Ten Days With Brock Pierce: EOS, Puerto Rico, Giving Away His Entire Crypto Fortune, and Burning Man Meets Blockchain
As you all know, from the Steemit article I wrote in Rolling Stone, I've started covering crypto and blockchain for the magazine whenever I can. Today, we broke new ground there, and did the first major profile of someone who is arguably the most interesting and controversial person in that space:
Brock Pierce, who recently made the Forbes crypto richest list and has pledged to give away a billion dollars to charity through a token he's creating called One.
In today's market, that's actually more than his fortune. Pretty unprecedented.
You can read the full article here:
And, as always, I'm going to be doing something expanded and special for Steemit.
In this case, we captured almost the entire experience on camera: 60 hours of video.
So I'm going to work with Kai Bickle Nygard, who filmed it all, to turn the footage into something great for DTube.
In the meantime, let me know your notes, thoughts, and reactions.
And let me know any recommendations on who to cover next...
Satoshi Nakamoto?
2PAC AND BIGGIE!
It's so great to see you posting here again Neil! You have been missed :)
In my opinion, behind the scenes is such a trail blazing aspect in this era because of the value it offers to the reader/viewer... Everyone loves to see how a story develops, how a piece of content - or even project - is created, and thank you so much for doing that :)
P.S: Such an excellent article btw, and on those lines my recommendation would probably be Roger Ver (Personally I would prefer Dan, and especially knowing more about his vision, drive, his dreams of changing the world, his universal basic income ideas..etc ).
But maybe for the readers Roger Ver could be a fascinating story how he went from being the Bitcoin Jesus to one of the most controversial figures to some, just because he's trying to stay true to Satoshi's vision and his struggle as well.
More importantly, I think that a humanized profile of Roger would be good for the crypto community in an era where it's easy to label people as hero or heel... But at the end of the day, everyone is working on a similar goal :)
Good call - he’s on my list of top possibilites along with Dan. And thanks for getting it: It’s aboit humanizing people who others turn one-dimensional.
Dan would be pretty interesting - What would be pretty cool, would be getting different philosophies from these heavy-weights.
For example, Dan's thoughts on decentralisation vs Vitalik's. Obviously STEEM's founder would be a good interview too.
hey @neilstrauss: My top interview candidates would be:
Keep it up!
Given @neilstrauss’s unique style and background of interviewing rock stars, that could be a very interesting interview with Vitalik - quite different than the dime-a-dozen technical-focused one from conventional crypto reporters...
I've said it before and I'll say it again: This type of behind-the-scenes content (what you have planned for DTube) is what Steemit desperately needs. I always enjoy your quality writing. I'm about halfway through with a cup of coffee. I, especially, love this:
To spend time with Pierce is to experience a new form of doing business... “I’m normally running three to 10 meetings at a time,” Pierce says. “I just pile them all up. I have no schedule and everybody just kind of meets at the same time. It sometimes makes people who are really important in their minds very uncomfortable ."
I'll send you an Instagram DM with a few more thoughts once I've gotten through the full article.
@NeilStrauss and I will get the content out soon on Dtube - Excited to have just joined steemit - Kai Bickle Nygard
I agree. Me and @rulesforrebels were talking about that type of thing before as well. Right now no one can really do longer form content or documentaries for the STEEM blockchain. If original content could truly be sponsored and published here then more people would come.
Right now it is a total crap shoot to try to get the delegated power upvotes so it almost makes more sense to just post random pictures 50 times / day on here.
Excited to hear that you want to see that type of footage. I really agree with you and because Neil and Brock were both open to it, we were able to get content that makes u feel like ur right there throughout the journey
Puerto Rico my favourite place
Ke Xu!
That would be really interesting!
Would be nice if you guys could catch up, she is regularly seen in the ONO English group on telegram: https://t.me/ONOUS
Why not @ned?
Interviewed @ned for the Steemit story. Definitely worth a follow up.
Indeed, he's become a little more public lately, so it'll be interesting to see if/how he's changed through your eye's.
I just looked at your oldest posts out of boredom wondering if I was reading the numbers wrong, clicked around in the comment sections for a while, recognized a bunch of people and stories I'd only heard about before, and goddamn is it some level of schadenfreude or what to see people messaging other people memos like, "hey you can right your actions plz come back," to people who ghosted the platform after receiving their one-off paydays.
Not saying your posts were bad or anything, you even got a little earnest when you were telling people to remember what they really wanted to do when they were young, but holy shit anyone who can say that superlinear voting and the premine distribution wasn't a broken as hell combo from day 1 in regards to the necessary starting foundation for building an actual social media site's content base with a straight face is an ape. Didn't do anything but force everyone to cater to the wishes of a handful of people with incredibly out-of-touch tastes in the modern social media world, and guaranteed that the only people who would be interested in the place at all would be those willing to clamor over one another for that fast money life.
Haven't read any of your books, I enjoyed your interview with the Overstock guy, Musky boy is turning out to be quite the douche on twitter, and I hope you have a nice day.
Oh, and why the fuck would you start a book club with Ulysses. Really wanted people to work hard for those steem bucks huh.
Please, also do cover @haejin in your next article.
Charles Hoskinson next :)