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

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He said he lived in peace, yet a piece in him was missing. The puzzle piece of selfless love, which marks the red X on the jigsaw of life. But it wasn’t the crazy stories of John McAfee that I’m still thinking of a few days after finishing this book. What stayed with me is how people can disassociate from the world of love and emotion, claiming it’s the world of reality and truth and individuality that are the only things there for you in the end. The stuff about McAfee is better, though essentially just a series of transcriptions of boozy convos with an increasingly unhinged McAfee.

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. One night, John got tired of his dad’s abuse towards him and his mother, and decided to end his father’s life with the pull of a trigger. From that moment on, John knew what hatred, death, pain, betrayal, and heartache felt like. Spears’ vulnerability shines through as she describes her painful journey from vulnerable girl to empowered woman. 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.In California, he saw the great contrast between the have’s and the have nots. The millionaire subdivisions and the tent camps surrounding them. He wanted to bridge the divide, and began filming a documentary featuring the homeless to show how, in the end, we’re not that different after all. 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 an exclusive chat with Digital Spy, Foster reveals the one hour and 45 minute documentary barely scratches the surface of what he experienced in the presence of McAfee. As a ghostwriter, Foster's work involved him writing as McAfee – and as a man who takes his work seriously, this involved months of interviews and time with him to write his point of view. In exchange, McAfee had to give Foster a no-holds-barred insight into his life. 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." 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.

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. He wanted to find truth through the lies and healing through the pain that was John McAfee’s life. He thought that through the confusion surrounding John, he could find clarity within himself. In one chilling moment on one of Foster's tapes, McAfee seemingly alludes to the idea he murdered his abusive father at the age of 17, getting away with the killing for decades, seemingly without consequence.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. In this debut memoir, a ghostwriter steps out from behind the scenes to paint a portrait of his larger-than-life subject. 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.

The book from beginning to end is about Alex, not McAfee. Not only the first half of the book where you could argue his own life is relevant to understand the mutual attraction between him and John McAfee (and at the same time allow you to understand why he is such an unreliable teller of the McAfee story), but I even when he is focused on the McAfee story, it is all in comparison, almost in competition, to his own. In early November 2008, eighty British MPs signed an Early Day Motion calling for any custodial sentence imposed by an American court to be served in a prison in the UK. [24] On 15 July 2009, many voted in Parliament against a review of the extradition treaty. [25]

She looked at me seriously. "No," she said. "This is very impressive, and trust me, it takes a lot to impress me, kid. How old are you?"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. He can be so genuine and so real, so poetic… but he could also be so dark, so paranoid, and so dangerous." Alex, a lost soul found by the love of stories, writing, and companionship, on the other hand says he would die for a loved one.