Heather Larson (2:25)

I want to hear all about the.

Derek Ross (2:26)

So this weekend. Sure. So this weekend, four of us from Soapbox, it was myself, Alex Gleason, M.K. fane, Chad Chadwick. The four of us, we went to Chad Chadwick. That is four.

Heather Larson (2:44)

Maybe we'll give his real name 234.

Derek Ross (2:48)

We went to Austin for a hackathon where we hacked all the things we. It was an AI hackathon where everybody there was using, you know, AI tools to build applications for freedom fighters and activists around the world that wanted to use AI or wanted an application to be built or wanted to use AI to be productive to solve some type of problem, or just developers were going to use AI to build whatever solution for them in a hackathon type atmosphere. So our team was, like I said, it was Chad, mk, Alex and I, but we were also joined by LSAT from the Domus team and Hazard, which you might know from Applesauce and Nostrudle. So it was us, six nostriches that formed our team.

Heather Larson (3:50)

That's good.

Derek Ross (3:51)

We, yeah, we ended up joining a team from Venezuela, Leopoldo Lopez. He is a political party leader.

Heather Larson (4:08)

He's in exile.

Derek Ross (4:09)

Venezuela. That's currently exiled. Yes, correct. He's currently exiled. He was imprisoned for political reasons years ago. Go. And that's heavy. Yeah, his story is pretty wild, but he's, you know, been mobilizing and speaking out about the current regime in Venezuela and advocates for freedom, you know, free elections and, you know, democracy to take place. Yeah, he. So it's more than Venezuela for him. He's part of the World Liberty Congress. The WLC has people on the ground in nearby countries like Nicaragua, you know, Colombia, and they have ties to people in, in Iran, you know, with the protests going on there and so forth. So there are a multi national global organization, tldr.

Heather Larson (5:06)

It's. It's people seeking freedom. It's people fighting for their freedom and fighting against the oppressive regime.

Derek Ross (5:11)

They wanted. They wanted an application to be able to do the thing right. They wanted an application to be able to help facilitate their communication, be able to get the word out when they need to get the word out. They wanted zaps, they wanted ways to stay organized on the ground and so forth. So they set out and they gave us a problem and hoped that we could fix it. It was probably, I would say, one of the most detailed problems because after we heard Leopoldo's entire project Scope, we kind of all looked at each other and Said, oh, he wants a massive community, full blown application built. Like it wasn't just a little project. Like, he wanted a full blown application and he knew what he wanted, which was great.

Heather Larson (6:06)

That's awesome. So we, that's a start.

Derek Ross (6:08)

Kind of. We kind of brainstormed. Yeah, we kind of brainstormed together, thinking, you know, like, he wants a wallet, he wants ways to mobilize on the ground, he wants notifications to get the word out, he wants challenges so he can say to his people, hey, go to the election booths, for example, and take pictures of people lining up to vote and things like that. And, and then he wanted a social aspect, communication aspect. And so he wants all these major features. And we're like, oh, wow, this is

Heather Larson (6:39)

just a recap, sir. But with AI as coding, it's fast, the accelerated innovation.

Derek Ross (6:48)

So at the hackathon, there were eight activists that were seeking teams for tools to be built. And there was about, we'll say, 24 to 30 developers there that were, you know, willing to build for these causes. So we all had to be split up. So that's, on average, you know, three to four people per team. But our team ended up having six developers work on it. So we had the extra people to hand to handle this extra large task. We divvied up a bunch of tasks amongst team members and then we worked from 9am until 4am the next day.

Heather Larson (7:33)

That's a hackathon. And y' all were happy about it.

Derek Ross (7:36)

That's a hackathon. Oh, my God, that's awesome. Like, so the hackathon ended at about. Well, it was supposed to end at 9. We stuck around the event. 9:00pm we stuck around the event till about 10, 10:30. Then we're like, okay, you know, it's getting late, let's go back to our Airbnb. But we said to our team, like, we're not going to go back and go to bed. Like, we want to build this app, work on this. You know, we're going to go and we're going to go build. So we went our Airbnb and we stayed up till 4am working on this, like LSAT. He was doing kind of like user experience testing, going through and finding all the bugs that he could find. MK and I were working on fixing all the bugs that LSAT was reporting. Hazard was working on Bluetooth mesh integration, which I'll get to that in a second. And Fancy Alex, Alex was working on notifications. And Chad was basically helping fix build errors and triaging. He was fixing some bugs and so forth. So we were all hacking away at these things, and I was starting to get skeptical because we realized that to be truly unique and do something really cool, we, instead of just saying, hey, we made another social app. We wanted to have some impact. So Alex ended up adding an AI chatbot into the app, as well as with notifications that night. So he added an AI chat bot. Again, it's contextual, too, so you can say, hey, what's going on in Venezuela? And it'll summarize everything and tell you really cool.

Heather Larson (9:25)

It's wild that you could make this in a night, a weekend, you know?

Derek Ross (9:30)

Yeah. So Hazard was working on this bitch at feature, Bluetooth Mesh, and I had a lot of doubt because there wasn't a library, like, there wasn't a plugin, There wasn't anything built to make this work in our app. Hazard spent a couple hours working with Claude to figure this out, and Claude was giving up. It was like 85% done. And Claude's like, yep, can't get it to work. Sorry.

Heather Larson (10:01)

Let's delete everything overall over the week after Claude Cowork came out, let me tell you, Claude kind of like, I don't know if there was a rate limit or what.

Derek Ross (10:12)

After a while, like, you know, Hazard, when Hazard went off on his own, like, little side quests for a little bit, and then we kind of said, okay, let's hunker down and get this fixed. And he's like, I don't know if I can do it. And I was like, dude, Claude can do it. Claude Opus 4.5 is amazing. You're brilliant. I guarantee you you're going to figure this out.

Heather Larson (10:33)

Quad code for the win, baby.

Derek Ross (10:35)

An hour later, he's like, okay, I want to test something. I have some test cases up. And we started testing. You know, we could see each other in the mesh. And then he started testing, you know, sending and then receiving and then standalone. So him and I were sitting there with our Android apps, running our app pathos and being able to send bitch at messages. Other people were launching regular bitch apps.

Heather Larson (10:59)

All right?

