The Man Who Hacked the World: A Ghostwriter’s Descent into Madness with John McAfee

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So really, I guess the answer is no," he added. "But they did the best job they possibly could have, because no one and nothing could ever truly capture the essence of such a person."

It wasn’t until Alex Cody Foster became the unsuspecting ghost writer for John that he grew to learn how similar the two really were. Fortunately and more importantly, after 6 months of working for John, Alex was also able to discern where their similarities ended and stark differences began. The stuff about McAfee is better, though essentially just a series of transcriptions of boozy convos with an increasingly unhinged McAfee. Alex never felt at home, though he had a house and a family. Alex never felt understood, though he thought his intentions were pure. Netflix's new true crime documentary Running With The Devil is a true wild ride as you're given a front row seat to a billionaire on the brink, living a life on the run in real time. I'm an obsessive perfectionist, holding myself to a nearly impossible standard. I strive to turn each project into a masterpiece, perfecting the client's voice and using my honed interviewing skills to get to the very heart and soul of the story; telling it in a way that will capture the attention of any audience.John McAfee was a superwealthy antivirus software entrepreneur, a third-place contender for the 2016 Libertarian Party presidential nomination, and an internationally notorious scoundrel, drug user, and accused murderer who died in a Spanish prison in 2021. His death was declared a suicide, though he had preemptively declared both publicly and privately that if he died in custody, his friends should assume he had been murdered. Despite the adrenaline rush of being a guest witness to this life and lifestyle, everyone has a line that they draw. For Foster, this finally came in the latter half of 2018, when he became privy to a rape accusation against McAfee from a trusted source, of someone he had befriended over the course of his research and investigation into the businessman's life. The documentary is a ride from beginning to end, rarely glorifying the twisted world McAfee had created for himself and showing it for the dangerous life it truly was. It's also somewhat teamed with unreliable narrators – the women who loved McAfee, those who downplayed their involvement, those who want to draw a line underneath it and move on and, for conspiracy theorists, those in power who are hiding what happened. I loved it. I was like on a thrill ride," Foster adds. "It was like a great grand adventure for me, and unlike many of my ghost writing colleagues who are like, twice or three times my age, they're not big risk takers. In my opinion, the higher the risk, the higher the reward. So I've always been a risk taker. And in my career, it's been no different. John was the ultimate risk, the ultimate challenge and I love a challenge. So I was just all about it. Until I wasn't." The book would have been much better had it just been an account of a crazy half year in the company of McAfee. Unfortunately the author finds himself just as interesting and keeps inserting his own life story wherever he can.

He tells a story in the book of how he once held his arm against a boiling pot to see if love or pain was greater within him. As his skin reddened and blistered by the heat of the pot, in minutes it became numb and his arm, and pain, could barely be felt. It was the feeling of love for his girlfriend that kept him going up to that point, and from then on, Alex knew that love was the most powerful emotion of all. In a cyber-netherworld, he allegedly commercialised the wholesale theft of financial and personal information through this virus, which he sold to other cyber-criminals.While the court documents make no references as to how the cash was spent, several reports online claimed that Bendelladj used the money to fund various Palestinian charities – information that made him a hero in the eyes of many. Death sentence rumors This memoir takes us on an exploration of the mind and soul, of love and fear, of the human condition. Foster and McAfee were raised in somewhat similar situations, but as the book goes on we learn about the fundamental core of foundational layers of belief that separate them .

Alone on the beach, a professionally dressed man walked up to Alex, drawing a knife and demanding him to remove his pants. Alex barely got away, stabbing the man and leaving him for dead in the process. This book is so beautiful, so raw, and so haunting. If you want to reconnect with your humanity, see all the unseen people in the world, and watch the way a powerful and wounded John McAfee directs his own personal circus of guns, drugs, and henchmen, you should read this book. I couldn’t put it down, and to be honest, I had no particular interest in John McAfee’s story. In the film, he brands McAfee "the most brilliant, manipulative person he's ever met", and during our discussion, this is echoed in his memories with him.My writing career began when I was twenty years old. I was in a cafe, painstakingly engaged in the 22nd edit of my first book — a memoir of my travels hitchhiking across country, being homeless in Los Angeles, living with one of America's wealthiest people, and sailing the Inside Passage to Alaska. Beside me, a woman asked if I was writing a memoir.