Behind the Bastards - Part One: John McAfee Is Not Funny Anymore

Episode Date: February 12, 2019

In Episode 47, Robert is joined by Laci Mosley to discuss how John McAfee became a violent con man. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm 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. No, I love what's scrambled in my eggs.

Thank you. Pita wouldn't love that, though. 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 Carl May. Oh, Shatterhand. Oh, Shatterhand.

Hitler's favorite author, Scammer. 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, this is going to get... So, he's good. I don't know if I'd say he's good, but everybody's got something they're vulnerable to from a scammer. We're going to find out what your vulnerability is. Yeah, I've got a vulnerability to the scam this guy was popping out.

Oh, great. Open on up then. All right. Have you ever heard of John McAfee? If it's involved with the computer program, like the virus scam. The virus scam, yeah. 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 Glauchestershire, England, on September 18, 1945.

His father was an American soldier, and his mother was a British person. He was raised in Salem, Virginia, 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's 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 John 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 fucked. So starting this on a dark note. But also a very juicy backstory. 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 your wallet, but really my dad stole $20. My dad stole the $20 out of your wallet?

He even uses his dad his whole life. I love it. Wait, does his dad have an accent? Do we know? No, I mean, his dad was an American. I'm guessing his mom did. A little bit more excited. He has kind of a weird voice, but I wouldn't say he sounds British. He doesn't sound British? No, no. All right, because that ups your scam level 100 points. Oh, 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'll have made enough money to talk like this. But continue. Yeah, absolutely. 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. It's specific. You nailed it. Shout out to a number one scammer, Madonna. John enrolled in Roanoke College. He sold magazine subscriptions 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 that just had to pay a shipping and handling fee. Yes. 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 $29.99 in shipping and handling. Ice potty? What? You know, it's not a potty like for peeing. Like, you know how 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 of that. You've never seen this infomercial?

How 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.

Ice helmet to wear out in the summer? Are you hot? You don't got no AC? Ice helmet. But yeah, that's how they get you. Oh, 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 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 what I said. Sponsoring this podcast, the Ice Genie. Yeah, get that Ice Genie. It's 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 Northeast Louisiana State College, and 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 he was a white guy. How do you get busted buying pot? I mean... Who is getting busted buying weed? This is 1960s, so maybe it happened more often. I feel like that's an 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? Yeah. This feels like the laziest way to go to jail. It's like weed. It has to feel dumb. Also, in the 60s, wasn't it just going around everywhere like free love, free weed? I think in some places, but if he was in Louisiana, like... Like an undercover cop tried to sell him weed.

Hi, sir, would you like to partake in some... Would you like some... Marijuana? Maryann Jane? Do you like puffing on reverse? Meet me in this alley. Yeah, maybe he was just shitty at buying pot. Anyway, he got out of the charges and 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 shit like this. Right. Shout out to him. Shout out to him. Here's Wired.

Quote, after six months, McAfee's 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 orange powder. Within an hour, my mind was shattered, McAfee says. Part of him still believes he's still on that trip, that everything since has been one giant hallucination and that one day he'll snap out of it and find himself back on his couch in St. 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'm scared to go that deep. People 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.

They're the happiest person I've ever fucking met. Apparently, you can do your job on acid. 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 which. Yes. Everyone has to guess. Everybody's got to guess which episode. If you guess correct, we will send you... I'm kidding, I can't send you shit.

I will send you behind the bastard swag. All you have to send me is $100 for shipping and handling. I'll send you some acid. All you've got to send me is... I didn't even notice you doing a scam there, Lacey. That was good. Look, the finesse. You got to have the finesse ready.

You made that so smooth. But yeah, so you can do shit on acid. So are you telling me that this guy scammed his way into this job that he had no skill? Routing trains. Routing trains. So also, can we just realize how the gravity of train routing... The serious job? They didn't even ask my man to route one train in a training process.

They were like, here, can you show us how you route the train? So trains could have been crashed and people could have just been dying left and right. People just trusted anything printed on paper back then. They were like, wow, you got ink and paper? It's embossed, all right. What's this, Helvetica? Oh, the job is yours. The job is yours, sir.

Let's 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 trains. 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 do that sort of job well. For sure. Because you're like, it's about focus and stuff. I remember just staring at some trees for a long time. 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 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 1.45 in the morning 12 years ago. That is a specific. I did a lot of drugs in Denton back in the day. Right. Is this a good place in Denton?