Derek Ross (11:00)

We were all interacting together, and I was so excited, you know, gave Hazard a huge hug. And then I was very. I was very skeptical that we're gonna be able to complete this. So I had to go over and give Alex Gleason a big kiss. He was sleeping on the couch and I was escaped kissing the guys. You gotta let him know you love him, right?

Heather Larson (11:23)

So it's another notch on your end pub, isn't it? That's You've hit it. How many?

Derek Ross (11:27)

Another notch on my end pub.

Heather Larson (11:28)

Another notch on your end pub. As you've gone after.

Derek Ross (11:31)

Listen, one that was. No. QW was the one that was drunk and gave me a kiss.

Heather Larson (11:38)

That's. I always conveniently forget that.

Derek Ross (11:41)

Yeah, you forget that context. Like, you know, I. I was not a willing participant. Some may say that he. That he was. You know, since he is a. He did not. There is no consent to that. I. I mean, I guess technically Alex didn't consent to the kiss on the forehead either, but that's okay. I was excited and I wanted to though.

Heather Larson (12:07)

We don't have to alert HR or do we?

Derek Ross (12:10)

Listen, listen. The kiss on the forehead between two bros is fine. It's no big deal. Like, it's no big deal.

Heather Larson (12:18)

That's very wholesome.

Derek Ross (12:20)

Alex then later got, I said he got the chatbot working, he got notifications working. And then he was, he was kind of tasked on fixing Shakespeare so Shakespeare would work with our app. Cause we were doing some really unique things that Shakespeare wasn't prepared for. So we spent a lot of the next day kind of fixing Shakespeare. So because the whole goal was, you know, we're going to continue building this app for them, but if other people around the world want like this app and they want to come up with their own, they can take the code and edit it in Shakespeare. And that's so. So he was working on that a lot.

Heather Larson (12:55)

Then everyone can have a page.

Derek Ross (12:57)

Ultimately. Heather, we woke up the next morning with four hours of sleep. We went back, we spent the next, you know what, six hours, I guess working and got to where it was a full blown working app on Android. IOS. Not yet. Because that's a complicated process.

Heather Larson (13:19)

IOS, another story. It always comes last.

Derek Ross (13:23)

And the web worked like we had. There was about a hundred activists on the ground that went out and took photos and made posts and that were using it. So we were the only aspect that had upwards of a hundred people using it with immediate users. Immediate. Yeah, that was one of the requirements of the hackathon is you wanted, you wanted, you know, at least one other, you know, multiple people besides yourself using and testing the app. Everybody had like one tester, maybe two testers. We had, we had, we had a hundred. We actually. And they weren't tested. Yeah, ours was a live production app. It was a live production app. Yeah, it was really cool. So I guess I didn't really talk about some of the features of the app. The course you missed.

Heather Larson (14:14)

You missed something. You guys. Actually this was There was a contest element and we placed.

Derek Ross (14:21)

Yeah, there was a contest. We did. We got second place. Yes, yes, we, our app got second place. You know, some people were saying we should have got first place, but that's okay. First Place was a really cool app as well. It was a proof of concept with a large roadmap. But their app was cool because it focused on protecting journalists lives that were on the front lines reporting about what's going on. So their app was really, their app idea, you know, was really cool and I hope they get finished. I can appreciate it because. Yeah, I mean, ours was a fully working large scope app, but theirs was focused on saving lives.

Heather Larson (15:05)

So here's why I can appreciate it.

Derek Ross (15:07)

I think they did, they deserved it in 2020.

Heather Larson (15:11)

I was a TV producer and I was watching my reporter get gassed live while, you know, she was on TV in a different city. But, you know, well, that is not a fun thing to go through, especially watching it happen to your colleague. And it's, it's certainly less fun to be a part of. So, you know, that's, you know, that's. To me, that's an easy win. That's, that's a, that's a great use case. You know, we need to protect our journalists, especially the ones who are still doing real journalism and original reporting. So hats off to that. That's awesome too. Hats off to the first place winner. Glad we got second. Okay, go on.

Derek Ross (15:47)

I'll say. An honorable. An honorable mention was Friends of the Show. Friends of Derek and the FOD were the three members from the Maple Team, formerly the Mutiny Wallet Team. They made. They worked with a, they worked with a guy and I don't remember his name, but he was a student organizer during the Tiananmen Square stuff in China in 1989. So like he legend himself, like he was there organizing. So his team made an app called Open CCP. Which essentially. Which essentially spies on and doxes members of the ccp. Like it's a, like it's just opens

Heather Larson (16:44)

Pandora's box, doesn't it?

Derek Ross (16:46)

Yeah.

Heather Larson (16:47)

Wow.

Derek Ross (16:47)

Yeah. Yeah. They, they made an app and they went that way. Interesting. Yeah. There. Theirs was a little more cheeky. You know, they were having fun with it and you know, Tony, Paul and Mark, like they did a. They did a great job with it.

Heather Larson (17:02)

That's awesome. That is a unique. These are very unique. Obviously much needed use cases. It's cool to see what the activists want as apps. Were there any features that they wanted when they saw Shakespeare or anything that they were like, hey, we should do this or that.

Derek Ross (17:20)

Well, I think we talked to several activists, we talked to several other developers, builders, and showing them Shakespeare and they all thought was really cool. I would say one of the more interesting use cases was Leopoldo. He had a. His 13 year old son was there, nicknamed Little Leo. And Little Leo, we gave him Shakespeare credits and he was given a laptop by Justin Moon from hrf and he just went to town and he was vibe coding the whole weekend building stuff and he was really excited. And basically we're like, hey, you can now teach your dad how to do this and your dad can go back and like apps now.

Heather Larson (18:04)

So that's really cool. That's.

Derek Ross (18:06)

Yeah, it was really cool.

