said to him, What, you know, why do you do this?
What is all this?
And he said, well, there's two sides of me.
You know, there's a side of me that when I'm in love with a woman and I want to be with her, I'm the most attentive guy in the world.
I'll do everything.
But he said, in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking, don't lose this woman.
Don't lose this woman.
And I think that was the possessive side of him.
I think he had that.
And he said the other side of him was when the woman wasn't around.
And, you know, when a woman not around, he goes looking for sex and, you know, and gets into trouble.
And I said, you know, which one's the real you?
And he said, well, both.
That's that's the point.
And I think, yeah, I think he understood all that.
And I think genuinely, without exception, he did love all these women.
And in fact, one of the most shocking moments in the whole book was his reaction to parting with the two girls he was in Belize with.
Because, I mean, we touched on some difficult subjects: death of father, death of nephew, and a tragic accident that John was sued for, etc., etc.
I never saw him as upset as he was when he described leaving these girls in Belize.
The guy was sobbing on Skype in front of me, and I was sitting there wanting to put my sort of hand on his shoulder.
I said, We're going to be all right.
And this went on for minutes.
So, where that sort of profundity of attachment to women came from, I don't know.
But he was very guarded when I asked him about his mother.
That's one time he shut me down, actually, because I remember asking him, you know, when your father died, did your mother have other relationships?
And he really slammed that and said, Don't, please, let's not discuss my mother's relationships.
I was like, Okay, that's that's quite an interesting reaction because he'd been very open about everything else.
That was one place he didn't want to go.
Uh, and I found that interesting, even though he was later told by voices to kill her, which, well, yeah, but you know, he was met by a friendly Bible thumper on the road, right?
That's such a crazy story, too.
That's one of those that you almost wonder if it's true.
It seems like something out of like a magic realism novel where you found it across it.
His family didn't like it that you published the story, they did, they denied that story.
His daughter, uh, she said it didn't happen.
How she knows, I don't know, because she was two, but yeah, they said, No, that didn't happen.
Uh, it's one of those things, maybe it was all one metaphor, giant metaphor.
Yeah, I thought about it.
I mean, he did have a drug trip, there's no doubt about it.
He did have a massive overdose.
Maybe his perception of what happened in that overdose was what he told me he thought happened, and actually, it didn't, or maybe it did happen.
We'll never know.
He thought he'd taken LSD, right?
And it was like MDMA or something, DMT or something like that, which I've never heard of.
Uh, and he he told me that what happened is he took it and nothing happened.
And he said, I just kept taking it until something happened.
And of course, the delayed aspect of those things is there anyway.
So he was one of these guys who would massively overdose on these kind of things.
And I genuinely think it was just a frightening trip, you know, running into St. Louis, hiding behind trash cans and stuff.
I mean, it was just off the rails.
But great narrative.
Well, I've had friends who have gone too far down the psychedelic road and they've, for the most part, been okay, but sometimes it's taken 12 months.
If you have a bad trip on LSD, take too much or it's bad LSD, they can really mess you up.
I mean, I have one acquaintance that thought he was a woman for a year.
And this is somebody who was not transgender.
I mean, you know, it's just like they took a bunch of acid, everything changed, and it took a year to snap out of it.
This wasn't flashbacks, intermittent flashbacks.
This was constant personality change for a year.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
I mean, John told me he had a couple of flashbacks.
There was one he had in the bank somewhere in Colorado 25 years after the overdose, which was crazy.
He was grabbing a lot of pillars and stuff.
It just went out.
Oh, it would kick in.
It would kick in again.
Yeah, I've heard about that.
Like it can store on your spinal column and crack it.
He said, you know, he occasionally has sort of flashbacks.
So, I mean, yeah, I think it happened.
I mean, the story's crazy.
He picked up two hitchhikers on that trip who basically said, just stop the car.
Don't care what you do.
Just stop the car.
I'd love to know where they are now.
If they can remember this crazy guy driving to Tennessee from St. Louis.
So one of the things that's really interesting about the book is his story of having an ironically religious experience reading Darwin's Origin of Species.
And, you know, it's funny to me because he's an incredibly scientifically minded person.
And he's not one to give into like, you know, spiritualism, despite the fact that he had yoga retreats and stuff like that.
