On this week's episode of Get Off My Lawn, Devin sits down with John McAfee, the man behind McAfee Software, a software company that makes anti-virus software, to talk about his life growing up in the streets of Belize, his time in prison, and why he doesn't want to be in the military.
Transcript
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00:00:50.000He's the guy behind McAfee, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, McAfee software, antivirus software, made $100 million doing that, sold it.
00:00:59.000And ever since then, he's become the most interesting man in the world.
00:01:03.000The biggest controversy was when he was living in Belize, he had a neighbor that hated his guts.
00:01:09.000John had an army around him of all times, of felons, armed felons followed him everywhere, a harem of sluts, boats, galore, party time, party time.
00:02:15.000I think they're doing a movie on his life.
00:02:17.000Johnny Depp was supposed to play McAfee, but I think he's out now, and it's Michael Keaton is playing him, and he's going to be showing a Wired reporter around.
00:04:53.000But I was pursuing a graduate program in mathematics, and at the time, they deemed that, for whatever goddamn reason, more important than putting a uniform on me and a gun in my hand.
00:05:08.000Now, let me tell you, if they had fucking known how good I was with a gun, they would have said, fuck school, send that guy to the front black market.
00:09:26.000I mean, I've done a lot, but I'm not Hunter Thompson.
00:09:30.000Thank God you're not claiming expert status because seriously, I mean, any Mofo out there listening to this that has not taken MDPV or alpha PBP or alpha PHP, the most powerful operators ever goddamn created and invented by the Chinese in the mid to late 90s in a brand of or classification of drugs called cathinones.
00:09:58.000Good God, they make amphetamine look like baby aspirin.
00:10:03.000That sounds like it's dangerous for your heart.
00:11:09.000Now, you're a real trophy to get as a hack.
00:11:13.000So what if a hacker set up a hit, had Greg Fall killed to make you look bad, and then that hacker can say, not only did I hack him, but I framed him in a murder?
00:11:28.000Well, that's certainly not outside the bounds of possibility.
00:11:34.000But no, sir, I do not believe that happened.
00:11:47.000The Belizean government raids my Orangewalk estate, destroys a half million dollars worth of damage, shoots my dog, submits me to serious discomfort, destroys a laboratory that I had been working on for antibiotics based on the science of quorum sensing.
00:12:09.000And we actually had a goddamn product.
00:12:13.000So it was like an organic antibiotic made with natural plants and stuff.
00:12:17.000Yes, actually, sure, it's made by plants along the Jungle River called the New River in Belize, one of the longest navigable jungle rivers in the world.
00:12:30.000And yes, we found a number of things of plants.
00:12:50.000Plants also are susceptible to both viruses and bacteria, but they can't uproot themselves and walk 100 meters away and replant themselves.
00:16:28.000I haven't dug into it to that level, but I promise you, if you Google it now, what is most, well, the least fertile soil on the planet, the soil of rainforests industry.
00:19:03.000Yet, the mainstream media, as stupid as the mainstream media is, actually believe the government story.
00:19:15.000Oh, John Macfree is manufacturing methamphetamines in Carmelita, the middle of the goddamn jungle, where there's no police, with a shore of thousands of cartel people.
00:20:12.000Captain Morgan and most of the pirates called San Pedro La Pena del Carib, the pearl of the Caribbean, the most beautiful fucking island you can ever imagine.
00:20:31.000I traveled my first time there in 1973, been back many times and finally purchased a large estate on that island.
00:23:34.000The British ran Belize, but when they left, they turned it over to fuck me, some strange people.
00:23:43.000Over the next 75 years, Belize City, which even today is the murder capital of the planet, more people per capital are killed, mutilated, shot, disappeared, burned alive, blown up, or otherwise disposed of in Belize City than any city on this planet, people.
00:24:08.000Well, there's still Aztecs, really, deep down.
00:24:11.000They're still the same people that were sacrificing virgins and sacrificing babies.
00:24:16.000Yeah, but now they just sacrifice foreigners, specifically Americans.
00:24:28.000We, Americans, arrogant, powerful motherfuckers with cash, money banks, and our government with stealth fucking airplanes and bombs and the nuclear goddamn bomb.
00:24:45.000And with one thousandths of America's army, you could wipe police off the face of the goddamn planet.
00:25:47.000I built a compound, a massive, I mean, a serious, the largest compound in the center of Belize.
00:25:55.000It had 11 houses, 27 security guards, 17 Dogs patrolling the property, barbed wire fence surrounding 30 acres along the river, boats, people to kill the crocodiles who ate dogs, and I preferred my dogs to crocodiles, and so on.
00:26:18.000People was a Colonel Kurtz compound of the highest order, except I didn't see myself as Colonel Kurtz.
00:26:27.000I saw myself as what I've always seen myself as, a gentle, unassuming person, just trying to do my thing while not fucking with anybody else.
00:26:41.000I mean, all I've ever asked of life is this.
00:26:43.000I promise I will not fuck with anybody if people don't fuck with me, but I don't know what it is.
00:27:07.000In reality, which is why I've been in jail 11 times in almost as many countries as Janice, and I just the fuck got out of jail nine months ago in the Dominican Republic.
00:27:21.000And by the way, those of you looking for a jail experience should not start with the Dominican Republic.
00:27:31.000It is, I've been in Mexican jails, Guatemalan jails, police jails.
00:27:36.000Police jails are pretty bad, bad, I must admit, nothing has ever approached a Dominican Republic jail.
00:27:45.000I heard they have weapons in DR jails.
00:29:37.000I had the wealth and experience, and I did it.
00:29:42.000In the middle of one of the poorest countries on the planet, where policemen make $3 a day, if they're lucky, and must buy their own bullets and their own weapons, which is why most of the police have no fucking weapons in Belize.
00:30:03.000The Dominican Republic, oh yes, they do.
00:32:10.000And yet this world, which seemed, at least locally, to be easily understood and worked with, from a political and historical standpoint, I was just in the fucking dark.
00:32:28.000And so what happened is A year and a half after I'd moved there, established my compound, was creating, and by the way, we had a goddamn spray-on antiseptic that would have changed the fucking world.
00:32:56.000So the governor comes in in the guise of a local congressman.
00:33:04.000Mr. McAfee, we're so happy you've chosen to come to Orange Walk to live.
00:33:13.000You know that the election is coming up in two months.
00:33:17.000We think that if you were to donate $2 million to the UDP, the ruling party, that it would assure our win in March.
00:33:35.000And beyond that, Mr. McAfee, we're willing to give you 10,000 acres along the New River near the recently unearthed Mayan City up the river.
00:33:58.000You know, if you're going to extort someone, start small with like 200 grand or something.
00:34:04.000You know, 2 million is a pretty big ask for your first extortion.
00:34:10.000It probably would have been 200,000 if I had been wise enough not to make my wealth and influence so fucking apparent.
00:35:00.000But every single plant that we discovered was unique, not just to the country of Belize, but to maybe a three-kilometer wide section of the fucking river.
00:35:59.000No, but no, I donated armaments to the Belizean police, which were headlined in the newspapers.
00:36:10.000And I donated an assault vessel, a marine vessel, to the Belizean Coast Guard so that they could actually take quads, the four-wheel machines, onto the beach, farm that fucking boat.
00:36:44.000You know, I used to live in Montezuma, Costa Rica, and my friends who would come to visit, they called it Camp Murderer because everyone they met had some story about a hit and run or they were wanted for growing pot and they just went there and never came back.
00:37:01.000Yeah, that happens in Costa Rica, too.
00:37:04.000So do you think, so you can never return to Central America?
00:37:10.000Well, I understand you're running for president now for almost two months in Belize, while every one of their 17,000-man army and every police officer, their 8,000 police officers, had my photo and instructions from the prime minister.
00:39:02.000Lydia, wife of Caesar Augustus, has killed all her fucking children, except one, and her husband, and everybody else in the goddamn family, because she favored one of her goddamn sons, Germanicus, fucking idiot, as far as I can tell.
00:39:23.000It's her son, yet she killed everybody to make sure he succeeded the fucking throne.
00:39:30.000You can't even trust your mother, people.
00:40:51.000Do I get up and get another bottle before my next podcast?
00:40:55.000Or do I, I don't know, ration this motherfucker out and see what happens.
00:41:02.000Well, I'm trying to lead you to a concept here where they say the Scots, they fought the English for 700 years, and the ones who don't like conflict are extinct, and they've genetically been bred to thrive in a state of conflict and danger.
00:44:10.000I mean, you, if you have a job, those of you who are listening, you have a steady income, and each week or month, money is taken out of what you have worked so hard to earn for what?
00:44:44.000What is of interest is that we have been given the illusion of freedom, the illusion of self-determination, and the illusion that we own the fruits of our labor.
00:45:04.000Those are the three greatest illusions of the modern age, people.
00:46:00.000Well, what happened is the CIA stormed into George Bush's office and said, Mr. President, please sit down.
00:46:12.000We have covert information of the highest priority.
00:46:20.000Iraq, we have just discovered, Mr. President, has the nuclear bomb and ballistic missiles capable of delivering those nuclear bombs to our closest ally.
00:46:38.000And each of those bombs, Mr. President, is 10,000 times more powerful than the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
00:46:54.000Now, Mr. President, we're not here to advise you.
00:47:20.000Now, everybody in the world knew Iraq did not have nuclear weapons, including the American public.
00:47:30.000But the people who did not know were the executive branch and Congress, both houses who were dealt with in the same fashion by the CIA, who maintains a staff of thousands of people who don't advise Congress or the President, but merely form so that I could say things like I'm saying right now.
00:48:02.000So you had no intention of winning or getting to the White House?
00:48:49.000If, in fact, presidents who can make no goddamn decisions in a fucking vacuum and are informed only by covert agencies, and in America there are 14, the CIA, the NSA, the Secret Service, the branches of military fucking intelligence, on and on and on.
00:49:16.000These are the elements of decision-making for presidents.
00:49:42.000Those of you who've seen more than one presidential election will have noticed one thing.
00:49:50.000When there is a change of power between Republicans and Democrats, Democrats and Republicans, did a single fucking hair on your heads get wafted by that explosion?
00:53:00.000He was shot in the head at a campaign rally.
00:53:04.000Now, if you can't see the connectedness, the obvious fucking reality of your existence and still insist on believing that you live in a fucking democracy in which you may vote and control your future,
00:53:27.000then I will reach through this fucking screen and grab you by the throat and shake you till you wake up to the truth of your fucking reality.
00:53:42.000Children, when I was your age, 30, 40, even 50, I'm 74 now, we would never have tolerated this shit from the U.S. government.
00:53:59.000I lived through the 60s and 1965, I was 20 years old in an experimenter in drugs.
00:54:25.000It ended at Kent State University in Ohio with students shoving daisies into the barrels of automatic weapons, which moments later mowed down every fucking student.
00:57:15.000The last time you talked with her about religion, the meaning of life, politics, children, love, sex, death, when was the last time you did that?
01:01:10.000You are responsible for this fucking mess.
01:01:16.000When you talk to people who are on the back nine, as it were, in their 70s, coming towards the end, they tend to have a very apocalyptic view of the future.
01:01:25.000And they tend to say, there's no hope.
01:02:00.000If you don't think you're drowning in the river, if you don't think your life is out of control, if you don't think governments are intruding ever more intensely into your privacy, if you don't think you're being watched and judged,
01:02:18.000if you don't think that your life in all reality belongs to some other thing, a government, an agency, some covert entity.
01:02:36.000I mean, if you don't see that, well, fuck me.
01:03:45.000If you don't think that is drowning in a river when you actually vote for someone spending a hundred times, a hundred fucking times what the job pays, then I have no hope for you, nor for humanity.
01:04:05.000So of course, I can give you nothing but an apocalyptic appraisal of where you're goddamn headed.
01:07:22.000I know it's valuable to you, and you could make a lot of money selling this wood, whatever they want to do here, but it would devastate the jungle.
01:09:06.000I guess the beach went steep, went down really fast.
01:09:11.000You could get really close, but still have a little bit of sand in the port.
01:09:15.000And so there'd be garbage there and seagulls.
01:09:17.000And there was a guy who looked like Jesus.
01:09:18.000He had on like the Jesus loincloth, just rags that were probably shorts one day that had become rags, beard with dreads in it, hair with dreads in it, and there'd be scraps and the seagulls would be and he'd become fighting with them for like a piece of a fucking gross dead fish.