Heather Larson (18:07)

Teach the kids. Yeah, the children are our future. You know, it's funny because this is such a new idea, I think for a lot of people, if anybody's happened upon this podcast somehow and they're like, what in the heck are they talking about? Like, development is faster. We're working with AI. Not that our AI is open, truly open. You know that the Shakespeare gives you. The Shakespeare. Shakespeare gives you a lot of choice and so that you can build things that are needed in the world. And the way that we have this set up is so that activists can use it in such a way that they can remain safe and private. I've done a lot of research on this. I'm a geek out for a second. You know, there is a lot of AI information out there. And just because the word open source is involved with it, whether you're googling it or asking ChatGPT about it, doesn't mean it's actually open, open source. So there's, there's a whole rabbit hole I could go down to talk about privacy first and, and you know, paying anonymously and all these things that activists might actually really be interested in and certainly aware of already. Like, I would assume all of these activists were aware of, like, okay, when I get on the Internet, I should be on a vpn, I should have a certain level of opsec. And if I'm working with AI, I should probably make sure that it's very privacy focused. You know, like, maybe I work with Maple AI or maybe I work with an open model. And these, these are things that I think new concepts to a lot of people along with vibe coding. And it is very possible for Derek and our team and a couple of friends to hack in less than 24 hours and create something that an activist team somewhere in the world can use and have it immediately operational and testable with a hundred people who are needing it. Because I think the interesting thing too was Alex mentioned that there. There's no Twitter in Venezuela. Correct. And that was another.

Derek Ross (19:58)

Yeah, it was banned about three years ago. That was one of the things they said to us, is that Twitter was banned three years ago, so they don't have it. And they use essentially WhatsApp for communication. And we know that, you know, WhatsApp probably shouldn't be trusted either. So they wanted a more anonymous way to be able to communicate. Yeah. So they're very aware of using nostr and they needed a way to organize. And what we built them like pathos. We built an MVP, we built version 1A beta, but it's fully usable. They're using it. They're using it to create challenges, to go out and do activism. And then the organizers that are creating the challenges are zapping the people that participate. And it's just a stream based on country where activism is happening.

Heather Larson (20:58)

And this is life and death for these people. We have very important work here.

Derek Ross (21:06)

It needed to be permissionless. It needed to be no kyc. So I built the wallet using the Breeze SDK. So there's no KYC for the wallet. There's, you know, no, it's secure. There's no. No tracking or anything in there.

Heather Larson (21:21)

I think that's important to stress.

Derek Ross (21:23)

It's great for fundraising.

Heather Larson (21:25)

I think a lot of people, they hear the word AI and they're like, oh, they're. They're going to track and train their AI for their company on all of these, you know, people who are at risk. And it's not how it works at all. We are the opposite of that. And I can't underscore that enough that we, we do not want, you know, personal details about anybody, but especially do not want to know personal details about people who are activists and dissidents, people are in exile, people who are in danger while they try to get power away because they're in the opposition. You know, that's important.

Derek Ross (21:56)

I should understand. HRF had recommended a couple months ago the Breeze SDK for developers using it to build apps, saying that it was private and secure and a great way to do fundraising. And that's what the people in Venezuela, they're looking to do, is that they will get zaps, they will get their funds, and they're not going to hold the funds in that wallet. They're going to transfer, do a lightning transfer to Binance and they're going to get currency that they can use to pay their bills. With maybe they'll convert it to dollars, maybe they'll convert it to local currency, maybe they'll convert it to usdt. But it's just a temporary location for them and you know, they'll offload it whenever they need to pay their bills. So I think it works great for fundraising. I think it's great because there's no kyc. It's really simple. You can do lightning, you can do zaps, you can do on chain transactions. Like it's, it's a secure wallet. You can even back up, download your, your seed words as it's self custodial so you can transport, transport your mnemonic seed words into other applications if you want to.

Heather Larson (23:10)

So did you think that the people like those first hundred testers for pathos, did you think that they were pretty savvy when it came to sats, Bitcoin wallets, you know, off ramps to their, their financial product that they use?

Derek Ross (23:24)

Yeah. Yeah. Well see most of them actually use Primal right now and you know, shout out to Primal. Love Primal. But they were kind of using it in a workaround. They were, they were creating wallets with Primal because Primal has very, very light kyc since they're using Strike, but they were lying and saying that their location was Costa Rica instead of, you know, wherever they were in the world. And that's fine and dandy and that makes it work. But, but I hate having people having to use a workaround. And also since they're activists, Primal has admitted this before and that's just how the application works, that you're essentially tying an NPUB to a lightning address. So there's that correlation there. And maybe, maybe activists don't want that.

Heather Larson (24:17)

Yeah, that's for their safety from their country, the government.

Derek Ross (24:22)

Yeah. So we came up with a method to give them an alternative. So they have an alternative to use the built in wallet. Now they don't have to use Primal if they don't want to. They can continue to use Primal if they want to, but they can also build their own wallet and you know, we're all about choice. I guess. The other technical aspect I didn't really talk about is how these feeds, these activist feeds work. They're country feeds based off of essentially a geolocation country hashtag. Nobody kind of. Yeah, we've mentioned Geohash on the show before. So it's not a hash value, it's a geocode. So you would do geo us for us or geo Ve for Venezuela because we realized that Geohashes is great. But Geohashes also doesn't fully line up with country borders. So somebody could be making a post and have country overlap a little bit. And that's not entirely what we wanted. So we chose a new nip that Domus is working on for new updated hashtag communities, simpler communities that nobody owns. And we adapted that using that model but we made them essentially country hashtag community communities. So it's a brand new nip, but it's in practice and in use.

Heather Larson (25:56)

Part of that we so early

Derek Ross (26:00)

but when Domus launches this that the hashtag communities it'll be live in Domus. I'm sure Veeder and Amethyst is going to put this in there. So these new hashtag communities will be coming to all major apps probably. Yeah, probably in the near future.

Heather Larson (26:17)

Very cool. I'm excited about this. This is kind of what we've all wanted to do for so long at Soapbox and have Shakespeare do and being able to help people in the world who really need and appreciate this right now. You know, I feel, I say this all the time. We're such over privileged Americans we don't see the need sometimes to denominate in sats and use, you know, hard money that we can send 24 7. But I think in the mainstream I think there's a little more understanding that like, oh, if I use, you know, this form of currency, I can, I can deal with it at nine o' clock on a Sunday night and I don't have to wait for a bank to open. I can use Bitcoin whenever I want, however I want. I don't have to ask permission for my bank, you know, to do that for me and I don't have to get, you know, if you're an activist and you get kicked out of your country and you're unbanked and your citizenship, you know, is it up in the air, you know, like what, what happens? Where do you go? Where can you go? How can you get there? You know, that's banking is a big part of the staying independent.