Are you like, oh, I'm back in that Denny's that I was at? Is there a good place in Denton? This is very true. There's no good place. In Texas, you know your trash. We all know. Some solid DFW area. Right.

I'm back at the water burger. 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 can think I'm back somewhere nice. Yeah, 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'd 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 this part's true. In the 1970s, he 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. And in 1983, this might have made him one of the less wild middle managers in the country. Right. Look, I watched Wolf of Wall Street. And yeah, that shit 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 where everybody was just doing cocaine.

Just quailudes in the bathroom? Fuck yeah. All right. Is everyone here for the morning meeting? Greg, Greg, Greg. Okay. And that's probably why I hate those guys is because they had to like fuck with people's money and they had to like, I mean, I guess most of them were rapey too.

Oh, for sure. Like 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's so much energy. So much energy.

You know how much I could get done every day? The shutdown, they wouldn't have even noticed. Right. It's been 30 days. I haven't slept in 30 days. Oh, I haven't gotten paid. Damn. I got a check on this.

I need to buy more. Yeah. 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. John 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. Yeah. 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 ant, like viruses were a problem.

Some CEO wakes up in the morning sees a news story and is like, oh my God, we have 10,000 computers. It turns there's a free program. So all these companies start downloading John's free program. That's how he got them hooked. You got to give him a free sample. You get him that. He's doing the same thing the drug dealers do.

Right. He's also doing the same thing he did with them damn magazine. He's talking about, yeah, you get a free subscription. Oh 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. We'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.

He invented Y2K. Is that what you're telling me? No. This is prior to that. We're talking like the late 80s. Oh, right. Right. He would just show up.

But he was one of the first guys showing up on TV and like daily news programs talking about viruses. Scaring us. Yes. Scaring us about this virus is going to do this. It's going to 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 threats. 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. Pretty great. Yeah. In 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 on March 6th, 1992, code that would wipe out all infected computers. Discovered or create? No, he discovered. I mean, he was a researcher. Oh, right. I haven't run into anything about this guy being it. Yeah.

He found it. It was his job. Okay. He was looking at stuff. Sure. Yeah. Maybe he was. I don't know anything about that.

I'm also suspect of him, but go ahead. Is it 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 him so shady. Anyway, yeah. So Riordan 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. If it were 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. Oh, yeah. That's a very sexy virus.

Yeah. You can imagine someone explaining that virus to 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, neck chopping people. Yeah, neck chopping people.

Where's Michelangelo? Where's the Michelangelo? For a whole movie. Yeah. You got a solid 90 minutes out of that. Right. Five or six sequels probably. Liam Neeson never shoots anyone.

No. He beats everyone's ass individually. Yeah. No. Guns aren't allowed in his hands because I had half of a Chuck Norris-style joke there and I just lost it, Lacey. Damn. That's a solid Chuck Norris-style joke, though.

Yeah. You got the pieces. Yeah, you got the pieces. 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 five million PCs when it started. And that was a lot of computers back then. In the 90s, right. That was like all the computers. Right. Isn't this like the era where the computers looked like on Ghost where it was like green? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything's green and there's like giant, the monitors way more than our televisions

do now. You could have told us any fucking thing about viruses back then. Exactly. But you could have told me Patrick Swayze and the Ghost would really go come back and hack your shit. Don't reach the hand in. They can strangle you from your monitor. Whoopie Goldberg said, you're in danger, girl.

Go buy a McAfee. This was right around the time that Whoopie Goldberg started 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. Are you kidding me?

No, it's a real movie. I've never heard of this movie. 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 already. 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. Because he 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 shitload of money. Right. Yeah. And yeah, he nailed it. Right place at the right time. I'm going to 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 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- What were they going to film? The virus?

They were hoping that like they'd be getting thousands of calls and everybody running around typing and yeah. I hope that McAfee hired crisis actors. He actually kind of did. 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 had initially claimed, as I said, that the virus should hit as many as five million machines. The estimate went down to one million by like March 2, 1992. And then a couple of days later, McAfee said it was anywhere between 50,000 and five million

computers. So he starts revising down the estimates as things get closer. As people buy his products. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it was a grift, and when Michelangelo actually activated, there was only very few computers. I think a few hundred, maybe a couple of thousand, but 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 shit. In October of 1992, his company went public and raised $42 million in its first round. Wow. By 1994, McAfee's personality and showmanship had made the adults in the room decide to edge him 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 that. Sex contests. People fucking on desks like.

