As you may have heard, Brock Pierce recently announced he's running for president.
I had a long Telegram conversation this morning with someone in the crypto community who is utterly convinced Brock is not a good person. They referenced allegations against him [1] and the Chad's World show co-produced by Brock (when he was around 17) and Marc Collins-Rector who is a convicted sex offender.
The conversation was concerning because it became clear to me truth and facts were not a concern for this person. They said things like:
"Unfortunately the truth oftentimes doesn't matter. It's almost all about perception."
and
"I'm not claiming that all of the information is fact, but it makes you wonder! I did message you out of genuine concern for your reputation. It's not good for it."
This was in reference to a reply tweet of mine yesterday which Brock retweeted. This Telegram conversation didn't bother me as much as what it represents concerning our social systems of judgement and reputation in general. Actual "fake news" can be destructive when you empower people to create your (false) opinion about others. This can happen on an individual level or, much worse, at a group level. Read a history book and 1984 if you don't understand how dangerous this can be.
Facts and truth do matter. Without them, we can not have accurate reputations or understanding. If anyone with an agenda can create a believable (on the surface) narrative to form public opinion without directly engaging with the people involved or having to use actual facts, then those people can directly control what we think while also destroying the reputation of others. Documentaries like An Open Secret [2] are important for blowing the whistle on corrupt systems of power, but what happens when some involved (like Michael Egan) appear to be lying [1] about others (like Brock) to extort money?
Imagine for a moment if someone did that to you. If they falsely accused you of something so bad that it stuck to your reputation for over 20 years.
Be careful picking villains.
I've talked about this before, but too many people haven't bothered to examine their own moral framework[3]. It's like they are on auto-pilot, following someone else's script. They have a "good guys vs. bad guys" [4] narrative like the cartoons we watched as kids. Their confirmation bias is so thick, if they run into a disagreement, the opposing party is immediately seen as ignorant, immoral, or stupid [5].
As someone told me in conversation today, there aren't really "good" and "evil" people but more so people who "correctly understand the situation" and those who "do stupid things because they got it wrong." I think that makes a lot more sense to me as a deeper study of ethics and morality show many commonly held ideas are cultural stories that change over time and, horrifically, cause a lot of harm, suffering, shame, and guilt in the mean time. Therefore, it's really, really important we be extremely clear about accurately defining "sin" while sticking to ideas people like Christ and Ghandi have been credited with: Love the sinner, hate the sin.
Today it seems many people prefer to hate everyone, regardless of what they've actually done, just to be on the safe side. This is especially true of accusations for the most obvious sins such as child abuse.
My Connection to Brock
More than two years ago, in March 2018, I visited Puerto Rico while considering moving here with my family. I enjoyed a week long crypto conference, hanging out with my friend Sean King, and also hearing Brock give a little toast which I recorded on my phone [6]. As I started talking about my experience, I began to hear rumors of accusations about Brock and so I got curious and started diving in to better understand this guy. I found a video recorded in 2014 (15 years after the events in the accusations) [7] which seemed pretty straight forward to me. Actor or not, that response came across as 100% genuine. Watch it yourself and tell me what you think. While on the island, I started asking about him from people who seemed connected to him directly or knew people who were connected to him directly and the results were the same in that he has a good heart, good intentions, and wants to improve the world.
I published my notes [8] as it was also around the time Jon Oliver published his video about EOS and Brock. I saw Brock give a talk at Burning Man in 2018 which further peaked my interest in moving to PR which I did in December of 2018. I met Brock at a conference on the mainland and didn't connect with him here until many months after moving. My friend Ben Sigman was in town, and he and Crystal Rose (Brock's wife) decided to come visit us in Caguas for dinner. Brock came as well as some others, and we had a packed house. It was a wonderful night with a lot of really interesting conversation. Brock asked me to come out to Old San Juan later that week and meet some people visiting in town who I later found out had been working on the EOS Alliance. One thing led to another and eventually they asked me to help as the interim director for a new EOS Foundation of sorts. Originally my background with eosDAC and my relationship with EOS NY (who they were already working with) put me in a good position to help facilitate creating a DAC (decentralized autonomous community) for this foundation. For reasons unrelated to this post, things took a different direction (EOS NY got hired by Block One, the direction of the community shifted back towards a non-DAC model which is still being defined, etc). The point is, I got opportunities to connect with Brock one on one here and there over a course of more than half a year. I also spent time getting to know his family including time at the beach, a horse back riding trip, a jet ski outing, and other times just chilling, playing board games, enjoying meals, and such.
Brock is not a perfect person and certainly has his vices and challenges as we all do. I do love and respect him because I believe he has a good heart and truly wants to use his time and resources in service to the world and positively impact a billion people. Over the last year and a half or so that I've been here, I've gotten to know him. We've hung out at various conferences off the island as well. I'll be the first to tell you working with Brock can be frustrating at times (I call it the whirlwind) because he's constantly, constantly moving and working on multiple things at once in multiple dimensions. I've never met anyone who packs so much into so little time. Meetings can run late or barely happen at all and that was surely challenging, but I'd also often later get a larger picture from a different perspective of what else was going on and my frustration would turn into a respect for the many different things he has going on that he doesn't bother to put his name on because he doesn't need the recognition.
When some people see a rich celebrity from a far, they tend to dehumanize them. They either villainize them out of some subconscious jealousy or insecurity about their own comparative lack of accomplishment or they turn them into larger-than-life heroes up on unapproachable pedestals. People who are complete in themselves don't fall into those traps. As I need nothing from Brock, it was easy to always treat him as a normal person. I also recognized that he wasn't quite like everyone else in that he has a deep understanding of many things I'm very interested in learning more about. He seems to get how things work behind the scenes as if he's tried many different approaches to reality and synthesized them all back into something explainable. Every time I'm around him, I learn new things, and I love learning, so I enjoy being around him. He has a ton of energy, and it's something that energizes you when you catch his passion for accomplishing great things. Hope is an encouraging, contagious power, and he's full of hope.
Some at this point may say, "Luke, you're just a Brock fan boy" and write me off, sticking to whatever narrative they already have about him. They can believe that if they like, but I'd caution anyone to withhold judgements before actually knowing the people involved (in this case, myself and Brock). I respect Brock, but I also see clearly what I'd consider flaws or where his approach differs from my own. At other points in my life, I've enjoyed validation from "big men" to stroke my ego, feed my insecurities, or strengthen my pride, but I do think I've worked through quite a bit of that at this point. I don't claim to know or see Brock in full clarity, but I do think his intentions are good, which is not something we often see in men with great resources.
He can truly make a difference in the world. While I think the chances of him actually becoming US President in 2020 are quite low, I do think he can start some very interesting conversations which are long overdue. Check out the video he published today at https://www.brock.vote/ and compare that to the other two main candidates. He's at least got a message that makes sense to me, and he has experience implementing some of these transformative technologies long before anyone else even understood what changes were coming. Yes, I hear my anarchist friends saying how pointless voting is and how it actually causes more harm than good (I've written about that too [9]), but I always think about the conversations Ron Paul started which are still going on today.
You may wonder why I bothered to write all this up. I was inspired not just by the Telegram conversation this morning, but also a text Brock sent me this afternoon with just a link to this YouTube video [10]:
Sure, softball questions aren't exactly hard journalism (and if you've already made up your mind about him, nothing I'm saying here will make a difference anyway), but I did get a sense for what it would feel like if false accusations from over 20 years ago still plagued my professional career. It got me thinking I'd certainly want my friends who actually know and spend time with me to help set the record straight from their perspective. So, I wrote this post in case it helps in some small way.
If anything, I hope it causes you to think about how you perceive others and about what mechanisms you use to build a mental model of reputation for someone you may not personally know. There aren't that many people who rise to power who truly want to do good in the world. We are easily manipulated creatures. Instead of tearing down others based on the absence of fact, let's look for the best in people and come together to create a world we all want to live in.
I hope you found this worth your time.
Thanks for reading.
[1] D.E.N: Fact & Fiction
[2] Wikipedia: An Open Secret: Controversy
[3] Where Does Your Morality Come From?
[4] Beyond Cartoon Morality: The World Isn't Bad Guys vs. Good Guys
[5] We Disagree. Are You Ignorant, Immoral, or Stupid?
[6] YouTube, Mar 14, 2018: Brock Pierce discussing Puerto Rico and plans to build the future in the present
[7] Bitcoin Foundation's Brock Pierce responds to controversy
[8] Brock Pierce discussing Puerto Rico and plans to build the future in the present
[9] Should Anarchists Vote?
[10] Brock Pierce: Cryptocurrency BILLIONAIRE speaks his truth. What is he up to from here?