Jon Stokes, One Of The Founders Of Ars Technica Talks, NFT's, AI, Crypto, And Tech With Brad Hart.

Foreign.

My name is Brad Hart and I am so excited to be bringing you yet another expert interview here in the crypto community. This is Mr. John Stokes, who has introduced to you by actually a member of the community, Natasha. Thank you so much for making that intro, Natasha, and I'm just so grateful because John has a really interesting substack and his writing is really compelling and I wanted to kind of pick his brain a little bit and talk about what he's doing with crypto and what he's excited about. But John, if you'd like to just do a quick intro and we'll go from there, that'd be awesome.

Sure, yeah. I'm one of the founders of Ars Technica, so that's probably how most kind of tech people would know me. I have a Twitter presence. I run johnstokes.com which is my substack. It's been dormant for a while. I was attached, I have been and still am attached to a couple of crypto related projects, but kind of like not in a super public way, but I've had some experience lately with a large NFT airdrop and a little bit of solidity. I've also been a developer. I was a Rubyist. I took a break from media and was a Ruby developer for a while and then I switched to Elixir. So, you know, I have a. I have an engineering background. I wrote a book called Inside the Machine. It's about microprocessor architecture based on a lot of the tech deep dives I did in Arsenica. And lately I have been focused on crypto, AI and machine learning. Not so much the tech around AI and machine learning. Although I'm going to get more into that because I have done some of that in the past. In undergrad we actually did a computer vision and neural networks and stuff. And I've interviewed a lot of machine learning guys, but more like politics, ethics of it, things of that nature.

Sounds like I should put on my black suit and my tie and my white shirt and make this more of a Lex Friedman interview. I'm going to put on my. Lex Friedman.

Yeah.

How did you originally get in computers and coding?

I got a Commodore 128 when I was about nine years old.

Nice.

And it came with the manual for basic programming and I basically just did everything you could do with that, all the way up to reading the game ports. You know, I was, I eventually had a racing game that I made and you could plug a joystick in and you can move these sprites around and stuff like this. And so I was like, I listened to that Lex Friedman interview with John Carmack and I was like, man, that.

I'm still going through it. It's five hours long.

Yeah. You know, I stopped halfway through it because I'm kind of saving it because I loved it so much. Like I was going to be depressed when it ended because, because Carmack was, you know, he grew up in a similar situation. I didn't have access to a lot of resources and I just had to go with like the books I could find just like Helm and I, you know, when I found that people were like, you know, doing things like, you know, writing to disk at a low level or whatever, this was like magic. Like, you know, it was hard. And I did Pascal, I did basic, you know, I did object Pascal. So, you know, really similar kind of kind of start to Carmack. Similar kind of socioeconomic situation, this kind of thing. My Commodore was a hand me down from my uncle. So yeah, that was my start. I did an undergrad in computer engineering and I minored in mathematics and then I went on and did humanities. I was a historian for 10 years of grad school, but I kind of never left computing.

So I also, when I was six, had a Basic. I don't remember exactly which terminal, but the big manual and you could do all the different games. Did you ever build the game where it was like the two clowns and the trampoline and they had to burst the balloons and they were like running around trying to catch the clown? Do you remember that one?

No, I don't remember. I don't remember a lot of the exercises I did out of that big Commodore book. I remember making my own like, you know, zork type clones and you know, your amazing twisty passages. And then like I said, getting into graphics and learning sprites and that kind of stuff. But yeah, I don't that. That's most of what I remember doing back then.

Yeah, that was a good bonding experience with my dad. I remember we did that and I would like, you know, get it to the point where it was like stuck and it would just bounce around the screen and rack up points. You'd unplug the controller and at the end of the day you'd have like, you know, it go up to a million. What happens at a million? Well, it just starts over at zero again. Keeps going. It's like, that's fun. But yeah, we didn't really have any money for more computers after that. So from like then till I was 16. So a good 10 year period, I didn't really do anything. Maybe I had a Nintendo, but that was about it. But nothing. I was program. And I always thought like, well, how life could have been different if we just had more money and I could have been in computers for longer. Maybe I'd be Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan right now. Who knows? But yeah, so, okay, awesome. So there's a lot of geekery there we can go into. When did you first get excited about. You mentioned undergrad, but where did you go to school, just out of curiosity?

