This is part two of a two-part series. If you haven't listened to part one yet,
I would recommend listening to that one first. This episode contains some adult material,
so if you don't want to hear it, or you have children around, you may want to skip it.
In May 2016, I attended a small security conference in Miami, Florida,
for a company I was working for at the time.
It wasn't anything big, just a few presentations, lunch, drinks, the usual.
But there was one event I was especially interested in checking out.
A presidential candidate was attending the conference and would be holding a Q&A.
This candidate was a strong advocate for privacy reform,
not just for individuals, but within the government itself.
He supported the decriminalization of drugs and wanted to promote cryptocurrencies
as a means of financial independence.
By now, you might have guessed who I'm talking about, John McAfee.
Of course, he never won, or even came close,
but it was still cool to meet him and talk with him for a few minutes.
Even in the short time I spoke with him and heard answers to questions,
he came off exactly as he was described.
Wild, unpredictable, and unapologetically himself.
From running a yoga retreat in Colorado to fleeing to Belize
on this episode of In the Shell.
Hello.
Hey, why are we not shipping Windows 98?
Absolutely.
Mr. Jobs, you're a bright and influential man.
Here it comes.
It's sad and clear that on several accounts you've discussed,
you don't know what you're talking about.
The key to success is developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.
Janice and I don't own phones.
Neither should you people, if you have any common sense.
My name is Josh, and I'm able to keep this podcast independent and advertisement-free because of support from listeners like you.
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And as a thank you, members get early access to new videos, ad-free versions of everything, bonus content, and access to a live monthly Q&A.
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Now let's get back to the show.
It's 1994 in Silicon Valley.
John McAfee, a name already synonymous with antivirus software, does something unexpected.
He resigns from McAfee Associates, the company he founded and built into an industry giant.
At 49 years old, with a fortune from selling his stake, reportedly around $100 million by the mid-90s, McAfee decides to retire young.
While many might have doubled down on new tech ventures, McAfee took a different path.
He kept a low profile for a while, mentoring startups, giving the occasional lecture at Stanford, and tinkering on side projects like an early instant messaging app called PowWow.
But corporate life no longer interested him.
Instead, John sought something more spiritual and adventurous.
By 2000, John McAfee had retreated to the wilderness.
He bought a 290-acre ranch in the Colorado Rockies and built a yoga retreat.
Picture McAfee in those days, a tech mogul in search of Zen, writing books on yoga, and spiritual enlightenment.
He would start his day meditating at sunrise, surrounded by pine forests, a far cry from the cutthroat software world that he left behind.
Around the same time, he also indulged his taste for adrenaline.
In New Mexico, he purchased another large property and founded an ultralight aviation club dubbed the Sky Gypsies.
It wasn't just flying, it was aero-trekking, skimming low over desert canyons and lightweight aircraft.
Life seemed good for John McAfee, at least for a while.
He was rich, free-spirited, and living on his own terms.
But this peaceful chapter wouldn't last.
The financial crisis of 2008 hit McAfee hard.
Risky investments and economic collapse shrunk his fortune from $100 million to as little as $4 million.
McAfee's lavish real estate, the sprawling compounds, the planes, the luxury toys, all of it had to be liquidated.
The one-time king of antivirus was now facing a very different reality.
Semi-retirement wasn't so comfortable anymore.
Restless and dissatisfied, John started looking for his next move, and he found it far from American shores.
In 2008, John McAfee packed up what remained of his fortune and headed to Belize, a small tropical country in Central America.
He chose the island of Amberguese Quay, a Caribbean paradise of turquoise waters and swaying palms.
There, he purchased an oceanfront estate.
Not just a house, but a sprawling compound that would soon become infamous.
Initially, McAfee claimed he had a noble purpose in Belize.
He wanted to work on his new biomedical venture.
He partnered with a young microbiologist to research natural antibiotics from rainforest plants,
hoping to discover breakthrough cures.
But trouble was brewing under the surface.
McAfee's personality, always prone to extremes,
began to assert itself in bizarre waves.
The microbiologist who co-founded the lab with him suddenly quit,
and the research project faltered.
McAfee's interests shifted away from science and into darker corners.
Rumors around Ambergase K grew outrageous.
Neighbors whispered that John's pristine beach compound was now home to armed guards patrolling.
with shotguns at night, a pack of large, aggressive dogs, and a rotating clique of teenage girlfriends.
By many accounts, McAfee, once the Zen yoga enthusiast, had descended into a haze of guns, drugs, and paranoia.
Imagine approaching McAfee's Belize compound.
High walls and barbed wire encircled the property.