Derek Ross (27:26)

We talked about that, we talked about that when we were talking about, you know, ways to do funding in the application and so forth. And that was my argument, Heather, that we're kind of privileged here in the United States. Like I legitimately don't know if I've ever met anybody in my entire life that is a, you know, from the United States that has ever said yeah, I lost my bank account or yeah, I've been banned from my, I have, I don't, I don't Know anybody? I never met one person.

Heather Larson (27:59)

Years, years of social work. I did social work. And in Wichita, Kansas, I worked in the addiction field. And I. I worked with a lot of people who got sober in prison or jail. And you know, as a result, they found themselves unbanked because they had been through the legal system. And, and once you're unbanked, you know, they don't, they don't care that you did your time and learned your lesson, you know, So I would see people. I even had coworkers because in the addiction field, you hire your clients, right? So I had coworkers who couldn't have bank accounts. And that was, that was interesting for payroll. And I was like, well, how do you do this? You know? And they would go to a check cashing place to do that. And sometimes Wichita, Kansas, you go down to the, you know, Westar Energy, whatever it's called now, and you go down there in person with your cash and you go to the office and pay your light bill that way. And you take for granted when you have a bank account and the ability to pay bills electronically. It's so much work for people in person when you cannot use a bank. And certainly those of us who bitcoiners don't like banks anyways, but we still use them out of convenience in addition to using obviously, bitcoin financial products. But yeah, it's you there. There are unbanked people all over this world and they're doing the most to get through. I mean, we, we hate the banks, but we still use them because they're for us, we're allowed to, and they're convenient for us, you know. And then like strike, I've used strike to pay bills. I mean, I just to be able to pay bills on a bitcoin standard, you know. So like, I've seen other ways of. I've seen other people be unbanked. And then I've tried to be on a bitcoin standard myself, even though I am banked. You know, certainly I think you could lose your privilege at any point in time. You know, there's no guarantee that I can have a bank account for the rest of my life. You know, the rate things are, are going with surveillance tech, you know, will. Will I lose a bank account someday? I think that's a very real question. Or will I be treated poorly by a bank? Which has certainly happened to me from a couple banks where I go, oh, I'm going to take my money elsewhere. But not everybody has that privilege as well.

Derek Ross (30:07)

Yeah, I think it's just always hard to see outside your social circles and your purview if you aren't experienced in these things. It's kind of hard to understand how important this is and how detrimental this could be when you become unbanked and you can't be a normal human.

Heather Larson (30:32)

Well, I mean, think about it. If you, if you go to sign a lease, buy a house, buy a car, a major purchase, what do they ask for? They ask for six months of bank statements. And then what do you do if you can't provide six months of bank statements? You know, if you, if you want to go to a lender of any kind, you. You got to say, well, here's my bank account. Here's what I. I had money in the bank for the last six months. Here's proof of it, you know, that it makes life so much more difficult when you are unbanked. And that. That is just. I think there's a good portion of the world, probably the majority of the world, doesn't understand what that's like. And, you know, that's. That's something to highlight, too. And that's. That's one of the reasons why we, why we lean into things like Bitcoin.

Derek Ross (31:17)

Yeah. Yeah. I'll say. Getting back to the hackathon, not directly related to the hackathon, but definitely related to the hackathon. We actually came up with a secondary bonus app that was developed at the hackathon or back at our. Back at our Airbnb. Chad made Following Party because following space was. I'll say it was not working as well as it should be for our activist friends. They had various follow packs. They wanted to edit follow packs and manipulate follow packs, and they were just having issues with it. So Chad used Shakespeare to make following party, which filled all of their needs. So they can edit follow packs. Because they're actually going to be using follow packs in a really unique way. Instead of doing, like, NIP05 IDs for, like, identity, we'll say, like, verification, even though it's not.

Heather Larson (32:26)

Which is like my Heather Oster plabs.

Derek Ross (32:29)

Yeah, yeah. Like, they're using NIP05 IDs as. I'm sorry, they're. They're using npubs and follow packs as a way to, like, certify or verify that somebody is a legitimate person. But they're using it as. As a, like, web of trust where if. If I kind of almost like PG pgp. So if. If I verify. You know, Heather, this is you. We've met each other in person, I'll. I'll trust you and add you to the follow pack. And then anybody that you meet in person and you trust, you would then go back to me as a follow pack owner and say, hey, Derek, these are the five people that I have met in person and trust and put them in the follow pack and so forth. So you have this web of verified hands on the ground users, and these, these people will be manually added to this follow pack and then they'll show up in the social feed as a, you know, verified.

Heather Larson (33:31)

I like it.

Derek Ross (33:32)

You know, freedom fighter. So Chad built a. Also, yeah, Chad built a following tool, a follow pack tool that kind of meets all these needs and allows them to kind of facilitate this. So we got a secondary application out of it. Yeah, really cool.

Heather Larson (33:49)

That's cool. Yeah. But when you put it in context and make it all make sense as to what went down over the weekend, it's actually really, really a cool idea. It doesn't look glamorous on the outside, and it's certainly. This is not glamorous work. This is hard work. I mean, nobody's. You know, this is not the land of private jets and lambos. This is the land of we will do what it takes to get our freedom. And I so respect and value that. And that's the, the courage and bravery of the people that you got to work with this. This weekend. I definitely honor, honor and respect them and, you know, shout out to them for the work that they're doing. That's pretty incredible. I'm. I'm impressed. I'm glad you guys got to do this and work on. On pathos with this group of people. This is pretty cool.

Derek Ross (34:33)

It. It was, you know, it's kind of destiny. Stars align. So the first night we. We didn't get there for the introductions. We went out to dinner ourselves. I went out to dinner with Chad and MK and Alex and then two of their local friends, and we all met up at a vegan sushi place. That was a new experience for Derek, but it was fun. I enjoyed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Heather Larson (35:01)

Just avocados and rice.

Derek Ross (35:05)

Now there was a lot of, like, imitation fish, imitation chicken, imitation beef type stuff. Imitation. Yeah. Like, no, it was fine. It was fine.

Heather Larson (35:16)

Cool.