So I went to Louisiana State University for undergrad. I am a. I'm from South.

Right on.

Love it.

So you've always lived in the south, now you live in Austin.

Great. No, I actually I left for grad school. I was. I went to Harvard for my two master's degrees and then University of Chicago for PhD. And then after we sold ours, I moved to San Francisco. So I sort of went up to the Northeast and then to Chicago. Five years in each spot. You know, it was kind of random. I was five years in Cambridge, five years in Chicago, five years in San Francisco, then back down to Austin.

So you're basically a slacker with no resume. Got it. Okay, cool. No, that's killer. All right, so when did you first get interested or introduced to blockchain technology and what were your first interactions with it?

My first exposure to Bitcoin was probably 2011, and I knew about it through Ars Technica, actually, probably even earlier, probably not long after it started to percolate, because I was in San Francisco at the time. I moved to San Francisco in 08. I worked out of the Wired offices for ours. We had sold the company to Wired's parent company, and I worked there for them for three years. And then I went on to Wired after that and worked for Wired for about a year. And so it was in that milieu. People were talking about it, people were asking me about it, and my feeling about it was that it was interesting and it had solved an interesting problem. And I thought that it was going to be big and then it was going to die. So I had an investor friend ask me about it. I'm like, look, man, I'm not going to buy any of this because of journalism ethics. And also my only speculation that I do actively is I was a gold bug at the time. I was into gold during the initial big run up of gold and then after the gfc. And so I'm like, I do gold. That's my one speculative thing. I allow myself I was like, but I think bitcoin is going to blow up. But obviously it's ridiculous Internet money. And so it'll be a flash in the pan after it blows up, it'll die. So even if I had bought it, I would not have held onto it. I'm not one of those people that looks back. I do. Obviously, everybody looks back. It's like, yeah, it'd been great. If I had loaded up on bitcoin when it was a penny, I would have wrote it up to $5 and been like, yeah, I'm out, it's done, party's over. But then I was anti crypto. I was a crypto skeptic up until. Probably 2018. And then I just flipped and I was like, all right, bitcoin, so you're.

Into it now, so you've kind of changed your ways a little bit.

Yeah, very much so.

I had been able to sit you down and be like, hey, this is basically the equivalent of gold on the Internet. There's only a certain amount of supply. Would any of argument in retrospect would have worked to get you in that early and have you hold for the long term?

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. What flipped me was I was working for. I had kind of left the media for a bit and was in software development and was actually a CTO for a startup, a really successful startup out of Dubai, and they're pretty huge now. And so I worked with them and those guys were all crypto pilled. And also it was the case that there were some Latin American devs that wanted to be paid in bitcoin because their currencies were trash and bitcoin was better for them to get payments than whatever they were using. I was like, man. And of course, in Dubai, crypto is big for remittances. So the workers, like the working strata that works there, like people that do the hotels and clean the rooms and stuff, they use crypto to send money back to Indonesia or wherever they're from. So when I became exposed to the fact that actually people are using this, even in 2018, people were using it and want to be paid in it. I was like, all right, this is serious. People are using it as money. I understood theoretically the pitch. I understood theoretically why people wanted it. But I kind of like, I was just resistant. So I had a lot of the same. I circulated a document to some friends of mine during the 2017 kind of bubble, the initial ramp up, and then there was that crash that happened after that and it was a short thesis for crypto. And it's the same stuff that you see on any crypto haters page. It's like, well, it's not, you know, it's not like the, the throughput is very low. They can't sell very many transactions. It's nerd catnip. It's like, you know, I had all these kind of, it's all the same stuff that everybody is familiar with. I had kind of swallowed all that. But, you know, like I said, I eventually I migrated out of that mindset and was like, all right, man, you know, there's no point in hating on this because people are using it and it is interesting and I see the point. And then I kind of got crypto built after that.