At the gate, guards with rifles eyed you warily.
Inside, John McAfee stands shirtless on his porch, a pistol strapped to his side.
Young Belizean women lounge in hammocks nearby, and loyal but ferocious dogs roam the yard.
By his own later account, he'd begun changing houses, or sleeping in different spots each night to evade potential assassins,
never fully trusting anyone.
Friends say he was experimenting.
with powerful psychoactive drugs like the bath salt stimulant MDPV,
and even searching for drugs that induce sexual behavior in women, as one reporter would later allege.
Whether these salacious details were true or exaggerated, one thing is clear.
John McAfee's life in Belize was anything but normal.
He seemed to be living in his own world.
Part pleasure-seeking hedonism, part fortress mentality,
convinced someone, perhaps the Belizean government, perhaps cartels, perhaps anyone, was out to get him.
During this time, the Belizean authorities certainly took notice.
In April 2012, McAfee's property was raided by the gang suppression unit of the Belize police.
They were allegedly looking for an illegal drug lab, suspecting McAfee's...
Fee was manufacturing methamphetamine.
Officers and tactical gear stormed a compound at dawn, detaining John and ransacking buildings.
He claimed the raid was a sham, retaliation because he refused to pay a hefty bribe to a local politician,
a $2 million donation that McAfee says he wouldn't pony up.
The raid ultimately found no meth lab, and no charges were filed at the time.
But it marked the beginning of a war between McAfee and the Belizean authorities.
After that day, McAfee fortified his compound even further, and grew more mistrustful.
He started wearing a handgun on his person at all times, and spoke openly about government corruption.
Some locals thought he had gone mad. He insisted he was being targeted unjustly.
Tensions between John McAfee and his neighbors
were nearing a breaking point. One neighbor in particular, Gregory Fall, an American retired
builder who lived just on the beach, had numerous spats with McAfee. Fall complained formally to
the town council that McAfee's aggressive dogs and armed guards were disturbing the peace.
He wasn't the only one fed up with the eccentric expat next door, but he was the most vocal.
McAfee was furious about the complaint. He allegedly told friends that his dogs had been
poisoned by someone, and indeed, two of his dogs died mysteriously, apparently poisoned, in early
November 2012. On November 11, 2012, the unthinkable happened. Gregory Fall was found dead in his home,
shot in the head. The Belizean police quickly named John McAfee a person of interest.
dressed in the murder. Whether out of fear, guilt, or both, McAfee panicked and went on the run
before the police could even question him. When the officers arrived at John's gate,
they found only his dogs and an empty house. McAfee had vanished into the Belizean jungle.
Thus began a chapter of International Cat and Mouse that turned John McAfee into a global
headline. For three weeks, the 67-year-old tech mogul eluded a countrywide manhunt. He disguised
himself, at one point dyeing his hair and beard jet black, even hiding in the sand, breathing through
a cardboard box, according to his own later recollections. Belizean special forces combed
the forest and swamps for any sign of him. Meanwhile, McAfee was skittishly moving under cover of darkness.
convinced that if the authorities caught him, they'd kill him on the spot.
I thought maybe they were coming for me.
They got the wrong house.
My neighbor's dead.
They killed him.
It spooked me out, he told Wired Magazine in an interview from Hiding.
To the media, he insisted he was innocent of the murder
and that he was fleeing only because he feared
a corrupt government would silence him for good.
McAfee's escape from Belize was as audacious and bizarre
as everything else in his life.
After weeks on the run, he reappeared in a neighboring Guatemala
in early December 2012,
only to be arrested by Guatemalan police for entering the country illegally.
Now you might be asking what led the authorities to him.
Incredibly, McAfee was undone by an iPhone photo.
A pair of journalists from...
Vice Magazine had managed to secure an exclusive interview with The Fugitive.
In their excitement, they posted a photo of McAfee online,
forgetting to strip the image's GPS coordinates.
That metadata gave away McAfee's exact location,
and within days, Guatemalan law enforcement scooped him up.
But the spectacle did not end there.
As officials prepared to send him back to Belize,
McAfee collapsed dramatically, clutching his chest.
He was rushed to a hospital amid speculation of a heart attack.
Many suspect this health crisis was a ploy to delay his deportation, and it worked.
By the time he recovered, and the heart symptoms turned out to be not serious,
Guatemala decided to deport McAfee to the United States instead of Belize.
