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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees SO4-O months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, what's scrambling my eggs? I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the ********. That's my new introduction. Sophie is crawling under the desk, so overwhelmed with shame that she can no longer sit upright. But there's no taking it out. There's no editing it. I'm. I'm sitting here in the studio with my guest, Lacey Mosley. Lacey, how are you doing? I'm doing good. Lacey, you are a comedian, an actress, also deeply embarrassed. And a scam goddess. You're. No, I love the West. Scrambling my eggs. Thank you, Peter wouldn't love that, though. No, they would not. No, no, they would not. But we lost that demographic long ago. So, Lacey, you are a scam goddess. As I already stated, you were on our episode about Karl May. Karl may? Yes. Old Shatterhand shatter hair. Hitler's favorite author. Scammer? Yes. Today we're talking about another scammer. And in fact, we're talking about a scammer who fooled me for a little while. So yeah, yeah, this is gonna get. So he's good. I don't know if I'd say he's good, but like, you know, everybody's got something they're vulnerable to from a scammer. And I think we're going to find out what your vulnerability. We've got a vulnerability to the scam this guy was popping. Great. Open on up then. Alright. Have you ever heard of John McAfee? If it's involved with the computer program? Yeah. Virus. The virus scan? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the guy who invented that. He's quite a character and that's what we'll be talking about today. John David McAfee was born in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, England on September 18th, 1945. His father was an American soldier and his mother was a British person. He was raised in Salem, VA, although other sources say Roanoke like most things about John McAfee, the story is a little different depending on who you hear it from, which is kind of one of the first signs that somebody is a little bit of a scammer right now. Mcafee's mom worked as a bank teller. His dad was a road surveyor and a drunk. McAfee says he was a very unhappy man who beat both. Don and his mother, he shot himself when John was 15, and McAfee later told Wired in an interview quote. Every day I wake up with him. Every relationship I have. He's by my side, every mistrust. He is the negotiator of that mistrust. So my life is ******. So starting this on a dark note, but also a very juicy back story, like a scammer needs, like something to feign vulnerability with. So he probably tells everybody that story. He's like, yeah, I stole $20 out of your wallet, but really my dad stole. Dollars. Who uses that? His whole life. I love it. Wait, did his dad have an accent? Do we know? No, I mean, his dad was an American. OK. I'm guessing his mom did. Would have been more excited. He is kind of a weird voice, but I wouldn't say he sounds. He doesn't. He doesn't sound British. No. Alright, because that UPS your scam level. 100.0. Yeah. I trust anything British people say? Absolutely. It's a superpower they have. It's why they ruled the world briefly. Yeah, exactly. That's why when you become rich, you become British. That's why Madonna's British now. Exactly. I soon, too, will be British. One day I'll come on this podcast and I've made enough money to talk like this. We'll continue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's it. That's a great. That's a great Madonna pretending to be British accent, by the way, because it doesn't sound British or fake British, right? It sounds Madonna. Fake British. Exactly. Specific. You nailed it. Shout out to a number one scammer, Madonna John enrolled in Roanoke College. He sold magazine Scriptions door to door in order to make money for booze, which, like his dad, he drank way too much of. In interviews, McAfee claims he made a fortune in the subscriptions business by telling people who answered the door that they'd won a free subscription. They just had to pay a shipping and handling fee. Yeah, that's the oldest. Late night TV scam ever. That's how I got my ice potty. It was free, but I just paid 2999. And shipping and handling ice potty. What? You know, not. It's not a pot tea. Like for peeing. Like, I like, you know you. It's like a bowl. It's probably not the name, but it's a bowl. And then the ice is made on the sides. And then you crack the bowl and you got a bowl of ice. I've never heard, you've never seen this infomercial. Now can you sell me one of these fantastic products? Lacey, listen. Ice without the limitations. Of plastic containers. Are you entertaining ice bucket for your wine? Are you sick? Ice bucket for your head? You see what I'm saying? It works. Nice helmet to wear out this summer. You had young, got no AC. Nice helmet. But yeah, that's how they get you y'all. And that's door to door too, so there's no way to confirm or deny. Shout out to him. Always. Door to door. People like are normally scammers. That's like the first startup scam for most scammers. And I you would think that maybe we'd have ice genie. Ice Genie, yes, genie. Sounds sexier than sponsoring this podcast. The ice genie. Yeah, get that. Ice Genie is free. You just gotta send a little money. So John got his bachelor's degree in 1967. He started studying for a PhD in mathematics at NE Louisiana State College. But he got. Expelled for sleeping with and then marrying an undergraduate student he was supposed to be managing. He bounced around several coding jobs, but his career was interrupted when he got busted buying pot. He managed to avoid any sort of conviction, probably because it was a white guy. How do you get busted by a pot? I mean, who is getting busted buying weed? This is 19, six, the 60s. So maybe it happened more. I feel like that's that's even more cause for it not to be how you got busted. We both come from Dallas. I know people who got busted buying weed. Really? Oh yeah. This feels like. The laziest way to go to jail is like weed. It has to feel dumb. 60S, wasn't it? Just going around everywhere? Like free love, free weed, I think in some places. But if he was in like Louisiana, like like a undercover cop tried to sell him weed. Hi Sir. Would you like to partake it? Would you like some marijuana marijuana, Marianne Jane? Do you like puffing on reefers? Meet me in this alley. Like, yeah, maybe he was just ****** at buying pot. But anyway, he he he got out of the charges in in 1969, the Missouri Pacific Railroad Company hired him to basically program their IBM based computers to schedule trains. Now, McAfee didn't know how to do any of this. He wrote out a fake resume and he got the job because there was no Internet back then. There's no way to check on **** like this. Yeah, yeah, him. Shout out to him. Here's Wired quote. After six months, McAfee. System began to churn out optimized train routing patterns. One morning he decided to experiment with another psychedelic called DMT. He did a line, felt nothing, and decided to snort a whole bag of the oranges powder. Within an hour my mind was Shattered, McAfee says. Part of him still believes he's still on that trip, that everything sense has been one giant hallucination, and that one day he'll snap out of it and find himself back on his couch in Saint Louis listening to Pink Floyd's dark side of the Moon. What? Have you ever had a drug trip like that? No, because I'm just. I I'm scared to go that deep. But I will say. That I have done acid, and you could definitely go to work on acid. You know, everyone's made acid out to be so crazy. I know someone who microdoses acid every single day. Yeah, and they're the happiest person I've ever ******* met. And apparently you can do your job on that. I've done a lot of different jobs on acid. One episode of this podcast was recorded on acid, but I won't tell anyone. Everyone has to get everybody's gotta guess which episode. If you guessed correct, we will send you. I'm getting. I can't send you. I will send you behind the ********. Swag. All you have to send me is $100 for shipping and handling. I'll send you some acid. All you gotta send me is. I didn't even notice you doing a scam there. Lacey. That was good. Like the furnace. You gotta have the finesse ready. You made that so smooth? Well, yes, you can do **** on acid. So are you telling me that this guy scammed his way into this job? That he had no, like routing? Routing trains. So also, can we just? Realize, how would the gravity of train routing? And they didn't even ask. They didn't even ask my man's to like route one train. You know, in a training process. They were like, here, can you show us how you route the train? Like, so trains could have been crashed and people