McAfee Part 4: The White House

shooters phone. The FBI believes important clues about accomplices and more plots could be hidden on that phone, but Apple says that complying with the government order could endanger everyone with an iPhone. This conflict ignited a heated debate over whether it was okay to sacrifice civil liberties for authorities purporting to fight violent extremism. John McAfee saw an opportunity and jumped into the fray. Here he is on Russia today.

The FBI needs to get us to act together and tell the two saying, yeah, we need it because we want to spy on Americans. Cool, let's talk about that, but please don't try to deceive US by pretending we're idiots. We aren't. At the time, McAfee had been back in the US for more than two years after being deported from Central America. He was active on Twitter and appearing on television talk shows trying to reassert himself as a

cybersecurity authority. My colleague William Turton was covering the aftermath of the San Bernardino shooting for a new site called The Daily Dot. He says McAfee was inserting himself into the story in a desperate attempt to get attention. He lied about the fact that he had a method that

would allow the FBI access to the phone. So you know, he was presenting himself as a savior for this scenario, saying that, you know, Apple didn't have to comply with the FBI and create this new standard, that actually he had found a solution to this issue. William was confident that McAfee was lying, but McAfee was adamant. He wrote an op ed declaring he would eat his shoe on the television show if he and a team of hackers couldn't do it. William decides to call him out on

this claim, and he gets McAfee on the phone. But I'm just curious as to why you did this, because because by doing so, I knew that I would get a shitload of public attention, which I did. That video on my YouTube account you can check it has seven hundred thousand views. McAfee's reaction surprised even William. It was. It was actually kind of refreshing in a way for someone to admit to their craven narcissism and not try

and spin it as something else. So my point to bring to and listen to me, I'm answering a question. My point is to bring to the American public the problem that the FBI is trying to write the American public. How am I going to do that by this raft and saying it? Now, one's gonna listen to that crap, So I confis something sensational. Now. What I did not lie about was my ability to crack the iPhone. I can do it. It's a piece of freaking cake. William

and McAfee go back and forth on the call. Eventually he agrees to share with William how he would crack the iPhone. McAfee tells William that he should try it himself and if it works, that William should write about it and give McAfee credit. Check it out if it doesn't. If it doesn't play, say McAfee gave me a line of gartmage. If it doesn't play, say McAfee told me how to do it. Sure, but I'm confused as though why you told me the whole method now and earlier

you wouldn't tell me the method. I must say kept it off the recollect because I'm assuming that since you kept on asking, you are not going to publish it. If you know so, probably aren't that you aren't a liar, not me. Nope, I never said that I wouldn't publish it. I explicitly said that, well, our conversation. Our conversation is over, and you need to look at yourself. You need to look at yourself, all right, Thanks for time, miss McAfee.

William publishes his story. In the headline, he accuses McAfee of lying quote to get a shitload of public attention. He writes that McAfee's method isn't much of a secret at all, and that there's a good chance it would end up destroying the data they're trying to get. William also uploads the recording of their entire phone call. McAfee is even more furious. After I published this story, John went on a week's long campaign to harass me and

my editors that included hacking my voicemail. I woke up one morning and I had twenty missed calls from my own cell phone number, and I had one new voicemail and it was from John, and the voicemail was meant to be extremely intimidating. His actually kind of made sense because the story that I wrote was damaging to him. It's extremely rare that I include the audio of an interview in a story, but I did that because I anticipated that, if not for that, he would lie about

the contents of the interview. I mean, the story of I remember correctly went viral and was actually really damaging to his credibility. He was not a fan of mine. William felt that McAfee was a charlatan forcing his way into the national conversation about a mass shooting. But McAfee was right about one thing. At least, this move got him a lot of attention. You're listening to Foundering, I'm

your host, Jamie Tara Bay. In twenty twelve, John McAfee left Belize, where he was wanted for questioning in the murder of his neighbor, Gregory Fall. He returned to the US with a cloud of suspicion hanging over his head, but he was free. He was also broke, alone, and worst of all, potentially irrelevant. McAfee anti virus software had been a widely used product for over twenty years, and even though he didn't have anything to do with the company anymore, McAfee cashes in any way he can. He

begins selling his most important asset, his name. Over the next few years, McAfee finds the limelight yet again. He exhibits his true talent beguiling women, drawing attention to himself, and blatantly breaking the law. He also launches a bid for the presidency of the United States. The semi serious campaign brings him shockingly close to landing on the US ballot, and it also introduces him to cryptocurrency, a new fascination