Fucking on desks. Fucking on desks. I hope you can imagine me as Soulja Boy right now, like sex contests. What? That's how you know you really wild in that work. Yeah. Yeah. If there's a sex contest at your antivirus company.

At your antivirus company. The irony of that. That was real viruses going around. A lot of people got chlamydia at the antivirus company. At the antivirus company. I thought you were at the antivirus company. Yeah. But it was some sex contests.

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Who won? We can't have you around here like you're doing kinds of crimes where other people got to go to jail with you Yeah, 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, yeah, so no McAfee's out He was 47 years old with you know what we're effectively unlimited resources And so he immediately spent 25 million dollars buying a 280 acre compound in Colorado in 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 gonna get into what comes next. Oh, God, 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 I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space And when I was there as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories But there was this one that really stuck with me About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth His beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space 313 days that changed the world Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI Isn't based on actual science

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price To death sentences in a life without parole my youngest. I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday I'm Molly Herman join me as we put forensic science on trial To discover what happens when a match isn't a match And when there's no science in CSI How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize That this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up

Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I heart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh god, seriously I swear and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you Oh, man, and so my husband Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We're gonna have to send an SOS

We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life step by step Oh, not another one. Uh-huh kids relationships life in general can get messy You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody you everybody About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye Listen to frosted tips with the Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts 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 hundred acres of land and he starts a yoga retreat Okay, how does cocaine and yoga work together? He's not doing coke. He's sober at this point And that may be true at this point in the story. He may actually still be sober I'm inclined to believe it. Yeah, cuz yoga doesn't seem like like relaxing. Yeah, you know cocaine All right Yeah, I feel like that's too intense. Okay, cool. I'll believe you yeah McAfee 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 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 had to have been it was the 90s So yeah, almost nothing about Native American theme sounds like it's not offensive something really bad You know, it was African-American themes. Yeah Chicken watermelon, I'm black guys. Did 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's McAfee

You don't know about that tribe! They didn't want to kill all the water buffalo. See now I'm going to hell Yeah, this doesn't sound good. So he has 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 If 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 went out and dominate the market But he was able to sell the venture for like 17 million dollars before AIM and 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 Powwow, he vowed to devote himself to quote the opposite of the business world. What are you both laughing at? Sophie just saw me a picture of John McAfee. Oh 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, yeah 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 one Where are we going and he'll often be shirtless with a gun

Strapped around his chest. Oh my god, John McAfee. All right. Okay, 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 four 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 for books from a white dude On yoga. Oh a 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 buy them

But like none of the reviews are like he's talking about fucking aliens or anything like that 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 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 would 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 piece the fuck 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 a hundred miles an hour and 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 fucking falls in love with so like fuck yoga fuck Colorado I'm gonna I'm gonna fly around in these weird little motorcycle planes. It's bike plane. Yeah So in 2003 he bought a tricked-out Jeep and he and his girlfriend who was like in her mid-twenties at this point Of course. Yeah, and he's like 50s. He's like late 40s. Okay. Yeah All 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 a hundred million dollars

You're gonna start dating the 24 year old. Yeah, 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 land in 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 spots in the desert I like the black plane there Now 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 arrow trekking which he is like the name he coined for the sport into like a badass extreme sport Where people would have adventures in like the wild desert flying from these isolated little airstrip to airstrip and Like this network. He built 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 why does he always use us a problematic terminology first?

He had the Native American app now he got the sky Gypsy like what else is he gonna come out with? Okay, at least we have like the n-word boat like what is happening? Yeah, I mean 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 Not quite that way I have no idea what's happening. I'm so upset that I'm guessing I guess cuz my scammer brain I understand. Yeah, but I will say shout out to the gold digger. Well, I'm not 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, yeah, you sexy now But she's out here riding around in the desert with this fool normally 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 like it They seem to have had like a good time for a while It seems like it was one of those things or she was like, yeah I'll go have adventures in the desert for for you, right? That sounds great