I love it. I love it.

Yeah.

I mean, at the end of the day, we're still so early. I know everybody says that, but I think the users in blockchain versus the Internet, it's like we're in 1998 where the Internet was in 1998. Most people thought the Internet wasn't a big deal. It was kind of a fad. Amazon was only a few years old. Google had just started. Facebook didn't exist yet. All the platforms that we kind of know and love today, YouTube didn't exist. We don't know what the blockchain could be. We know it's going to be something and we know that there is use cases. But you made an amazing analogy and that's why I reached out to you. I'm like, this can open analogy, right? And I'd love for you to explain that just briefly for folks if they haven't read the article.

Yeah. So I have this article called the Can Opener Problem. It's on my substack. And this is not, I think it's not original to me, maybe it is, but I feel like I read it in a dead tree book somewhere. But the. A little bit of cough here from Alex. The basic pitch is is. Or the basic concept is I find myself talking about crypto concepts to people and, and trying to unpack them. And I'll often say, imagine that you had never seen a can or one of those hand crank can openers. They're called bunker can openers. I found out, you know, writing this article. But you know, for me it's just the can over. It's the two wheels and one of them cut, can open and you know, it goes around the lip and there's the gear. So imagine you just came across this device and Maybe you were living in the 1700s. You would never in a million years back into what that device does. Like, so this is obviously a solution to some problem. It's a mechanical device. It's a really simple mechanical device. There's only these two surfaces kind of going at each other. And you might, if you were really sophisticated, infer that it cuts in some kind of way, you know, after experimenting with it. But you're never going to make the jump even to like a larger context. Like, what does it cut? You're never going to even infer. People use this to get food. Food comes packaged in a thing that this opens. So the fundamental idea is that this solution presents itself as an alien type of thing. But the problem is also alien. The problem is one that you have no context for. So you can't really intuit a sort of problem space that this solution fits with. This is true for, I think blockchain for proof of work and like Nakamoto consensus. It's true for like a one way hash function. It's sort of foundation of cryptography. You can explain or if someone comes across the math for this, or you're trying to explain what this does. And like fingerprinting, you have to kind of give them like a larger context for this. Because most people in their day to day life are not doing version control. They're not trying to check if a text file has been tampered with or something like this. So a lot of these crypto primitives and basic core crypto concepts are what I call can openers. They're very specialized, not overly complicated in and of themselves, but specialized solutions to problems that are alien to most people. So people have to kind of engage their imagination and this helps people feel better. I'm trying to explain some public private key pair to somebody. And the concept of the public private key pair, and I'll give them this analogy. I'll say, imagine they found a can opener and you had never seen a can. Would you understand what this is for? Could you infer what it's for? And immediately it clicks and they're like, no, obviously I have to have seen a can can. I have to have actually probably seen somebody use this. And then I'm going to get it. So I'm not stupid. You know, the person feels like, oh, okay, I'm not stupid for not getting this. It's not because it involves math. It's not because it's complicated. It's just because there's a thing that this goes with that I have not seen before. And crypto is like full of these kinds of can openers. You know, you've got them everywhere you look. You know, ZK roll ups and like all this other kind of stuff. You have to have another base layer of abstractions before you can engage with some of the newer ones. But the other piece of that and that I unpacked in the article is that nowadays in 2022, there is a set of multi user computing primitives and concepts that were previous generations can openers, like can opener concepts, maybe like 20 years ago or less that everyone now engages with. So if you want to buy groceries online and have them delivered, you will download some client software that connects to a server on a network. You will create an account with a password that has certain permissions and roles. You will upload payment details, you will connect to a remote server, you will submit an order and this kind of thing. And so these are for me, these are these, these, this sort of collection of concepts here. A remote server, a client, an account, a password, electronic payment details. These are things that were really boutique and obscure and weird. And not many people did these things in the year 2000, but now many billions of people with smartphones do this and they don't think about it. So they have these concepts in their head and they can also then think with them to understand new concepts. So when people try to explain a wallet or a public private key pair, but really like a crypto wallet, they'll say, well, it's like an account on the blockchain. It's like you have a user account on the blockchain. I don't think that's a very good analogy. But people will use it, and they use it because everyone knows what a user account is. I mean, when I was an undergrad in like 93 and I made my first user account on a Unix system, I don't think I would have, it would have occurred to me that like, you know, my parents would have Many probably like 60 user accounts on multi user systems. You know, in their retirement they would use them all the time and they would be so familiar with this concept that you can explain something else in terms of that concept. You know, so they've got such a mastery of the concept of user accounts and passwords and even privileges. You know, you can access some things, you can't access other things. And so they've got such a mastery of these abstractions. The average smartphone user has enough of a mastery of what were previously really obscure technical abstractions that you can use those to explain a new thing. And so that's how we know we've won in crypto and in blockchain. When I find myself in 10 years saying, well, this new thing here you're trying to understand, it's like a blockchain. And then they go, oh, yeah, I get that. Yeah, okay, blockchain, I totally know what that is. Use that all the time. I understand all the things of it. I have like a good, you know, or it's like a public, private key pair. You know, I might say this is, you know, think about your pub, think about your crypto wallet and how that works. Now imagine, you know, this new thing. And so when I'm using it to explain a new thing, it becomes part of their, like, middle furniture. And they can just like, you know, put new stuff on top of. They can build with it instead of trying to, like, reason about it like it's alien.