But my point that I'm trying to make is, even though he says that in the book that he discovered that he had no need for God, I get the sense that he, and maybe this is just my own projection, but I get this sense that he had a notion of a higher power.
I agree.
And I'd take it a stage further and say that his life might have been a quest for God in some capacity, subconsciously.
I know the Darwin thing, I think that suited him, the Darwin thing, because it simplified life for him.
And I understand that.
You know, you don't need to worry about things.
Once you understand Darwin and once you have explanations for the kind of questions that you might have, you have no need for God.
However, life isn't that simple.
And I think, you know, this was 1970 that he discovered this.
I think when he went through life later and, you know, the various things he went through, I think you're right.
I think there was some recognition of a higher power there.
I think he could be conflicted on that.
He could have been conflicted.
I don't think his sort of trashing of religion and, well, certainly organized religion and to an extent, God, I don't think that was a true reflection of how he lived later.
You know, one of the funny things about McAfee that I noticed is that I've read a lot.
I'm a small business owner.
I've read all the famous books about how to be successful in business.
I've read Zero to One.
I've read Good to Great.
I've read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.
I've studied Benjamin Franklin.
I mean, you can spend hours upon hours, as many small business owners of some intellect do, trying to figure out how to be as efficient and successful and intentional as possible.
Yet McAfee just fucked around and it was awesome.
So do you think it was just because he was special or do you think there's a method to that madness?
Do you think that if more people adopted that mentality and that attitude that they wouldn't see similar outcomes?
Or do you think that's just something only McAfee could accomplish?
No, I think you just get fired.
You do that stuff.
Most people just get fired.
I mean, you know, you get given a six-month contract in Munich, Germany working for Siemens, and you turn up for one day and slap some shit down on the desk and say, you know, if you need me, call me type of thing.
Then you go and live in a house with homeless people.
You just get fired.
I mean, someone just calls you up and say, I'm sorry, you don't have a job anymore.
He managed this for six months.
But the reason he did manage it, and he did this in other roles as well, is because he did the job.
He knew how to do the, he had systems designed within a couple of days that would take other people months.
And I mean, your employer in that situation, I mean, what do they care whether it takes months or days?
Ultimately, they don't.
And if the job's getting done and he's not there and he shows up once every couple of weeks, what do they care?
But I do think that at that time, you know, when John was one of the premier brains of programming as he was at that time and in very high demand, he was probably one of the only people on the planet who could have done what he did.
So I do think it's a lot because he was a genius, but he also made, he also took massive advantage of these people and he did it unashamedly and admitted that he was doing it.
He was just saying, you know, I'm here to have a good time and I'd have to do a bit of work on the way, so be it.
But my focus is on having a good time, whether it's in Rio, Munich, or wherever it is.
Oh, it's hilarious.
That stuff.
So one thing that, and this is my own failing, just because I wanted to get through the book before our conversation today.
So I sped through the last maybe 50 pages or so.
So forgive me for that.
But where I get lost in McAfee's story is why he was to be extradited to the United States.
Was it just simply internal revenue service issues?
Yeah, he just didn't pay tax.
For 10 years, right.
Let me rewind.
He didn't file tax returns.
Now, this is a confusing one because I don't think failing to file tax returns, they can do that.
But anyway, let's put that to one side.
And I said to him, listen, okay, why didn't you file tax returns?
He said, well, I paid millions of dollars of tax over the years and I just decided that I don't want to pay it anymore.
I paid enough.
You know, I was living in Belize or I was living in Hawaii.
I wasn't driving on American roads.
I wasn't getting water from, you know, American, you know, water supplies.
So why should I pay tax?
And I couldn't really argue with that.
So he just decided he wasn't going to pay tax.
And for a while, you know, there's lots of people who don't pay tax.
And I'm not going to say it would have been different, but it's one thing not paying tax.
It's another thing going out there as he did and basically rubbing the IRS's nose in the position by saying, yeah, I'm not paying tax.
And here's how you don't have to pay tax either by getting involved in the whole crypto conversation.
I think that was his downfall.
And I think he knows that was his downfall.
That was a step too far.
I mean, you become a problem when you're someone like John McAfee when you've got a million followers on Twitter.
You're all over the, you know, all over the social media platforms saying all this stuff, going out on cruises.
