Jon Stokes; Why the supply chain is failing & the danger of woke religion being written into AI

About this episode

Jon Stokes, founder of Ars Technica and independent writer, joins Vance for a sprawling conversation about systemic fragility across three domains: semiconductor supply chains, cryptocurrency as an escape valve from centralized financial censorship, and the concentration of ethical power inside AI systems run by a handful of companies. On supply chain, Stokes explains why Taiwan's TSMC can't simply be "unplugged and moved" the way an oil field can be seized — chip manufacturing is a fully interdependent, non-modular global process, and disruption (COVID lockdowns, phantom orders, shipping bottlenecks) ripples for years, not months. He and Vance trace a chain of unintended consequences from understaffed fast-food restaurants to stalled trucking schedules to empty store shelves. On crypto, Stokes — speaking as a systems/software person rather than a "crypto replaces fiat" true believer — describes Operation Choke Point and modern de-banking (his friend's account closed over an LLC named "Blaze") as the real motivation for decentralized finance: censorship resistance, not speculation. The conversation's centerpiece is Stokes's critique of AI ethics teams at Google and Facebook, which he argues are staffed almost exclusively by secular, "woke" engineers and linguists with no formal ethics training and no religious representation, making unilateral linguistic and moral decisions (e.g., "birthing people" vs. "pregnant women") that get pushed to billions of users overnight. He extends this into a broader worry about AI sentencing tools and algorithmic hiring — arguing that centralizing judgment into one "super-powered" model eliminates the messy, regional, human variability that lets a pluralistic society actually live with disagreement (comparing it to Greek myths of all-powerful, flawed gods). He closes pessimistic about reforming Google from outside and instead pins hope on building decentralized alternatives.

“So semiconductor manufacturing, it's not like, it's not as modular as some other kinds of manufacturing or as you might think intuitively that it is... If Apple needs a chip, they can't just pick from a menu of people that make chips to their spec and be like, you are gonna make this chip for me this week.”

“So there's a demand surge that is hitting TSMC. There's a demand surge that's hitting the semiconductor industry. There's a demand surge that, you know, hit lumber a while back and then cratered, and now it's hitting steel.”

“The bank is obligated to put in a what's called a sars, a suspicious activity report. And that is only the beginning of all of the reporting that goes on... the government's role in, in censorship.”

Key moments

• ~5-13%: TSMC/Taiwan explainer — why chip manufacturing can't be relocated like a commodity extraction industry; the "fully baked cake" metaphor.
• ~15-20%: "Phantom orders" mechanism — panic-buying up and down the supply chain that manufacturers can't distinguish from real demand, compounding shortages.
• ~26-32%: Vance connects supply-chain fragility to farmers feeling it first (his own Twitter poll of farmer respondents rating disruption 8-9/10) before consumers do.
• ~38-42%: Bitcoin/DeFi as censorship-resistant alternative to banking gatekeeping; Stokes's personal story of a friend's bank account closed over an LLC name.
• ~44%: Operation Choke Point — using financial regulators to de-platform disfavored but legal industries (guns, later OnlyFans/adult content).
• ~56-58%: Core AI ethics argument — a narrow, secular, "woke" demographic making unrepresentative moral calls that reshape language for billions of users.
• ~68%: Harvard Divinity School and Princeton secularizing away from their founding religious traditions, framed as a parallel institutional drift.
• ~90-98%: Sentencing-AI and vaccine-triage thought experiments — why centralizing one AI's judgment into every hospital/court removes the regional variability that lets a divided society coexist; closing argument for decentralization over efficiency.

Notable quotes

“There are a bunch of people with no formal ethical training who are having opinions in publishing papers about ethic and all their ethics are woke... Is there a Christian in the room? Is there a Muslim in the room? Often the answer is no.”

“The minute that code is deployed... you have just changed policy across the entire hospital system, the entire court system, the entire Facebook newsfeed system... and there's no way to run away from it.”

“Operation choke point... a lot of credit card processors and banks were trying to de platform firearm sales.”

“If Apple needs a chip, they can't just pick from a menu of people that make chips to their spec.”