Yeah. So I love that because it gives you a framework essentially for explaining new things to people and bringing them along on the journey. So, like, okay, if you want to talk about NFTs, well, you got to understand kind of blockchain first. And if you want to understand blockchain, maybe we talk about like, well, you've written a check before, right? Well, there's four ledgers in that transaction. Then credit cards made it three ledgers, and now there's one ledger that everybody can work off of. And now, okay, cool, everybody can have a user account, but it's a little bit different because there's no forgot password function. And if you lose your keys, you're kind of screwed. And anybody with those keys can show up and be you for that sake of argument. So, like, that helps you kind of start to make the transition between web two and Web three or even, you know, starting with web one. So, like, having all these tools, where do you think the most exciting, exciting new spaces that we're moving into with crypto?

Like, what.

What are you seeing use cases for that are most exciting to you and for what reasons?

I. Even though we've had an NFT crash, I still like the NFTs for token gating. I think it's interesting. I had some experiences with NFTs where there's something like there's clarity, which is like a notion clone that you can token gate roles. And I've played around with this in my blockchain explorations and I did some community management and seen the back end of some daos. And if everyone is on the same chain and you're using NFTs for permissioning, then you actually don't have to go into these different software services and create roles and add users to roles. You just add the NFT to the role and then any user that's got that NFT can log in pseudonymously and can immediately have the permission to have. So the idea of NFTs and crypto as a distributed user table that you can do logins and permissioning and role based authentication with is really compelling to me. The other larger bucket of ideas that is related to this is probably biology Screen of Austin's network state. And I'm like, I'm really into that right now and have been a little bit involved with some of that.

I don't know that I'm familiar with that. Can you give me the quick overview?

So if you go to the networkstate.com it's a book and there is a set of concepts behind it. And so the idea is that we could use the blockchain and distributed ledger to build a kind of set of social and political structures. So if you're going to like give a short summary. He's got the network state in one sentence. Actually it's probably better to just read his.

Let's just bring it up right now.

Yeah, yeah, the network state dot com. Yeah, in one sentence. So if you click on the network state in one sense you'll get his overview. Right? One sentence. There we go. I'm trying to point to my screen like it's like. Yeah.

So a network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre existing states. So this essentially raises money, buys lands and takes over bits of the world digitally and then physically.

