Welcome back to another episode of Talking Intentionally. Today we're speaking with Mike Brock, who is an eccentric guy and also one of the early employees at Cash App and a bunch of other cool places. He's been in tech forever, worked in crypto, done a lot of interesting things. So, we're really excited for this conversation. We hope you enjoy and as always, let us know if there's anything you want to see on the podcast next or any feedback you have for us. Take care and be well. Bye. Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Talking Intentionally. It's myself and Ash. What's up, guys? With Mike from a storied career in Silicon Valley. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us.
It's great. Good being out here in New York. Great time of year to be in New York right near New Year's. Right near Times Square here.
Life's okay, I suppose. I mean, it could be worse.
Could be. I could be sick. I'm not. Could be dead. I'm not. We're alive and kicking.
We're alive and kicking, right? And the world marches on.
Yeah. I mean, what's your background? You're a person who I know pretty well in the world of fintech and tech. But what was your background with it and how did it color your opinion on how you view the world today?
How did my world and how did fintech...?
Yeah. Like your perspectives on the world are obviously a byproduct of your life and your existence. Would love to hear a little bit about that.
I mean, from a very young age I've always had a pretty strong world view. I write about this a lot actually on Notes from the Circus, my Substack. When I was younger I was into libertarian politics. I call myself a classical liberal today. Some people would even call me a liberal philosopher. I've always had this core set of romantic beliefs that go back to my childhood, go back to conversations I had with my grandfather who fought in the war, who was part of the D-Day Normandy invasions, about the sacred gift that we have to live in freedom and in a society that is capable of governing itself and has a system that tries to reach towards some concept of fair justice. I know that we fall short of that as a society in all different ways and our history is littered with examples of that. As I move through life, I've tried to the best of my ability live according to my values, which are long-held and give me a sense of meaning in the world. What I learned in fintech was that there are troubling features of the political economy in this country and throughout the world. There are features of our economy that have become, in the case of the financial industry and fintech, very extractive. Not all, I don't think fintech is extractive. I obviously worked in fintech, I don't think I was working on extractive products. Financial products serve a purpose, they can be pro-social or antisocial. My views on Bitcoin and crypto have evolved since I left that sphere. I'm definitely not of the ilk of the sound money theorists and Bitcoiners who think we should get rid of all high finance and debt-backed money. I think that's an insane proposition. John Maynard Keynes was correct in his rebuttal. The Bitcoiners and other sound money theorists, gold bugs, often misrepresent what Mises was saying about the properties of money and why he valued gold. The Bitcoiners are all triggered by Peter Schiff and they've been in this ping-pong match with him intellectually. Schiff himself is a scholar of Ludwig von Mises. Mises was a really smart guy. At the time, there were a few things going on in elite conversations and intellectual discourse. One big one that people don't talk about is the revolution in physics. We had the quantum physics revolution at the beginning of the 20th century. Niels Bohr was influential on the thinking of how to think about information in markets that both Mises and Hayek used. There's this thing in quantum physics called the measurement problem. You can know the position or the velocity of a particle but not both at the same time. In order to measure a system you must disturb the system, which creates a paradox in measurement. This insight from quantum physics leads to the economic calculation problem, which is the problem that a central planner in a socialist centrally planned economy has to contend with: knowing ahead of time what the required inputs are for everything. Mises, building on the insight from physics, intuits that you can't really do this. The only effective way is through the price signaling mechanism. The observation is that it's way more efficient to allow supply and demand signals in the market determine what the price should be. For example, if there's a shortage of apples one year, the price goes way up. That sends a signal through the market, and other farmers might grow apples next year to cash in on that demand. That's how the price signaling mechanism works. Mises observed that all of this happens in a distributed way. Milton Friedman talked a lot about this too. Friedman is not Austrian, he's associated with the Chicago school, which is closer to Keynesianism than to Austrian economics. A lot of people don't realize that because there's a weird aestheticization in libertarian politics and market fundamentalist politics that associate Friedman and the Chicago school with Murray Rothbard and libertarians. That's not fair. Friedman would have recognized these people as fascist reactionaries. There's a lot of tortured retellings in the crypto and Bitcoin world of what these people actually believed.
Do you think historicism is really that important? I think there's a lot of intellectual pontification about the roots of why Bitcoin matters, but for the vast majority of people who own Bitcoin, they have some form of skepticism about their government and they want to have something that maybe doesn't. What do you think a government is?
Tell me what the government is.
A planner that regulates public goods.
I think there's certain things that they should not meddle with and public goods should be meddled with. What's your definition?
I don't know. It would be an entity that regulates rules that the masses agree upon and is funded through taxing the citizens.
Government is the greatest social institution that humans have ever created. It is the basis of civilization. The ancient cities, like Babylon, ancient Mesopotamia, early human civilizations. A philosopher by the name of Thomas Hobbes, who wrote a famous treatise, Leviathan, observed that there were two worlds from his vantage point of civilization. In civilization, there are people who have moved to these great cities all around the world, like Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire. And there are other people who live in what he refers to as the state of nature, tribal people. He notices that the lifespans of these people who live out in nature are nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes says to himself, what's going on here? In some ways these people living out there have a lot more freedom than we do. We don't have tax collectors and census takers and religious organizations exerting social control. But there's less violence, less people get killed arbitrarily. When that happens, people get punished and people are feared away from doing those sorts of things. He recognizes that this government thing actually saves a lot of lives. Anything doesn't go. We have some basis in our humanity for seeing what's right and what's wrong. You don't have to get sophisticated about it. You're a human being. This is a wrong thing. You shouldn't do this. Stop right now. I demand it.
More tangibly on the fintech side, or not even fintech, any tech, any corporation, any company that comes out. You mentioned at the start that there are certain decisions that are being made that are pro-social and good and help out a lot of people, and then there's certain things that are very extractive. What are things that immediately come to mind, any time period you want, when you first entered the industry versus today, or even go further back like humans a thousand years ago?