I feel like I will come up dead. That's not like some Scott Peterson type Well, you'll come back from those no, thanks and a couple of people do come up dead and the John Yeah, the sky gypsies Were all aero trekkers too. They were a mix of other rich people MacAfee 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 hangers in rural New Mexico and filled it with vintage automobiles He and his friends could off-road in The sky gypsies grew to 200 members each playing between 500 and 270 thousand dollars 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, he'd 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'd pay a shitload of money, but This was like the fire festival, but with like bike planes. Well, but they actually did it for years Yeah, yeah, like it wasn't like it was a real thing like they built this network of run and runways and they flew around round for years So like it's not a total scam. No, it's not a scam at all. 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 MacAfee'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 to send on Rodeo Which is where his compound was and other airports and stay for weeks at a time at night Mr. MacAfee and his compadres some of whom were retired engineers physicians and fellow multi-millionaires often gathered before the large television set on his Villas patio to watch a selection of the 6,000 DVDs in his personal library One night a group of gypsies including Mr. MacAfee decided they wanted tattoos They drove 160 miles to a CD parlor and festooned themselves with tattoos of the ornate Celtic wing the sky gypsies adopted as their logo The group's quirky website describes Mr. MacAfee and his 27-year-old girlfriend as John and Jen two 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 is being built at the time It's fun. It's carefree. This don't sound like sobriety It sounds like what a guy who Loves being wasted and then 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 try to get a thrill. Yeah to get that thrill and like John and Jen keep a bunch of people around me So I never alone. Yeah Okay, you know if you're the kind of person who has a huge drug problem

You're always that kind of person you just got to find something to throw yourself into Yeah, and that's and this is I mean this is healthier than cocaine. Yeah, that's 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 I don't have a problem with flying around The desert thing like so y'all just winning on some symbols. I don't know what the fuck these mean McAfee is his life. I'm sure I think that part's probably not like maybe he's probably scott's irish. I'm gonna guess

I mean mom came for me We'll let you ride McAfee that one sounds okay. Yeah, you can have a Celtic wing if you get a Mac in your name, right? As cool and extreme as John's life was that battitude 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 Coots quote the sky gypsies would later prove to be one of McAfee's various downfalls Oh hell 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 Biddoe the head of the sky gypsies flight school went up on a training flight with an Aspiring gypsy named Robert Gibson nepotism mr. Oh, yeah dangerous nepotism

Mr. Gibson was 61 years old roughly the same age as John McAfee and newly retired like John He decided that aero 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 if you've got a sport pilot certificate, but you can't be paid to I can't be your job

Which means that we can't in truck because we can't trust that you know what you're doing So you can't like if you want to teach a friend how to fly we can't stop you But like you can't be the head of a flight school, right? Like I can do my friends here at home, but I can't open a salon Exactly everybody's here or your your uncle can't hire you to run his desert flight school Way higher stakes Like you're teaching me how to fly and you don't know how to fly yourself. Yeah, right? Yeah So he's also a scammer runs in the family. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah

So these two guys Joel 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 horrible Yeah, yeah, yeah So the fast company article goes into more detail about Maccabee's reaction to the death of both his nephew and an innocent grandpa quote After the accident Maccabee says he struggled to understand how it could have happened How could putting an untrained man in charge of a pilot school? Okay? Okay, cool. So he didn't know how to fly planes Yeah, but still basically Like posited that the old guy had been sick and had had a heart attack during the flight and had like fallen

Onto the kites wing so he had made up a hole. He just he just lies. No, dude You're untrained and nephew got them both killed. Yeah, and isn't that the plot to that one book? What's that book called? I don't know, you know where the pilot has a heart attack and then the kid is out with a axe The hatchet hatchet that's the plot of the hatchet. That is kind of the plot a hatchet except for the kid is the guy flying and dies He was like, how could I spend this? Um, yeah, he had a heart attack Anyway, quote to honor bittoe's memory Maccabee had the image of a single teardrop added below his sky gypsy's tattoo So he murdered his nephew I'll say that that's a fair that that part's not appropriation. No, you did

In an interview later Maccabee said quote arrow tricking can create an avenue for self-awareness He told me seven months after bittoe 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 Optimus. Yeah, it's just whatever. Yeah, you know people die. Sometimes they're 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 journalists 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 a simultaneous collapse of real estate stocks in 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 crashed 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

Yeah, 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 ten million dollars 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 fun? Well airbikes? Okay, 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'd 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 wise, so he gets on the news and he was like, yeah, you know I lost all my money. I lost all my money at a adiata