Yeah, there's an intermediate step that's sort of like what biology would say is like a digital archipelago where people kind of opt in to this cloud based community and you've got little pockets of the network state that are geographically separated. And then at some point these people kind of like come together and they pool enough resources they can actually buy land and then physically move to the location where the land is. And one of the things that's that's interesting about this is, you know, we have now in America especially is you've got already these different cognitive tribes that are sharing a geography, they're sharing a school district, like even at small levels, like there used to be an urban versus rural divide. Like I think that's not even true anymore, is not even just urban versus rural because you can be in a rural area and if your neighbor is watching, is in one particular TikTok filter bubble and you are in a different TikTok filter bubble, then you and your neighbor are going to belong to these really different clashing cognitive tribes, right? So we have already a problem where we've got a polity that's defined geographically and we have people who are increasingly fractured into these different splinter groups and can't align with each other to accomplish anything in the real world. So if you're trying to do something irl, build a subway system, high speed rail, respond to a pandemic, you name it. How are you going to do this if no one can even agree on, on like basic fundamentals of what kind of society we're trying to have and you know, fundamentals of like science or biology or physics or whatever. So you've just got these different thought worlds. And so we have the bad part of this already where people have kind of migrated their brains into the cloud and have fractured off into these little groups. So then the question is, how do you knit the people that are aligned together into something like a functional cloud policy, into something like a functional cloud force that can be a political force that can act in the real world and provide services like health care and education. How can you take and remix? So there's a decentralization and there's a recentralization. An analogy for this to give you something to hang it, so to give you a can opener is the Spotify playlist, okay? So we had the physical album and you went to a store and you bought albums and they were in sections in different genres and they were grouped together by artists or what have you. And the country section had country guys and the rap section had rap guys and so on and so forth. And then we went through a decentralization where all that was unbundled, okay, With Napster and with online MP3s and the Apple Music Store. So, pardon me, this stuff was unbundled into tracks. And so then you just had this sort of soup of individual tracks, especially like on early peer to peer services like Napster. And there was kind of no structure. And now what's happened with streaming is these things have been rebundled into playlists, right? So they've been rebundled into playlists and stations. And so you've got these mixes of tracks that are then recentralized in the cloud so that you can access them as a unity. And this is not my example, this is I think, biology's example. So the Idea is that civilians are sort of like this, right? People are sort of like this. People were in these geographic polities, like the old CDs and the old record albums. If you lived in a particular town, your politics may have been a certain way, your values may have been a certain way. Maybe that town is really religious or I would say the preponderance was always. There's outliers, right? There's always people that don't fit. There's square pegs and a bunch of round holes. But in general, you know, if you live in Fayetteville, Arkansas, or Jackson, Mississippi, or even Austin, Texas, there's a vibe there, there's a unity there that's political and that's cultural. So then with the Internet, we've taken each of those things and kind of blown them into bits. So that when you go to Jacksonville, you are going to find people that are big fans of Drag Queen Story Hour, and you're going to find people that are big opponents of Drag Queen Story Hour and they live in the same town. And you are going to find people who vote for Joe Biden and people who are like, let's go, Brandon. And you're going to find centrists, you know, who don't like either. And you're going to find QAnon people. And all these people are like, in the same school district. And it's because every one of them has a smartphone and they're all in a different, like, filter bubble on Twitter and on TikTok and on Facebook. And so the phone is kind of fracturing them out. And so even those little towns, again, it's not a rural versus urban divide anymore, I don't think, or it's rapidly not becoming one. People are so. So just like with Napster, it's the Napster Ization of, of a political unity where, you know, all the albums are broken apart, all the genres are broken apart, and you just have these isolated, you know, pockets of just different tracks. Right? And so what the Network State wants to do is to re centralize that stuff to come up with like a kind of a politics playlist. Like, okay, I'm going to log into this Network State. I'm going to join it. This is the Country Music Channel. This is the Luke Combs playlist. Oh, this is the. This is the EDM playlist. Oh, man, we're just doing Handbag House. Okay, so it's even more narrow, you know, or like, whatever, you know. This is the jazz playlist. So this is late 50s bop. Okay, right, right. So we've narrowed it down and like, look, there's like 100,000 of us in here that are the political equivalent of like all we listen to is Miles Davis, you know, or maybe the political equivalent is all we do is free jazz, you know, so you've kind of like recentralized these folks and you've collected them and so then what do you do? The next phase, the buy and land phase, is almost like if you took a Spotify playlist and you minted an album with it and you started mailing albums back out in the mail, you know, so it's like, okay, this is my, this is my Luke Combs playlist from Spotify. And now like I'm doing a vinyl run of this Spotify playlist. That's kind of the next phase of political evolution per the network state is we will get land and then all of us that found each other online will move and like share geography.