If he just shut up, gone on the run, not paid taxes for 10 years, I think he would have been okay.
But he didn't.
And that's just his style.
He wanted to bait them.
Yeah.
And he seemed to have an insatiable appetite for freedom.
I mean, that was the first thing that he said after when you asked him about his father's suicide.
It was like right in the first paragraph of his response was, oh my God, the freedom.
And he said this about his career too, that his career at a certain point in his life changed from something that he had to pursue in order to self-actualize to something that he had to do as a means to an end for the lifestyle that he'd already discovered he wanted to live, the sort of vagabond lifestyle.
Yeah, it was just a means of funding that.
Yeah.
And so he's, I mean, he was a libertarian in the sense that he believed in libertarian principles, but he was really a libertarian in the sense that, by God, did he want just total freedom?
He wanted to go anywhere.
He wanted to fuck anyone.
He wanted to do any drugs.
He wanted to have any guns and he wanted to buy any property.
And he never wanted to hurt anyone because you can see he bounces from community to community and he invests in them, whether it's wiping out crack in Hawaii or whether it's buying the ferry system and wherever he was when he was, was that Belize when he bought the first?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, sometimes with unintended consequences, certainly in the outcome and how that played out.
But this is not somebody who was malicious or malevolent in selfishness in any certain way, but he just wanted to be free.
And it's so ironic because the more he desired to be free and lived accordingly, the more pursued he was.
Yeah.
Well, I think that says a lot about society, doesn't it?
And government agencies.
I mean, do they really want someone like that to be free?
And the answer is no, because, you know, you're basically, you become emblematic of an ideal that all of a sudden, just regular people might start turning around saying, well, actually, John McAfee can do this.
Maybe I can do this to some extent within the confines of my life.
Now, I made the point before that, you know, if I was to try and bounce around, be blown like the wind like McAfee was, you know, you'd be on the street in two days.
You'd be homeless because you'd just run out of money.
But I don't think money is the issue.
I think the freedom and the desire to live uninhibited by outside forces is the key.
And everybody has the ability to do that to some extent on within the confines of their own life.
He had a very broad life.
He had money, he had property, et cetera, et cetera.
So his position was different.
But I don't think governments want people like McAfee to be standing up there as an example of what you can do.
Why would they?
All of a sudden, everyone would be trying it on some level.
Do you think he was broke when he died?
Yeah, I do.
Yeah.
Just last penny.
Done.
Well, listen, John McAfee's broke and yours and mine is probably two different things.
But I don't know.
The whole idea, I mean, I'll clear a few things up here now.
I think the QAnon thing on Instagram, it's bullshit.
I think Dead Man's Switch was bullshit.
I think the Telegram channel was bullshit.
All of that nonsense.
I've dismissed all of that since June.
And I was never conclusion.
I was never really on board with any of it.
You know, I just think it's the kind of noise that surrounds McAfee.
And there's lots of reasons why that noise can exist that are nothing to do with him.
John was the kind of guy that had a lot of hangers on of different types from different places in his life and guys that he probably given more access to certain things to than he should have at some point and forgot, you know, oh, I forgot I gave this guy this back in 2010 or whatever.
And all of a sudden, Mr. X pops up and does something.
I don't know.
But all I'm saying is I think that was all nonsense.
Similarly, I think the fact that the suggestion that he had a ton of crypto hidden away was bullshit as well.
I don't think that was because, I mean, he literally couldn't find me five grand.
And he did.
It took him weeks.
Nothing wrong with that.
I was very grateful he got it.
Yeah, that's man.
That's that's interesting.
So what would you say?
This is like the impossible question, man.
What would you say is your one takeaway with this experience?
I don't know.
I'm not, I don't have enough distance from it yet.
I really don't.
Yeah.
I really don't.
I'm so immersed in this still.
And you know, I don't feel any light.
I don't, I don't feel any, I mean, I think people want me to feel, to make a moral judgment on him.
And I get that impression sometimes.
I, you know, people say, you know, this was a bad guy.
I don't feel that.
I really don't.
And I never felt that.
And, you know, people always tackle me on the murder in Belize or the accusation of murder in Belize.
I don't think he did it.
I think they killed his fucking dogs and they framed him.
Absolutely.
That's what I thought the whole thing.