could have just been dying left and right. People just trusted anything printed on paper back there, like, wow, ink. And it's embossed. Alright. What's this Helvetica? George, the job is yours, Sir. Put some lives in this man's hands right away. Oh, God. But then he got good at it. Well, yeah, I mean, maybe it's just not that hard. I've never routed drains. Neither have I yeah, but I can see how. Like, there's that guy Doc Ellis, who pitched a no hitter in baseball on LSD. Like, I can see how the way that acid works, how you could you could do that sort of job. Well, for sure. Like, it's about focus and stuff. I remember just staring at some trees for awhile. Yeah. Yeah. And I understand what he's saying about. Having a trip that goes so far that you're never quite sure that you've come back from it, because I've got, there's there's a couple of those. I still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes. Pretty sure I'm back in Denton at like 1:45 in the morning 12 years ago. That is a specific. I did a lot of drugs and then back in the day, right. Is this a good place? And then are you like, oh, I'm back in that, Denny, they're good. Is there a good place in Denver? This is very true. There's no good. Sorry, didn't Texas we, you know, you're trash. We all know some solid DFW area. You're right. I'm back at the Whataburger. I can tell it's Denton because there's that smell in the air, right? I need to do drugs in the Bahamas so I could think I'm back somewhere nice. Yeah, that would have been that would have been a wiser choice. So drugs did as drugs do, and McAfee accelerated into a massive, uncontrollable addiction. He started doing cocaine every morning, drinking a bottle of hard liquor every day. His marriage fell apart, you know, all the things that you would expect from a serious substance abuse problem. And I don't think he's lying about this just based on what comes next. I'm pretty sure at this part's true in the 1970s. Moved to Silicon Valley, where drugs come from, and of course his problems got even worse. But still, he was able to maintain a sometimes unstable but generally profitable career as a programmer. By 1983, he was director of Engineering at a company called Omex. He was 38 years old, selling cocaine to his employees and railing lines off his desk every morning in Santa Clara in 1983. This might have made him one of the less wild middle managers in the country. Look, I watched Wolf of Wall Street, and yeah, that **** is problematic, and I'm glad workplaces are safe, but boy oh boy would I have loved to just have one day at a job. Everybody was just doing cocaine and Quaaludes in the bathroom. **** yeah. Alright. Is everyone here for the morning meeting? Gregory? See, OK. And that's part of why I hate those guys, because they had to, like, **** with people's money and they had to, like, I mean, I guess most of them were rapey too. Ohh, like, sure, if we could have all just made it be a thing where everybody was just always doing drugs at work, what a better economy that would be. The FBI was just railing lines of, you know, PCP or something and then going out in the morning, like, yeah, but that so much energy, so much energy, you know, I mean, not much I could get done every day. Down. They wouldn't have even noticed. Like, right. It's been 30 days. I haven't slept in 30 days. Oh, I haven't gotten paid. Damn. I gotta check on this. I need to buy more. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of drugs is poor judgment. So I guess that is a big part of the John McAfee story, too. Yeah, good to know. So he describes himself at this time as constantly terrified about running out of drugs. He contemplated suicide on a daily basis, and eventually misery drove him to a therapist who sent him to Alcoholics Anonymous. And that seemed to work really well for John McAfee for a little while. He sobered up, he claims, forever. But as you'll learn, what John claims should not be taken at face value. At any rate, he told Wired his first AA meeting is what really started his life. Now sober, McAfee soared to unthinkable heights. He got a job designing software for Lockheed Martin, and it was there that he came across his very first computer virus, something called the Pakistani brain. Computer viruses get weird names. Here's a wonderful fast company article on John, written by a guy named Jeff Wise. Quote. Seeking an opportunity, he picked the virus apart and figured out how to defeat it. Then he built a program called Virus SCAN that could detect and disarm multiple threats automatically. The program the first commercial. Antivirus software was an impressive achievement, but it's what he did next that was true genius. See, John didn't start selling his antivirus instantly. He started giving it away. He just put it out there for any company to use. And this was at an early enough era that nobody else was doing this. So all these companies that had just now learned and, like, viruses were a problem. Some CEO wakes up in the morning, sees a news story, and it's like, Oh my God, we have 10,000 computers. He learns there's a free program. So all these companies start downloading John's free program hooked. You got to give them a free sample. Get him that. He's doing the same thing the drug dealers do, right? Or at least doing the same thing he did with them. Damn magazine talking. You get a free subscription? Yeah, it's free. It's free, buddy. Yeah, in no time. He had like 30 million people like using his software. And within a couple of years, half of the Fortune 500 companies used McAfee antivirus software. So we started McAfee associates out of his small home in Santa Clara, and he eventually started offering licenses to these companies. And because they were big companies, they wanted the security of knowing this isn't just a free product. They're like paying a company to maintain our stuff and make sure. So he kind of went seamlessly from free product to making millions and millions of dollars. He became the world's biggest evangelist of the apocalyptic dangers of computer viruses. He started showing up on television, invented Y2K. Is that what you're telling me? No, this is this is prior to that. We're talking, like, the late 80s. Oh, right, right. Yeah. So he would he would just show up, but he was one of the first guys showing up on TV and, like, date Daily News programs, talking about viruses. Yes. Scaring us about this. Virus is going to do this. It's gonna do this. And in 1989, he wrote a book called Computer Viruses, Worms, Data Diddlers, Killer programs, and other threats to your system. Damn. That's a lot of threat. That's a lot of threats. All this did well enough that by 1990, he was making $5 million a year off of his antivirus business. Wow. Pretty great. Yeah. My 1991, far away from John McAfee in the fabled land of Australia, another antivirus expert named Roger Riordan discovered a unique new virus coded to deliver a debilitating injection of code. March 6th, 1992 Code that would wipe out all infected computers discovered or created? No, he discovered. I mean, he's he was a researcher. Ohhh. Alright. I haven't run into anything about this guy being. Yeah, like he's found. It was his job. He's looking at stuff. Sure. This guy is not the scammer. The scams coming in US. Maybe he was. I don't. I don't know enough about that. I'm. I'm also suspect of him, but go ahead. Is because he's the Australian. Lacey, listen, you never know what's going on down under. Exactly. Because it's down under, so you can't see it. That's what makes them so shady. Anyway, yeah. So reordan named this virus. He'd found Michelangelo not because it was a work of art, but because March 6th was Michelangelo's birthday. Now, the Michelangelo virus was not actually a big deal. It had a bunch of flaws that made it not super dangerous. It hadn't been coded well, so left to its own devices, it would have made almost no impact. But John McAfee read about this virus, and he knew that there was potential in just its name because Michelangelo, that's like a Hollywood virus now. Yeah, that's a very sexy virus. Yeah, you can imagine someone explaining that. Virus to like Bruce Willis and then having to go punch people to stop it, right? Yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's just Bruce Willis or Liam Neeson. Nick chopping people. Yeah, neck chopping. Angelo for a whole movie? Yeah. Yeah. You got a solid 90 minutes out of that, right? Five or six sequence. Probably never shoots anyone. OK. He beats everyone's *** individually. Yeah, no, he's guns aren't allowed in his hands because, you know, I had half of like a Chuck Norris style joke there and I just lost it. Lazy. Damn. That's a solid Chuck Norris style joke, though. Yeah. Yeah, you could. You, you you got the pieces? Yeah, listen, someone