So, okay, so let's kind of extrapolate this even further. So like eventually one day people will be able to do off grid communities, right? They'll be able to entirely be solar or create their own little nuke plant or buy one that can handle the needs of a small community. They could figure out sewage, they could figure out all these different bits and pieces. Maybe this is after the advent of robotics and there'll be more help to set this type of thing up. Or there's just companies that come along and do this for you. They'll 3D print the homes, they'll set you up, you get your, your solar, your water, whatever. You could just be anywhere and you're kind of in the jurisdiction of the United States or another country, but you're your own little entity. So that could be one thing or even extrapolating further. We go into the metaverse, we create these little worlds where everybody can, can assimilate or even further than that. Now we have space travel. Maybe we have our own planets that have our own little political and geography, geographical things. So maybe in a way, like human beings have been doing this forever. This idea of decentralization, deconstruction and then reconstruction, recentralization under a new banner. But now we just have more tools with which to do it and more people that fit into these little narrow categories that might actually be significant enough if they were all find each other. It's beyond what we used to do with just religion and politics and music. Now it could be any little thing that we align with. And eventually we'll have filtering systems to really match Everybody. So where do you see blockchain overlaying all of this? And what are the tools besides NFTs that we spoke about that, that really excites you with it?

Yeah. So the blockchain piece of this is that you can blockchain gives you a set. It enables a couple of things that you can do here. One key primitive here is pseudonymity. So you can be easily is very, very frictional as pseudonymity on the blockchain. And it's very robust to having yourself blown up because the fundamental enabler is that you have this set of bearer instruments. So you have your private keys and your private key is a bearer instrument, meaning if you don't bear it, if you're not care, if you can't physically like, you know, I've got this, this ledger nano X here and this has you know, my private key for John Stokes eth on it and that's, that's real ownership. Because if you don't have this, this private key, if you don't have this device and the data that's on it, you can't like I don't have to trust an admin. Everybody has root. And so it's a little bit of a devolution back to like a pre online society in a certain way. People had cash, they had gold, they had valuables. And if you're carrying it on your person then you have it and you can present it and you can exchange it and this kind of thing. So the blockchain enabling piece is that, is that we're not reliant on centralized servers. We're not relying on centralized crowd servers for permissioning. We can all kind of have our own passports and we can bear our own passports and our own documentation and our own money and we can kind of like then do. You can do a certain amount of permission like either on chain or via a centralized service if you want. But the ability to have like an unpermissioned like set of bearer instruments that are digital is, is I think key to being able to form a like these, some of these new political constructions.

What do you think the downsides of some of this could be? I know people are, you know, better in power, want to protect power, right. So they're probably thinking oh my God, this sounds horrible. This sounds like terrorists would use this or what have you. And I always kind of shoot back, I'm like well terrorists use cash right now. Terrorists use shell companies to move money. They use all types of things that it's never a perfect state system. There will always be bad actors. So I'm kind of curious how far have you thought about this and what are some of the downsides or drawbacks to a system like this?