In December 2012, a frail but defiant
John McAfee arrived in Miami, back on American soil for the first time in years, and nominally
a free man. Belize would later seize his properties and still consider him a person of
interest, but John never returned there. One might expect John McAfee to lay low after that harrowing
escape, maybe slip into quiet anonymity in the United States, but John McAfee has never been
one for laying low. In 2013, barely a few months after his extradition drama, McAfee launched himself
back into the spotlight, this time with a heavy dose of self-aware humor. He produced a satirical
YouTube video titled How to Uninstall McAfee Antivirus. John appears in a silk robe, surrounded
by scantily clad women, snorting white powder, jokingly
labeled as bath salts, and firing a gun into his computer,
all while mocking the very software that made him rich.
Oh, hello there. My name is John McAfee.
I'm the founder of the McAfee Antivirus Software Company.
Although I've had nothing to do with this company for over 15 years,
I still get volumes of mail asking, how do I uninstall this software?
I have no idea.
The video is outrageous, profane, and over the top, and it instantly went viral.
I tried one final time and got the Urban Dictionary Definition for McAfee.
McAfee, a barely passable virus scanning program that updates at the worst possible times.
Tends to render your computer completely useless whenever it starts an update,
which it doesn't ask to start, and you cannot cancel.
Or pause. McAfee updates at horrible times, almost like the creators want you to die.
Here was McAfee, parroting his own public image as a drug-addled, girl-crazy wild man,
as if daring the world to laugh with him at the legend he'd become.
Beneath the satire, there was truth. He genuinely hated the modern McAfee antivirus software,
which he called bloatware, and had long been urging people to uninstall it.
The video struck a chord, turning McAfee into a kind of tech-folk anti-hero, unpredictable and unfiltered.
Also in 2013, McAfee found companionship in an unlikely way.
While holed up in Miami, he had hired a young prostitute named Janice Dyson for an evening.
That encounter...
blossomed into an unusual romance. John and Janice married later that year, and Janice became his
steadfast partner through the chaos to come. She was more than 30 years his junior and had a
troubled past of her own, but John trusted her implicitly. Together, they settled into a home
in rural Tennessee and tried to live quietly. But quiet just wasn't in McAfee's DNA.
By 2015, John McAfee was itching for a new stage. He dabbled in tech again,
joining a startup and even becoming CEO of a publicly traded company, MGT Capital Investments,
focusing on cybersecurity. But what really grabbed the headlines was McAfee's next stunt,
running for President of the United States. In September 2015, John McAfee announced
his candidacy for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He eventually sought the nomination
of the Libertarian Party, styling himself as a champion of personal freedom and privacy.
His campaign slogan was Here's to the Crazy Ones, which was borrowed from an old Apple ad.
McAfee fully embraced the role of the eccentric outsider candidate. He'd appear on talk shows
like Larry King Live, wearing tinted aviator glasses, waxing poetic about government overreach
and the importance of encrypting your data. He argued that the U.S. government had grown too
invasive, that privacy was sacred, and that he alone, as a tech guru who understood the dangers,
could be a visionary for cyber defense and liberty. McAfee's 2016 presidential bid was less about
actually winning, and more about amplifying.
his renegade brand. He didn't come close to securing the Libertarian nomination,
that honor went to Gary Johnson, but McAfee had succeeded in transforming himself yet again.
As the years went on, John McAfee's life somehow grew even more chaotic.
Freed from the constraints of any job or office, McAfee found a new playground, Twitter. He amassed
hundreds of thousands of followers who never knew what he'd say or do next. One day he might
post a philosophical musing. The next, a shirtless photo brandishing weapons or a crude joke.
Unfiltered and uncensored, McAfee turned his Twitter account into a performance art piece of his life.
Around 2017, McAfee became one of the loudest voices in the exploding world of cryptocurrency.
He was an early evangelist for
endar something of 특히
Not a reprogram которой
to
Bitcoin, and other digital currencies, preaching that crypto would empower individuals to resist
government control of finance. His love for crypto was matched only by his flair for the dramatic.
In one infamous July 2017 tweet, John McAfee made a jaw-dropping bet. He swore he would eat his own
dick on national television if the price of Bitcoin did not reach $1 million by the end of 2020.
This outrageous wager, equal parts confidence and shock value, cemented McAfee's status as a crypto bro.
And for the record, Bitcoin never reached that price target, but McAfee later backpedaled on the
offer as a ruse, but the stunt had already become part of his mythology. Behind the scenes,
John had failed to pay U.S. income taxes for several years.
He openly admitted this, claiming taxation was illegitimate.
He was also allegedly making millions by promoting various cryptocurrencies and consulting.
In late 2019, McAfee learned that indictments were being prepared against him.
Sensing danger, he did what he knew best.
He ran.