added up. Put it together. Tweet it to us. Yeah. So John McAfee started claiming, based on nothing really, that the Michelangelo virus was going to disable 5,000,000 PCs when it started. And that was a lot in the 90s, right? That was like all the computers, right? Isn't this like the era where the computers look like on ghost, where, like, it was like green? Yeah, it was great. Everything's green and there's like, giant the monitors way more than our televisions do now. Have told us any ******* thing about viruses and you going to tell me Patrick Swayze and the ghost will really go come back and check your ****? I'm gonna be the hand in. They can strangle you from your monitor, Whoopi Goldberg said. You in danger, girl, go by McAfee. This was right around the time that Whoopi Goldberg starred in that movie next to a fake Tyrannosaurus where they were both cops. Great moment in pop culture history. A lot of people forget that movie, but they shouldn't. It was called Teddy Rex and it was amazing. It's a real movie. It was somewhere sometime in the Nice anyway. Yeah, as you just said, this was in the early 90s. Nobody knew anything about computers or viruses and stuff, so everyone just kind of, like, took Mcafee's word for this. Sure. He was on TV, he was on TV. He was like the nation's number one virus antivirus expert. That's what, like, people had called him just because nobody else was talking about it, because he was the only one was the only one. Imagine getting to just be the expert by default because nobody else. Oh yeah, it's amazing. That's the best way to make a ****. Out of money, right? Yeah. And yeah, he he nailed it. Right place at the right time. I'm gonna read a quote from a 2012 article from the website Naked Security. Thousands of PCs could crash by Friday. Screamed USA TODAY. Deadly Virus set to wreak havoc tomorrow, was a headline in the Washington Post. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times declared paint. It's scary. So this is how, like, everybody's covering this thing. Like, John McAfee talks up the Michelangelo virus, and then everybody's freaking out about how it's going to disable all these computers and crash the economy. CNN sent a film crew to Mcafee's offices because they wanted to like they were they gonna film the virus? They were hoping that, like, they be getting thousands of calls and everybody running around typing. And yeah, I hope that biography hired crisis actors. He he actually kind of did. Oh **** not quite that, but he released a special antivirus program built solely around Michelangelo. But since it was actually really easy to scan for this virus, he made the program scan a bunch of unnecessary files so it took like 10 times longer than it needed to. Because he wanted them to feel like it was doing something. I got it. Yeah, maybe I got it. It's taken so long. So McAfee, uh, had initially claimed, as I said, the virus would hit as many as 5,000,000 machines. The estimate went down to 1,000,000 by like March 2nd, 1992. And then a couple of days later, it was any. McAfee said it was anywhere between 50,000 and 5,000,000 computers. So he starts revising down the estimates as people buy his products. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's it's it was a grift. And, you know, when Michelangelo actually activated, there was only very few computers, like, like, I think. A few 100, maybe a couple of 1000, but like not a significant number, got hit. It didn't really do any damage, but that didn't actually matter, because John McAfee had succeeded in drumming up enough fear about viruses that every major company had to have antivirus software on its computers. And they all wound up using McAfee because he was the guy talking about this ****. In October of 1992, his company went public and raised $42 million in its first round. By 1994, Mcafee's personality and showmanship had made the adults in the room decide to edge. Out of his own company, he left, cashed out his stock, and wound up with around $100 million. Personality and showmanship. So he was coked up and drunk, acting a fool. Yeah, yeah, there were apparently sex contests in the office and stuff like this. Sex contest. People ******* on desks. Like, ******* on ******* on desks. I hope you can imagine me as Soulja Boy right now. Like sex contests? What? That's how you know. You really willing that work? Like, yeah, yeah. If there's a sex contest at your antivirus company. Your antivirus company. The irony of that like that real viruses just really good. A lot of people got chlamydia at the antivirus company. Antivirus company? I thought you were gonna antivirus company. Yeah, but it was some sex contest. Who won? I'm kidding. I don't want to know the virus, but it was clearly one of those things where the company was when it suddenly, when it was worth a huge amount of money and like a lot of companies relied on it, the adults that got brought in were like, this guy is a ******* nut. We can't, we can't have them running this business. Let's when other people have money involved and it's like, OK, come on back. Ohh, you're crazy, right? You're a huge liability, a gigantic problem. OK, you're not even doing miles, you're going to commit felonies. Can't have you around here like you do, the kinds of crimes where other people gotta go to jail with you. You know, you do a Trump level crimes where it's like a whole consortium of people who got to go to jail at the same time. Yeah, so no Mcafee's out. He was 47 years old with, you know, we're effectively unlimited resources and so he immediately spent $25 million buying a 280 acre compound in Colorado and a 10,000 square foot mansion. So Mcafee's out of his company, he's rich, and he is beginning the next stage of his life and we're going to get into what comes next. Yeah, but first, Lacey, are you a fan of products? Oh, you know, I love products. You like a service or two every now and then? Absolutely. I'm a big fan of both. And we've got a great list of products and or services for the ears. The people listen. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. 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Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. Hey, Robert Evans here. It's been like two months since I got LASIK laser eye surgery and my vision still 2020. So many things about my daily life has changed. I don't have to worry about putting on a mask and my glasses fogging up and have to take out contacts at night or put them in the day. I don't have to like, worry all the time when I'm traveling. Like, how many contacts do I have by go swimming at the lake during the summer? Something I like to do, go to the beach or whatever. I don't have to worry about losing a contact or, you know, bringing swimming glasses or something. With me, everything is just easier. And getting it done was easy too. You know, I went in, I had my consultation, they told me I was a good candidate and then I went back in couple of days later about it being about a boom. You know, my eyes were perfect. So LASIK Plus is a leader in laser vision correction in the United States. They have over 20 years in the industry and more than two million treatments performed. If you want to start your LASIK plus journey, you can get $1000 off when treated in September. That's 500 per eye. So visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free. Consultation now. And we're back. We just got into some products and services, and now we are talking again about John McAfee, who, at this part in our story, has bought himself a gigantic mansion and is now getting really into yoga. So that's the thing he does first after he after he gets out of this, you know, company he built as he buys a mansion in Colorado and a couple 100 acres of land and he starts a yoga retreat. OK, how does cocaine and yoga work together? He's not doing coke, he says he's sober at this. OK. And that may be true at this point. The story he may actually still be sober. I'm inclined to believe it. Yeah, because yoga doesn't seem like like relaxing. Yeah, you know, cocaine. Yoga. Alright guys, not mistake. Mistake, *************. Alright, guys, we're getting child. Yeah, I feel like that's too intense. OK, cool. I'll believe you. Yeah, McAfee, yeah, he got really into yoga starts doing yoga retreats, and he also launches an app called Pow Wow, which was a very early chat client. When I read an article about it in the register, it was described as Native American themed. I don't know what the hell that does that mean, like the Redskins? That's not a good idea. I don't know. I'm not sure if it was offensively done or not, but probably to have been. It was the 90s. So yeah, almost certainly about Native American themes. Sounds like it's not offensive. I think really bad. You know, it was African American themes. Yeah, I'll get it right. Chicken, watermelon. Like, I'm black, guys. And I say that I'm black. I can say that. But yeah, that doesn't sound good. That sounds bad. No. Especially since John McAfee is a guy with very prominent tribal tattoos on both of his arms. Is he Native American? No, he is. He is as white a man as it gets. His last name is McAfee. You don't know about the tribe? Was it killed out of water Buffalo? See, now I'm going to hell yeah. No, this doesn't sound good. So here's an app. He has an app. Some people say that it was ahead of its time. It was like a chat client, like AIM, you know, those of you who are old enough to have used AOL instant messenger or like Skype chat or whatever. But before anyone else was doing a chat client, it didn't clearly win out and dominate the market, but he was able to sell the venture for like $17 million before Amen Skype, you know, came into it. So he made more money. He did good. But he decided this was all of the business he wanted to be into. For the rest of his life, after selling Pow wow, he vowed to devote himself to quote the opposite of the business world. What are you both laughing at, Sophie? Just show me a picture of John McAfee. Well, good, he looks like if Richard Branson. Did more drugs than Richard Branson does. Yeah, like if Richard Branson was in a motorcycle gang and then for some reason was stranded on the island and lost a bunch of weight. Yeah, so 90% of pictures of John McAfee, he's shirtless, and in 50% of those pictures he's armed. He has a tie on in this way. Shirtless with a tie. Where are we going? And it'll often be shirtless with a gun strapped around his chest. Oh my God. John McAfee. All right, we're getting he's not that man yet right now. He's the recent, he's yoga. He's doing yoga. He's a Native American. He's just decided he's he's tired of business. He wants to be into the opposite of the business world for the rest of his life. So he starts teaching yoga and he wrote like 4 books on yoga, which I haven't been able to read yet. I read some reviews of them and they seem. Like, they were pretty normal for the most part. If you're like into that kind of stuff or books from a white dude on yoga, yoga, oha ton of white dudes have written yoga book. That's true. And I don't buy them. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm not saying I'd buy them, but like, none of the reviews are like, he's talking about ******* aliens or anything, right? The people who buy it, like they're in the they want that. Yeah, apparently one of them does talk about time travel, telepathy, and levitation. OK, so it is possible that John McAfee believes or believed at one point that he could read minds if I had that much money. I don't think I could. Why? Not sure. I can see that leading you into some wild places, which is that's what the story is about. So that kind of thing spiraled until the compound had turned into like, a really active yoga retreat, and John McAfee decided that that was too much work, so he kind of pieced the **** out. So in August 2002, on a flight to Kathmandu, John McAfee read an article about a device called a trike. Now, trikes are basically motorcycles attached to small planes. They can travel at around 100 miles an hour. Zip along. At just 20 or 30 feet above the ground, McAfee was enchanted by this idea. He started going out to New Mexico, learning how to fly by Jaunting from airport to airport. And this is like his new rich man hobby that he ******* falls in love with. So, like, **** yoga. **** Colorado. I'm going to, I'm going to fly around in these weird little motorcycle planes. This bike planes. Yeah. So in 2003 he bought a tricked out Jeep and he and his girlfriend, who was like in her mid 20s at this point, of course. Yeah. And he's like 50s. He's like late 40s. OK? Yeah. Right. Yeah, I mean it's not like criminal, but it's like kind of what you'd expect from a 47 year old guy with $100 million in the way you're gonna have. You're gonna start dating the 24 year old. Yeah, sure, whatever you're doing. What a million other guys who got rich have done. Yeah, so he and his girlfriend start like driving around in a Jeep looking for beautiful landmarks in the desert to build rudimentary airports on. They decided like the real problem with these trikes is that you had to have airstrips to Landon. So like you couldn't really go anywhere that pretty because they didn't have like crazy range. So you just have to fly from one town's airport to the next. Nobody wants to do that. So they started like finding all these beautiful body once the bike, the black plane there. No, he wanted to like fly around canyons in the middle of the high desert and stuff. So he like made all these airstrips in the middle of the desert. He bought hundreds of acres of land and made a bunch of like a network of airstrips and like. The idea was to turn Aero trekking, which he is like the name he coined for the sport, into like a ****** extreme sport where people would have adventures and like the wild desert flying from these isolated little airstrip to airstrip. And like, this network you build made that possible. So when he talked to the Wall Street Journal, McAfee explained. My personality is such that I can't do something halfway, which, you know, that's true. He follows through. He follows through. In 2004, John McAfee founded the Sky Gypsies, who basically served. Was he always using some problematic terminology? First he has a Native American app. Now he got the sky Gypsy. Like, what else is he gonna come out with? OK, let me have like, the N word vote, like what is happening? Yeah, I mean. You don't have to include groups of people into these sales. But no, don't point at me like that. This, this story, Lacey ends with both a boat and racism, but not quite that way. I I have not read this, guys. I have no idea what's happening. I'm so upset that I'm guessing, I guess because my scammer brain. I understand. Yeah, but I will say shout out to the gold digger. Why am I gonna call her gold digger? Maybe she wasn't gold digger, but I don't get super. I don't get super hot for like, old dudes, but if they got money, ooh you sexy now. But. He's out here riding around in the desert with this food. Normally, you just go to nice dinners and they take you on vacation. Like, she must have really loved him. I think she. Yeah. And it seems like she was having a a. Like, they seem to have had, like a good time for a while. It seems like it was one of those things where she was like, yeah, I'll go have adventures in the desert for four years. Right. That sounds great. I feel like I would come up dead. That sounds like some Scott Peterson type. Don't come back from those. No, thanks. And a couple of people do come up dead in the John McAfee story. OK. I'm going to stop talking. But not her. Not her. So yeah, the the sky. Gypsies were all arrow trackers too. They were a mix of other rich people McAfee liked and random strangers. He plucked out of obscurity and gave a role in his weird flying club. He bought an enormous house with several hangars in rural New Mexico and filled it with vintage automobiles he and his friends could offroad in the Skype. Gypsies grew to 200 members each, paying between 500 and $270,000 a year for the right to hang out with John and fly baby planes. So like some of them were like random people would read about him and like travel to his compound, and especially if they were a young woman. Be like, sure, we'll just train you how to fly and it's free. And then some of them were like his millionaire friends where, you know, they pay a **** load of money, but damn, that was this was like the fire festival but with, like, bike planes. Well, but they actually did it. Scissors. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like, it wasn't like it was a real thing. Like, they built this network of run and runways and they flew around around for years. So, like, it's not a total scan. No, it's not a scam. Yeah, it's not a scam. Yeah. And it's like, it's one of those things he was charging them because there's upkeep on the runways, which I'm sure there is. Absolutely. So here's how the Wall Street Journal described John Mcafee's life at this time quote. From May through October, when winds and temperatures are most favorable, as many as 150 pilots in their aircraft descend on rodeo, which is where his compound was, and other airports, and stay for weeks at a time. At night, Mr McAfee and his compadres, some of whom are retired engineers, physicians and fellow multimillionaires, often gathered before the large television set on his village patio to watch a selection of the 6000 DVD's in his personal library. One night, a group of gypsies, including Mr McAfee, decided they wanted tattoos. They drew 160 miles to a seedy parlor and festoon themselves with tattoos of the ornate Celtic wing the Sky Gypsies, adopted as their logo. The group's quirky website describes Mr McAfee and his 27 year old girlfriend as John and Jen, 2 derelicts who didn't lose their last names but have never divulged them. We don't have a clue about them, it adds. So that's how all this being built at the time. It's fun, it's carefree. We just don't sound like sobriety. It sounds like what? A guy who loves being wasted. And then. He knows he can't do that anymore because he'll kill himself, but has unlimited money. Does instead of drugs. I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna spend all day flying in planes as fast as I can. 20 didn't get a thrill. Yeah, to get that thrill. And, like, John and Jen keep a bunch of people around me, so I never alone two. Yeah. OK. You know, if you're the kind of person who has a huge drug problem, you're always that kind of person. You just gotta find something to throw yourself into. That's like a new drug. Yeah. And that's. And this is. I mean, this is healthier than cocaine. Yeah, that's true. So far, it's whatever. You know, he's not a monster yet. He's just. No, you know what? This is just weird, but it's like rich people weird so far. This is the story of a scammer who cashed out and then did something cool. Yeah, other than the cultural appropriation, but, like, I don't have a problem with flying around in the desert. Like, thing like, so y'all just went and got some symbols. I don't know what the **** these mean. McAfee is as I'm sure. I think that part is probably not. Like, maybe he's probably Scott's Irish. I'm gonna guess he knows anything about Celtic. And his mom came from England. McAfee, that one sounds OK yeah, you can have a Celtic wing if you get a Mac in your name, right? Right, right. Is cool and extreme as John's life. Was that bad attitude like using the word bad attitude? I haven't gotten to use that since the 90s. Was not without cost to steal an incredible sentence from digital trends writer Andrew Kootz quote The Sky Gypsies would later prove to be one of Mcafee's various downfalls. Of a sentence Sky Gypsies just sounds like it couldn't fail. Yeah, it sounds like it. How could this go wrong? Near the end of 2006, Mcafee's 21 year old nephew Joe Bitto, the head of the Sky Gypsies Flight school, went up on a training flight with an aspiring gypsy named Robert Gibson. Nepotism. Nepotism. Ohh yeah, dangerous nepotism. Mr Gibson was 61 years old, roughly the same age as John McAfee, and newly retired. Like John, he decided that arrow trekking was a great way to spend his golden years. There was only one problem, and it was that Joel, ostensibly the head trainer, only had a sport pilot certificate, not an actual pilots license. Now. Fast Company interviewed an FAA spokesperson about this who said, quote, someone with a sport pilot certificate cannot be paid for providing instruction. So legally this is a little bit of a Gray area. You're not specifically banned from teaching people how to fly. You've got a sport pilot certificate which you can't be paid to. It can't be your job. Which means that we can't entrust because we can't trust that you know what you're doing. So you can't. Like, if you want to teach your friend how to fly, we can't stop you. But like, you can't be the head of a flight school, right? Right, right. Like, I can do my friends here at home, but I can't open a salon and everybody's here, or your your uncle can't hire you to run his desert flight school. Way higher stakes and like, you're teaching me how to fly, and you don't know how to fly yourself, right? So he's also a scammer. Runs in the family. Shout out to the family. Yeah, so these two guys, Joe Bitto and Robert Gibson, go out flying, and they wind up flying through a box Canyon, which is apparently the most dangerous thing to fly through because there's very little, and he crashes and they both die horribly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the fast company article goes into more detail about Mcafee's reaction to the death of both his nephew and an innocent. Groupon quote after the accident, McAfee says he struggled to understand how it could have happened. He speculates, how could putting an untrained man in charge of a pilot school fail? OK, cool. So he didn't know how to fight planes. Yeah. But still, basically, McAfee, like, posited that the old guy had been sick and had had a heart attack during the flight and had, like, fallen under the kites wing. So he made-up a whole he just. He just lies. No, dude, you're you're untrained and nephew got them both killed. Yeah. And isn't that. Plot to that one book. What's that book called? You don't know. You know what? The pilot has a heart attack, and then the kid is out with an axe. The hatchet. Hatchet, that's the plot of the hatchet. That is kind of the plot of hatchet, except for the kid is the guy flying and dies, right? He was like, how could I spend this? Yeah, he had a heart attack anyway. Quote, to honor Vito's Memory, McAfee had the image of a single teardrop added below his Sky Gypsies tattoo. Yeah. So he murdered his nephew. Is that what he's trying to say, too? Kind of right. That he did murder. He did murder his nephew. Accurate, this is. I'll say that. That's a fair that that part's not appropriation. No, you did kill two guys. Carry on. In an interview later, McAfee said, quote, Arrow tricking can create an Ave for self-awareness. He told me seven months after Bitto and Gilson died. You find self-awareness by breaking boundaries, breaking taboos. Do you think you'll ever get bored of this too? I asked. I anticipate that happening, he said it doesn't worry me at all. It's a seven months after he gets two people killed, he's already spun it into something. Optimist? Yeah, it's just whatever. Yeah. You know, people die sometimes. They your nephew? Yes. Sometimes they're your nephew, sometimes they're your nephew. For your unregistered flight school. That's just the way it goes. In 2009, the housing market crashed and the rest of the economy followed soon after 2008. Actually, the rest of the economy followed soon after. For a brief time, Hack journalist did a brisk business writing articles about former industry Titans who'd also lost a lot of money in the crash. Perhaps the most prominent of these was John McAfee. Here's an excerpt from an ABC News article at the time titled Antivirus Software. Pioneer gets a dose of reality. Quote like many wealthy Americans, McAfee was hit hard with the simultaneous collapse of real estate, stocks and Wall Street. Investment banks. But he got whacked more than most, since much of his fortune was tied up in luxury properties. Oddly enough, when real estate markets crash, it's the higher end properties that crash, most simply because they're not necessities, he said. My father always said real estate, you can't lose in real estate, you know? Oddly enough, you can. So, yeah, he he put his property in New Mexico up for auction, sold his property in Colorado. Various sources I found say he was claiming his wealth had been reduced to less than $10 million. Sometimes less than five million. Wow. Yeah. McAfee sold everything, and later in 2009, he moved to Belize. So was he not making any money off of flying? Well, air bikes? OK, that was all a scam. Rumors started floating in the air show circuit that he had moved to Belize and been in all of these articles about how he lost his fortune in order to hide the fact that he still had most of his money and move his assets, you know, out of the country into movies. So he he get he gets on the news and he was like, yeah, you know, I lost all my money. I lost all my money, yeah, yadda yadda. Yeah, yeah. But. Really? He's just shoving stuff over to Belize because he knows that. Like the family of this guy who died at his flights, it's gonna sue his ***. Yes. Shout out to him. He was like this disparaging article. I'll take it. He was like, yeah, we're cold. This is going to work out great. Yeah, in the years since the crash, John McAfee has repeatedly and openly claimed that these stories about the collapse of his fortune were all lies told to protect himself from the many frivolous lawsuits against him. In 2017, he told ABC News in an in an interview quote. I've had 200 lawsuits in my life because my name is John McAfee. No, I didn't lose everything. I wanted to stop people from trying to sue me. So John didn't move to Belize alone. He brought along a small entourage, including some of his Sky Gypsies and his long term girlfriend, Jennifer Irwin. Wired talked to her around this time quote. John has always been searching for something, says Jennifer Irwin. She remembers him telling her once that he was trying to reach the expansive horizon, but that expansive horizon seemed to be rushing away from John. He was in his early 60s now, his negligence had ruined his weird airplane club, and he was hiding his assets from a multitude of lawsuits. To make all that even worse, he was getting old. John seems to be one of those people who's always just been sort of naturally robust. He has a high tolerance for substances. He probably recovers quickly when he, you know, has a drug binge. He seems to have a fast metabolism that all aided him during his 20 years of being a rich adventure junkie. But vitality only lasts so long without chemical assistance. So John McAfee started injecting his **** with testosterone twice a month. He moved into a beachside mansion in Belize at an expat heavy community called Ambergris Cay. There he launched a cigar company coffee company. In a water taxi company, he claimed he was basically handing the business to locals for free, but it's just as likely that this was part of some scheme to hide his money now. He also took up a hobby of lying about himself on the Internet. During this time, he would claim to live in different countries than he did. He would put up false Facebook posts to make it look like he was building houses in countries where he didn't reside. That sort of thing. Jeff Wise wrote about this quote. Like many of Mcafee's pranks, these gags are both fun and purposeful. There are he mentions 5 civil lawsuits against him currently pending in the United States. That's how it is in the states, he says. If people know you have money, they'll sue you. And his Facebook sham was just a harmless game of cat and mouse, the judge. In one case, he couldn't understand why it would put incorrect information about myself on the web, he says. I told him when I put that up, I wasn't Underoath he asked me why I would do such a thing. I said I thought that if somebody wanted to serve me papers, it would be much more enjoyable for everyone involved if they tried to serve those papers to me in Honduras. So John McAfee moves to Belize, just starts lying about himself to everyone he can, every journalist he can, and around this time. He starts claiming in another interview that he started a business that's like rich people paying to watch other people do yoga because he claims that studies show that you've gained benefits from exercise by watching people exercise. So he tells that to a journalist, but it's all just a lie. Like, he's just lying to reporters all the time. Like, this was a great plan. Yeah, we don't know where he lives. I don't know if he's got money. He's just lying to everyone about everything about him and if you're going to do the things that John McAfee is about to do. 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During his second year there, he met a young doctor named Allison Adonizio. Here's how she described her journey to Jeff Wise. When I turned 30I cried on paper. Everyone envied me. I just bought a house. I had a partner and a job at Harvard. I just got in a grant from the National Institutes of Health for a three-year research program. I realized that the prospect of spending another three years in the lab was incredibly depressing. So I wrote a letter to a bunch of resorts in Belize asking if I could come down at work and play. The guitar. So this young woman who just finishes getting her medical degree flies down to Belize to spend like a year playing guitar, chilling out and like living, having, having fun before, so envious of these lots. And then I was just like, I want to go somewhere and play my guitar. Yeah, I want to fly a air bike. Like, what the **** is kind of lives are these like which I get up and pay my bills every *** **** day. I ain't flying no air bike and playing no damn guitar, like. And then also the people that McAfee took with him to Brazil was like, hey y'all y'all, wanna just come live in? Or in Belize. I think their job was just being part of his entourage. Like they were just a millionaires entourage. And that's your gig. That's a solid employment well, and and Allison found what she thought was solid employment this way. So she winds up playing guitar at a bar where McAfee is, and he starts talking to her and she talks to him about, like, the research that she wants to do and like what she's going to do when she goes back home. And the research she was doing was in something called quorum testing. So it's like a way to fight bacteria without using antibiotics. It's like other kinds of substances that. They don't kill bacteria, but they reprogram them so they're not dangerous. So this is the research Alison wanted to get into, right? So she tells McAfee about all this, and he's like, hell, I'll fund your research. I'm a crazy millionaire out here because she's talking about, like, how, Oh yeah, they find a lot of these chemicals and, like, plants and stuff like jungle plants. There's a lot of different medicines in them. And he's like, yeah, it's great. That's great. I'll give you a bunch of money. You'll find medicine out here. Like, so yeah, that John McAfee hires this doctor lady sight unseen and decides he's going to get into the business of making medicine. OK, yeah. So why not? Why not so well in every other business? Trains, planes, automobiles. Yeah. Autoimmune diseases in the **** yeah, it's the natural evolution of of what he's into. So funding Allison's research quickly turned into John McAfee buying a bunch of land in an isolated jungle chunk of Belize, building a compound there, and creating a laboratory for Doctor Anisio to work in. The stated goal of this lab was to find new bacteria fighting medicines, but very quickly things started to get weird. Oh, I know, I know. Next contest. Weird. Or. You wish it was sex contest. Weird. Although there's some there's some sex stuff coming up and I've been to Belize. It's like very ugly there. What? Yeah. And they're like, no, hell no. Like the beaches are gross and there's a lot of jungle life and plants. You don't like jungle life and plants and cashew plants. What the **** is that? It's it's trash. Don't go to police. I'm going to say go to don't go. Just don't be John McAfee. Only go if you are John McAfee. So he creates this plant. So he creates this, this thing in the jungle, this, this, this, this lab in the jungle. And he moves his doctor out there and yeah, yeah, he starts inviting journalists over to his jungle compound to talk about his new venture, including our friend Jeff Wise at Fast Company. Now, Jeff visited in early 2010, and at that time most of McAfee **** seemed to be together. So McAfee said **** like for 20 years I played around and now I'm serious about doing something positive. So he's trying to like, I'm going to, you know, especially since he just got two people. Build I'm gonna do a do a good thing here. I'm going to give back to the world, right? And provide you heal the planet. So there were some signs that things might be wrong. McAfee lied to wise and told him that he and doctor Addonizio had been working together for two years when they've been working together for seven months. He also called her like a a leading mind in the field when she was really just starting out. Like, so he's overselling this guitar in a bar. Yeah, he oversells everything to reporters, but there is a lab they are working on stuff. She seems to be seriously trying to do something. But during that interview in 2010, McAfee kind of like suddenly dropped the information that his company mission had expanded beyond making medicine to making **** drugs. So **** drug, **** drugs. So there were sex contests happening, probably. I mean, between Mr McAfee and himself, he just can't stop. He just can't stop. So he he basically the the way Allison told Jeff Wise, the journalist who's interviewing her, is that McAfee? Suddenly came to her with a brainstorm. What if what if we tried to find, like, an herbal compound that would be a libido booster to women, you know? Then we could make a bunch of money, which we could use to fund our other research into medicine. So is this like, his own personal problem? He's like, ladies are no longer aroused by me. Can you make something he's like, using this for his own drug compound? He's like, can you make something that makes me sexier to women? Yeah. Yeah. That might be what's going on. So he's just trying to make like, Spanish fly in a lab? Yeah, it's it's also he. I don't think he has much of an attention span look. OK, so that might be part of it, makes sense. It's certainly part creepy, but it also might part be John McAfee can't focus on anything from they were trying to save lives, but how do we go from saving lives to like those ****** **** pills that they ******* tell in the gas station? He went from saving lives to like, extend like, what happened that was. Yeah, that is a really quick amount of time. Sleep yeah. So the next major article about John McAfee was published in late 2012 by Wire's Joshua Davis. So in the two years between that fast company article where John announces that he is making **** drugs and it is into medicine, and 2012 when wired gets on on things, John's condition degenerated substantially. The Wired article revealed that McAfee had started spending increasing periods of time in an isolated town named Orange Walk, which was kind of near his drug making compound. Now in emails to friends. John described Orange walk as quote the ******* of the world, he wrote in one e-mail quote. My fragile connection with the world of polite society has without a doubt been severed. My attire would rank me among the worst dressed Tijuana pan handlers. My hygiene is no better. Yesterday, for the first time, I urinated in public in broad daylight. So John John's going through some ****. OK? Yeah, them drugs catching up or or maybe it maybe drugs. We will be talking about that. I mean, like the ones that he did in the past. Yeah. And maybe the guilt from killing his nephew and that old guy. Ohh, you think I maybe he has some sociopathic tendencies. Yeah, feel like he might have slept well on that one. And just either way, for whatever reason, when he first moves to Belize, he moves to this, like, beautiful mansion on the beach and like a really nice part of Belize, like a resort part of town. And he quickly leaves that to go build a compound in the jungle and like a place nobody goes, like, where everybody's really poor and like, it's not like a tourist spot. So he like, builds a compound in the jungle and then he leaves there to go hang out in a dirt. Or small town and like, sit around in a really grimy bar and watch prostitutes all day and not drink like that's. That's what John Mcafee's life turns into at this point. So while he's hanging out at that bar watching prostitutes, he gets to know several prostitutes. Everything. Like just being a weird old guy hanging out in a bar watching teenage prostitutes. Oh God. OK, so he winds up falling in love with one of these teenagers. Of course he does. Of course he does. A 16 year old girl named Emshwiller and 16 is the age of consent in Belize, so he's not committing a crime in Belize. That is important, although morally, I don't think 5060 year olds should **** 16 year old. But there's no, it's not like illegal, right? So he dumps his longtime girlfriend for this 16 year old prostitute. He brings the prostitute in Childer to his compound and then she almost murders him according to that wild wired. Not too hard? Well, shout out to her. What her name? Emshwiller emshwiller? Yes, Eschweiler Eschweiler schilder, yeah. According to Wired quote, she slipped out of bed and pulled McAfee Smith and Wesson out of a holster hanging from an ancient Tibetan gong in his bedroom. Her plan, if it could be called that, was to kill him and make off with as much cash as she could scrounge up. She crept up to the foot of the bed, aimed, and started to pull the trigger. But at the last moment, she closed her eyes and the bullet went wide, ripping through a pillow. I guess I didn't want to kill the ******* she admits. So. This will not be the last time that one of John Mcafee's lovers almost gets him murdered. Also, he's old as hell, since you definitely did not have to murder him to make off with his cash. You could have just stole small amounts every day. Yeah, yeah, you know, you would have been fine. I mean, maybe he's just the kind of guy you want to shoot. He does seem that way. So after he moved to Belize, John's old entourage gradually faded away and was replaced by increasing numbers of young women, including the teenage emshwiller and heavily armed Belize. In men with criminal backgrounds, these became. R Kelly of Belize, yeah, but like. Less evil, but shadier. So, like, R Kelly doesn't hang around with like convicted murderers and is always, well, actually, our R Kelly isn't constantly photographed with gang members holding guns next to him, which McAfee is during this. There's always big like Belize in guys with criminal backgrounds holding like scoped rifles, standing behind him with like a pack of wild dogs around him. Like, that's every picture of John McAfee and believes he is shirtless. He's surrounded by large Belize and men holding rifles. And like a gaggle of teenage girls and a bunch of dogs. So this is like the El Chapo phase of his career. Yeah. This is the Chapo phase of his career. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I would. I would definitely say chop Ish. Although, like R Kelly, we are about to get into a rape allegation. So, yeah, I mean, that's not totally off base. Yeah. No, it's not shocking either. All monsters have more in common with each other than than they don't. Absolutely. I mean, this guy was doing sex contest, so we pretty much knew he was a deviant. You know, back in the day I was doing that. Clients, like, I don't even know if that's devious. Like, for all we know, he was assaulting people there. Yeah, he might have been. I haven't heard any allegations. Yeah, well, there's not allegations yet. When those people were interviewed, most of them seemed to think fondly at that time. So may have just been a bunch of weirdos that have enough **** company together. Listen, sometimes you get the right one, sometimes you find the right crew, OK? So in 2011, John McAfee was raided by the Belizean authorities on suspicion of producing methamphetamine. According to Wired's reporting, McAfee initially stormed out naked, wielding a handgun. But once he realized what was happening, he put down his gun and went inside to get pants. He was arrested there by the police and police commandos. When he was told they suspected him of making meth, he told them. That is a startling hypothesis, Sir, because I haven't sold drugs since 1983. Hey, hey, it's telling the truth. Telling the truth. So the rate hauled out a bunch of guns and someone unidentified. Crystalline chemical, John claimed, was related to he and doctor Attanasio's work, but Belize tested the substance and it wasn't meth or anything else illegal. They weren't really sure what the hell it was. To this day, there is no conclusive answer as to what exactly John McAfee was making in that jungle, although in Part 2 we will talk about the best theory. It's worth noting this was right around the time when John McAfee started posting on the drug Forum blue light about his growing affinity for bath salts, specifically a drug called MDPV. Now, if you've never done MDPV. How would I describe MD's? Too many letters for me. I'm not doing a drug with more than two letters. Ohh I'd love four letter drugs. DP QH that sounds like my life will never be the same. Ohh no, MDPV is like if Adderall. Hit you in the face before it started to work. Like that's that's MDP. It's like angry ****** *** Adderall. That's that's how I describe MVPD drugs, to be angry kind of people who take MDPV. That's one of the face eating drugs. To the bath salts everybody was talking about back then. Now, when Wired talked to him, McAfee claimed that all of the writing he'd done about bath salts on the Internet was actually just another gag to stir up the waters and suffuse everybody. Yeah, quote, it was the most tongue in cheek thing in the ******* world. If I'm going to do drugs, I'm going to do something that I know is good. I'm going to grab some mushrooms, number one, and maybe get some really fine cocaine. So maybe that's true. Maybe he was lying about bath salts on the Internet to throw everyone off the case, but I have read through the posts that he put up on blue light. They're pretty intricate. John Post pictures of lab equipment and asks for very technical advice on how to produce a drug. He seems to know a lot about other people in the forum who are drug chemists. Like give him serious answers. It's not just, you know, bro, this drugs awesome talk. It's like shop talk from chemist to chemist. So maybe it's all a scam. Or maybe him trying to make it into a scam as the scam and John McAfee was doing the **** load of bath salts. It would make some of this make more sense because you know, nobody asked for like. No one asked for specific detail information about making drugs. It's like, no, this is another one of my hygiene. It's one of my hijacks. John, you're talking for pages about how to, like, distill this stuff properly. Let you. I got you, suckers. You had all those pages, didn't you know? You literally had chemicals in your house, you had pictures of beakers, and you're doing stuff. And yeah, I was trying to make Superman. Whatever the truth about John's experimentation with bath salts, his behavior after this point ratchets up to a level of intensity that I