Tech’s Last Liberal: What Silicon Valley Did to the Man Who Refused to Bend the Knee
Mike Brock was positioned perfectly. CEO of TBD at Block. Jack Dorsey’s inner circle. The architect who brought Bitcoin to Cash App and built Spiral, the open-source crypto initiative. He had the keys to the kingdom—the coming fiefdom in the broligarchy’s decentralized utopia.
Then he made a fatal mistake in Silicon Valley: he stayed liberal. Not progressive, not woke—liberal in the constitutional sense. Someone who believes ordinary people can govern themselves, that the Constitution matters, that democracy isn’t negotiable even when it hurts your portfolio. Silicon Valley exiled him for it.
“After I published ‘The Plot Against America,’” Mike told me on Narativ Live, “recruiters mostly stopped replying to my emails and text messages.” Being publicly anti-Trump after November 2024 “did not seem like a very tenable thing for various executive teams and boards across Silicon Valley.” A senior executive in one of America’s most innovative industries became unemployable for defending democracy. Being pro-Constitution is now disqualifying in Silicon Valley.
So we brought him on to ask the questions that got him exiled: Has Silicon Valley become a cult? Why is Jack Dorsey the only tech CEO not prostrating himself before Trump? Should you buy or sell crypto right now? (Spoiler: Mike sold all his positions.) And the big one—what are democracy’s odds? His answer, from someone who’s seen the machine up close, should alarm you.
Watch the full interview to find out what Mike Brock saw inside Silicon Valley that made him walk away from everything—and why he’s giving American democracy only slightly better than even odds of surviving the next five years.
