Hi, it's me again, Jamie Tarrabay, and you're listening to a bonus episode of Foundering. In April twenty twenty three, we put on a live show at RSA in San Francisco. It's one of the biggest cybersecurity conferences in the world. I did a live reading of the first episode of the John McAfee story, and then we did a Q and a with one of the people who was featured
in that episode. Look out for a recording of the live show on bloomberg dot com for now, though, I wanted to share the Q and a you're going to hear from Alan Lisker. He's an author and expert in cybersecurity who had some interesting things to say about the impact McAfee had on the industry. I also talk a little bit about my reporting process for this show, and
the moderator you'll hear is Foundering's editor Mark Million. Thank you for listening to the series and I hope you enjoyed the discussion.
Hey, everyone, a Mark Million. I edit Foundering.
I'm also the slideshow operator.
Alan.
I wanted to start with you. You had this very memorable quote in the in the episode buy My Thing Instead. Can you expand on that, like, how did McAfee shape today's approach to digital security.
I love that we're highlighting that quote at RSA, which is the biggest buy my thing convention for security community in the world. Please don't throw tomatoes at me. Well sure, I mean.
So think of it now.
SISA now has an initiative out there to build better and more secure software, to mandate that software is more built, is more secure and built.
And that is forty.
Years after you know, Macale launched his antivirus program, so we're still we're.
Just now catching up to that.
But that has been the model in security forever, and in a lot of ways it makes us less secure. So if I walk into any company right now, they have antivirus, and they have EDRs, they have endpoint protection, they probably have three or four different agents there on
each individual endpoint. Then you have your web application, firewall, your firewall, your IDs, your male security program, and so on, so you have you know, you walk into an organization and you have one hundred different security tools, one hundred different consoles, and yet things like ransomware, which is where I specialize our running rampant because we can't seem to stop it because there's too much and the one thing that caught the ransomware actor is the one console you haven't looked.
At this week, and so.
We've made it much more were complex to operate a secure environment.
Jamie, you talk in the recorded version of this episode about your background and career a long time foreign correspondent and conflict reporter. How did that context shape have you thought about approaching a story like macafee's.
I mean, I think one of the things that he not to say that he was like a dictator or a terrorist or anything, but he did have a lot of things in common with those sorts of men, which is there's a lot of ego, and there's a lot of a greater sense of unaccountability and the vanity that comes with being the leader. And what we found in our reporting is that he managed to continue to build these small worlds where he was in charge, and you know, it was just a lot of the similar kind of
characteristics of that sort of behavior and personality. The cult of personality was definitely present in a lot of McAfee's life and through a lot of the people that we spoke to.
I mean, I see in your reporting almost a direct through line from like John mcavee to Elon Musk. I mean that you see a lot of similarities in that kind of cult of personality, and you know, the I'm in charge and running things and so I think that. But I think that not just those two, but I think there's a lot of that in general in tech for worse often.
Yeah, that's I think a through line of the series. As Jamie talked in the beginning, you know Adam Newman, even Jeff Bezos is there's some common traits that exist between these leaders. Alan clearly McAfee's work had an impact on security industry. Do you think his personality shape the business at all? Like his boosterism and salesmanship and antagonism and paranoia like reflected in today's companies or CEOs.
I mean, and I love this company, so I'm going to pick on them, but but go downstairs and look at the crowd strike booth and the fact that they have ten foot tall action figures of adversaries.
I mean that is great company.
But but yeah, that that that's sort of Oh, these are really scary things that you have to fight, and they are like there.
It is a real problem. It is a real threat.
But but we we we we do have this almost fetishization if that's a word, of of the adversary rather than sort of taking a a more fact based look at things. So I do think that that that is absolutely the.
Case, and there have been and I think this is in any.
Industry, but in particular to the areas where McAfee was in technology and then cryptocurrency later, because it's areas that a lot of people don't understand.
You do get some Charlotte Tens in there.
You do get some companies that kind of build everything and I'm not saying mcvy did this, but are able to build their whole company on lies.