think crosses the line into mandis and may, in fact, be the result of a drug addiction. Maybe bath salts, maybe something else, but you remember that 16 year old prostitute? He was in love with him. She Wilder, who tried to shoot him, who tried to shoot him but then didn't. Well, she started telling him dire stories about a nearby town called Carmelita, which shout out to Warren Zevon, she said, was a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Basically, she starts telling him this. Town is filled with monstrous criminals who rape and torture with impunity. And it's a big, like, secret drug hub network and all this terrible stuff. So he kept her around after she tried to shoot him. Oh yeah, of course. Did he not wake up when the gun was? No, he did. And he took the gun out of her hands. But he forgave her. He was like, girl quit playing. He just he gave her a separate bungalow. Yeah, that's kind of this. That's not the only time he does that. Damn, he's forgiving. He's forgiving. I'll give that to John McAfee. Likewise levels. You can stay angry. Oh my God. Go to the guesthouse, give me the gun. And Schilder not even the second person to shoot at me today? She will. I'm John McAfee. So. McAfee told Wired later quote Carmelita was literally the Wild West. I didn't realize that 2 miles away was the most corrupt village on the planet. So McAfee says that out of concern that this teenager who tried to kill him, like, was telling the truth about this dangerous town, he basically decided to become Batman there. So Mcafee's next big move is to start using his wealth to fight crime in the town of Carmel. Bruce Wayne? Yeah, Bruce Wayne. So he buys a small cement house and hires workers to basically build a jail because the town hadn't had a jail. He calls the cops like responsible for the area and tells them to start arresting people. And when the police were like, we don't really have any equipment to like, do that with. He starts buying M sixteens boots, pepper spray, stun guns and **** like that. M16. You couldn't just get them handguns. They need no John McAfee, John McAfee says. This is serious crime going on here. I need to be able to shoot 20 people in one time. Some people who actually lived in the area said that McAfee basically made himself a private army and started issuing orders to like, go after. People that he didn't like. And he starts, he confronts some of these people that he says are criminals with like guns in their own homes. And it's like low key colonizing believes, yeah, yeah, he's he's a one man colonizing one man colonizer. And this is a poor ***. Like the journalist Josh Smith. The journalist actually went to Carmelita to try and see like, is this a dangerous no man's land? Like, did he stumble onto a real terrible place that needs fixing? And he just finds a poor village filled with people who had no ******* idea what, John? Have ever heard I have ever. I don't think anybody has lived a white or white man life than John McAfee. He did everything he did. He's done all the white man things. Everything. He started for company and based off last he scammed his way. No in this ends with him running for president. Oh my God. Shout out to him. He did. He. He taught, yo. Bingo card. But he across the board, through the middle, the free space, everything. And I'm such a white guy. I didn't even realize that until you said it. Like, yeah, you're he did do everything that a white guy can do. Listen, this is what I will say about McAfee. You talk about taking advantage of some privilege? Yes. ************* took advantage to the fullest extent. He squeezed all of the juice out of whiteness. I'm not even mad at it. There is. There is no more white privilege left in his privilege sponge. He is. He is. He is. Bringing out all the every drop. I'm not mad at it. I'm, I'm, I'm really not mad at it. Yeah. So one of the village elders who that that journalist Joshua Smith interviewed said, quote, I thought he would come by, introduce himself and explain what he was doing here, but he never did. He just showed up and started telling us what to do. And it worked, and it worked. And it worked well and there was much crime to stop. But he got to play Batman for a while. I don't even think that girl told him there was some crime there. You just probably made that **** up. He was like my girlfriend that I found at the bar. So now, at this point, Dr Attanasio, who's remember still trying to make medicine here, started worrying about John McAfee. Over the months they'd work together, she'd noticed him hiring more and more armed men. She'd also noticed that his room at the compound was filmed with literal garbage bags of money and boxes of Viagra and other unidentified pharmaceuticals. She decided to leave the country. And in 2012, when that Wired article was written, that's all anyone knew about the end of their working relationship, she just told Wire. Basically, like, I just, I just left, you know, four years later in 2016. Doctor Addonizio talked in Annette Bernstein for a Showtime documentary on John Mcafee's life. She gave a very different story than one that paints John McAfee not as a fun, wacky, libertarian, kooky character, but as a monster. And we're going to play an excerpt from that right now. He would talk about how he could have people hurt or killed and. You know, honestly, I was. I was scared. It planned to leave. But I needed to figure out how to do it, you know? I went to talk to him. He sat there on the couch and I and I told him everything. I said, look, I don't, I don't like what you're doing. I I'm not getting anywhere with my work. I feel undermined and. Now I miss my family. I want to go home. And you know, I had a headache. I was, I was crying so much. I I told him I had a headache and and he. He brought me. He, you know, he went into the other room and and he brought me. 2 pills and a glass of orange juice and. So I took them, I you know, and I I took a sip of the orange juice and it it tasted foul. It tasted bitter. Such an idiot, I I remember I made a joke about not being able to get good orange juice in a place called Orange Walk. Like I honestly. So. She claims that. Basically, she blacked out after that point. Something was in the orange juice pretty clearly, and she has snatches of memory and one of them is John McAfee standing over her, naked. She alleges that he raped her. It seems like a pretty credible allegation. Yeah, me. Also, it doesn't seem. I don't have a whole lot of trouble imagining John McAfee being a ****** after everything we've talked about. Stockpiling Viagra. Yeah. So she was just trying to leave. She was obviously what? I mean, the fact that she went off with this millionaire and to a compound to, like, try to do drug research, that was all crazy. But, like, that's the kind of crazy anyone you get him at the right point with the right thing. If you're the type of person who leaves the country to go play guitar, chances are, like, yeah, you would. Why not take a chance? And obviously, it had gone OK. It's like he did put in the money to build by our last said he was gonna do. But like, she came to you and said that she wanted to go home. Like, that is just so disgusting. Like, oh, what a ***** ** ****. Yeah, yeah. And this is a dark and terrible note to end our first episode on, but it's the note that we're going to end on in the next episode starts with murder. Ohh, tight. Buckle up. Enjoy that. Lacey, you want to plug your plegables before we we we roll off. Damn. I need to distance myself from that. I know I should. I didn't know where to stick that, but I felt like the very end. You know, if you like. No. The sentence of that poor woman is just the worst way to lead into any kind of pivot, right that poor woman if you're looking for a bed. Sad, no. Yeah. But the shout out to her. So sad. I'm scam. Got it. So I I do love scams, but I don't hurt people, guys, I swear. Yeah. good-natured scams. Yeah, good-natured scams. That's not me, but yeah. So look out for my podcast, scam goddess. If you follow me on Twitter at Diva Lacey DIVALACI or on Instagram at Diva LACDIVALACI, I'll have more updates there. And I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at Irido. OK. You can find this podcast on the Internet. Behindthebastards.com you can find us on Instagram, at Twitter, at ******** pod. You can buy T-shirts. You can buy cups, you can buy stickers. You can buy the mummified hand of an Egyptian pharaoh. All on teepublic.com, all branded with behind the ******** logos and special Mummy fighting witchcraft. Buy it products. Yay. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's SPR. Eaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Life on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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