Derek Ross (35:16)

Just interesting for me. The after, after we had ate dinner, we went to the event where the reception was partaking, so we missed the introduction, like, to people, like I said, and we were talking to some people, and through the grapevine heard that, hey, this guy over there, his name's Leopoldo Lopez. He's from Venezuela. He's using an app called Augur that Pablo had built for him. And I said, wait a second, this sounds familiar. I think this is the guy that his whole political party is, like, using Noster. Okay, stars are aligning here. Okay, all right. So then, you know, our team started talking to ourselves, and we said, okay, not that we all want to swarm this dude, but tomorrow, whenever he gives his presentation, if. If it aligns with what we want to do, he sounds like he's our Noster guy because he already uses Noster and he sees the value in it. Let's go. So he gave his speech, and while he's talking, like, the four of us are looking at each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're all shaking our heads and, like, MK and I were all like, yo, this is Ditto too. He wants Ditto too. So we're like. We're like, you know what? This is already a project. We wanted to build a new version of Ditto. Okay, this is perfect. And then he starts talking into particulars, and then I'm like, wait a second. Okay, this is more than Ditto too. This is, like a highly customized, slash complimentary service of Ditto. So maybe in the future they'll run their own Ditto, but they need this custom app with these specific goals, and

Heather Larson (36:58)

that's what we're here for. We're here to help people.

Derek Ross (37:01)

And that's what we did. Yeah. Yeah, that's what we did. And. And of course, Elsa, and of course lsat, you know, like. And Hazard. Like, they want to build the Noster app too, you know, so they joined the team. It all worked out like it was a beautiful. It was a beautiful marriage of all of our skills and our ideas and our mission, because we really wanted our mission in 2026 to really focus on onboarding communities. And what better than a freedom fighting community?

Heather Larson (37:30)

Yeah, a community that is really invested. They really know what they want and, you know, value the kind of the freedom tech that we provide. And, you know, that's. That's the name of the game right there, is having a community that wants freedom tech. And I was like, hey, there's people that. They want the fun apps too. I get it. But I think that being able to, I guess, be the change we want to see in the world. And, like, I. I don't think I've ever taken my freedom for granted. And certainly, you know, want to help people, you know, have the same. I. You know, I just. You can't keep it if you. If you don't give it away, you know, so that's, that's why it's nice, I think.

Derek Ross (38:09)

Yeah. All in all, it was very successful. And we already have a meeting planned for tomorrow to start building this app. Like, we want to build this app for them.

Heather Larson (38:19)

Do it.

Derek Ross (38:19)

They're gonna seek, you know, grant funding to see what, you know, they can come up with. We're aligned. We already have our developers. Like, I made a bunch of issues and tasks and handed them out to our devs. Of course, we already have our devs hacking away at it. Like, no, we're, we're all gung ho. And this is our, you know, this is our moonshot, right? This is our app. That could mean a lot for a lot of people. So we're very excited.

Heather Larson (38:49)

It's better than building a vanity app or building some Silicon Valley, VC funded unicorn juggernaut type of thing. I think this is going to be a lot more fun and rewarding, a lot more work, but definitely worth its way home.

Derek Ross (39:04)

Other exciting news that came out of the hackathon, Heather, is other exciting news from the hackathon. I talked to Tony from the Maple team and, well, first I like, kind of bullied him for abandoning us and not using Nostr as much as he had been. And he's like, wow. I still check Nostr from time to time. So, Tony, if you're listening. What's up, man?

Heather Larson (39:25)

What's up, Tony? What's up, Mark?

Derek Ross (39:27)

But he said that he just published their API documentation, so guess what? Shakespeare now supports Maple AI.

Heather Larson (39:37)

Boom.

Narrator (39:38)

Yay.

Heather Larson (39:38)

We love it, baby, in every way.

Derek Ross (39:43)

I gave those docum to Alex and Alex is like, boom. Alex was right on it. Now it's added it. So now we have that as a Shakespeare provider. Because of course it's in there.

Heather Larson (39:54)

It's in there. All right, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna blow that up on the socials. Get people, people probably don't know that yet. And getting, getting the purpose, the purpose of Maple AI is it's not spying on you. Okay? We like, we like the world of tech where you were not a product where things aren't.

Derek Ross (40:11)

They're end to end. Encrypted.

Heather Larson (40:13)

Yeah, that's awesome.

Derek Ross (40:14)

Like, it's literally encrypted from your keyboard to you to the GPU that is rendering the request.

Heather Larson (40:21)

I will use any AI thing, period.

Derek Ross (40:24)

Like, it's crazy.

Heather Larson (40:25)

Definitely use any AI thing that promises that I'm not giving up my privacy, that you, you know, I don't, I Don't. I don't want to be spied on. You know, I want things to work, but I also don't want to be spied on. And that's, you know, that's. That's what I want out of everything, not just my AI thing that I use.

Derek Ross (40:41)

But if you do want to be spied on, you could use Derek's next app that he's been building.

Heather Larson (40:46)

Oh, I do use Derek's apps. I tested every app you have.

Derek Ross (40:50)

No, actually, no, actually, that's. You know what I bet you could use? No, you could use this with. With Maple AI. Yeah. You don't have to use Claude Opus. Even though we have been. You can use this with. You can use this with Maple AI. Yeah, you could be very productive and not get spied.

Heather Larson (41:11)

Hey, win, win. We like being productive and not being a Win, win. Not. Not being spied on by the overlords of big tech AI is what I spend way too much time reading about. So you. You made.

Derek Ross (41:28)

Yeah, I. I think.

Heather Larson (41:28)

Can we talk about the tool you made?

Derek Ross (41:31)

Sure. So almost three weeks now. I've been working on this in my spare time, and I've been using it every day. I made. And I think we talked about this last week a tiny bit.

Heather Larson (41:42)

Well, since last week's podcast, there have been a couple developments since last week's podcast. Like, we weren't here yet. Last week we were. I don't even think Claude Cowork had happened and come out for people with Max yet. So you had been working on a productivity tool, but you hadn't turned it into an app yet.

Derek Ross (41:59)

I can say that I beat Anthropic to the productivity stage. Now, of course, it was just me using it, but I didn't know what I had. Right. Like, I used it for a week by myself. I showed some people on the jam session. The jam session was like, wow, this is cool. And I was like, okay, let me make it easy. Everyone you showed.

Heather Larson (42:22)

Loved it, though. That's the thing, is that people immediately grasp what it was. And. And then, like, the thing that it was came out, like, the next day after that, we released the last podcast. And. And. And it. It's called Claude Co work. Yeah.

Derek Ross (42:34)

Like, literally the next day, which, by

Heather Larson (42:36)

the way, Claude Anthropic. They made that in 10 days, and it shows, but they made it in 10 days. So, like, you're on the same wavelength.

Derek Ross (42:44)

Claude Cowork only. Like, you can only use Claude. Right. It's not open. You can't. You can't choose your Models and I'm sure they have all sorts of tracking and other shit in it that's slightly

Heather Larson (43:00)

less evil than OpenAI. Just slightly less evil.

Derek Ross (43:06)

Well, we like the freedoms and we like the choice. So I built something I'm calling Onyx. It is a productivity application where it has open code built into it. You can import and choose all of your various skills. So if you want a content writer, you want a researcher, you want an executive assistant, you know, whatever you want someone to write documents for you and so forth to keep you organized, whatever productivity skill you might want, you import that skill and then you just tell it to do the thing. You just use it, you just set up all your work, you import all of your work documents and you point it at it and you just tell it to go. So obviously, wait, let me, let me

Heather Larson (43:55)

jump in with like the, Let me jump in with a non technical explanation of what this is. Because I feel like you, the technical explanation undersells it. So what it does for you is like people are used. Whenever I talk to like normal people, I'm like, hey, do you use AI? And they're like, yeah, I use ChatGPT. And I'm like, what do you use it for? And they're like, oh, I use it for studying. I ask it question this, that, or, you know, people are still using it as a chat box that they, they talk with, they put in text and it gives them text answers back. Right? So now there's this new wave of, I don't know the proper name for it. I don't know if it's, it's frontier agents or not, but it's this new part of, or new, I don't know, what do we call it? A new trend in AI is, is that we have tools where we're going beyond just talking to the robot and we're having the robot complete tasks for us. So I can go in and say, hey, open this file on my computer and it will do it, or clean up the files on my computer and it will do it. And it's not just like, hey, chatgpt, make my grocery list or plan my vacation. We are going from, you know, just texting back and forth with the robot to now it is working for us, it is completing tasks. It is taking the jump beyond just barfing out an answer and jumping to, oh, let me open that tab for you. Oh, let me put that on your calendar. And this is what Derek has been working on and he just gave you the technical explanation about it. So I'm Giving you, like, the use case of here's the thing and what it does. And so when I use Derek's app. Well, first of all, let me back up. Clyde Cowork came out in the world, went nuts last, what, Thursday, Friday, and the tech world went nuts. AI nerds went nuts. But normal people are like, what's Claude? Right? So they. It has to be to make it palpable. Yeah, exactly. The normies, like, what is it? I'm just going to use Chat GPT and it's free. And so, like, when Claude came.

Derek Ross (45:50)

Came out with clonework lessons have never heard of Claude.

Heather Larson (45:53)

They don't know what we're talking about.

Derek Ross (45:55)

You talk to anybody that uses AI, they use Gemini or ChatGPT. If you say Anthropic or Claude, they're like, oh, I've never heard of that. What's that? And we're like, oh, what's the best model out there?

Heather Larson (46:07)

Yeah, the people don't know. Like, the smart people know or the, you know, the savvy know. So, like, if I use Claude Cowork now, because they built it in 10 days and it's still kind of beta, like, it will die. If it works for me, it's slow or it dies on me, like, I can get a few tasks out of it before it's like, I need the rest of the day off, right? But if I use Derek's tool with open code, which is like. Like a mashup of like Obsidian with Claude code, but it's the open version of it all, it works great. It works cloud code still works for me, the terminal, I can. That's probably the best way to use Claude co. Or use. To use Claude in the terminal is the best way. But then there's cloud cowork, which doesn't quite hit for me because I don't think it's ready or there's too many people on it, it's rate limited or just it's too congested, I don't know what's going on there. I'm not getting the Claude cowork experience the Internet has promised me. But Derek's thing works really good and it's open source and I'm liking it

Derek Ross (46:59)

a lot because it's fully open source.

Heather Larson (47:01)

I'm getting somewhere with it where if I want to get somewhere with Claude, I kind of relegate it to. There's nothing wrong with Claude and the terminal. I think it's the best way to use it. But if people were hooked on using Claude in the terminal the last Several months, you Claude cowork makes that palatable for the normies who don't know what the fuck a terminal is. So that's my non technical explanation of what is, what Derek just said and what's going on here and how kind of big this is. So I think to be part of

Derek Ross (47:31)

it, I think this is, well, it's, it's the AI for the, for everybody. Because not everybody's a developer, not everybody is going to build an application. But everybody has some type of task, some type of work, some type of documents, you know, that they want to organize. So if you can gather all of that information, you know, all your schedule, all of your, all of your tasks, all your documents that you're typing out, all your plans, all your meeting notes, and you have all this stuff like, like most people have all this stuff in various places for their, for their job if they have some type of office.

Heather Larson (48:11)

This puts it in one place. Like you're, you're in one chat box.

Derek Ross (48:15)

You just put it, you put it all in one place and then you ask AI to what should I work on today? That's a set. All you need to do. Now the way that I have skills set up is everybody has a different, everybody has a different priority level, right? So I have these baseline skills that you install and then you just say, you know, for me this is my priority. A, B, C, D, E. You know, you lay out your priorities and you say update the skill to remember my priority so you don't have to teach AI that so you can update the skill to fit your needs, make it custom tailored to you and then every time it's going to remember that.

Heather Larson (48:54)

And then, and by the way, in Claude, you have to like go into your settings and tell it like, turn on memory. You have to like click, click the button to turn it on. Like, just so you know, like, learn from my mistakes. It works better if you go into the settings first.

Derek Ross (49:11)

But yeah, like, like I have, so there's plugins, we'll say, yeah, so if you hook this up to your, your Google Calendar, for example, you hook it up to a task manager, you hook it up to GitHub, you hook it up to GitLab, you do these things and then you can let it just, if you want to, you can just let it do everything. Spoiler alert. All, all of the Git Lab tasks that were assigned to all the developers that I assigned this morning. I mean technically I did it, but technically I didn't do it either. I found all of the issues In a document. Oh, Claude did it. Yeah, I mean, oncs my tool. Onyx. Onyx did it. I said, these are the developers, these are the developers skills and these. And these are the developers, what they excel at based on the list of all the issues, create all the issues, come up with a plan to fix them all and then assign them to people. And I looked at it and I said, you know what? I agree with all of this. Hit go. And it did it. It literally. This would have taken a very long time. And I divvied out all of our work I divvied out all of our work to developers. Now here's the neat part. Developers could then literally say to their, they could say to their robot, hey, download my issues that were assigned to me and let's begin to work on them and then just have them start working on.

Heather Larson (50:45)

This is a piece that, like, I have worked at companies where a whole person is hired to do this. So Claude just took their job away.

Derek Ross (50:54)

Yeah, Me being the, me being the project manager on this, now I'm the overseer store. I'm the human overseer. And I, yeah, I told it to do a thing and I, but I fed it data. I said, Sam is good at this. I said, patrick is good at this. I said, you know, Sean Turrell is good at this. Daniel's good at this. Based on my perceptions of their skill sets, pick the tasks that are good for them and doing all going forward,

Heather Larson (51:22)

though you don't have to keep telling it that, you know, so and so is good at this or so and so, like, it should remember going forward so you don't have to do that step again. Is that correct?

Derek Ross (51:34)

I'll say on this project, it will remember that if I, if I say to AI, I say update. Update my project manager skill with the developers and their, their skills. So you remember this, then it will do that for all projects and I'll never have to do that again or in the future be like, hey, Shantaram. I used to say, he didn't know what he's doing and now he's a genius. Are you on board a new person? Yeah. But you can change. You can change this. Yeah. So I just made it easier to do project management because I'm doing project management on this app and Shakespeare, I don't want to have it be a time sync and admin tasks for me, but I can absolutely check in on things and make sure it's doing it properly. It makes me think of like, so that's what I'm doing the.

Heather Larson (52:30)

The person who makes the tickets in the Monday.com or the Reich that that person is. Is going to be out of a job, but probably happily so, because that is tedious work. It's not fun, and people have better talent than that. You know, I think, you know, if that.

Derek Ross (52:46)

I will tell you what. We probably wouldn't have been as successful if we didn't have a human. Project manager in Austin. Lsat. He was our project manager. While we were brainstorming and talking out ideas, he grabbed a Magic Marker and he was writing it down on the whiteboard, and he was connecting dots and organizing data. And once a whiteboard was. But here's the cool thing. Once a whiteboard was filled up, I was taking a picture of it and then I was giving it to Claude and being like, okay, do the thing. Interpret this. And like. And it was doing it, but he was. He was being the scribe and that. Yeah, well, he so el. So Alex. Alex said, you know, we should call the app this and this and this and. And gave it like two. Two names. And he and LSAT wrote them in different colors. So Claude knew that the different color marker meant something special. Didn't LSAT didn't write, like, name or anything. He just. Just wrote in a different color marker. And Claude's like, wait a second. These two words are written in different color. They must be important. I wonder what they should be. I bet they're going to be the theme or the name of the app. That's fucking wild. That's smart.

Heather Larson (54:07)

The AI is getting a lot better very quickly.

Derek Ross (54:10)

The AI is getting better. Like, yeah, I don't know if you're

Heather Larson (54:16)

a Luddite at this point.

Derek Ross (54:18)

Basic project. Basic project management skills. Basic project management skills. Like, AI is going to do that for you, and all you need to do is babysit it to give it some data.

Heather Larson (54:32)

Yeah, you have to understand some data

Derek Ross (54:34)

points and then ONCS can manage your. Your whole life. Like, ONCS is gonna be the pathos project manager. Derek is just gonna be along for the ride.

Heather Larson (54:45)

I like it. I think it's already helping me. I'm working more since we last talked on the podcast last week. I'm using these tools a lot more and benefiting from them a lot more because I think part of the issue is reaching normal people who it can help and putting it into terminology that normal people understand so they can see the use case. And then you realize what you can do. And it's like, oh, okay, I don't have to do manual work. Anymore. But I need to understand how to ask the robot to do the manual work for me, or I need to be aware that it can do it.

Derek Ross (55:20)

And that's still a skill. Like, that's part of your troubleshooting skills, as part of your communication skills. AI isn't just going to do everything. It still needs proper input and proper data. So you need to have that skill and be smart enough to talk to the robot. You can't just roll your face yet. Like, that's a joke and a meme I like to use.

Heather Larson (55:43)

Okay. Five years, I envision it. Maybe in five years it's coming. I get to roll my face. Point where maybe a lot of the laborious work I do, I can automate and or have AI do it for me or at least remind me that I need to do it. And it has some sort of intelligence where it's like, oh, Heather, you forgot to do this one thing that actually is a big piece of the puzzle because you don't like and you don't want to do it, and it'll take 30 seconds, but you put it off. Like, I wanted to have that kind of intelligence where it kind of like, realizes how stubborn or forgetful I can be about certain things and just be. Give me that little nudge. Like, yeah, that's what I'm going to do is like, winning and probably ready to just take over and run my house and crash my car and kill me. But.

Derek Ross (56:28)

Oh, speaking of crashing cars and AI and killing you, I didn't realize. I didn't realize that Austin was like, every fourth Uber was a Waymo car.

Heather Larson (56:41)

Oh, come to Phoenix, bro. We got. We got them everywhere here, too.

Derek Ross (56:44)

I didn't realize that. Like, I did not realize that. That was kind of wild for me that they're just everywhere they are.

Heather Larson (56:54)

They're all over the place.

Derek Ross (56:55)

Well, speaking of Phoenix. Speaking of Phoenix, you were a pirate over the weekend, weren't you?

Heather Larson (57:02)

I was out dropping the treasures on Piestewa Peak. I've got. I've got four treasures hidden on the mountain now. Yeah, so Chad has this great app called Treasures, and it's Treasures to. And it's geocaching, and it's open source geocaching, so you don't have to pay for it. We're open source and everything. And one of the things about Chad is he loves geocaching. He's done it a long time. So he built treasures. Right? So we've got more than 100 treasures now hidden around the world. And I've hidden the first Four of them on Piestew A peak here in Phoenix. I gotta go branch out and hit another mountain because we have plenty of them, we have plenty of hiking and it's winter in Arizona so I'm going to be dropping treasures everywhere. But if you want to geocache, go to Treasures to and check out Piestewa Peak. Just get up there and look for them. Because I'm trying to be like, I'm not sneaky about it. I'm trying to leave them kind of in plain sight so that you'll, you'll find them easily.

Derek Ross (57:59)

What is right off your,

Heather Larson (58:02)

what is

Derek Ross (58:02)

your winter in Arizona temperature? Because it's, it was zero degrees like yesterday here.

Heather Larson (58:09)

It's, it gets in the 70s. So like I, if I go hiking, you know, too late in the day, which is like after 11am I know that I'm gonna like rip my shirt off and be running around in a, in a tank top and shorts and it's very bright and you probably need sunscreen and I don't put any on. And it's, it's absolutely a gorgeous win winter. Yeah. So like if it, if we have a cold snap, I might put on a long sleeve shirt and pants, bro. Like that's.

Derek Ross (58:34)

Well, it was single digits here the past two days. So.

Heather Larson (58:37)

Yeah, you don't hide any treasures in that. You could though. You could, you could put some under some snow and then it could melt and people would find them.

Derek Ross (58:44)

Yeah, well, I don't really have any snow right now. I mean there's a little bit of like a dusting. Like you can still see grass, but in a week I think we're supposed to. They're calling for 2ft of snow in a week. That's a lot. That's a lot. So that's where you go when the

Heather Larson (59:05)

snow starts to fall. Go hide some treasures around and then like they'll have two feet. Feet of snow on it. And then like days later when it melts, people be like, ooh, what's that? Whereas like I have, I have hidden treasures at the bottom of cactuses. Okay. So easily find them on the, the Freedom Trail.

Derek Ross (59:22)

Well, I want to come find one out in the desert. That sounds fun.

Heather Larson (59:25)

Come out, come out. We got. They're on the Freedom Trail mostly there. There's one that's like, you know, not too far up the peak, but that's an extremely difficult trail. So if you get to the point of Piestewa Peak where there's, there's like a little wall and I put it, I Put it behind the wall so you can find it. Right. I'm gonna make it easy for you to find the treasures. But it's a tough trail. And then there's the. The. There's. There's a two on the nature trail. There's. So there's two on the Freedom Trail, two on the nature trail, which. The nature trail and the Freedom Trail, kind of the same thing. It's number 302. So go on out there, get you some wholesome touch and grass family fun. It's free. If you're tired of paying exorbitant fees for geocaching dot com. That's why Chad made Treasures, because, you know, there's certain big tech things that have come along and just squeeze people and fleece people, and in this time of inflation, it's. It's nice to be able to have a free option for wholesome family fun. Get out there, get on the mountain, Go hiking. Arizona. Derek, come on out here. I don't know what we have to draw you out here, Noster ce, you

Derek Ross (60:30)

know, but I. I've never. Well, I flew into Phoenix one time on my way to Las Vegas, like 10 years ago. Oh, so you got. I was in the Phoenix airport, and I remember seeing, like, mountains off, like rock, rocky structures off in the distance, and I thought they were really cool.

Heather Larson (60:50)

Well, you've seen my pictures of the mountain here, and that's just one of them. So, like, usually when you're landing in Phoenix, you're getting a good view of South Mountain with all of the antenna on it. There's also camelback. There's. And there's like, lots of little mountains and hiking areas all over the valley. This is a great time to get into geocaching. So that's what I'm doing so that we. At least I planted my flag here on Piestewa Peak and put the flag, the first of the treasures, down in Arizona. I have more plans to travel around this gorgeous state this winter. Get out there, get some sun, get some treasures out there. And I can't. I can't wait until somebody that, I don't know, some. Some stranger takes up Treasures two. And they. They get out there and they. They get to Geocache and have some fun. Hopefully somebody and their kids will find it. A lot of kids out there on the trail learning about nature and getting to see things and. And get away from screens, you know, like. Yes, you have to, you know, use your phone for.

Derek Ross (61:49)

It's good to get away from screens from time to time.

Heather Larson (61:51)

Yeah, you Got. You got to get away. You gotta. You gotta stay healthy. Because it is very easy to get drawn into this world where we could pretty much build anything with the tools at hand and do it well and do it quickly. Even. Even somebody like me who's not a coder, I can. I can build an app every freaking day if I want, you know, if I want to spend the time on it and get very, very addicted to the screen myself.

Derek Ross (62:13)

So it is very addicting. It's very add expecting to see your ideas come to life with minimal effort.

Heather Larson (62:20)

Now, dude, do we feel like kings or what? I feel like I am not that level of genius, but the tools can make me feel like I'm that level of genius, which is, you know, you just push ideas forward faster. It's incredible.

Derek Ross (62:37)

Yeah, it's incredible. Real quick, before we go, we should say a shout out to friends of the show Geyser, the fundraising platform that is built on Nostr and Bitcoin. They got kicked off the Instagram, I guess, Heather.

Heather Larson (62:53)

They got kicked, unceremoniously kicked off with no recourse. Their Instagram for Geyser is gone. They gotta. They gotta move on.

Derek Ross (63:02)

But that's okay. Nostr is here for them, which they know because their entire application is built upon Nostr already. So that's kind of, you know, that sucks. But it's also poetic too. You should be using the Nostner anyway, so you should be using Congratulations for using in parallel the Noster.

Heather Larson (63:20)

I think we're still in a stage where the world doesn't know about Nostr. And so as long as you can survive still and not get kicked off of Instagram and Twitter, that's fine. But you should build in parallel and build your audience on Nostr while you do that, because, yeah, I'll probably get cut, kicked off at some point and have to move on. So. Shout out to Geyser.

Derek Ross (63:41)

Shout out to Geyser. Okay, well, we'll see you. See you next week. We'll be back when we talk about more from the AI verse, more from the Nostroverse and all things freedom Tech. Thanks for listening.