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 Flight school. It's gonna sue him. Yes Shout out to him. He was like this disparaging article. I'll take it. He was like, yeah, we're cold. This is gonna work out great Yeah, yeah in the year 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 and 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 talk 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 has 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 butt with testosterone twice a month He moved into a beachside mansion in Belize at an expat heavy community called Ambergris K There he launched a cigar company coffee company and 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 and 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 five 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 I would put incorrect information about myself on the web He says I told him when I put that up. I wasn't under oath. 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 gonna do the things that John McAfee is about to do it helps to shoot some chaff out in Maybe that's why he had a long game here. Yeah, it's the long game and if you're playing the long game Listener then you might want some of the fine products and or services that support this podcast and or program I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync

What you may not know is that when I was 23? I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space And when I was there as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories But there was this one that really stuck with me About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth His beloved country the Soviet Union is falling apart And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space

313 days that changed the world Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI Isn't based on actual science The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price Two death sentences in a life without parole my youngest. I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday I'm Molly Herman join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover

What happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I heart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh god

Seriously, I swear and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you Oh man, and so my husband Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush Boybander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one kids relationships Life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now If so, tell everybody you everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen So we'll never ever have to say bye. Bye. Bye. Bye Bye. Bye. Bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts And we're back. We're talking about John McAfee who has just moved to Belize

Uh, in 2010 during his second year there, he met a young doctor named Allison Adonisio Here's how she described her journey to Jeff Wise When I turned 30, I cried on paper. Everyone envied me. I just bought a house. I had a partner in a job at Harvard I just gotten 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 my 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 I'm so envious of these lots And then I was just like I want to go somewhere and play my guitar. Yeah I don't want to fly an aero bike. Like what the fucking kind of lives are these? But I get up and pay my bills every goddamn day. I ain't flying no air bike and playing no damn guitar And then also the people that McAfee took with him to Brazil. It's like, hey y'all y'all want to just come live in In Belize. I think their job was just being part of his entourage Like there 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 Uh, 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 reach 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 Allison 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, that's great. That's great. I'll give you a bunch of money You'll find medicine out here Like so, yeah, John McAfee hires this doctor lady side unseen and decides he's going to get into the business of making medicine Okay. Yeah, why not? He's done so well in every other business trains planes automobiles Autoimmune diseases, but yeah, it's the natural evolution 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 Dr. Adonisio to work in the stated goal of this lab was to find new bacteria fighting medicines uh, but Very quickly things started to get weird. Oh I know I know contest weird or You wish it was sex contest weird. Um, although there's some there's some sex stuff coming up gosh And I've been to Belize. It's like very ugly there. Um, yeah

And no hell no like the beaches are gross. There is a lot of jungle life and plants You don't like jungle life and plants and cashew plants. What the fuck is that? It's it's trash. Don't go to Belize. You hate kid. I'm gonna say go to Belize. Don't go there. 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's shit seemed to be together

So McAfee said shit like for 20 years I played around and now I'm serious about doing something positive So he's trying to like I'm gonna you know, especially since you just got two people killed. I'm gonna do a do a good thing here I'm gonna give back to the world. I'm gonna 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 adonisio had been working together for two years when they'd only been working together for Seven months. He also called her like a leading mind in the field when she was really just starting out like so he's Playing 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 Um, 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 fuck drugs. So Fuck 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 basically The way alison told jeff wise the journalist who's interviewing her is that McAfee suddenly came to her with a brainstorm That 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 around 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 you're 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 So that might be part of it makes it it's certainly part creepy But it also might part be john mack if he can't focus on anything from They were trying to save lives

But how do we go from saving lives to like those little dick pills that they fucking sell in the gas station? He went from saving lives to like Extends What happened? Oh, yeah, that is a really quick amount of time to approach. Yeah So the next major article about john mack if he was published in late 2012 by wires joshua davis So in the two years between that fast company article where john announces that he is making fuck drugs and it is into medicine And 2012 when wired gets on on things john's condition degenerated

Substantially the wired article revealed that mack if he 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 asshole of the world Uh, he wrote in one email 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 teowanna panhandlers My hygiene is no better yesterday for the first time. I urinated in public in broad daylight so John's john's going through some shit. Okay. Yeah, I'm drugs catching up

Or or maybe it may be drugs. We will be talking about that. I mean like the ones that he did in the past Oh, yeah, and maybe the guilt from killing his nephew and that old guy. Oh, you think Maybe he has some sociopathic tendencies. I feel like he might have slept well on that one and just Either way For whatever reason when he first moves to believes he moves to this like beautiful mansion on the beach And like a really nice part of believes like a resort part of town and he quickly leaves that to go Build a compound in the jungle in 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 poor 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 mac if his life turns into at this point so While he's hanging out at that bar watching prostitutes he gets to know several prostitutes But everything Like it's just being a weird old guy hanging out in a bar watching teenage prostitutes. Oh god, okay So he winds up falling in love with one of these teenage

Of course he does. Of course he does natural a 16 year old girl named im shwiler And 16 is the age of consent in believes so he's not committing a crime in believes That is important although morally. I don't think 50 60 year old should fuck 16 Yes, but there's no it's not like illegal in beliefs. No, right? So he dumps his longtime girlfriend for this 16 year old prostitute. Uh, he brings the prostitute im shwiler to his compound Uh, and then she almost murders him. Uh, according to that wild wired article Shout out to her. We're named im shwiler. Im shwiler. Yes, im shwiler. Im shwiler. Im shwiler. Yeah 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 bastard. 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, 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 im shwiler and heavily armed Belizean men with criminal backgrounds. Okay, so he became the R. Kelly of Belize Yeah, but like Less evil but shadier So like R. Kelly doesn't hang around with like Convicted murderers and there's always well

R. Kelly isn't constantly photographed with gang members holding guns next to him Which McAfee is during this period. There's always big like Belizean guys with criminal backgrounds holding like scoped rifles standing behind him With like a pack of wild dogs around him. That's a every picture of john McAfee and Belize is he is shirtless He's surrounded by large Belizean men holding rifles and like a gaggle of teenage girls and a bunch of dogs So it's like the ill choppo phase of his career. Yeah, this is the choppo phase of his career Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would I would definitely say choppish. Although like R. Kelly We are about to get into a rape allegation. Oh, 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 then they don't

Absolutely. I mean this guy was doing sex contests. So we pretty much knew he was a deviant, you know back in the day I was doing that in the office But I don't even know if that's deviant like for all we know he was assaulting people there Yeah, I mean it might have been I haven't heard any allegations. Yeah I'll say there's not allegations yet When those people were interviewed most of them seemed to think fondly of that time So it may have just been a bunch of weirdos and having a fuck company together. Listen, sometimes you get the right one Sometimes you find the right crew

Okay, 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 Belizean 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 It's telling the truth. Tell the truth So the raid hauled out a bunch of guns and some unidentified crystalline chemical John claimed was related to he and doctor adonisio'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 two We will talk about the best theory Uh, 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 mdpv? It's too many letters for me. I'm not doing a drug with more than two letters Oh, I love four letter drugs mdp

qh That sounds like my life will never be the same. Oh, no, mdpv is like if at all Hit you in the face before it started to work like that's that's mdp. It's like angry pissed off at all That's that's how I describe mdpv drugs to be angry Kind of people who take mdpv. That's one of the face-eating drugs Yeah, like these are the bath salts everybody was talking about back then now When wired talk 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 confuse everybody. Yeah Quote it was the most tongue-in-cheek thing in the fucking world if i'm gonna do drugs I'm gonna do something that I know is good. I'm gonna 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 Um, 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 chemists to chemists

So maybe it's all a scam or maybe him trying to make it into a scam as the scam and john mac If he was doing a shitload of bath salts, it would make some of this make more sense scam because you know what he asks for like No one asked for specific detail information about making drugs. I was like, no, this is another one of my hijinks It's one of my hijinks john. You're talking for pages about how to like distill this stuff properly I got you. I got you suckers You had all those pages, didn't you? No, you literally had chemicals in your house You had pictures of beakers and you're doing stuff. 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 madness and may in fact be the result of a dangerous drug addiction Maybe bath salts. Maybe something else Uh, but you remember that 16 year old prostitute. He was in love with him Schwalder Yes, I'm Schwalder 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 karma. Lita, which shout out to warrants. Yvonne Uh, 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? No, he did and he took the gun out of her hands, but he forgave her. He was like girl good plan He just he gave her a separate bungalow. Yeah That's kind of this that's not the only time he does that Damn, that's he's forgiving. He's forgiving. I'll give that to john mackaffey You try to kill us. He doesn't even stay angry. Oh my god. Go to the guest house. Give me the gun and schwalder You're not even the second person to shoot at me today. I'm john mackaffey

