I sat down with Mike and talked to him for several hours back in 2022. From that conversation, I concluded that his priority is always his politics, and at a more fundamental level, his confidence in his own worldview.

We talked about a lot of things in those few hours, including libertarianism, COVID lockdowns, Bitcoin, Austrian economics. His take was consistently progressive, though he claimed to have been libertarian at some point. He defended the lockdowns, thought libertarian principles were BS, that Austrian economics was bad.

So for someone like that, I was surprised to hear that he was into Bitcoin, but then I learned that he worked for Jack Dorsey and it was actually Jack that convinced him over a number of weeks (interestingly, there was very little actual argument, just exposure to Bitcoin and its ideas). I'm guessing that once he left Dorsey's orbit (I don't know that he has, this is my speculation), his loyalty to Bitcoin disappeared with it.

It's really hard for progressive BItcoiners. Not only do they have their own political tribe against Bitcoin because of Trump, but their worldview is increasingly us vs them, which doesn't allow for much dissension in anything. I've seen a lot of progressive Bitcoiners drop one of the two labels. Mike obviously dropped the latter.