for McAfee that would ultimately spark his downfall. For a time there in jail in Guatemala, John McAfee looked like he was in real trouble. He'd entered the country illegally. His biggest fear was getting extradited back to Belize, where police wanted to talk to him about the murder of his neighbor Greg Fall, but ultimately McAfee wasn't charged with anything by authorities in Belize or Guatemala. He was deported to the US. McAfee landed in Florida on December twelve,

twenty twelve. He said he had no money and no phone. He checks himself into the Beacon Hotel in Miami. Canadian filmmaker Francois Garcia arranged to lend McAfee some cash to tide him over. Within the hour, John is on the street and there's journalists waiting for him, and he's flashing and seeing pictures where he's flashing out of his jacket. The words of money and I don't know which publication, where'd you get that money? Is like, you know, this

mysterious Canadian friend. He made it sound like, you know it's a drug deal or drug gartel or drug kingpin who just dropped him a bag of money. Why McAfee needed to borrow cash is a bit of a mystery. At the time. He said his assets were frozen when he was fleeing Belize, and he went further to allege that the Belizian government had seized his remaining properties and accounts,

but Francois Garcia says this isn't true. He sent us documents showing McAfee transferring three hundred thousand dollars out of his bank in Belize. The first of these chancefers is dated to November seventeen, twenty twelve, less than a week after Greg Fall was killed. As for his larger fortune, we know he spent recklessly and also gave much of

it to his ex wife, Judy during their divorce. Whatever his access to money was at the time, several people told us that McAfee started this new chapter of his life completely broke. McAfee was casting about for what he was going to do next. The day after he arrived in Miami, he was sitting at an outdoor table at a cafe on Ocean Drive by himself when a woman

named Janice Dyson walked past. He looked rough, you know, suit was kind of wrinkled and dirty, and oh yeah, you know, I kind of just kept walking And it was actually the security that worked at his hotel who actually pointed him out and said, you know, that's John McAfee. The guard explained that McAfee was the same McAfee who invented the anti virus software. Janice was a sex worker at the time. She walked back to talk to him and he was smoking a cigarette, so I asked him

for a cigarette, you know, I just asked him. I said, well, what's your story? Who are you? Who are you? You know, what brings you to Miami? And it's like, like, seriously, you don't know who I am. He assumed the whole world had been watching his flight from Belize after Greg Fall's murder. He says he's been on television for months.

She says she doesn't watch the news. I just remember thinking, who is this guy and how was he able to, you know, kind of maneuver himself through this very dangerous situation. You know. So we spent hours of four hours just talking and okay, and I spent the night with him, and we were together every day after that. Janice was thirty years old. She said she felt a certain camaraderie with John. She's been living in her own hell in Miami.

She'd given up custody of her three children to her parents. She'd been unable to disentangle herself from an abusive and exploitative relationship, so McAfee represented a kind of escape. We spent a week together in Miami. Then he asked me to come and meet him in Tennessee and we were going to drive from there to Portland. So we're on this road trip, which was like three weeks. You know, we took our time and really does so we got to know each other on that road trip. What did

you like about him? Oh? Everything, everything. He's just you know, he's very smart. Obviously it's intelligence, but also at the same time, it's still very down to earth. I feel like I could relate to him. The relationship between Janis and John McAfee began as a commercial transaction, but over time it became deeper. She says that by the summer of the next year, he asked her to marry him. McAfee spent much of twenty thirteen living quietly with Janis

in Portland, Oregon. She would beat his partner up until his death in twenty twenty one. During that first year. In June twenty thirteen, he released a YouTube video that put him back in the spotlight. Fuck send oh, Hello there. My name is Sean McAfee. I'm the founder of the McAfee anti virus software company. Although I've had nothing to do with this company for over fifteen years, I still get volumes of mail asking how do I uninstall this software? I had no idea. He's in the robe. He snorts

white powder through a straw. There's a box labeled bath salt on the table in front of him. There are women massaging him and undressing him, including Janie. At the end of the video, she picks up an automatic rifle and walks away with McAfee. He told Business Insider that he made the video to parody the allegations about him in the media. The greatest thing about that was that after that video that the headlines about me were vastly reduced.

Because once you've, once you've accepted the fact that guard you's have been living with seven women. Okay, fine, let's get seven women in this video and put him in the scantily clad clothes, and I would be as decadent as possible. Then what mud can you sling? I mean, I've already slung in it myself. Now. This video came out three years after Intel bought McAfee, the company for over seven billion dollars, but it had been more than a day since John McAfee had anything to do with

the company except in name. There was money to be made off of his famous product, just not by him. He wanted to reclaim his name, and he was about to do so in a very splashy way. We'll be right back. By twenty fifteen, McAfee and Janice had left Portland and were living in Lexington, Tennessee. He had some new viral fame from the video he made. The next step was rebuilding his fortune. It all comes down to

the idea of milking his name for its value. That's my colleague Brody Ford, who reported on McAfee and his business dealings during this period. Everybody knows McAfee the innovator. Everybody knows the name McAfee, So he's making money off speaking fees, hacker conferences, that kind of thing. It was around this time when McAfee met an entrepreneur named Kyle Sandler who was running a business incubator in a small

town called Opelika in Alabama. John was dirt broke when I met him, and I was paying for his hotels when he would come to visit. Kyle Sandler and McAfee became close. They worked as business partners. Brodie says it was a beneficial relationship for McAfee. He needed new customers and he needed a place to look more legitimate. And Kyle had this massive kind of like what we would think of as a co working space, kind of a

wee work type thing there. And John was living in rural Tennessee at this time, so there's all these accounts of him driving down there in the middle of the night in an old beat up pickup truck to a beat up with clients at Kyle's incubator. So hanging around Kyle it lended both of them legitimacy in different ways. It would turn out that at the time Kyle was actually taking people's money and misleading them about what he was using it. For a few years after Kyle worked

with McAfee, he actually went to prison for fraud. We'll get into that more later, but for now, let's just say that that willingness to deceive people was something that Kyle and McAfee had in common. To me, Kyle understood McAfee in a way that a lot of other people didn't, right, I mean, they both were kind of running operations that relied on the confidence of others. Right, I mean Kyle was a kind man at the time. Right. McAfee and Kyle seemed to work well together, and their partnership made

the papers. USA Today wrote a splashy feature on them in February, and shortly after that a group of investors from a company called MGT Capital Investments reached out. Brodie says, MGT had a pretty broad portfolio. So they had started god like twenty years ago as a medical imaging company, and then they went into sports betting, They went into various kinds of tech. They really never made a whole

lot of money. They were in trouble because their stock price was so low that they might get kicked off of the New York Stock Exchange. So MGT said, let's pivot, Let's do cybersecurity. What better way to drum up hype for cybersecurity than getting the famed innovator John McAfee. So they called up Kyle. I'm thinking, you know, this is all bullshit, just like everything with John. But the next

day they flew into Auburn. We picked them up from the Auburn Regional Airport and had lunch with them, and they're all talking, you know, forty million, this forty million, that the deal from MGT was significantly bigger than anything on McAfee's immediate horizon. I think it's safe to say it was the biggest deal McAfee I had seen since coming back to America. But he walked away because he felt like they were asking too much of him. He felt like the startups he had in his consulting fees

would pay off. But he came to kind of regret that, and I'm thinking, dude, you're stupid. You should have just taken the money. And so about six or seven months goes by and John is still broke and the startups that he has him just shit. So we had decided we needed to do something to make some noise. And I really just jokingly said, what about if you run for president? And he gets back to Tennessee the next day and I'm totally not even thinking about this conversation.

He's like, Kyle, I think I want to do it. Do what? John? Run for president? Are you fucking crazy? To Kyle, running for president is an insane way to resuscitate your career, especially if you're broke and the major business deal falls through, but that's what mcavig planned to do. This was in the summer of twenty fifteen. Already quite a few people had announced their intention to make a play for the White House in twenty sixteen, but it was months ahead of the first primary vote and no

party had a clear front runner. And in addition that June, another controversial businessman without any political experience, had also just announced his run and was doing shockingly well in the polls. I am offacially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country grade again. In the twenty sixteen primaries, there was a sense in the air that people were more willing for non traditional candidates.

Right you had Bernie Sanders out performing anybody's expectation. You had Donald Trump appearing and not fizzling out and actually leading the whole thing. And then among Libertarians you had John McAfee emerge, and a lot of people thought, well, no dust, somebody like John mc if he jumped in. I mean, that was just the energy in the air at the time. There was a lot of populist, non traditional candidates popping up. McAfee had a core fan base

of hackers, and his name could draw a crowd. Kyle said they threw one of their first fundraisers at a strip club, which seems very on brands from McAfee. Larry Flint's Hustler Club is like the one of the biggest strip clubs in America. It's like four levels, elevators, girls everywhere. We rented the whole freaking thing, and you know, there was all kinds of campaign finance laws being broken. That day. Took probably about two million dollars in bitcoins and paypals.

This was twenty fifteen and is twenty twenty two. No, literally, I'm trying to make sure that if there's anything that I'm about to admit that's crime, that statute of limitations is up for real. Okay. So Kyle is alleging that from the start the campaign was raking in money and breaking the law. We haven't been able to confirm that, and there weren't any legal repercautions that we could find. The next month, on September ninth, McAfee formally announced he

was running for president. It was an immediate news story. John McAfee has entered the White House race as a libertarian. He originally planned to run from the highest office under his own cyber party, but he ended up choosing to go with the Libertarian Party for a number of reasons. After Democrats and Republicans. They are the largest party in the US. There's a big difference. They do not come close, but they are the next largest. They already have ballot

access in all fifty states. They have an established media infrastructure. McAfee wouldn't have to build his own from the ground up, so joining the Libertarians gave him a platform that he didn't have to build himself. So anti tax, pro gun, pro drug, anti regulation of any kind in so many ways, McAfee was the perfect fit for the Libertarians. He's a tech entrepreneur who brags about doing drugs not paying taxes. He was well suited for a party that valorizes the

image of frontier masculinity. I mean, that's just his aura. He doesn't give a fuck, and most of the Libertarians don't give a fuck, so he resonated with them. In a matter of months, McAfee learned how to tailor his talking points for his new party. Even Darryl Perry, a long time Libertarian who ran against McAfee in twenty sixteen, was impressed and I was like, oh, okay, it's like, you know, just some celebrity guy that jumping into the

LP race because he realized ballot access as hard. But then over like the next six months, he started sounding a lot more libertarian. By the way, Darryl Perry is best known for this viral clip of a response he gave during a presidential debate in twenty sixteen while he was on stage with McAfee. Should someone have to have a government issued license to drive a car? Hell no, what's next requiring a license to make toast in your own damn toaster. I hadn't known before we made this

episode that driver's licenses were controversial among libertarians. Here's McAfee. I don't think licenses are required. However, if you are under sixteen and your parents so you can drive, and you haven't done it before, you should put a flashing pink light on your roof, at least so we can get out of your way. There was another question John had to answer repeatedly. Candidate McAfee. Everyone knows that something happened in Belize, but no one seems to have the story.

What are you accused of? Did you do it? And how would this affect your campaign if you are the nominee. Let me make this perfectly clear. At number one, I had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Gregory Fall. The moderator you hear is magician Pendalet from Penn and Teller and one of the best known celebrity libertarians. Although McAfee was questioned about the murder of Gregfall, the topic was treated casually, incredibly, it didn't seem to hurt

him in the debates. This is a clip from Fox. You went to Belize. Police there accused you of unlicensed drug manufacturing. You were a person of interest in the murder of a neighbor. You left, police went to Guatemala, which suported you to America. You're still technically a fugitive, though they don't seem that interested in grabbing you. People go wild, they're cheering, they're celebrating, laughing. Gary Johnson, the front runner who would later get millions of votes, walks

over and kisses McAfee on the cheek. You know, libertarians were not other by the Greg Fall murder accusations. McAfee's past was treated lightly when it wasn't a bizarre point of pride. It was the punchline to endless Jokes. Here's a clip from Full Frontal with Samantha b Eighteen libertarian presidential hopefuls gathered to take on the tyranny of big government.

They were educators, pro lifers, anarchists, veterans, and a millionaire wanted for questioning by authorities in the murder of his neighbor and Belize after he fled the country in a disguise to Guatemala, faked to heart attack, and was deported to the US. Well all you see. Brodie says that McAfee's suggestion that these murder allegations were pinned on him by a crooked Belizean government gelled with the libertarian ethos. Their entire belief system is based on the idea that

governments are corrupt, they're wrong. The idea that the Belize government was corrupt and wrong in accusing him doesn't seem far fetched at all, So it really wasn't a problem for him. In a few months, McAfee learned to breathe through libertarian talking points. He criticized the FDA, he supported withdrawing US troops from overseas wars, and he promised to

deliver real change in America. I am a walking revolution, I promise you, with all of its drawbacks and all of its risks, the Libertarian Party is also a revolution. Watching these videos, it's remarkable how comfortable McAfee is on the stage. He's charismatic, he's easy in front of a crowd. He was even sympathetic, like this moment when he casually mentions his new wife, Janice during one debate. When I came back to the States. My first day back, I was penniless. I all I had was my jacket and

my shoes. And I met this woman who was thirty years old, beaten and battered. He was forced into prostitution at the age of twenty. I rescued her personally, I married her, and I hope she's watching the stream tonight. I love you, baby. McAfee was in good spirits during the debates. Behind the scenes, he was making business deals. His presidential campaign and renewed TV presents were about to

pay off financially. MGT Capital, the company that flew the private jets to Alabama, they're coming back to the table. They want to hire him. They're they're dangling millions and stock options, a CEO title, They even want to invest in Kyle's startup incubator. So McAfee begins really talking with them about transitioning all the attention he got in the presidential campaign and to doing another public company gig and

you know, making millions in the process. Kyle Soundler remembers leading up to the deal, the MGT folks told everyone in the know to buy the share because they would explode once the McAfee news became public. The MGT guys basically told us to tell our friends and whoever we trust to invest in this penny stock. It was trading out a quarter and by the end of the week it was five dollars and twenty five cents. In case you're wondering, yes that could be considered insider trading. According

to the SEC. Yes it could be illegal, and yes there were charges coming, but McAfee wasn't worried. The deal went through in May, and here he is bragging about it during another libertarian debate a week later. A month ago, I was approached by a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and they wanted to know, is it possible to get our stock price up fifty percent within six months? Because if not we're going to get delisted, meaning you're gone. I said, well, I don't know, I'll

try it on Monday. I took over as the CEO. On Friday, the stock closed up seven h MGT's share price explosion caught the eyes of investors and the mainstream business press. Here's Bloomberg TV's Emily Chang. MGT Capital is an online gaming company that was once a penny stock, but served tenfold earlier this year on the announcement that it had signed none other than the anti virus Gurup. It didn't take long for this to catch the attention

of the SEC. The share price explodes, everybody involved in the deal gets rich, right, Kyle makes money, McAfee makes money. All the people who are working with an MGT Capital makes money. But then the government regulators say, hey, this company hasn't made money in sixteen years, And they would later allege in a lawsuit against a lot of the MGT Capital core people that this was stock price manipulation. Right,

this was illegal pumping up. The SEC formally sued a group of MGT shareholders a little over two years later for pumping up the price of MGT and two other companies in a similar way. The litigation is ongoing, and today MGT trades for about one cent a share, down more than ninety nine percent from its value at the time. McAfee gloated about boosting the stock. Amazingly, McAfee and Kyle Sandler were never accused of any wrongdoing, and McAfee made

millions in the deal. His salary that year as CEO of MGT, which was renamed McAfee Global Technologies, was seven million in stock, and he may have made even more on the initial deal. The SEC filings show that Janus his wife had stock options too. The gamble of a presidential run had paid off. Kyle says this was the whole reason McAfee ran for president. The whole campaign was a first. It obviously brought and everybody back to the table.

They made the huge investment. Everybody made money. That was part of it. In addition to the MGT windfall, McAfee was also sitting on those campaign contributions. Kyle left the campaign by the end of twenty fifteen to focus on his own businesses. Two and a half years later, Kyle was arrested for fraud related to his incubator in Opelika Alabama. Around the time of kyle sentencing, McAfee was making himself out to be the victim. He posted this video to Twitter.

One of the slickest con artists I've ever met named Kyle Sandler. I met him in Opelaka, Alabama, when he was originally setting his business up. I had a business in the same town and we became friends. I got sucked into his scams like everybody else. Kyle was sentenced to five years in federal prison, but he was released early for good behavior. We spoke to him a few months after he got out. He now makes TikTok videos

about his prison experience. Hi. My name is Kyle Sandler, and I was sentenced sixty three months in federal prison for stealing one point nine million dollars from the investors in my venture capital fund. I knew prison tips and more here on TikTok, So please give me a salad and hit that plus subscribe button right over there on the right hand side of your phone. He disagrees with McAfee, calling him the best con artist, but not for the reason he might expect. And am I the best comment

in the world? No, John is by far he could outcom me any day and he has. Kyle was done, but the McAfee campaign kept rolling, exceeding anyone's expectations. We'll be right back, okay where in April twenty sixteen, time is ticking down to the Libertarian National Convention in May, where delegates would choose their presidential candidate, and McAfee gets a new campaign manager, Tiffany Madison. She says she could tell that McAfee and Kyle were doing something fishy in

the early days of the campaign. There's an air that people have when they're grifters, and there was a lot of grifting energy in that space. He generally attracted pile types right that are fun artists. They think that's they moved back. John's very attracted to that busy energy. Tiffany had been a Libertarian for most of her life when she took over the day to day operations of McAfee's campaign. She believed his story and she saw huge potential in

him as a candidate. He was someone with bona fides as a businessman and who could appeal to the wilder impulses of the libertarian electorate. But she was shocked at the state of the campaign. He had no idea what was going on under the hood of his own campaign. The website didn't work, there were no payment gateways to take donations, there were no donations being solicited. I mean, if I could just sabotage a campaign and then hand it to you on a platter, that's literally what was

being done. Tiffany also noticed that the campaign finances weren't quite adding up. The discrepancy started when Kyle Sandler was managing everything. Here's Brodie. Kyle doesn't dispute that the campaign was about money, right. He says that he saw about two million come in and donations while he was there,

and that includes in bitcoin. While the campaign only disclosed about fifty thousand and finding and forty thousand and expenses federally, that's way less than what other libertarians spent on their campaign, about less than a tenth what Gary Johnson spent. The campaign took donations in bitcoin. They're supposed to be transparency in a campaign as part of the whole process, But he kept a bitcoin wellt on his phone, and we have no idea how much bitcoin was actually taken except

for the emails we'd get. We're like, you know, I just gave fifty thousand dollars worth a bitcoin. So is the guy lying? Or is John Lyne? Who knows. When Tiffany took over in April, she made a strong push to revitalize the campaign, but she only had a month before the primary, and her efforts came too late. Bilibertarian Party already has its ticket. Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson won the presidential nomination for a second time. He got about one fin of the vote when he ran

in twenty twelve. McAfee came in third, but he wasn't bothered. The MGT deal had come through just two weeks earlier. He was a millionaire ceo again. He spent the day before the vote handing out his delegates to another candidate, Vermin Supreme, a man who wore a fisherman's boot on his head. Tiffany thinks that if McAfee's campaign had been run more professionally from the beginning, he had a real chance of winning the party nomination. That would have put

his name on the presidential ballot. They think that he could have won. That's why I decided to work with him, because you know, give him a mic. That's really all he needs. Several people close to McAfee seemed to truly believe he could have won the ticket. Here's Judd Weisse, McAfee's twenty sixteen running mate. He was a long time libertarian who also barely had any campaign experience. We were surprisingly close. McAfee and I would have been in the

middle of that ship with Hillary and Trump. It would have been completely insane, that's how close it was. McAfee never got that close to Trump and Clinton. But even if he had won the nomination, there were questions about how seriously he was taking the larger race for the presidency, even from the people who believed in him. My belief is that it was a publicity start. I don't think he was really running to be in the White House,

although he was saying he was. He was clearly living more of a libertarian lifestyle than pretty much any libertarian I know. McAfee himself has changed his story a few times. Two years after the election, he seems to acknowledge that the campaign was just about getting attention. I have no intention of ever getting elected, no one in the right mind.

I mean, I could never get elected president. However, running on the libertarian platform, it gave me a forum that allowed me to speak and to tell what I think the problems in America are. And that's all I asked for and that's what I achieved. Later in that interview, he starts talking about his new favorite topic, Bitcoin, he'd recently learned about it from his libertarian friends. Jadwis says he gave McAfee his first bitcoin in early twenty sixteen.

When McAfee came on the campaign. He didn't even use Uber. He was still using like taxis and stuff. He never used crypto, so it's not really known, but I gave McAfee his first crypto. At that time, bitcoin was worth less than six hundred dollars. In five years, it would surge more than one hundred times and break into the mainstream. But cryptocurrency was big early on in the libertarian community, which saw it as a way to subvert the power

of government regulated money. His new found obsession with crypto would take over his life once the MGT money dried up, and it gets him in trouble with the law again. Kyle Sandler speculates that it's even the reason he lost his life. That's when he went into the business of hucking shipball cryptocurrencies on Twitter, which is where ended up getting him an in deep shit That's next time on Foundering the John McAfee story. Foundering is hosted by me

Jamie Tarabay Sean When Is Our executive producer. Brodie Ford contributed reporting to this episode. Sure thanks to Young Young and Eileena Pain for help with production. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Sharif Yosef is our audio engineer and editorial assistant. Mark Million and Vandermay and Molly Shoots are our story editors. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends, see you next time