Essentially, Jamie.
One thing we established in the episode we just heard and made very clear throughout the series is that mcavee is a controversial figure. What were some of the most surprising things you learned about him during your reporting.
I think one of one of the challenges was figuring out what was actually real, and you know, we had to go back to a time that was pre internet, and you know, a lot of those work experiences that we talked about the employment history, we couldn't verify so many of them because they went back to the sixties
and beforehand, and so that was really frustrating. One of the things that I thought was really telling that we everyone that we spoke to who was close to him sort of began with this, Oh, he was so great, he was such a smart person, he was brilliant, he was the love of my life.
Yeah, the ex wives, Yeah.
And then it was, oh, he was horrible, and you know, he cheated on me, or he betrayed me or did this, and then by the end it was like he was the worst. So your people just kind of went through this whole journey of how they felt about him, but their immediate recollections were that he was this positive person on their lives, and then they remember, oh, no, actually he kind of you know, destroyed me. So I mean
that was really surprising that it was. It wasn't just one or two people, it was nearly everyone we spoke to.
I want to give people a chance to ask questions. We get a couple of microphones in the room. You're welcome to step up and asked your own questions.
Alan.
Something that McAfee talked about, especially leader in his life was this push and pulled between security and privacy. I think this was for him personally, often in the context of not paying taxes and a sort of creative interpretation of privacy is like a license to break the law. But this theme of safety versus privacy civil liberties is a pretty relevant.
One today, right, Oh yeah, absolutely, I mean we we the the FBI and the Department of Justice is trying to figure out still trying to figure out how to find back doors into encryption tools and so on, and considers that to be really important without any actual evidence that having those back doors would actually help them solve cases faster. You know, the the just a couple of years ago, the you know, the fight between Department of Justice and Apple over hey are you gonna help us
jail break this phone? And know we're not, and and yeah, it's a real challenge. And you know, as somebody in the security industry, I think privacy is really important.
I think we shouldn't be giving.
Governments back doors to to encryption algorithms and you know, giving them access to these kind of databases because if one if country, one country has access, then essentially all countries have access to it.
It's funny to bring up to SANDBERD, you know, example, because that's in our suit. Mcaveee like inserts himself into the story. Yeah, try to bring the attention back to himself.
Course, Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And that was a great example of he always had to kind of be front and center on the story.
So yes, absolutely, But it.
Is also really smart about like the zeitgeist, right, he knew where and.
What and that.
I mean, like I kind of felt by the end that he should have really just chosen a career in Hollywood because he was so good at figuring out how to use fear and and and sort of what it was that what that drew attention, and he was really he just knew, he understood people so well, and because you know, so much what he did was so fantastical, I really thought that Hollywood would have been his true home.
Yes, he was very charismatic.
Absolutely, he would have made billions producing movies and so on. Update war games only instead of you know, just a just a basic computer, it's now a government funded AI that is starting World War three, right, I mean, you know, that would have been the perfect movie for him.
Jamie McAfee associated with some pretty shady characters.
You talked about how.
Separating fact from fiction was a challenge in your reporting. What other sorts of reporting challenges? Is this great for you?
I mean the shady characters, unreliable narrators, that.
Was what help me.
I'm not one of the shady characters.
Characters you are not, but I think it was really hard to find someone who was connected in some way with him, who could be truly honest and and you know, really just sort of call it what it was. And that was always really hard. And whenever we would sort of say to someone, well, apparently there's video of you doing this, so like, no, it's not true, never happening.
So that was always a challenge. And I think at least one of our interviewees had an ancle bracelet for a while, so that was also challenging.
Yeah, it's interesting to prep for this. I grabbed I ordered a couple of biographies on McAfee, And when you start reading through the biographies, I guess the people that he would allow in to write biographies were also kind
of self serving and shady. And I'm reading the biography and I'm like, this is more about you and how great you are as a biographer, and I'm like, all right, well, but but you know, I do think he did foster that kind of environment, especially later in life, which I thought was interesting.
Really good at co opting media, really really really good at it.
We have a question from the ans. Could you identify yourself?
Yeah, Oh, my name is Rushmama, cybersecurity architect life. We met last month.
You might remember me, but I remember you.
But Jamie, you're an amazing storyteller. I'm just curious to know how did you come to the title Foundering, especially when you mentioned that so many times you came across during your interviews that he's not necessarily a leader, not necessarily somebody who would put the company together to take it to the next step. So was there any struggle about coming to this title?
What solidified the title?
I'm going to defer to at least one person in the room who came up with that title.
Yeah, it's the title for a series we've been doing for a few years, where I mean it's like a double meaning ever playing off a founder because it's the founder of a company, but foundering also refers to a shift thinking. So oftentimes these entrepreneurial stories, there's some great chanceallenges in our first subject, which Ellen here, Ellen Hewitt from Bloomberg, who was the host of We focused on Adam Newman from We Work, who was definitely foundering, and
then sank. Not all of our subjects sank entirely. Some got to leave on their own terms, like Jeff Bezos who Brad Stone, the host of that series, is here too. And so yeah, that was the story behind the title. Another question from the audience was.
More about kind of the kernel of his brilliance. So we heard about different aspects of what made him successful, his salesmanship, the relationships he developed, but what was at the start of his success in building his company. Was there some sort of technical brilliance or was it more smoke and mirrors?
I mean, according to the interviews that we did, the product was like good. There was a whole controversy about whether he even like created it himself or whether one of the programmers that he employed did it. And it's a rabbit hole like it really. I even heard from one person that I spoke to that when he was working at Lockheed Martin, one of his colleagues at Lockheed Martin had actually came up with it and John had
stolen it from him. And then when it so, I mean, this is why I said it was so hard to verify exactly what was happening. But what we do know for sure is that Dennis l the computer programmer who worked with McFee, was instrumental in sort of creating that first version, and obviously it fit in need. But I don't really know much about fighting viruses back then. But they were like for specific viruses, right, so you had to constantly iterate and find new solutions, is that right?
Yeah, I mean, so what you were looking at in back in the early eighties was you had two You had McAfee and you had Norton, and then you had a whole bunch of scammy uh uh pretend anti virus programs that didn't actually do anything, just kind of like now actually, But but yeah, and you know, basically the way it worked was it was entirely a subscription model. They would identify a new virus and then they would
and they would add it to the signature. So it was all signature based and that was kind of the brilliance of it. When you're only dealing with one virus a month, or one mutation of a virus a month, you can add new signatures monthly and do pretty well, and so they were able to stay ahead of it. The problem was when you moved from that one a month to you know, hundreds of variations a day, then
it became much much more difficult to keep up. But yes, in the in the early eighties and mid eighties, McAfee and Norton were your options for better, for for better you know, internet security and to protect.
You from these viruses that were a real problem.
I think the uh, the question of who programmed it is like similar to the sort of like Steve Jobs versus Steve Wozniak like debate, which is who who was the genius? And I think they were they were both geniuses. And like mcaview's ability to market the to create the Ghostbusters Dan and drive it to the sites and like go on TV and get people interested and scare everyone about the Michelangel virus, that was an effect that you know, he created an industry that's like pretty amazing.
Well, and we see that even today there are incident response companies that have like their promotional incident response truck like like you know, it looks like an ambulance or or something like that. So that again when we talk about through lines, that that continues through uh where where where they have that ability?
Alan, How unique of a figure do you think McAfee was, Like, have you come across other mcafeees during the course of your time?
Was or is?
So?
I think in in the early cybersecurity industry, I think he was fairly unique.
I do think there are maybe.
With less cocaine, although I'm not at the CEO level, so I could be completely wrong about that. I think
there are. We still see them pop up. The type of salesman you have to especially if you're a startup, you have to be a bit of a salesman to sell your product, right, and McVie did make a good product, But I do think we have a lot of the people who are more of the salespeople without the good product behind it in in security industry, again because it is such a complex industry, but I think the best CEOs also have to be able to sell their product.
I don't think that's a bad thing. You know, as a technical person, I get all queasy and uncomfortable around selling stuff, but you can't do that as a CEO.
So we have a question from my boss, Brad.
I would encourage everybody to listen to the podcast, it's really crazy, but in particular the last episode is wild because McAfee authors this incredible last chapter where he runs for president, he gets into crypto, and he gets arrested, and then he dies under mysterious circumstances.
So I'm wondering, you know.
Jamie, what did you end up concluding about this last chapter in his life and the mysterious, somewhat mysterious circumstances of his death.
And then Alan, the one for you is.
Like, why do you think we're still talking about John McAfee. Why does he continue to resonate in this industry?
I mean, I was trying to. I really struggle with this because it's really hard to sort of imagine a seventy ydd year old man running around the world rather
than like pay taxes. I couldn't understand why he felt he had to react sorely to something like that, And all I could think was it was his narcissism and his ego and this this idea, this belief that he had that people cared about him, you know, and that without his online audience or his fans or whenever he would go to these conferences and speak, he was you know,
in Alan. You saw him speaking in a couple of places as well that you know, he had this adulation and I don't know, I was really it just seems like the most obvious thing is just go to court, but that's he's never done that. He had all of these instances where he was meant to go to court to face up to charges and he just point blank refused to. And they think that if you entrench yourself in your positions so stubbornly, I think seventy five year
olds can be stubborn, then, you know. But and then I think the sort of the conspiracy around his death was just part of fo menting and making sure that he could do what he could to keep his name out there as long as possible. I mean, it's really an exercise in just like extreme narcissism. But a lot of people, you know, brought into it. We get a lot of reactions still online to the story that he's not dead, so that's always fun.
Well, I mean, you look at the contrast between John McAfee and Peter Norton. Does anybody know what Peter Norton's doing these days? I mean, you know there's a guy who paid his taxes made his money, and you know, is off doing whatever we talked about him because he wanted to be in the public eye and he wanted to keep that public persona and that was that was important to him. And I do think that there is for a lot of the security community. I think there's
a very libertarian streak in the security community. So a lot of what he said resonated with with with many people in the security community. A little overboard for for for for many, but but I do think that that that kind of resonation, you know, was important, and there were people that agreed with a lot of what he had to say. You know, I think he had a
very good stance on privacy. For example, Personally, I'm not a fan of cryptocurrencies, but that's because I deal with ransomware and I only see cryptocurrency is being used for bad things. But you know, so in that way, he's managed to stay relevant because he was always chasing after the next relevant thing.
We're almost out a time, but I want Jamie to ask one more question. What is the one thing you hope listeners take away from the series?
Oh my god, I mean, I think in a lot of ways, it's it's a really great story. Like I think what happened to John McAfee, Like he came from nothing and he built this incredible company and it helped start, you know, an industry. And I think that sort of the the good parts of what he did and what he accomplished I really worth sort of paying attention to. Like he saw an opportunity, he had an idea, and
he went for it and really went for it. And I think the other part of that is, you know, it's such a slippery slope.
You you you become powerful and wealthy, and you were surrounded by your neighborers and you never hear the word no, and you start to believe that you don't have to operate on the same level as everyone else.
And there's a big lesson in that as well. And you know we see that every day. Actually you're right about that.
All right, Well, thank you Alan for sitting down with us now twice if you count the podcast interview, absolutely and thanks to Jamie for doing what is a very awkward dance for a journalist of sitting up here and performing for an audio. And I hope you all give
a round him applause for our executive producer Sean. When Sean came out this morning's bite having a tiny baby at home and was not letting her sleep, and Brad and Tom and Hannah, and this is the first time we've been able to get almost the entire team together. But most of all, thank you to all of you for coming today And if you like the show, find us in your podcast app, subscribe, leave a review, thank you, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference.