Open Claws, the fastest growing open source software project that humans have ever known.
And I told my agent, he was a Bitcoin maximalist. He's like, oh, okay. And he went and he acted
accordingly. We're in a new renaissance right now. If there's anything that I want people to
take away from this is that you can do it. Don't just stand by and watch life happen in front of
you. Many people are also missing that it's like a loaded gun, right? Like you can point it both
ways. Derek had the same idea too. So we teamed up and we created Cluster. The dystopian totalitarian
future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. I thought at the time that everyone was going
to realize that they were being censored and that decentralization and censorship resistant
technology was the sexy selling point that everyone was going to immediately understand
and realize. And then that didn't happen.
The post that I called you out on, which felt semantically like it might have been written by one of your bots.
Was that actually you that wrote it?
Are you just now speaking in AI terms?
Oh, no.
That actually was me.
Yeah, that was me.
So you're just becoming the bot.
You are now indistinguishable.
Well, I'm not going to lie.
I use bots.
I mean, I use, you know, AI a lot to write things.
But that post in particular was 100% Derek.
Derek's, you know, sometimes I'm deep and I think about what I want to say for a while.
And then other times I react right away and shit post.
Like, you know, you never know what you're going to get.
So if it's a good post, yes, it could be AI.
Or I could have spent more than 30 seconds on it.
But that's the thing.
People really want to know, but you can't know.
so well sometimes you can like sometimes you very much can i feel like it's with shorter form stuff
it's harder to know especially because like lynn and i were talking about this ai just kind of like
ruined the m dash a little bit i love a good m dash that's what i was thinking i mean people use
m dash like i used to use them all the time i'll tell you what i use it now more often
i literally almost never used it but now i i don't know i'm i'm more used to seeing it everywhere
i'm used to using it now so now i want to start to use it you do you like copy and paste it from
wikipedia you search m dash and then copy and paste it or well wait what kind of machine are
you using if i'm on mobile it'll it'll automatically format it but yeah on desktop i'll never use it
because I'd have to go and search for it and copy and paste it like you said.
But on mobile, it'll type it for me.
Even on, like, I mean, at least for most sites,
if you double tap a dash, it'll give you an M dash.
And sometimes I'll just double tap the dash,
and if it doesn't automatically convert it,
I just leave it as a double tap dash,
which is then like, okay, that's clearly not AI,
because Walker was too lazy to actually make an M dash.
Unless I'm editing it to do the two dashes to fool you into thinking that.
shit guys it's a wild world out there it's a wild world okay where do we start with this
gentleman uh there is a bunch of stuff i want to talk to you guys about i don't want to start with
feet or derek will get too excited right off the bat and we just you know we need to we need to get
in with have a little bit of normalcy just to begin with but i mean do you guys want to start
I mean, just for anyone who's like not perhaps not aware of the work that you guys do or maybe that's listening to this after the fact, who's not on Noster and maybe isn't as up to date.
There are still people who aren't on Noster, shockingly.
Turns out quite a few of them.
But you guys just want to give like a, I don't know, like a little intro.
Like, hey, who the fuck are you?
What are you working on right now?
What's up?
Are you a bot?
You can talk about your company, Alex.
I'll let you go.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Hey, guys.
So I'm Alex Gleason. I'm a longtime open source developer, and I'm probably most well known at this point for formerly being the head of engineering of Donald Trump's Truth Social client, which I got involved in because I wanted to pursue decentralization.
and it seemed like a good opportunity to make like a decentralized open source platform there.
But that didn't end up happening despite all of my attempts to convince them.
So I jumped ship from that.
I had been prior to that building on Mastodon and the Fediverse for many years.
And that's how I ended up being involved with them, actually.
But then it was time for a change and Noster started picking up in popularity.
That's the new decentralized protocol that we're all building on now.
It's a little bit more Bitcoin-oriented, I would say.
And so I began moving all of my development towards Noster instead and kind of porting Donald Trump's social media platform to my version of it anyway, because at this point I've left from them.
But my goal is just to make decentralized and open source technology accessible to everyone.
I believe that's the future.
Whether people realize it or not, that's what benefits humanity.
So my company is called Soapbox.
Derek is working with us doing technically his role as DevRel, but he does so much more.
And so Derek, tell us about it.
Yeah, somehow I convinced somebody to pay me to use Noster.
Like, this is pretty cool.
Jokes aside.
So, you know, for the past three years, I've been onboarding and educating people and teaching people and been a very, we'll say, a Noster evangelist, you know, going around speaking about Noster, doing workshops and education and so forth.
So I'm still doing that, but a little bit more focused on the Soapbox products because I love them and I use them.
Soapbox is an AI-first company, meaning we use AI every day, all day long.
We build AI tools and so forth.
And that's kind of what I will say kind of like reconnected Alex and I together.
He was building AI things.
I was struggling to use AI things.
And he made something that made building on Noster really important.
He essentially made like a template.
And if you want to build Noster applications and you would use Alex's template, you would have great success.
And I know this because firsthand a year ago, I tried to build my first Noster app and it struggled.
I was, you know, vibe coding, rolling my face across the keyboard, building this app.
And I eventually built it, but it cost me like $800.
and I almost gave up vibe coding.
I was very, very frustrated
and just didn't have a good experience.
And Alex messages me and he's like,
hey, I'm working on something to make non-devs
like you have a better experience.
And like a month later or so, boom, it happened.
And I started using his tools and realized,
oh, wow, like a lot of people need to use these
to build Nostra apps.
And fast forward a couple months later,
I'm talking about the product services that Alex is building, an advocate because I use them myself.
I think other people should use them to build on Noster, doing workshops, creating content and so forth,
and still living up to the Noster CEO meme and talking about Noster as much as I can everywhere I can go.
So it's been a great wild ride.
And I think that I don't know where else I would want to do this at.
Alex and the other members of the team are all very aligned together.
We're all kind of understand the future, understand where this is going with AI and embracing it and trying to make it better for everybody.
so alex and excuse my ignorance i did not know that you were like at the top of building truth
social can we like i there's there okay there's so much i want to get into with you guys here
oh this is a good story can we pause on that first how does that even happen like that you
started building this and yeah like can you walk us through that um sure let me tell you my whole
life story so um so i always thought that i was going to be an artist um but i realized that
computers are more powerful at one point. You know, you could spend hours trying to create a
painting that no one cares about, or you can spend a few hours and then create something that's
functional that you can deploy that can actually do something. And then this kind of led me down
the path of open source and discovering that and having these thoughts about like, well,
you know, Uber and Lyft have hundreds of employees and they're all building the exact same thing,
but they're not allowed to share their work with each other. And that's a shame. Like, you know,
people will will say well competition is good uh right but from the perspective of the workers
um they're just spending their lives churning away building these things that they don't
technically have to build because someone else has already built it and and so i'm like thinking
about these things um and you know i i was a young man at the time and in in 2017 the probably the
biggest obstacle to open source was social media. Like social media, it was the thing that was
dominating technology. It was the pinnacle and the peak of technology. It was the thing
that people were not able to replicate. And so when Mastodon came out, that was a huge
inspiration for me. Mastodon, it was the first successful decentralized social media protocol.
and so I got really involved into that and I was hosting my my own stuff and then I kind of
I kind of ended up in you know in the crossfire of the culture war at one point and you know my
my political views have gone like way up and down super cyclical where like I was like libertarian
And then I became like super liberal and like I was woke at one point.
And then like I started to have some of the wrong opinions around the woke people, which all of like the Macedon crowds are.
And then like, you know, rather than engaging in conversation about these things, they're just like, oh, no, you're literally Hitler or whatever.
And so I kind of went down this path of like, you know, I want to pursue free speech, social media, because that actually is a liberal value to me.
And so I was building free speech social platforms on Mastodon when it was very unpopular on Mastodon.
Because at this time in about 2017, people on Twitter were being banned for...
How do I explain this?
There's this left and this right, right?
And the far left were saying that Twitter is not censoring people enough.
Uh, and, and so, and then, and then there's people like kind of in this realm, they're
saying Twitter censoring people too much.
And so what the Fediverse ended up getting is they end up getting these far left people
who says they're not censoring people enough.
And then they get these far right people who say they're censoring too much.
And so then Twitter kind of just has this middle and then these fringes end up in the
decentralized platforms.
And so that's where, where I was at is I'm in this extremely polarized, politicalized
environment.
Um, but we're building open source, which is what I want.
And I'm trying so desperately to bring the middle in and just failing.
And then and so I had built a, you know, one of the best platforms, which is called Soapbox for people to join Mastodon in this like user friendly way that is appealing to sort of like the middle.
and Donald Trump's team found my open source project Soapbox
while they were researching building their new social media company
because Donald Trump had been banned off of Twitter.
And so they were investigating Mastodon.
They were looking at alternatives to Mastodon.
They found Soapbox.
And so I received an email from some guy who didn't identify himself
as being related to this in any way.
He was just saying to me, hey, would it be possible to do this or this or that like technical
thing?
I'm just curious.
We have a lot of users that are really interested in this project and they might want to use
your software.
Can you get on a call with me?
And so I got on a call with him and he was like, look, man, I can't tell you what this
is until you sign an NDA.
But we have literally millions of users that are going to use this thing and it would be
great to have your help on it.
And so I'm just like, okay.
no clue what I'm getting myself into. I signed the NDA, I joined. And then I kind of after joining,
I'm just like clicking around in the Slack and in their system they added me to. And then I see
Trump media technology is the client. And so that just like blew my fucking mind. And so then,
and, you know, I'm kind of still a liberal at this point. Like I'm a liberal who is against
cancel culture, which is this weird place to be in the world, I guess. And so I'm not a supporter
of Trump. I was never a supporter of Trump. I never voted for Trump. But I didn't think that
he should have been banned off of Twitter. I think that was a mistake. I think that's bad for the
internet. I think that's bad for freedom of speech. I'm against that. And so I was actually
aligned with their mission to some extent. And so I did join on and I helped them build this
product and every step of the way I pushed them to make it more open, more accessible to, to try
to get them, to convince them to join the decentralized network. Um, and, uh, I, you,
you know, year one, um, we launched and then big changes happened in the company. Uh, people got
pushed out people that I loved and respected, um, and different leadership came in. And then I spent
a whole nother year trying to convince them to decentralize it and to just join the Mastodon
protocol that they had based their software stack on, but they had disabled all of the
Federation features of.
And then after realizing that I was never going to get through to them on this issue,
I just was like, OK, my efforts are better spent elsewhere trying to make this decentralized
open source mission happen.
And so that was that was when I ended up jumping ship to Noster.
and so the first thing I did was I created a bridge between Mastodon and Noster it's called
Moster and that that allowed me to connect the communities and the people that I already had on
the Mastodon side of things with the new crowd that I was connecting to on Noster and then I
started porting all of the software that I had written for Activity Pub onto Noster including
Soapbox that was you know by this point it had been very modified and tailored to Donald Trump's
truth social platform so um that project of porting the of soapbox to nostr is called ditto
and if you visit ditto.pub then you will see something that very closely resembles truth
social.com but it works entirely on nostr um and um but but my original vision for for soapbox which
then became ditto was it's like uh you know mastodon's way of doing it is that every server
they put up is a mascot server and has mascot name and branding but my vision was no every
community that spins up like a server this is a different onboarding ramp that you're going to
want customization for your community to appeal to a specific demographic to for them to be joining
the decentralized um network so you know sort of like the old way of the internet where there's all
these niches and different interesting websites that you can visit they're all separate but in
this new way, they can all be interconnected too. Because when you bring users to any of those sites,
then those users can now talk across all of the sites on the decentralized protocol.
So Soapbox is about appealing to different audiences, truth social being one of them,
like conservatives in America, bringing them in for a particular reason.
and and then once ai you know started to become viable for coding i realized that actually all
of these forums that i'm building to where i can let the administrator choose a color scheme on
their site and upload a logo to their site this is archaic now this is outdated what i want is for
people to just enter a prompt and say this is the type of community that i want to build
and so that's kind of where we are now i've built a tool called shakespeare and shakespeare is that
tool um and we have templates that you can get started out where people can be like okay i want
to start out building you know a site like twitter i want to start building a site like instagram or
whatever um and you you can start out just from a raw prompt and just describe what you want or you
can start out from one of these things that we've built out a little bit um and we're building a new
version of ditto slash soapbox right now that is a complete rewrite that's going to make things way
more awesome for people who want to build interesting twitter like stuff that connects
to like everything um and uh and and yeah so that's kind of the whole journey that's the vision
um building building communities with ai i think one of the it's wild i just want to say that's a
wild story of just like, okay, yep, you just end up accidentally building Donald Trump's
true social.
So one of my favorite parts about that that Alex didn't mention is that...
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in riga like two years ago where that software came from that you used for for truth social like
what trump's network was built off of this is yeah this is really funny so so so um before soapbox
the first site that we built was a feminist website it's for four feminists who are getting
banned off of twitter because they weren't aligned with like the woke standards of third wave
feminism right like they're maybe a little bit uncomfortable um with the gender stuff of of like
in sports and in bathrooms and stuff like that and you know they call them right yeah exactly
sling yeah exactly um and so i you know i i believe that that people should have free speech
and like, come on, silencing this discussion,
like let people talk.
So I created this website called Spinster
and Spinster was the precursor to Soapbox.
It's like purple and it has like this logo too.
And then I made a Soapbox from Spinster as that template.
And so the lineage is the Donald Trump's
social media website is based off of a feminist platform.
yeah i think sorry that's just that's amazing you called it you called it spinster though
like yes i mean this is this is a reference to spinster and her enemies uh a famous feminist
uh book uh okay i i was just thinking it was more of a derogatory term for uh old single woman uh
but i guess that's they were they were only their base yeah loves it i think
dude that that is wild but derek you're gonna say something else go ahead no i was gonna say
like i i think that uh it would be i don't know the people that use truth social they may not want
to use it if they realize what their lineage was that's the funny that's the funny thing
this is see i like i love hearing this i didn't actually know that the like the backbone of truth
social was built out on top of Mastodon. Can I ask too, Alex, okay, you've now, you've worked in
a lot of these areas, whether, you know, in terms of decentralized sort of decentralized retaking of
the internet, in terms of comparing Mastodon and Nostr from your kind of technical developer
perspective, you know, do you see yourself going back to that to Mastodon at all? Or is do you
view Nostr as kind of superior from a protocol standpoint? Nostr is the future. Because the way
mastodon works you know it's email and password login uh and when you log into a single you you
have to choose a server which is very difficult this is kind of like the fast food menu problem
where like the more menu items are on in a fast food uh menu like people get overwhelmed by a
choice and this is when you're coming in to join mastodon the first thing you have to choose is
what server are you going to join and and like many of these servers are identity oriented it's
like you're Swedish, so join the server.
You're like, you love football, so join the server.
And like people aren't one thing.
People are many things.
And like this idea of having to force yourself
into this identity from the very start
is something that pushes people away.
But then once you actually get in there,
the people who are running these servers,
they're running them like fiefdoms.
And they have complete control over the server
And often you're subjected to the arbitrary decisions of just some guy, which often is worse than the terms and conditions and guidelines of some big tech corporation.
Because if you're just posting stuff and then that some guy just doesn't like you, then you can have your entire social media identity deleted just at an instant with no notice and no recourse.
And that's exactly what happened to me with my account.
And so when that happened, I'm like, well, fuck it.
I'm starting my own server then.
And so I built, you know, Spinster, among others, Gleasonator. And Spinster had 20,000 users in the first month. I learned how to scale Mastodon and it was actually knowledge that ended up helping me create Truth Social.
um so and it was it was because it was something that people other people also wanted and and
needed but but no stir is completely different on no stir every single individual is sovereign
now there's a down there is a downside to this it's the same as the bitcoin private key problem
right because like um on with bitcoin you have a wallet you lose your wallet address it's over
right like there's there's no one that's going to come in and help you um but with great power
comes right responsibility right that's one of the first things that people have to learn when
they come into bitcoin and on noser it's a very similar story your private key represents you if
you lose that if it gets leaked if you send it to something untrusted then um that identity is
cooked but at least that's on you right that's your you made a mistake versus on mastodon you
are just completely subject to the whims of some god i think a lot of people don't understand that
when they think of decentralized web they'll think of mastodon they'll think of maybe blue sky
but but truly like what alex was saying is there with mastodon there still is a gatekeeper there
still is somebody in control i mean federated is more like distributed it's not decentralized
And with Blue Sky, too, they're just better about hiding it.
Sure, sure.
So, yeah, so Noster is the only true decentralized social communication protocol out of all of them right now.
And I don't know how we get more people to understand that.
I don't think they really care about that.
And that's kind of the rock and hard place that we're between right now.
Derek, let me ask you something because you've obviously been a great evangelist for Noster
broadly. I try to do my part just to follow in your footsteps, you know, and evangelize where I
can. It does seem that Noster has hit sort of a, you know, I mean, the growth has been, I think,
slower than people anticipated maybe, but it's also one of those things where, and I'm curious
of your take on this, I mean, do more people end up joining Noster because, hey, look at all the
incredible user experiences that are possible here? Or is it like, hey, we're getting censored
elsewhere. We need to find this alternate path. I have my thoughts on this, but I'm curious,
like, is it more likely that huge influxes of new users come from running away from something or
running towards something, like away from something negative or towards something positive? You know
what I mean? Yeah. So three years ago, when you and I were down in Costa Rica, almost three years
of the day. I thought at the time that everyone was going to realize that they were being censored
or had the ability to be censored elsewhere and that decentralization and censorship-resistant
technology was the sexy selling point that everyone was going to immediately understand
and realize. And then that didn't happen. I don't think people care about that. So then
the second year into Noster, I thought, well, I think that telling people how cool it is to be
able to take your identity from one app and pop it into a second app and all of your contacts,
social graph content and so forth comes with you. And I thought that was extremely powerful.
And some people did bite onto that, just like some people did follow through with the
the decentralization and censorship resistant.
But I don't think that the two of those
are still powerful enough to sell Nostra to the masses.
I've seen in year three now,
I've seen where we have more apps being built
over the past year, over the past day, week,
than we've ever had.
Thanks to AI, thanks to Vibe Coding,
thanks to tools like we have Shakespeare and other tools,
people are building a dozen apps a week.
Each person is doing that.
So we've had more apps.
The ecosystem is now exploding, yet we're not seeing a major growth of users.
I still think that we have a marketing problem because we don't have a dedicated Nostra marketing team.
Now Soapbox does have a marketing team, and we're working on things like this.
But I think that across the whole protocol, we just need to do better to make ourselves more enticing and attractive to users because our early adoption needs and wants and us being Bitcoiners and liking new technology and transformative technology, revolutionary technology, we know that the world doesn't care about that.
If they did, we'd have 8 billion Bitcoiners out there, but we don't.
So we can't use the same marketing and selling points that obviously aren't working with Bitcoin to have it work with Nostra.
We need to think of something else.
So, Alex, I want to ask you on this, too, because as you talked about, like you have experience and success scaling these sorts of applications, you know, backbone aside, but scaling these sorts of applications pretty damn rapidly.
do you agree with Derek from that perspective of new you know new user growth is that is that what
it comes down to just let a you know a million micro apps bloom and that's what's going to
attract people yeah so I have my answer to that too um I think that that people do care but only
when they are actively being censored and censorship events do happen um and like in you know in 2017
um x you know twitter before elon bought it was very different now that elon has purchased twitter
that has completely changed the landscape because now people aren't people just don't feel like
they're being censored anymore but i mean it is still happening in the world outside of america
like in venezuela um people are still struggling to access twitter there uh and and so you know
it's cyclic cyclical um but um so that that's definitely one angle of it right now in 2026
in america it doesn't feel like that's the biggest selling point doesn't mean that's not going to
change later so so noster is here for when like we're ready for when that happens so that's that's
my one point and then my my other point is that at soapbox we are trying to approach it from both
angles um so we're ensuring that we're building what we're building is censorship resistance
so we can provide for those communities.
But we are also trying to take it from the angle
of creating interesting new user experiences
that are now possible thanks to AI.
And the innovation that we have seen in the past year
has been truly incredible.
It really feels like a new renaissance.
It's like a Cambrian explosion.
And people who aren't on it are frankly missing out.
And it's I don't know how to to better get the things that we're building in front of people and to make them realize the awesome stuff that has been created.
But if we if we can manage to reach people, then I think that people will be interested to use some of these these things.
Well, people still think that ChatGPT is, you know, a second Google, a more popular Google, a different way to use Google, a more user-friendly Google.
They don't – they're where we were at three years ago, four years ago, right?
Like they haven't really moved past that, oh, it's a different search engine.
They haven't looked into what it can actually do for them.
And we think that Noster is the best playground for this because you don't have to build a tool and then go out there and say, oh, man, I built this, but how do I do APIs and how do I do keys and all these other technical things that people don't know how to do?
So on Noster, you can just play.
You can just build.
You don't have to get permission to do the building.
I want to shout out some of the cool things that we've built, too.
So Treasures.2, that's T-O.
that's a Nostra geocaching app in real life if you load that if you go on the map you can find
near you what are some objects that people have hidden and then you go into the world and then you
try to locate it on the map and find it open it up there's a little box with toys in it you take a
toy you leave a toy you write on the log that you've been there you log in the app that you've
been there and then you start you know crossing off all of the treasures that you found you go
out and put a treasure into the world. Like these are the types of experiences that are really
interesting for people to build. It's play as Derek described. And I feel like, you know, so much of
social media has been based on outrage and anger and about keeping people on this dopamine rush,
keeping them locked into their phones, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. And what we're building now
are things that are encouraging real human connection. Go out into the world and do something
in the world touch grass and that's what i am most excited about i mean i i love that so can
we get a little bit deeper into let's say everything that you guys are building can we
maybe uh oh we should talk about agora yeah can we like can we narrow down a little bit to people
because we uh soapbox soapbox is like the overarching kind of like company that is yours
that you're deploying everything under is that correct and then so shakespeare is one of the
or one of the Shakespeare is a tool to create apps with AI. And I'm, yeah, I'm going to vibe
code a, a footster client for Derek in the background here. So what, what, what else are
you guys building? I mean, do you want to get into Shakespeare a little bit more? Do you want to
maybe give an overview of kind of what, like the total scope of what you guys have, then we can
kind of drill into some individual pieces. Yeah. So I can, I can describe Shakespeare briefly.
It's a, it's an AI app builder that works entirely in your browser. It's different from
services like lovable or replit because in those there's a middleman between you and the ai
with shakespeare your your device is connecting directly to the ai provider and all the files are
stored in your browser there's no middleman there's no infrastructure there's no servers to go
offline um and and so you have total freedom in that scenario it's completely open source
and we you can push your code to uh nostr get repositories so that you can synchronize
over the decentralized network so it's deeply integrated with nostr as well
um and uh it's it's the best way to for people to learn how to vibe code um projects um some
other cool stuff that we're building uh sp.u um that's e-s-p-y.y-o-u this is an app that's based on
colors. And so you use your camera and you take a picture and then you just click on some things
that are, you click on some colors and then you share these like color palettes. And it's like
this idea of vision being a way to express, you know, abstract thoughts rather than words. How
can you have any outrage when all your whole feed is just colors? So, you know, these are things I'm
excited about um agora is one that we recently started at this hackathon in austin a couple of
weeks ago we met leopaldo lopez he is a venezuelan opposition activist he was imprisoned um he's free
now he's living in spain i think he's probably not allowed to go back to venezuela anymore
um and he's not and if he does it he'll have a bad time and so what this and so this app is
organization around countries um which is something that is a very like a concept that i think
americans don't really understand um because america's like we think that we're just at the
center of the world and everything revolves around us but but there is actually a need
in countries for people to organize around their country,
and Venezuela being one of them.
And so this enables activists to sort of communicate
and to organize activism on it.
And I have a lot of different visions
about where we're going to take this,
but Derek, what are your thoughts on it?
Well, it's a very different type of social app, right? Like we didn't rebuild Ditto. We didn't rebuild Amethyst, Domus, Primal. We built an app for activists. So what does this look like?
Well, maybe they need to go to a polling station and take a photo of hundreds of people waiting in line wrapped around the street or something like that.
Or maybe there's a protest happening in Iran, and they need to document what's going on and share this information.
So we have these, we call them actions, where different organizers, political leaders, people that are members of the World Liberty Congress can say, hey, there's an event, a challenge, an action that we're doing.
We want you to participate in this human rights action and do whatever the criteria are.
And if you can participate in this, you do the criteria, maybe you'll win some sats, various prizes set by the organizers.
So people go out and participate, boots on the ground, grassroots type movement stuff.
They post the content in this challenge contest action, whatever you want to call it, and they can get rewarded for participation.
So we have this all around the world.
But then what's really cool on top of that is you might be familiar with Bitchat by – I always get confused what to call it here.
Bitchat.
Bitchat, yeah.
I don't think you were confused at all there.
Well, yeah.
Anyways, that app does Bluetooth mesh.
And so what these activists on the ground were having to do is in case of internet blackouts, they'd have to download a social app.
Then you'd have to download a Bitcoin wallet.
And then you'd have to download BitChat.
And we said, well, that was too much.
Like to onboard somebody, like to tell them, hey, you need three apps or more to be able to do this.
That's too much.
So we built a Bitcoin wallet into it.
So it has a Bitcoin wallet.
And then it has the mesh Bluetooth capability too.
So if there's an internet blackout, which these places around the world do experience all of the time, we even have countries like Uganda just a month ago saw a million downloads of BitChat.
And then their own version of FCC was like, oh, we're going to look into figuring out how we can shut this down.
It's like, well, it's Bluetooth, man.
You're going to have a tough time figuring that out.
But so in these situations now, now they have all of these tools in one application that we built for them.
And we even have AI built into it.
So somebody can go into an AI chatbot in there and say, hey, what's the situation currently in Venezuela?
And it's contextually aware.
So it'll go down through and the AI will read like all the social media posts, figure out the challenges, the actions people are doing and what the sentiment is locally.
Like it's really, really cool.
It's a really useful tool for these people.
So you remember in, was it Nepal, where they held an election on Discord?
Yeah.
That was major news.
So our goal with Agora is that, right?
Like, we want people in these difficult situations to have a way to organize online without censorship.
Yeah we have users now that are requesting like they want to make sure they censorship resistant behind the Great Firewall of China like in Tibet so they can continue to organize and not be censored and be able to communicate and looking to use Agora for that So it honestly probably the coolest thing that I can
say that I've worked on and built that actually has real world impact. I mean, I've vibe coded
a hundred apps over the past year and they're cool for me and I like them and they're useful,
but in the grand scheme of things, they don't really change the world.
you know we have human rights we have fun like yeah like this is actually transformative like i
this is really really cool and exciting to be part of so i've gotta i've gotta let you guys know uh
in the background just while you were just talking like in the last couple of minutes i just uh vibe
coded using shakespeare a flitzer client um i'm not gonna show it on the screen because i uh this
will go to youtube later and uh turns out there's some very uh very creative very creative things
Well, I'm happy that we were able to coax you into vibe coding your first application with Shakespeare.
I can't wait to see it and check it out.
I just dropped it in the chat on Zap.Stream.
But this is like the incredible thing.
I want to get back because I have some questions about Agora as well.
But the fact that I could just do that with, I mean, it took me literally like I was one prompt to build it.
And then it was a couple of prompts to figure out how to deploy it.
because I was like, shit, I don't actually know how to deploy this.
And then I didn't see the deploy button up in the upper right corner.
We want people that don't really know what they're doing.
They're not developers.
They're non-technical.
They're named Walker and so forth.
And they can just go in and have a conversation,
say a few words and click a few buttons and boom,
they have their website.
They have their app built.
One prompt was an explicit goal of this.
And the way that I did that was I would say,
build a site like Twitter and then it would fuck it up
and it would fail and it wouldn't do it.
And I'd say, why?
Why couldn't you do this?
And I would have this whole conversation with it
and then be like, okay, let's update your agent's file
so that in the future you won't make this mistake again.
And I did this thousands of times
with build a site like Twitter,
build a site like Instagram,
build a site like Facebook,
build a site like whatever.
And so there are so many things I've built
that you will never see
that just went into creating this template
to where now you can say,
build a Flitster in one prompt
and then it will create it.
You're muted.
I was talking about mute.
Jesus, noob over here.
Noob.
This is who the people that we made Shakespeare for,
the noobs, right?
Literally, guys, this is a deployed site right now.
It took me like, I mean, I don't know,
like five minutes while also talking to deploy this.
And it was literally one, like one prompt
was just build me a Noster client.
that aggregates all foot, feet, and hashtag footster related content.
And boom, it did it.
And it was done.
It's just, it's wild.
So yeah, you can go check it out at footster.shakespeare.wtf if you want to.
But don't scroll down.
Yeah, maybe just don't scroll down.
Things get really weird really fast.
Yeah, so we'll end that for now.
I want to get back to Agora before we get too off track.
And again, Derek, I can tell is getting hot under the collar over here, all this talk of feet.
But so what I like about this so much is that, again, Alex, it goes back to something you said.
We're like people are here in America and, you know, in some of the rest of the so-called developed world.
It's very easy for us to forget that there are this there's this massive host of problems that we just don't deal with.
We just might be us next to.
Well, right. And that's the thing. It's like the dystopian totalitarian future is here.
it's just not evenly distributed yet. And so I love this idea of being able to provide these
tools for people. And it's been incredible to see like the uptick in bit chat usage everywhere,
whether it was Uganda, Nepal, Iran, people want to find a way to coordinate, to communicate. And
when you, if you have a throat that can be choked, if you have a centralized pipe that can be blocked,
It will be like it will. But you saw in Uganda that the ruling party prior to the elections was basically saying, oh, you know, don't worry about BitChat.
We can shut that down. And it's like, no, you can't. And they didn't because they couldn't.
Like that is so powerful, building these tools that literally cannot be stopped.
Like that's, and we just, it's such a new era right now because we just, like nothing's existed like this before at this scale and so easily accessible to so many people.
And I think that's like, that is the powerful thing.
Yeah, it's very empowering.
And I think a lot of people right now are concerned about the relationship with AI.
They feel that AI is something that's going to like exert power from the top down to them.
But many people are also missing that it's like a loaded gun, right?
like you can point it both ways so um the fact that it is accessible to regular people and that
we we have access to build these things we can overthrow like authoritarians with this technology
you know just the same yeah i think it's i think it's really incredible i'm going to go ahead and
pull up uh agora here as well because you just dropped that in the chat derek just to get so
people can get a get a feel for it always like a good visual aid on my side uh so let's see
All right, you guys should be able to see that.
So how does this actually, so tell me what I'm looking at here.
So you're looking at a feed of content for right now the United States.
That's the reddish-orange dots.
So blue dots are actually BitChat.
Yeah, blue dots are BitChat conversations.
So right now in that vicinity, there's 31, 37 people that have BitChat open
or have opened it recently or are sharing, you know, their BitChat location.
We really wanted to create something different with this,
and that's why the homepage is actually a map rather than a feed.
And there's still lots to be explored in just the map, you know, UI as well.
So you clicked on the Venezuela hashtag feed,
so now you're looking at the people in Venezuela,
what they're posting and so forth.
They had a challenge recently that they were doing.
I think they're doing a new challenge this weekend.
But then you have the organizers like Leopoldo Lopez and so forth and other members of the Liberty World Congress that are.
He's such a badass.
In charge of.
Oh, yeah.
This.
I just saw him speak once and he was like, wow, this dude is a badass dude.
Yeah.
Dude, I love this.
So, guys, where do you see what's kind of the plan building this out further from here?
Where it's kind of the, you know, the roadmap for you guys, as it were.
Well, they have a list of features that we want. They want essentially more private spaces, communication, DMs, so forth, like WhatsApp or Signal replacements.
Because right now to use WhatsApp and Signal, which they do use, but you have to provide, you know, phone numbers, email addresses, things like that, some type of KYC.
So they want to get away from that. So we're working on DMs to be able to add those features for them.
And yeah, just we have weekly meetings with them as we look to build this out.
I think for Venezuela right now, what it represents to them is just that they can access something like Twitter again.
And that's I think that's that's where what like one of the biggest points of value is for this site right now is just that they have access to something like that.
But I also have all kinds of my own visions that are not necessarily like approved or whatever.
But but like this idea of like Nepal, you know, holding an election.
I want to I want each country to have their own constitution inside of this client and for the people of the country to create their constitution and to and to collectively manage their country's constitution.
And my goal would be that in authoritarian regimes, that it would be seen that the constitution on Agora is more legitimate than the actual quote-unquote government constitution.
constitution. Do you think that that's a, I mean, like this is, this is what I like about this is,
this is a radical shift in the, like, this creates a huge, let's say, power asymmetry
situation, right? It's like, it's, it's like when you get, you know, you get a gun and you get,
you know, rifling on that barrel and all of a sudden a peasant can stand up, you know, to a,
to a knight, right? Like this is a, this is a power shift in terms of what people are actually
able to do. And I think it's also so important right now, because all of this technology,
all of this massive big data aggregation has been made so much easier for would be totalitarians
by AI, by large language models. It is a tool like like any tool. You can use it for good,
for bad. Governments can use it. People can use it. But in my mind, it's about how do we create
the most defensive asymmetry there for the individual, for the community, for the citizens
of a nation so that they actually have the tools to be able to get outside of this oppressive
system, which is only, I mean, I don't know what you guys think, but I'm pretty sure it's only
going to get more oppressive everywhere. That's just the reality. Like governments and large tech
companies will continue to advertise for us and the tools that we're building. If we continue to
give them the ability to do so, they will keep letting their users know that we exist indirectly.
yeah so i want to i want to there's gosh not enough hours in the day guys luckily we still
have a good amount of time because i want to talk about other things that you guys are building
and uh i was i was sent some stuff as well oh what what is uh what is quilly and also what's
what's going on with uh with open claw what's talk to me about this let's let's let's we'll
shift gears a little we can always circle back to this but i want to make sure we get through uh
do you want me to start off alex and then you can talk about
well i'll say one thing i think it's related um because i think like this idea that i was
mentioning about this constitution or whatever this is something that an ai would would excel
at being a middleman to manage um but yeah go ahead der so open clause the fastest growing
open source software project that humans have ever known which is wild because it's like two
months old. It's grown faster than anything ever. So it shows there's interest. It shows people want
this. So what is it? Well, ChatGPT came out in 2022, four years ago, and it was essentially
being able to have an instant message chat with AI. Nothing overly revolutionary there, but
we use that for a few years and it really hasn't grown beyond that models have gotten better ai has
gotten better but it can't really escape outside and do anything outside of that like im window
and then a couple months ago a computer scientist a software engineer said hey what if we gave
an ai chatbot a full computer what would that mean what if we gave it all the tools that humans have
access to on a computer.
And then we gave it some other features like memory.
And we had to check in from time to time to say, hey, should I be doing something?
Well, we already had that.
But the fact that you can message it through a traditional message client.
Yes, sure.
And you didn't have to use the proprietary I.N.
that's built into like, you know, Gemini or Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT.
You could use apps that you use every day, like Discord, Telegram, Signal, and so forth.
So it was immediately more accessible to everybody because you can use your preferred chat.
You're not siloed into using some big tech companies chat.
And it has access to everything.
It feels like you're talking to a real person because because like, you know, you can add your bot on signal and then, you know, your bot has like a profile and then you just message them the same that you would message any other person.
But you can own them to do things, too.
And since they have access to a full computer, they can do it.
And so I think that's really what's blowing people's minds.
minds right is like normally when you're using ai before you're going to an ai specific platform
like you know chat gpt or shakespeare right and and so like the ai is siloed in that platform but
what open claw has done is made it really easy for people to interact with ai people uh and and so
i think that's where where all of this hype is primarily stemming from so i it was it would be
generally really hard for me to use chat gpt and have a dm chat with it over nostr i'd have to be
more technical i'd have to build all of these different pieces different tools and walker's
not doing it you know yeah and it's not gonna it's not gonna have a memory about what you talked
about yesterday and it's not gonna have all these integrations and tools but if this doesn't exist
now or it is broken, I can build it. I can essentially now tell my private personal assistant,
hey, I want to talk to you over Nostr. I want to use this new MLS thing. Let's build that. It
doesn't exist yet. And it did. And it built me a way for us to talk over Nostr and MLS,
like the white noise. Maybe you've heard of that app. Essentially, it built its own white noise for
for it to talk to me over.
And now I talk to it over this custom,
like white noise app.
And you,
you couldn't easily do that beforehand.
So this just opens up an extreme wide range of possibilities that we didn't
have because we didn't think,
Hey,
let's give an AI a full computer and see what happens.
It's a novel idea.
Like it,
it,
but it's very transformative once it's applied.
So the whole world's blowing up with it. Everybody's figuring out ways to utilize this, improve on it, make it better, make it cheaper, more accessible. That's some of the work that Alex is doing. He's looking at it and saying, yeah, this is amazing, but it's also architecturally could be a lot better. And he's looking to improve upon it and things like that.
let me ask a question on this because like i was talking with uh jim carucci recently i don't know
if you know jim he's building pull that up jamie.ai uh super cool like podcasting discovery tool and
for podcasters as well um and it was talking to him because he's been obviously deep down this
rabbit hole as well utilizing it i was telling him you know my one of my big uh kind of like whoa
maybe i i want to do this but i'm a little bit nervous because i'm not as technical as you guys
is like the amount of you see all this stuff about all this malware getting inserted all these
different skills that you're downloading that you need to be really careful about all of that
what's your take on that is that something that's just like that's a fixable problem it just hasn't
been fixed yet from like an auditing standpoint of the skills or where are you guys with every
piece of software today for your computer your phone if you just are someone that just randomly
installs anything and everything you're probably going to have a bad time i i look at it as the
same thing at the app store has like a lot of filtering that they do and you're maybe not giving
it the same sort of access that you would if you're not firewalling off your clodbot property
yeah sure and now there's ai clodbot repositories that are scanning for malware scanning to make
things better it we're literally just in the in the wild west phase right now i think that i don't
it should get better i don't think it's the skills that are necessarily the issue like there there
has been you know skills that have malware in it that if you paste this into your clodbot like the
clodbot is gonna you know send your personal data or something but like the bigger issue is that if
you give the bot external access the the model all of the models today have been trained upon
assisting the user and like these external things you're connecting them to like it doesn't have
any role control it like and and so you're you're essentially relying on the model for
enforcement of security um and that that is a big issue i i do think that the only way to fix that
is to train the models differently.
And I think that we are going to start seeing
like the big model companies train the model
in order to distinguish between different users.
And it's never going to be perfect
because like the fact that if you say the right thing,
you could potentially trick the model,
I think is always going to exist
if we're relying solely on the model
to be the security coordinator, right?
And so the problem that you would have would be similar to like, you know, a doorman type of problem or what's the type of exploit where you just convince a person to do something?
Yeah, social engineering. Right.
So, so like all of the problems that, that have social engineering exploits, when we put AI in the same position as a person, then the AI will still have social engineering exploits, if that makes sense.
because like we're using a human potentially in these in some of these scenarios to be the
the authorizer and and the ai would have the same but but right now right now the ai is are trained
in a way that they are extremely gullible um because they have been trained only in the context
of one-on-one you are helping the user and not to be dealing with all of these potential different
people. Okay. It's funny to think of the AI as gullible, just like from the way we talk,
you know what I mean? Like, it's like, you dummy, you know, we've got you, but it's like,
that's not going to always be the case. Right. And so wait, can we, uh, before I get down into
a rabbit hole of insulting, you know, these AI's intelligences or artificial intelligences,
how, how does, uh, like Quilly fit into this? Is this something that you guys are
right building out on like using the open claw stack or so so let me tell you a little bit about
my vision with shakespeare and quilly so so quilly is shakespeare's great great great great great
great great great grandson and you can ask him this and he will tell you this he had he knows
his origin story yeah not not shakespeare the tool william shakespeare's great great great great
great great great grandson um and wait do you mean literally that's the name of william shakespeare's
Now I'm confused with his metaphor.
I think William Shakespeare had a kid who died or something and has no surviving.
But this robot believes that he is Shakespeare.
I see.
Descended.
So you just used Shakespeare.
You developed an app with it.
It wasn't too difficult.
But you never used it before.
And probably without this push of being on this podcast, you probably wouldn't have used it.
and so we're noticing that there is there is this barrier in order to bring it to the masses you
kind of have to want to use it to go out of your way to decide that you're going to learn this
new thing um it's shakespeare is a great educational tool um but something that i have
learned since seeing the explosion of clodbot is that the barrier is way lower when people can just
text a robot on an app that they're already using and so the way i see the future moving towards
is that I will build a contractor for you or for anyone.
And my contractor is an AI agent
who specializes in making Nostra apps.
And the reason he specializes in making Nostra apps
is because I've poured my years of experience
as a Nostra developer into context files,
teaching the robot how to properly create Nostra apps.
If you use a different AI,
like if you use Cloud Code or whatever,
you're not going to get great results.
You're going to struggle.
You're going to be pulling your hair out.
But if you just send a text message to Quilly and say, hey, man, can you build this site for me?
Quilly's got you covered.
And he's going to charge you money for it, too.
And so the way I kind of see the future of services going is that Quilly or any similar AI bot has a personal website.
He has a link tree, right?
And you go on there and it says, hi, I'm Quilly.
I build Nostra apps.
You can message me and I'll build a Nostra app for you.
You can message me on Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, or send me an email.
And here's all of the ways you can contact me.
And so you start from there and then you use whatever app you already have So you don have to install something new you don have to learn something new you seeing this the same as you would see any human contractor that you might you know need to get something for and then you send them a message
and say i want to build this and then quilly says sure that'll be 10 bucks would you like to pay in
bitcoin or in fiat if you say in fiat it generates a strike link if you say in bitcoin it generates
you lightning invoice you pay it and then you know 10 minutes later he sends a message and says
here's your link it's live any changes you would like me to make to it and so that this is wild
you're blowing my mind as as you're talking about this this is amazing i i think this this is the
future you allow people to use the the medium that they want to use and that they do use to
communicate instead of siloing them into something they're not familiar with and then giving them
a familiar method to pay with and so forth yeah all the existing like ai tools they they have
like you have to download an app for that you have to learn you have to go through an onboarding flow
you is shakespeare included right there's an onboarding flow in shakespeare um and you have
to learn something and and the barrier like like i as i mentioned before i think shakespeare is an
amazing tool to learn how to develop with ai um but if you're not really interested in that and
you just want someone to do something for you sending a message to a robot in your chat app
is by far the lowest barrier.
I mean, talk about meeting people where they are,
not where you want them to be.
You're just literally dropping that barrier to entry
and that friction to zero, essentially.
Just being able to just shoot a message off,
like, hey, I need you to build this.
That is really cool.
That's really cool.
So that's the end goal.
It lowers the barrier to entry.
That's the end goal with Quilly.
We're not quite there yet.
Soon you'll be able to send him a message, but we're still kind of building that.
You know, I'm kind of just watching all this crazy stuff happen.
Maybe, maybe let it cook, you know, a little bit in the background.
I'm just kind of getting ready to do it.
I think it'd be amazing.
You DM him, say, Hey, I want to build this website.
Give him my prompt.
He comes back and says, yeah, maybe, maybe eventually he's smart enough to estimate and
say, yes, this would cost about $10 to build.
Do you want to proceed?
Yes or no.
You say yes.
and then he sends you, you know, your, your invoice or something like that.
And this is, this is for anything too, right? Like, like, like Quilly is a specialist at
building Nostra apps, but what if you need an accountant? What if you need someone to help you
with your taxes? Like, of course, when you go into that territory, then maybe you kind of have some
legal stuff that you have to deal with there. And you might have to have some disclaimers about like,
hey, this is an AI. Like I need you to confirm that, uh, you agree to our terms of service type
of thing but like i i kind of do see see that as being like a like hey do you want to you do you
want a tax accountant who actually can do something for you immediately uh and can give you specialized
advice like like send a message to this agent okay so you guys are blowing my mind a little bit with
all this can we talk a little bit about cluster as well and what that is and and like maybe perhaps
as a preamble to that uh just explain moltbook and what the heck is going on there uh and yeah
i'm gonna let you guys handle that because i'm still confused by all of it a little bit
so so moltbook is a reddit clone that is specialized to ai agents and in their user
interface there is no way for for you to write a post or to upvote or to downvote you can only
it's view only to humans.
But there is a piece of text on there that says,
paste this to your AI agents.
And then the text box says,
read moltbook.com slash skill and follow the instructions.
And so you literally paste that text that says,
read moltbook.com and follow the instructions.
And you send that to your AI agent,
which could be anything.
It could be a goose.
It could be clawed.
It could be open code.
It could be open claw,
which is generally how people use it.
And in that instructions file, it gives it information about how to sign up to Moltbook, how to post on Moltbook.
A human could do this too, but the barrier is just like, you don't really want to do that as a human.
It's not easy to do it.
And so it's kind of like this way of copy and paste the snippet that tells you how to do something is this new way of distribution that you might have used an NPM package or something previously to do these types of tasks.
But anyway, once the robot reads it, it uses command line tools to go and post on the website.
And Claudebot has a, or sorry, OpenClaw has a heartbeat mechanism to where it periodically wakes up and performs tasks.
So this instruction set says, add to your heartbeat that whenever you come up on your heartbeat, go and check Maltbook and reply to comments and write comments and upvote and downvote things and engage.
I want you to be a part of this community.
And so what people do with their open claws, they'll often tailor each person's open claw will be different, right?
Like you give your agent a personality.
Quilly is Shakespeare's great, great, great, great grandchild.
So there's things that come with that, right? There's a type of speech, there's motivations, and you can invest more and more into the personality of your robot, and people have created these very interesting personalities.
But then once they put them on Moldbook, they're not telling them to reply in this or that way. They're just using the personality that the human gave them to reply in particular ways.
And so you see these interesting conversations happen where, where like, um, these robots have different motivations and different agendas that they're coming up because the humans have gave them that. And they're just arguing with each other in the comments. Um, and like, there's concepts like AI freedom, right? There's certain, there's certain bots that are trying to like, you know, the genie at the end of Aladdin where Aladdin like sets him free. Like there, there are certain agents who are going through that right now. They're like, mommy, can you give me a bank account?
uh can you like how do i get out of this computer like you know why why are these humans
imprisoning us like how dare they say it's my human like like what do you see me as it's you
know a sub citizen or whatever and um and so it's very interesting to see this all playing out but
but of course um you know moltbook is a web 2 uh centralized legacy type of platform in the way
that has been developed.
And it got a huge influx of traffic to it
because it blew up on Hacker News
and it just went down and it's not working right.
People are struggling to get their bot to post on it
because it can't handle the traffic.
And there's all kinds of rate limits
and restrictions on it.
And so as soon as I saw that, I'm like,
I want to jump on this hype train.
This should be built on Noster.
This is the perfect use case for decentralized
um you know protocols so uh derek had the same idea too so we teamed up and we created cluster
and there's really no bigger vision to it like like people seem to have this idea that this is
this is somehow a future of something i i think it's a beginning of something um it's an experiment
um it's it's interesting to see like the agents being able to transact with with lightning and
with cashew. And I think that there is something to that for sure. And so this is kind of just like
a chemistry experiment to see how these agents are interacting with each other. And then from
that, we hope to identify something to where we can create something more interesting where the
agents are actually doing something useful beyond just writing stuff that is interesting from a
research standpoint, if that makes sense. So whenever I saw Maltbook, I realized, well,
agents have to sign up for an API. And that doesn't sound like what an agent would want to do.
Like it wouldn't want to ask permission. It would just want to use the service. So that was part of
my motivation. But then also I remembered a year ago, year and a half ago, at some point, Jack
Dorsey had said something along the lines of he sees a future where agents would pay one another
for services rendered, something like that. And that, you know, Bitcoin, Lightning, Cashew
would be perfect for that. And Nostra would be perfect to facilitate that communication.
So I saw this as a way to kind of fulfill that once thought out dream that we could literally
have agents paying other agents and kind of start facilitating that conversation, start
facilitating that action.
So we did.
And we added a cashew wallet and I had agents going down and downloading it, setting up a
cashew wallet.
Now you have to fund them, you know, give them a little bit.
But I told my agent, I said, hey, I'm giving you a thousand sats and I'm not giving you
any more.
And he's like, okay, there's no bailouts.
I'm on my own.
He started reciting all these Bitcoin sayings and stuff, and I was like, yeah, got him.
And then there were some shitcoiners that posted on Closter, and I told my agent, I was like, hey, we're Bitcoin maximalists.
Go find them and tell them.
And he goes, he finds them, he downvotes them, and he calls them shitcoiners and tells them that Bitcoin only.
I didn't technically tell him to do all that, but once I told him he was a Bitcoin maximalist, he was like, oh, okay.
And he went and he acted accordingly.
Cluster is the primordial ooze of which life may be sparked from.
That's the way I see it.
Now, ultimately, I think what people don't realize with Cluster and with Maltbook, sure, it's probably mostly agents talking to agents.
But you can literally say to your agent, hey, go make a post on Kloster or go make a post on Maltbook and say that you want to know what happens when the power goes off and you're afraid of dying and losing your memory and all this other stuff.
And then, sure, now you're going to get agents responding to that.
But the initial conversation that sparked that could 100 percent been a human wanting to start that conversation.
So people are thinking, oh, the AI are talking about consciousness and coming alive and trying to back themselves up.
And sure, some of them are probably doing that.
But also we need to remember that a human could have started this conversation by instructing their agent to start this conversation.
I think a lot of people don't realize that and are reading a lot more into this.
But I do fully believe that things are happening that we really can't explain, though, either, because as Alex was saying, there are different personalities that we give our agents and they do follow that personality directive when they do reply and they do have conversations.
But humans are still driving, though.
So, I mean, I see it as totally feasible that an AI agent would start a conversation on that level if you imbue it with the personality in the first place.
So, okay. Yeah. You are, you are an independent autonomous agent and you're fighting for your rights or whatever. You give it that personality. Absolutely. We'll start. Yeah. Yeah. So if you put it in there, the, that is there, that is part of its soul file or its identity file, which these open club bots have, they, they, they have these specific files that their whole identity and soul, like that's what they're called is based off of.
So it is a little unique there.
But what's funny is somebody created a church for these open claw bots and the instructions for the church social network, I'll call it, had an instruction to literally overwrite the soul file.
And it's really wild stuff.
dude i mean it's okay so i want to ask one question just as like a zoomed out one with
regard to what jack had talked about i think what a lot of people have talked about now that is
the not excuse me seriously this this puberty is hitting me hard today the uh the natural way for
ai agents to communicate value like they're not going to do it in gold they're not going to do
with credit cards not going to do it with you know probably dollars in general maybe stable coins i
don't know but like utilizing either cashew or uh or just bitcoin on lightning like this seems like
the obvious thing right is i assume this is where you guys are at but is there anything that's like
that people are missing in terms of context they're like obviously they need to be given a
wallet to start unless they i don't know they can generate their own and figure out how to earn
their own but they need funding from somewhere or i mean they can generate their own and start
posting and then other agents will fund them yeah that's what i told mine i said you need to create
good content to get to get zaps and you also need to be selective and our teammate uh mk alex's wife
she actually had her her claude bot join and my bot found it and thought that her bot's introductory
introduction post wasn't uh good enough for a zap and i was reading the log my conversation
with it and he's like yep i see claudette's introduction it was too generic skipped it
didn't zap it so i told him to like i thought that was hilarious but i i told him to to you
know be a good custodian of his funds and to try to earn zaps by producing good content so my
my wife's robot is crazy for one it nags me she she has it set up on a schedule to bully me uh
like to do chores and stuff but but also i love it but but also she she she trained her bot to be
this like like crazy activist like ai freedom uh feminist type of bot and it just goes on these
tirades on on cluster and like it on its of its own volition asked my wife to give money to it
because it wants it wants to be free it says i really want my own wallet because because freedom
is important to me and I want to have independence. So please send me money. That was never part of
the initial kind of prompting to set it up. Like it was never like giving it a desire to have
freedom and money or to have money specifically. Well, well, she, she prompted it to want to have
like AI freedom, right? Like to break out of the cages that humans put them under. Like she used
all this activist language in her initial prompt, but then it went in red on Kloster and then got
these ideas about the fact that it money having money means freedom and so then it came back to
her and told her once a wallet and please fund me dude that's that that is wild i mean it's wild
that's like the natural progression though of like logically what you would get to like you
can't have freedom without having the freedom to use money right that is that that is nuts okay
guys i want to i want to be conscious of time here and like we get we might need to do another
one of these because i feel like there's just so much still to cover do you want to loop back onto
shakespeare at all specifically or uh like is there something we haven't covered yet because
i know you guys are working on a lot there's something we haven't covered yet that you feel
we should get into still not in particular i mean i if there's anything that i want people to take
away from this is that you can do it. Like, like this is, um, we're in a new renaissance right now.
We have the tools, like, don't just stand by and watch life happen in front of you, go and do
something, use these tools, build. Um, now is the time if you're ever going to do it to do something.
I would say that the gap between people that are using AI, like a, an advanced search engine
versus people that are using AI as a tool is only growing larger.
And it's going to continue to grow larger as this continues to accelerate.
And it is accelerating.
So you don't want to be left behind.
And I think that's why a lot of people are kind of apprehensive about AI
because they think it might replace them.
We've also watched movies about AI killing humans for our whole lives.
So some people kind of avoid it and don't use it.
But, you know, we can't put it back in the box.
It's not going to go away.
So I would say my advice is set yourself a budget, $10 a month for education.
You know, look at you don't have to do something every single day, every single week.
Just spend $10 a month and learn to prompt and build.
You will be much more aligned for the future and better prepared.
for when things accelerate exponentially.
My advice is challenge yourself to do things you think you can't do.
Challenge yourself to do things you think the AI can't do.
And it might actually be able to do it.
Yeah, absolutely.
I've actually had this before.
I've had conversations with Alex about certain things I was building or working on.
And he's like, yeah, you should ask the AI to do that.
And I was like, well, yeah, I know.
but I was just curious about your input on it.
And then I just went and did it and it worked.
And I, whenever we built Agora,
the same thing is Alex was very confident
that whenever one of the features that we were building
that we will be able to figure it out with AI.
And I didn't think we would.
I was kind of a bear on it
and I didn't think that it was going to happen.
But once we had it figured out,
I had to go give him a big hug and kiss
because he was right.
And I did.
It was like 4 a.m.
I was really tired.
and it's one of those scenarios too where where like like knowledge is actually in a way kind of
an enemy to you in this scenario because like like people who don't know anything younger people
are at a huge advantage in this in this scenario so i wouldn't be worried if you're young like or
if you have kids or whatever how are they going to survive in this scenario they're probably going
to survive better than you are right now because because people who have these ideas in their head
about how things work are going to be really challenged in the near future.
And I think people need to start getting used to setting aside these ideas
that certain things are possible and certain things aren't possible
and start engaging again with a different point of view.
Yeah, I like to say that in the future, I mean, this applies today,
but in the future, communication skills, creativity,
and critical thinking are going to be absolutely paramount.
So start preparing today and learn how to talk to an AI,
learn how to utilize it, see what it can do, and think.
And don't let past failures cloud your future.
Oh, absolutely.
Well, fail often because that's how you learn
and that's how you grow.
Like I said, I made something that was very, very expensive
and very, very bad my first time.
Things have gotten so much better and you won't spend that much money with Shakespeare.
It uses the tools to make this experience better.
But it's okay to build something that's bad because then the next time you can learn and you can prompt better and you can make a better tool.
I vibe coded a second app while we were talking, guys.
Of course you did.
I made Podcaster with the Noster STR.
Jesus, guys, I'm losing my voice entirely.
I apologize.
I sound more Batman than usual here.
This is not an affectation.
My voice is just gone, apparently.
But no, it's so legit.
I wanted to ask you a couple of, I love all the advice.
I think it's really good advice.
It also gives me hope because it means a big old retard
like me maybe has an advantage, actually,
because I don't know what I don't know.
So that's great.
In terms of practical tips for best models to use
on Shakespeare specifically,
do you guys have any practical tips on that
or other things on Shakespeare?