So, um McAfee told wired later quote karma. Lita was literally the wild west I didn't realize that two miles away was the most corrupt village on the planet So mackaffey 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, okay, mackaffey's next big move is to start using his wealth to fight crime in the town of carmelina bruce wane Yeah, bruce wane 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 m16s boots pepper spray stun guns and shit like that M16s you could just get them handguns. They fuck. No, john mack. John. McAfee says this is serious crime going on here I need to be able to shoot 20 people at one time Some people who actually lived in the area said that mackafee 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 is like low-key colonizing beliefs Yeah, yeah, he's a he's a one-man colonizing one man colonizer

And this is a poor ass like the journalist josh smith the journalist actually went to carmelina to try and see like is this a dangerous No man's land like that. He's stumble onto a real terrible place that needs fixing And he just finds a poor village filled with people who had no fucking idea what john this is the most Caucasian shit I have ever heard I have ever I don't think anybody has lived a white or white man life than john mackabee. He did everything He did everything. He's done all the white man. He did everything. He started for company based off lies He scammed his way. No, and this ends with him running for president. Oh my god Shout out to him. He did he taught yoga and had a calm down at his home

You know, 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, 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 This motherfucking 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 wringing it out all the way to dry I'm not mad at it. I'm I'm really not mad at it Yeah, so uh, 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, I don't think 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 He probably made that shit up. He was like my girlfriend That I found at the bar. Oh god, john So uh now at this point doctor adonisio who's remember still trying to make medicine here started worrying about john mackafee

Over the months they'd worked together. She'd noticed him hiring more and more armed men She'd also notice 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 adonisio talked in a net Bernstein for a showtime documentary on john mackafee's life She gave a very different story then one that paints john mackafee Not as a fun wacky libertarian kooky character But as a monster and we're gonna play an excerpt from that right now

he would talk about how he could have people hurt or killed and um You know, honestly, I was I was scared I planned to leave but I needed to figure out how to do it, you know I went to talk to him I 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 undermines and You know, I miss my family. I want to go home And um, you know at a headache I was I was crying so much I I told him I had a headache and and he

He brought me um, he you know, he went into the other room and and he brought me Two pills and a glass of orange juice and um 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, um I'm 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, uh she claims that

Basically, she blacked out after that point something was in the orange juice pretty clearly and she has snatches of memory One of them is John McAfee standing over her naked um She alleges that he raped her. It seems like a pretty credible allegation to me Also, it doesn't seem I don't have a whole lot of trouble imagining John McAfee Being a rapist after everything we've talked about stockpiling by agra So she was just trying to leave because obviously what I mean The fact that she went off with this millionaire into a compound to like try to do drug research that was all crazy

But like it'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? Taking out a chance and obviously it had gone. Okay I guess he did put in the money to build by her lap He 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. Yeah, like oh what a piece of shit. Yeah. Yeah, and this is a dark and terrible note to end our first episode But it's the note that we're gonna end on in the next episode starts with murder. So tight buckle up Uh, enjoy that lacy. You want to plug your plugables before we uh, we roll off damn

I need to distance myself from that. Yeah, I know I should I didn't know where to stick that but I felt like the very end, you know Um, if you like step no The sentence 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 You like sad. No, um, yeah, but uh, shout out to her so sad. Um, I'm scam god I I do love scams, but I don't hurt people guys. I swear. Yeah. Um, good natured scam. Yeah, good natured scams It's not me. But yeah, so look out for my podcast scam goddess If you follow me on twitter at diva lacy diva lacy i or on instagram at diva lacy diva lacy i I'll have more updates there

And i'm robert evans you can find me on twitter at i write okay You can find this podcast on the internet behind the bastards dot com You can find us on instagram at twitter at at bastards pod. You can buy t-shirts. You can buy cups You can buy stickers. You can buy the mummified hand of an egyptian faro all on t-public dot com all branded with behind the bastards logos, uh, and Special mummy fighting witchcraft buy it products. Yay Alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations In the first season we're diving into an fbi investigation of the 2020 protests

It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse was like a lot of guns But our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them He was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen Listen to alphabet boys on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast Did you know lance bass is a russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space well I ought to know because

I'm lance bass And i'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space With no country to bring him down With the soviet union collapsing around him. He orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world Listen to the last soviet on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like csi Isn't based on actual science And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price

Two death sentences and a life without parole my youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday Listen to csi on trial on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts