Brock Pierce (58:30)
And that's why it's dumb that these guys. Yeah. IG was ever hoping the company would like that Blizzard or whoever would accept there being a middleman who makes money off of like their in game world. Like that's nuts. Why would they. Yeah, yeah. Why would they be okay with this? So Blizzard constantly raids ige, Right. They find people's accounts, they delete them, they ban people who are buying gold. There's a bunch of lawsuits from people who bought gold and didn't get it. Yada, yada yada. It causes a bunch of problems for ige. Pierce eventually has to step down as CEO and Bannon replaces him. And it's kind of framed as like Bannon edges Pierce out, but that doesn't. It seems to have been perfectly friendly. Like Pierce seems to have been fine with this and understood that like this is what's, you know, we need to do for the next stage of the business. Right? Yeah. Ultimately, IG stops selling gold entirely and under Bannon the company is renamed Affinity Media holdings and instead makes its money running and operating a series of chat rooms and forums for Gamers. So the company pivots to running places where gamers communicate and socialize. And Bannon, first, he sees how angry these gamers had gotten at gold farming, and he starts paying attention to the social dynamics in these online communities. And it gives him a horrible, awful idea. And I'm going to quote from the Washington Post here. Bannon became fascinated with the collective power of gamers who gathered on these sites. According to journalist Joshua Green, who wrote a book, Devil's Bargain, about Bannon's rise in the Trump administration, selling virtual currency was highly unpopular with many gamers. And they railed against IGE in these chat rooms, putting pressure on the companies that operated the games not to partner with ige. These guys, these rootless white males had monster power. Bannon said, right? So he's, he's starting to realize, okay, this kind of fucked us. The power that these, these inchoate groups of angry white dudes on the Internet, it kind of fucked the business now. But you could manipulate these guys, right? You could tune them up and turn them on an enemy and unleash them as a weapon and they have the ability to do some damage, right? This is where, where Bannon makes that realization, Right? And I know, folks, that we're 55 minutes in and I barely talked about Epstein past the introduction. Trust me, we're coming back to him. This is all necessary groundwork for you to understand Epstein's role in all this. Brock Pierce would later describe Steve Bannon as his right hand man for like seven years, which again suggests there were no hard feelings about Bannon replacing him as CEO of ige. Not long after leaving the company, Brock gets involved in the world of cryptocurrency. That's kind of his next move. After gaming, he founds a company called Blockchain Capital, and he is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative that he founds this under. Right? Well, he's like part of the Clinton Global Initiative as he creates Blockchain Capital, which again, the Clintons are very tied to Epstein, right? And that may be part of how Jeffrey Epstein heard about Brock Pierce for the first time is because Pierce is tied in through the Clinton Global Initiative. Now let's perspective shift back to our old pal Jeffrey. He had served time in 2008 and 2009 for soliciting sex from a minor, right? But he was by 2010, a free man. He was still rich and he was still influential, but he was something of a pariah, at least to normal people. He's not a pariah to the power Elite. He's not a pariah to the people running the New York Times, to a lot of people working at the Times. He's not a pariah to a lot of Harvard professors, to a lot of famous academics and scientists, to a lot of celebrities. But he's like, in public, is a guy who got arrested for fucking a kid, you know? Right. And this aided him. He hates the fact that, like, he had to take an L, right. And that's. He sees it as this kind of petty because his friends are like, man, you kind of got off light. Which he did. But it really bugs him that he had to suffer any consequences at all because he doesn't think he's done anything wrong. Now. It would take years.