John and Janice McAfee suddenly vanished from their Tennessee home.
They took to the high seas on a yacht, a white 60-foot yacht, ironically named The Great Mystery, roaming from port to port in the Caribbean.
McAfee declared he was in exile for his political beliefs, that he'd been charged for speaking out.
In reality, a grand jury had indeed indicted him for tax evasion, and it was about to be unsealed.
For the next few months in 2019, McAfee led authorities on a nautical goose chase.
He would pop up online posting videos from marinas in the Bahamas or anchoring off of Cuba.
He even offered to help Cuba evade U.S. sanctions using crypto, which the Cuban government politely declined.
In July 2019, the McAfee's luck nearly ran out.
Their yacht was boarded in the Dominican Republic, and John was detained on suspicion of bringing weapons into the country.
Local officials held him for four days, but once again, John charmed or negotiated his way out.
The Dominicans released him and allowed him to fly to London rather than handing him over to U.S. agents.
In a triumphant tweet, McAfee posted a photo of him and Janice on their escape flight, grinning ear to ear.
During this period, McAfee's behavior was as erratic as ever, and it was all playing out in public.
One week, he was challenging the U.S. government to come get me.
The next, he tweeted that he had been arrested in Norway for wearing a lace thong as a face mask during the COVID-19 pandemic,
complete with a mugshot of him scowling.
When reporters asked Norway about it, they found no record of such an arrest.
McAfee later laughed it off as a hoax to trick the media.
He taunted authorities with such pranks, even as he was genuinely on the run.
In 2020, from some undisclosed bunker or boat, John mounted a second run for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination.
Not surprisingly, his 2020 presidential bid fared no better than his first, and was largely ignored by mainstream media.
But it was official. John McAfee, fugitive, was campaigning to be John McAfee, U.S. president.
The absurdity of the U.S. president was a big fan of the U.S. president.
It was lost on no one, least of all McAfee himself.
John McAfee's luck ran out in the fall of 2020.
On October 3, 2020, while attempting to board a plane in Barcelona, McAfee was arrested
by Spanish authorities.
The U.S. Department of Justice had finally unsealed its indictment, charging John with
tax evasion for failing to report over $10 million in income.
On top of that, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission hit him with civil charges alleging
McAfee had fraudulently promoted cryptocurrency ICOs, initial coin offerings, and earned $23
million for those promotions without telling investors he was paid.
At 75 years old, John McAfee was looking at the very real prospect of spending the rest
of his life in an American prison if extradited and convicted.
McAfee was thrown into a Spanish jail as the extradition proceedings began.
Ever defiant, he kept in touch with the world via Twitter through his lawyers.
His tweets from behind bars swung between upbeat and ominous.
On the one hand, he wrote in late 2020 that he liked his new life in prison,
finding the conditions good, and even making new friends,
saying he had no regrets and had found some peace.
But in another tweet, he referenced the fate of Jeffrey Epstein,
who died in jail under suspicious circumstances,
and he doubled down on his prior insistence that he would not die by his own hand.
Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine, McAfee warned.
He even got a tattoo on his arm that read whacked,
implying that he could be murdered by authorities just to get the message.
Cross. For about eight months, McAfee languished in a Spanish prison as his legal team fought
extradition. Janice McAfee, his wife, rallied behind him, tweeting updates and proclaiming
his innocence and vitality. But ultimately, the Spanish court approved John's extradition to the
U.S. on June 23, 2021. It was effectively a green light for him to be sent back to face charges
that could put him away for decades. John's reaction never came because mere hours later,
he was found dead. The official report from Spain was blunt. Suicide by hanging.
John McAfee was no more. He was 75, ending a life of infamy in a cold cell far from the tropical
beaches he loved. But in death, he died.
as in life, McAfee sparked immediate controversy. News of his apparent suicide sent shockwaves
through the media and online forums. Many recalled his own tweets and statements vowing that he would
never take his own life. Conspiracy theories exploded within hours. Some noted that his
Instagram account bizarrely posted a single image of the letter Q, a possible reference to QAnon,
just minutes after his death, fueling wild speculation that it was a coded message.
Others pointed to his whacked tattoo and claims that secret authorities wanted him silenced.
McAfee's widow, Janice, publicly stated that she does not believe John killed himself.
She met with him in prison and the days before and said he was upbeat about the situation,
fearing only that the extradition might actually succeed.
Janice questioned the Spanish authorities' rush to declare suicide and demanded a thorough investigation.
To this day, she continues to push for answers.
In the shell is written, researched, and recorded by me, the Belizean Podcaster.
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That's it. Take care, and I'll see you next time.