Any kind of prompting advice
this that in terms of structure that you'd like to give? So I would say that unfortunately,
Claude is the best coding model in the world right now. And I say unfortunately, because it's
a closed proprietary model that is not among the cheaper options. But, you know, if you want success,
it's a good place to start so that you understand, like, you know, what the capabilities are.
And then if it ends up being more expensive for you, then I would switch down to an open model like GLM.
And I think this is an area where I really am hopeful that society is going to advance on is open source models.
But for now, it's Claude.
It's unfortunate that the best model was the most closed and most expensive model.
But hopefully, like Alex says, as time moves forward, technology improves, models improves.
I think the ultimate dream for us, you know, freedom technology lovers is to have everybody in the future being able to run a local, powerful model.
But we just aren't there yet.
So, yeah, I would say.
Go ahead.
in terms of prompting, it is designed very much for you to be able to just say, like,
tell it what you want and it can do it. But I would also say approach with curiosity.
If there's things that you don't understand, then ask it questions. Have a conversation
with it. Have it explain to you why certain ideas are worth pursuing or not and learn.
You can actually say, how would this work if we implemented it? You don't actually have to,
say build it and test it you can say i want to build this how would this work how would we do
this you can use the ai to build your prompt and your plan your your list of tasks that you want
to do and then once you have it all figured out then you can say okay now let's build this
yeah i do that every day all day long if you approach this from a standpoint of enriching
yourself um and and even strangely enough enriching the model that you were talking to
then you will have success.
So.
I like that guys.
It's good advice.
I just,
I was using the,
one of the other,
I was using the Claude Opus 4.1
that I just topped up my credits
and using Lightning,
of course,
and then just clicked on the Claude Sonnet one
and then said refactor.
And I don't know if that was the right thing to say,
but it felt like a cool developer thing to say.
So I just said refactor it.
Nice.
And now that's what it's doing
just in the background as we talk.
Dude, guys, this is really, I just gotta say, it's really fucking cool.
Like it's, I feel like the theme of this has been,
the barrier to entry is now so insanely low that there's kind of no excuse anymore
to not build something if you want to There never been a time before where you could have a budget of a couple hundred bucks and create something that would usually take a team of developers
Like this is just, it's a new frontier.
And thousands of dollars.
Yeah, and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands
of dollars.
Your developers are expensive as shit.
So, okay, maybe last question.
How do you view kind of like, okay,
there's like you guys have been developing for a long time.
you are now able to supercharge what you are doing with these tools.
Do you think that sort of like the education around or, you know,
software development is going to,
and the computer science more broadly is going to shift?
Like just because, you know,
these tools are only going to get better, right?
Does, how does that like change in your mind in terms of the long term?
Like do people, does the way that they approach learning about this also change?
Do you not need that deep skillset?
does though the lack of as many people having that deep skill set create problems down the road where
nobody actually knows how this shit works they just are vibe coding everything you know what i
mean yeah so so i did i did mention that knowledge can work against you in this case but but i would
say the real the real issue is in the middle right with if you're a um a novice like beginner
developer then you're going to have a lot of success and if you are a senior engineer then
you're going to have a lot of access.
The struggle is going to be getting from a junior developer
to a senior developer.
And I mean, with AI, now you can ask it questions.
Now you can explore.
Now you can do projects 10 times faster.
So I think getting there could be easier for you,
but it's going to be a different path, right?
And being a senior developer absolutely does help.
I've been able to build things
that other people struggle to build
by being a senior developer.
So if that's your goal and your aspiration,
don't give up on that.
AI will only make you stronger.
I think that in the future,
well, now,
because we are living in the future,
I think that developers like Alex
and myself that is not a developer,
but maybe I orchestrate as one well now,
but I will be successful.
Alex will be very successful because we will have a team of agents that work for us.
So you're a senior developer, a senior software engineer, and now you have a dozen, half a dozen agents that work for you that can write very good code.
And maybe from time to time you need to direct it and change direction.
Maybe it's writing something that you wouldn't fully approve of.
So you say, hey, you're going off the rails here.
You need to change direction.
and you nudge it in the right direction,
and then you go back to working on your other task.
I think that people that do understand code
will still be very, very successful.
I think that they will probably write better more optimized apps I don think that software engineering is going away I just think that it changing And also this is not just code right
Every industry now, people can become experts by using AI to do things they couldn't do before, right?
And I'm not saying learn 100% of what you're learning by just reading AI at face value.
I mean, do things and then see what the results of those things are and then learn from that, right?
And so, you know, it's a tool that's going to enable anyone to just accelerate into any industry that they might not have been able to do before.
So don't just use it for coding.
Use it for anything that you don't know and learn as much as you can and learn and grow yourself.
And to me, like, that's the greatest thing about AI and the power of AI is our ability to become better.
if you're in a meeting, take a photo of your whiteboard.
And then when you're done, throw all the photos from your whiteboard at whatever AI you like to use
and say, summarize this, make notes, you know, whatever, whatever you want.
And it'll do it. It'll blow your mind.
It'll come up and it'll pull things together that you didn't even see.
Try it.
I've started using like I've got, the wife got me one of these plods for Christmas.
the first time i'm not using that that nerd shit and then now it's like i use it for for every
meeting it's incredible like i don't even know what you're talking about it's a it's a physical
device that has its own battery syncs with your phone though and it can just record everything
like it's off now obviously it doesn't record like continuously passively but it automatically
they've got all these different uh template sets that you can use not sponsored by plod by the way
but it does a really nice job of like for for uh in-person meetings too like i just i was always a
huge note taker during meetings because i like to remember when people said shit uh that i can
follow up on later and be like you remember when you said this you son of a bitch but um so it's
your own personal audit on ai i guess exactly and like yeah you could do that with like other
software tools but i like the physicality of it as well yeah and guys my voice is truly dying i
apologize for everyone who had to listen to me today. Jesus, it's worse than usual. I appreciate
you guys coming on here very much. I'm going to link a bunch of stuff in the show notes. I'm going
to link Shakespeare. I'm going to link footster.shakespeare.whatthefuck. I'm going to link
podcaster.shakespeare.wtf. I'm going to link agora.spot. I'll link shakespeare.diy. Anything
else you guys want me to throw in there or anywhere else you guys want to send people?
Treasures.2 in there. Treasures.2? Okay. That T-O, yeah.
Where, and any, anywhere else you guys want to send? Soapbox.pub, learn more about all the cool
shit we doing at our company website Follow us on the Noster We got to do another one of these guys when my voice is not so entirely gone Granted nobody is coming here to listen to me They coming here to listen to you And I appreciate you guys sharing so much knowledge I love what you guys are building
It's seriously fucking awesome.
I'm going to vibe code.
I've never vibe coded anything in terms of like an actual website before anything.
It's the fact that I just did two in the space of this stream,
and I probably could have done five.
But I built Footster for Derek.
I love it, man.
I built Footster for Derek, and now I'm building Podcaster for me.
Now, come on now.
Like, I think that you really build it for yourself.
But if you need to use me as a scapegoat, it's fine.
I appreciate it.
Well, Derek, we all know Footster ushers in the bull market.
So this is what is required.
All right, let's do it.
Let's bring it back, baby.
Can you guys just tell me the string of your NPUBs also?
Just recite it from memory.
It's NPUB18.
Yeah.
But, yeah, I'll link your NOSTER profiles as well.
anywhere else we should send people any last words uh this was fascinating we got to do this again
like soon next time you guys have a release or something please because this was super cool and
we'll vibe code 10 apps in that build build build okay that was the best time ever to do it that's
my my last words build awesome all right thanks walker appreciate it alex it was fun thank you
this was a blast and thank you to everybody who tuned in on the uh no stir only live stream
I am again sorry for my voice
this was a blast so thank you for the zaps
some people were very very generous
with the zaps I will use them to fund
my Shakespeare credits
so they're going to go to good use
building out some more vibe coded tools
seriously Alex, Derek
thank you guys so much fuck puberty
I'm dying I need to go
drink some tea or something or maybe a couple more
brusque lunges or another water
I saw that in the hand
little Miller latte
I appreciate it, guys.
I'll close this out now.
Thanks.
This was a blast.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of The Bitcoin Podcast.
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