Yeah, there's going to be growing pains for sure. I mean, if you've got privacy and pseudonymity at scale, especially in financial flows, you will have bad actors that are going to use this. That just goes with the territory. So that's a downside, is that bad actors? Of course. Who is a bad actor? So if you are Ukrainian and you're trying to preserve wealth, from the Russian perspective you're a bad actor, but from the US perspective, you're a good guy. And this is like Ukrainians are using Bitcoin to do some amount of expatriation of wealth and to have some portability with their assets. So from the Russian point of view, those people are bad and we should stop them. And maybe from the American point of view, they're good. So you have a certain amount of people that are politically disfavored, people that are bad actors are going to, are going to use this. And that's a two edged sword. The other issue is that bearer instruments are treacherous. You know, so I mean, I do have this ledger backed up on paper. I have the seed phrase backed up on some, you know, some archival waterproof paper and some nice ink and stashed away somewhere. But someone could potentially steal this. They could steal my seed phrase. And so there's a higher level of responsibility. And I think we're going to end up with some people will use the bearer instruments, they will custody their own NFTs, their own money. Some people will use centralized services and we'll have a mix. But obviously there's been a lot of theft and scams. Of course there's plenty of theft and scams in the centralized financial system too. But that's a, that's a concern. You know, there's not really account recovery yet. We'll build that stuff, but there's going to be growing pains while we build it.

Yeah, 100%. So in your world or with your focus, because you obviously have a lot of skills and talents and experience, what are you most focused on building right now and what are you most excited about? Is it more the journalistic side? Are you building your audience or is it more, you know, hard tools and data that you can actually go and build stuff in the blockchain?

Yeah, lately I'm turning back to the journalist stuff. I have some things in the works that I can't yet announce, but I'm turning back to that. And I'm interested in building an audience and I'm also interested in building an audience of people who are tech positive, who are techno optimistic and we have the tech lash. And there's a lot of hate for tech and there's a lot of hate for figures in tech. And I have never been such a person and I just have not shifted with the winds of culture and journalism. I am still pretty much the same more or less positive guy about tech and network technologies that I was in my early 20s, back in the early 2000s. Now I understand and have experienced the downsides of many of these things, as have we all. So I'm not saying that all this stuff is perfect, but I do think that tech is fundamentally a force for good. I think that markets are fundamentally a force for good. I am a capitalist. I would say that I am anti communist and I'm antisocialist. I'm not, you know, I'm also open minded. I like to talk to communists, I like to talk to socialists. I have, you know, I have communist friends, which I do, you know, so I'm, I'm kind of a little bit of a, I guess they call these people rationalists or whatever, although I'm sort of rationalist adjacent, you know, in that respect. And so I'm, I'm very much a free speech person. And a lot of those kind of ideals and values are not represented in the media and not represented in tech media. And I kind of want to go back to that and to just sort of do like kind of what I did in the beginning of ours and at ours. We were excited. We were excited about tech, we were excited about the PC, we were excited about graphics, we were excited about Apple. There was excitement there and there were things to be excited about. I am still excited.

I really feel like tech is an opportunity to experiment with things that have never been experimented with before. And just like any experiment, you're going to have some that work out and some that don't. But the fact is that if you look along a long enough timeline for tens of thousands of years, human beings were basically the same. We had the same problems and the same stuff kind of doing its thing over and over again. And then with a few technological breakthroughs, we've hit this exponential curve over the last few thousand years that has brought us to where we are today. Where the poorest person today enjoys luxuries that the richest person 500 years ago couldn't even fathom, let alone afford. And they're just ubiquitous. You know, it's, it's an amazing world, and I think it's only going to get crazier and better. I look up to people like Peter Diamandis and, and folks like that who have that optimistic, technical perspective, whether you agree with their politics or their, the way they live their life or not. Like, I'm a product of socialism in some respect. Like, our family would have failed if it wasn't for disability and Social Security and things that helped us stay around. When my dad got hurt and, you know, I was two years old and my mom had to leave to go to work, it was like, okay, you know, how are we going to survive and keep a roof over our head? Well, if there wasn't a little bit of socialism in the, in the economy, it wouldn't have worked.

Right.

Or we would have been much worse off and could end up on the street and we might even have this conversation. So I think at the, I don't know that there's one solution that fits all, but I think we need to explore and have experimentation and have that be okay and not take the failures personally. So I don't know if you agree with that or not. I don't particularly consider myself a political person, although I understand how important politics are. I just want people to get along and find better ways to interact with each other. And, you know, you do you, I do me, as long as it doesn't harm each other. It, let's, let's do it right.

Yeah, yeah, No, I agree with that. I, I, that, that's, you know, that's a set of sentiments that I, I largely share. I mean, I, I, I am of a, you know, let more flowers bloom kind of mentality now. Okay, so to be clear, there are flowers that I want to win, you know, so I'm not, I am not like, everything is equal. I'm not a person that thinks that all things are of equal value. I think that some cultures are worse than others. Some political arrangements are worse than others, some religions are worse than others. You know, I don't think that everything is equal and it's okay to make those value judgments. That said, I'm not necessarily always confident that the ones that I want to win are correct. So I like it that there are other people trying other things, even though I want them to lose. I like that there's competition. And that's kind of a tough headspace to be in right now because everybody's so polarized. So I can say, hey, I disagree with you. I want to beat you. I want you to lose, and I want to win. That said, I'm glad that we're in this contest and that you exist, because if I win, it may be bad. So, you know, it's. It's quite possible that if I win in whatever way, you know, it could be. It could be worse, and it's good then that you're still. If you're still around and I don't have it totally eliminated you, because then maybe you can come back and show a better way if I've screwed it up. So you have to have some humility. You have to have some. I think if you're not constantly asking yourself, are we the baddies? Then you're probably definitely the baddies. And that's a value judgment, too. I think it's a better way to be. To constantly be asking yourself, am I the bad guy here? Than somebody who doesn't ask themselves, am I the bad guy? And so when I say that I'm expressing a value about the kind of attitude that should win out in the world, which I'm not afraid to do.

And I think that's why people are so fascinated by villain origin stories, which have become very popular lately. Now Disney is doing the other side of the co. And Breaking Bad is such a popular thing because you can kind of see, okay, I can understand how they got there in the first place and maybe have empathy for where they're at, even though I see that they went off track, even though I say they made horrible choices, you know, they. It was kind of inexorable in a way. You know, they got pulled towards it. So you don't just show up as a solid state villain overnight. You know, you got to work on getting there, and you got to make choices along the way, and we're all making choices, so maybe it just helps us to reevaluate and realign our choices and have some compassion for the very hard task of being human, which we're all dealing with, you know, so that's beautiful. Yeah, I think that's a really good place to start to wrap up. What. What can people do to support you? This is the Make More Marbles podcast. We believe in, you know, not just being the Hungry Hungry Hippos and grabbing for all the marbles. We want to help you to make more. So what. What initiatives, what things can we support you with? If people are listening, you know, crazy stuff can happen. So what's your.

Yeah, just. Yeah. Subscribe to my substack@johnstokes.com. i have paused paid subscriptions right now. I'll probably restart them soon, but I think you can still sign up. I don't know, but I'm just sort of like, priming the pump a little bit so, you know, pick up a free sub and then later on when I restart the paid, you know, support my work there.

Absolutely. I signed up yesterday, so it's working. I can. I can verify it's working. I signed up yesterday.

Yeah. Well, I will. Thank you. I will. I'll also have a podcast soon, so. And that. That will be a supplement to the substack. I don't. I don't consider that to be, like, my main effort. I'm a writer more so than a podcaster or talker, so I will probably just do interviews with the podcast and then write them up for the substack and then also offer the audio version for people who want it. I love it.

Well, thank you, John. Thank you so much for taking the time today to explain what you got going on. Everybody jump on johnstokes.com that's J o n s t o k e s dot com and it's a wonderful newsletter. He puts a lot of work and effort into it, especially if you're interested in technological topics and specifically cryptocurrency and blockchain topics. As always, this is Make More Marbles podcast. My name is Brad Hart. Thank you so much for being here, John, and we'll talk to you very soon.

Thank you.