And I said in the book, listen, if I'd genuinely felt 100% this guy had done it, I would have taken a moral judgment and say, listen, I can't publish this.
I would have walked away without any hesitation whatsoever.
I was ready to.
I would have said, listen, great talking to you, but this isn't going to work because I don't trust you.
I did trust him.
So I've still got great fondness for him and his story.
There's a lot of people out there who dislike the way that it's been done.
Well, actually, I shouldn't say a lot.
His family aren't happy.
His daughter specifically isn't happy.
And listen, let me.
About the book?
Yeah, she's not happy about some of the things that are in it.
Now, I get why.
Listen, it's not an emotional win for her because I think maybe she was looking for a bit more sort of adulation from John or affirmation from him within the words.
He said in the book that he regretted that he didn't have a better relationship with her.
Yeah.
Yeah, but that's it.
And, you know, the unusual position I'm in now is that, you know, my name's on the cover.
They're his words.
I am now the object of a few people's frustration.
And that's absolutely fine.
Listen, I understand all the frustration.
You know, if you have a dad like John McAfee or you have a business colleague like John McAfee or a friend or whatever, you know, if things go wrong, you know, I've had a few people who said, oh, I was in business with John.
He screwed me over.
And listen, these things happen.
But, you know, I'm not the, I'm not the target.
I'm the wrong target.
I'm just expressing the guy's story.
And I'm sure there's a lot of in some of it and probably not in some other books.
I got the sense that he thought he had more time to fix some of those issues than he did.
I think he meant to fix all that shit.
Yeah.
Couldn't.
Totally.
I mean, you know, I remember saying to him, why?
I think we're talking about the CAA Black, CIA Black program.
I said, well, why can't you tell me about it?
Because you're in the run.
And this was him having told me that, you know, the consequences for not talking about it were death or execution or something really dramatic.
And I said, but what do you care at this point?
He said, well, I don't always intend to be in this position.
I intend to, you know, resolve the legal stuff, maybe get back to the US, maybe do, you know, I think in his mind, he saw his position as a champ, a temporary one.
And that's sad.
That makes me feel sad because it makes me feel that the guy still did have some hope.
Certainly when he was speaking to me.
Now, whether that hope was obliterated by prison and whatever was going on in the background legally, I don't know.
But certainly he had hope when I was talking to him because the plan was, he said, yeah, promote this book when it comes out.
You know, that was the plan.
Well, and the fascinating thing, too, reading the text was his position on the CIA.
It's the whole need to know aspect of the CIA.
And he adamantly believed that the CIA was actually running the show in the country.
Yep, 100%.
Yeah.
You know, and he used the Iraq war example.
I don't think it's the first person to use it.
But, you know, he made the point that, you know, everything that's going on in countries that we're not really sure about, all of a sudden something happens, a regime change or whatever.
Nine times out of ten, the CIA will be on the ground in that country doing something for some reason that we may not know about at that moment when it's happening.
But those reasons will become clear down the line.
He seemed to be abnormally clued up about how all that worked.
And the reason for that was because he still had contacts in the CIA.
He had this weird sort of schizophrenic relationship with them whereby, you know, someone was tipping him off about pursuit and someone else was giving him help.
So I think he did know.
I don't think it was paranoia.
I think he had his ear to the ground when it came to that kind of thing.
And obviously he had a couple of people who wanted to help him.
So yeah, I think he knew what he was talking about.
Do you think that his perspective on the United States politically was that it was hopeless long term?
Or do you think that he felt that it was going to be okay?
That's a broad question.
I'm sorry, but the whole CIA thing can seem very hopeless when you look into it because there's no accountability there.
Did you ever talk to him about politics per se, or was the brunt of your conversation primarily just about his life?
We didn't get into too much politics.
He threw in the odd breadcrumb, like, you know, I hope Trump doesn't build the wall.
That was one that made me think in my mind, okay, maybe you're an anti-Trump person, but I don't think that was the case.
I think John was quite apolitical.
And that's quite ironic because somebody who wanted to run as a libertarian candidate, but that was nonsense anyway, just to be clear.
I mean, it was just fun.
But I think John kind of, I don't think he was on the left or the right.
I think John was like looking in on a bubble from outside it and just sort of observing.
I don't think he had, he wasn't a centrist either.
He was outside it.
And I don't think John had a particularly pessimistic view on anything.
That's one of the things that struck me.
I mean, 75 years old, you know, you're on the home stretch.
I think he was still pretty optimistic.
And I never heard him say, you know, America's screwed.
It was more a case of, you know, people need to accept what the realities are.
Now, whether they are the CIA run the show or the president's a puppet, which he told me, he said you could just drag some vermin off the street and put him in the chair for four years.
It would be the same thing.
I think that's just, it's not, it's not hopelessness.
It's just accept reality.
And I think that's how he was about most things, you know.
And a lot of the time he spent his life telling people what realities are, whether it's there are computer viruses out there that can crash systems.
Cybersecurity is a big problem.
People can hack your iPhones.
All this kind of stuff.
I just think John was shining a light on realities.
And I don't think there was any great pessimism there.
I just think it was just like, here's how it is.
You deal with it.
How did you come up with the name of the book?
That just came into my head.
It's funny because he mentioned it.
There is another book that was written by somebody else that was started.
I think it was the guy, Boston George Jung, or something like that, who died in jail.
I think he called a chapter no domain.
And I don't know whether that's why John suggested that word to me.
So I thought, that sounds great because it's got a computer connotation and all that kind of thing.
Then John started saying, I'd like to call it alone in the world.
And I said, I don't think that really has a great ring to it.
I don't like that.
And he said, well, okay, go with whatever you want to go with.
And the John McAfee tapes, I should say, was very specifically chosen.
And it was chosen for my own selfish reasons because I'm one of these people that's kind of fascinated by sort of Netflix documentaries of dark, dusty rooms with real-to-reel recordings running and, you know, just sort of unknown stuff.
And I think that to put the words, the John McAfee tapes in there suggested some degree of mystery and the unknown and that kind of thing.
So I put those two together in the hope that people would think, what is this?
And that's you going to publish the tapes?
Well, Amanda, Amanda Millius, has she's optioned the book for a movie and documentary.
She's also Robert Downey Jr., please, Robert Downey Jr.
Is that would that be your choice?
That's the first one that comes to mind.
I wouldn't say that it would be my definite choice, but that comes to mind.
Matthew McConaughey.
Yeah, but he's not old enough yet.
True.
Robert Downey Jr. is a good show.
Yeah.
I think he would nail it.
Because he had a similar lifestyle.
I mean, he had a drug problem and everything two years ago.
Yeah.
And he's that.
And with the Iron Man character, I know that Iron Man isn't John McAfee.
I know they're completely different people, but it's just that there's an easy transition from the technical genius.
I don't know.
I think it would be a good transition for him.
I get it.
Anyway, what I was saying is she's optioned the book.
She's also got the tapes.
So they're available for her to use in whatever she chooses, in whatever way she chooses with documentary and movie.
So it's good.
So let me ask you as an author, after you complete a work like this that requires so much emotional and intellectual attention, how do you decide what to do next?
Well, I mean, the same as always.
I mean, this is the frustrating thing about it.
People think that doing this kind of thing is this sort of really glamorous.
I mean, there are aspects of it that are.
I mean, when you're going out promoting something like this, and you know, I didn't intend it to be this way with John, but it's become this.
Obviously, I'm happy to talk about it.
But at the end of the day, you've got to pay the bills.
And, you know, if you've got, I've got a couple of projects that have been sitting for five years with people that for one reason or another haven't got finished.
And the reality is that pretty soon after I finish something like this, I've got to get going on those again, you know.
And I also have a big project coming, which will be of interest to you.
And I can't discuss it yet, but it came on the back of this conversations about this project.
Some other person came onto my radar and, you know, it might end up being something like this.
But, you know, you just have to move on, do the next thing.
But I'd be lying if I didn't say that to go and write about, and it would be unfair to mention anyone, to go and write about X, Y, or Z is as much fun as writing about John McAfee.
I'd be lying because it's probably the kind of once-in-a-lifetime type thing.
I've recognized it as that.
I will probably never be in that kind of position again with a book, you know, and obviously that position includes the great sadness that he's no longer here and all the circumstances surrounding it.
But just to be, to find yourself in that, that place where you can sort of tame someone like McAfee, he told me once, he said, you've got the biggest tiger in the world by the tail.
Don't fuck up.
That's like, okay, that's quite, that's quite, oh, it's first of all, it's an exaggeration.
But secondly, I knew where he was coming from.
It was like, all right, I hear it.
I hear you.
That was one of the things that I was impressed with about you writing this book is that there are so many people that out of their own narcissism would just love for you to write their autobiography.
It's easy to find people that are like, hey, write my story.
Hey, write my story.
Hey, write my story.
But you were like, no, McAfee, I'm going to write your fucking book.
And he's like, no, you're not.
And you're like, yes, I am.
He's like, no, you're not.
You're like, yes, I am.
And that was sort of the charm of it, too.
It's like, you really hustled to get this guy on board.
Yeah, he tested me big time.
And I got that right at the beginning.
And the way he tested me the first time was by calling me when he felt like it.
He called me.
He caught you.
And it was just like, well, will this schmuck pick up whenever I call him?
Because that's a boundary thing.
And you want to, you want to know what those are.
I did pick up the first time because I thought, well, he might not call again.
But once I did, I made it very clear thereafter that we would talk when I decided we were talking.
You know, we're going to talk 10 o'clock tomorrow morning.
You will be there.
And so will I. And then we'll talk the next day.
It's not just going to be this thing where you basically ride roughshod all over me and you decide what happens.
I think he respected that in a way because I think at the beginning he was looking to see, is this guy weak?
Is this guy to go?
Is this guy going just going to puppy dog me?
Is this guy going to be shocked and too naive to understand it?
I don't think it was any of those things.
I just fronted up to him and said, this is what we're going to do.
And, you know, when he didn't show up for calls for a couple of weeks, and I do document that in the book, I basically harassed him, said, you know, you better get on here because this is what we're doing.
And, you know, deep down, as much as he might have sort of been irritated about it at the time, I think he respected that.
And I think it was a good relationship from that point of view.
At what point in this process did you actually start writing?
Really late.
Really late.
Well, first of all, I didn't know if I had a publisher because John bailed, you know, this whole crypto thing.
It was like, oh, Christ, I've got all this material and what am I going to do with it?
And there was a part of me that thought, well, I'll just leave it, forget it.
I won't do it.
And I went to Jacob Hoy, who's the editor of this book at Posthill Press, said, you're going to hate this suggestion, but why don't I go alone with it?
And he said, well, okay, I don't see how it's going to work.
But if you think it can work, we'll do a deal and we'll go from there.
So gradually he got on board.
But that would have been December of 2020.
And I delivered it in April of 2021.
So people wrote it in four months.
How did you do it without Methamphette?
I mean, yeah, coffee.
That's as much as I got.
But I mean, that's not a class.
I've done some books quicker than that, but four months was pretty intense.
And it was amplified by the fact that I had three other books that were kind of converging at various stages of completion at that time as well.
So 2021 was crazy for me in terms of getting stuff finished.
But yeah, McAfee was, that was top priority.
And it's really easy to write a book like that because it's so exciting.
It's not like you're trudging through tedious stuff or not to say that any books I've done have been tedious stuff.
I hope not.
But you do catch yourself in the moment and think, this is fantastic material.
And, you know, if you're thinking about packing it in for the night at 11 o'clock and saying, ah, come back in the morning type of thing.
When you've got McAfee material, it's very easy to push through until two and three in the morning and keep it going.
So yeah, I mean, the material makes it a lot easier to keep going when you've got somebody like McAfee as your subject.
Plus, I've got the tapes.
You know, a lot of times I didn't have tapes, but I had these tapes all the time.
I've just, they're on my computer and you just put them up, you listen, and you're right back there again.
It was so exciting.
Do you still listen to them?
Yeah, every day, some capacity.
No kidding.
Just because you miss them or because you're fascinated still?
Yeah, not really because I miss him.
I mean, I mean, I do miss him.
Obviously, I miss the conversation.
Quite often go back to remind myself that there's quite a lot that's not in the book.
And that was partly down to time crunch.
I really was on that tough deadline, as I said.
And I got to the point where I started to make decisions about do I include this or do I not?
And consequently, there's stuff that I've gone back and thought, what was that again?
What was that little story?
And there's some good stuff on there.
So it's mostly that I go back and listen to some of the stuff that we didn't put in.
How many hours are there?
30.
30 hours.
So you'd meet with them several times a week for an hour at a time.
Yeah, I always said, and I say this with everyone I work with, an hour is the sort of limit in terms of people's sort of concentration and all that kind of thing.
I've discovered that over time.
People start to get bored and wander after an hour.
So I said, let's keep it to an hour.
Not one of these calls was an hour.
Some of them were three.
So, you know, if he got on a roll, he'd just keep talking.
And that was fine.
I knew that I couldn't do anything about that because, you know, you're in that situation.
Say, well, listen, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush type of thing.
We'll just take it.
Then there were other days where we'd be on for 15 minutes and he'd say, well, I'm tired now.
And he'd just basically put the phone down.
I was like, oh, the Skype down.
I was like, oh, okay.
So we'll see you tomorrow type thing.
That's just how it was.
But when he felt like talking, and I could tell immediately when I saw his face whether he'd feel like talking or not, you just let it roll.
There were some days he was very difficult.
Whatever there was clearly some stress going on.
I describe in the book about some of the events going on in the background that I was trying to piece together.
You know, guys building partition walls and stuff, literally in real time.
There was walls appearing behind him.
And I was like, what's going on here?
And some days he was extremely stressed.
Now I know, you know, obviously under pressure, maybe discovered, don't know.
And on those days, he just took what you can get.
Would you describe him as would you say that he was troubled?
Or I mean, obviously he had stressful environment, you know, things going on outside of his own mind.
But do you think that, you know, regardless of his, you know, if he was a retired guy with no lawsuits, do you think that he would have been troubled?
No, I don't think so.
The opposite, in fact, I mean, one of the things he told me, and he said it publicly, is about arguments and stuff like that.
He said, if you can't forget an argument with your wife or your kid or whatever after five seconds, you're lost.
He said, it's just not worth it.
You know, it's just not worth it.
In the scheme of things, it's just not worth it.
Let it go.
Don't hold onto any grudges.
And I think it's very difficult to be troubled by life in the way that you're describing if you have that kind of attitude.
I don't think he spent his time worrying.
I mean, he told me that he enjoyed being in hiding.
You know, it's great.
You know, you get to a place, you're safe, you discover the area that you're in, and you basically just do what you do, which he said includes talking to you, talking to the press.
I can do podcasts.
I can talk to people.
You know, I can do what I would be doing anyway in hiding.
So I think John was the kind of guy that could make, you could, you could probably be happy in a phone booth if he had to be.
And I think to answer your question, I wouldn't say he was troubled at all.
Very good.
So where can people find your book?
Yeah, Amazon, Barnes ⁇ Noble, all over the country.
Apart from Seattle and Austin, somebody needs to explain to me why those two cities are the only two cities in the U.S. that don't stock it.
This is it, right?
By the way, so everybody recognizes it.
Awesome book.
Nice cover.
And by the way, I should give a quick shout out to the cover artist, the guy on Twitter who's, I believe he's French.
His handle is a lot of money.
And he was somebody I approached because I loved the cover and I didn't want an agency shot of John, you know, just a standard agency shot and thought, let's find something different.
And he'd done a sort of draft of something that was black and a bit like that.
And we approached him and he said, love it.
He knew John.
He had met John.
So I think it was the perfect guy to go with.
And initially, I thought it was a bit gonzo, didn't like the colors, thought it was a bit garish.
Now I kind of love it.
I think it's awesome.
And I think it captures the tone of his personality, as far as I know it.
Yeah, then you got Steve Bannon pull quote in the back, which, you know, I didn't realize.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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 and his raw energy and spit in your eye.
Cussedness.
Yep.
Buy this book, read this book, and understand.
Could anything, even John McAfee, kill John McAfee?
Wow, that's Bannon did a hell of a line there, man.
I've never even heard the word cussedness before.
That's his Ivy League education speaking there.
Yeah, I know.
I really appreciate it.
And Steve really does appreciate it.
I mean, he's been great getting me on the podcast and stuff.
He appreciates the McAfee stuff.
So, yeah, very happy.
Well, this is, you know, I read a lot of books.
I see a lot of books that make it to number one, and a lot of them are just bullshit.
But this is a real deal, real deal work, man.
You should be proud.
And thank you so much for writing it.
Really appreciate it.
And thanks for coming on, getting me on to talk about it.
