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A
Welcome to the Soapbox Sessions. Imagine this, an open and free Internet where voices are never silenced, where causes aren't shadow banned, and where no one can be deplatformed. It's real. It's here, and it's happening on nostr. So what exactly is nostr? It's a worldwide community of everyday people working to decentralize the Internet. On nostr, you can build websites, communities, social networks, apps, and more. One login works everywhere. You own it and no one can take it away. No more juggling dozens of platforms, chasing audiences, or managing a giant password. And the cherry on top. Nostr allows for built in digital payments that can come from anywhere in the world. On nostr, value flows as freely as ideas. We're hooked on decentralizing the web and we think you will be too. So now let's hear from your hosts, Derek Ross and Heather Larson, who are working to grow Nostr1 vibe at a time.
B
Welcome back to Soapbox Sessions. Today is March 10, 2026 and we're here with your weekly dose of all things decentralized, social and AI. Soapbox Sessions is our soapbox about what's new, what's cool, and what's coming. We want to make it easy to understand and keep up with everything happening in the decentralized world of social communication and AI as we work to rebuild the Internet one brick at a time.
C
Yeah. Have we done it yet? Is it complete? Do we build a new wall of Internet or do we take.
B
It's a series of. It's a series of tubes. I shouldn't have said bricks. Wait, are we.
C
Are we building or are we deconstructing? Are we reconstructing? Are we remodeling? Maybe better way to say the thing that we are doing to the inner.
B
I like to say it's a remodel. I like the remodel. Right. Because we're not totally tearing it down
C
and it's still there.
B
Starting over. It's still there. The tubes and the bricks are still there. Just getting fresh coats of paint. New ways of thinking, new ways of doing things. Yeah, new tubes.
C
We, we all decided we hated big tech and it decided we could do better with our smart brains that can code things. And then we have robots that can code things. So let's. Let's lfg.
B
So do you know what the, the whole like, series of tubes is like, why I keep saying that? There's like an article from like 20 years ago where something was talking about what is the Internet? And he described, he described it as A series of tubes.
C
Tube. So like a subway.
B
It's an inside nerd joke. I'm trying to.
C
Like the BART train in the Bay Area. It's a series of tubes.
B
The. In the Information Super 2.
C
Boy, remember when information superhighway was the buzzword? It's the information superhighway.
B
That was the buzzword. Yeah. It was the information superhighway 30 years ago. We appreciate you.
C
Oh, my.
B
Doing that.
C
God. Good times. Oh, man. The 90s, showing our age. I know. That's okay. You got a little gray in the beard. No.
B
Well, I think nostalgia, right? Like, we. We want to go back to when things were. And I think version one of the Web was better.
C
Oh, yeah. Like, give me blinkies.
B
Give me Version 1 of the Web was better for ownership. It was better. It was better for decentralization.
C
Yeah. I wish I could remember all of the things. I'm sure I made friends on MySpace. Like, I'm sure I had the freedom to make friends on MySpace and make a glittery HTML background, et cetera, et cetera, and just really express myself on the Internet. And then I. I don't know what happened, because I was drinking a lot back then. Thankfully sober now, but I. MySpace faded into Facebook or. Or Twitter or. Like, I don't. It was. It was a moment that. I don't know where I fell out of love and stopped logging into MySpace. I think it became uncool at some point, but it was cool to be on Facebook, like, doing farmville, which, in retrospect, it became uncool. Absolutely.
B
And then you joined Facebook, because that was the place that was cool.
C
And now we want it back because we didn't know what we had until it was gone. It's just kind of how everything works.
B
We need to make it cool. Make the. Well, maybe that needs to be the slogan. Make the Internet cool again.
C
Make the Internet cool again. That won't fit on a.
B
Make social media.
C
Make it fit on a bumper sticker. Derek, this is marketing.
B
Make. Make Internet cool again. That'll fit on a hat. Make Internet cool again. Make mica cool again.
C
There's all sorts of things you could do. Make Internet cool again. Mica. There we go. We can have mica hats. We'll hand them out at conferences. We'll go to things and be like, you got a mica hat? And they'll be like, what are you, a mega.
B
No, I pick picture. I picture it being. Being purple, like, Noster purple with white leather. It has to be. No, it has to be orange.
C
Trim. Kind of like the Phoenix Suns colors where you can't go wrong unless you're Dylan Brooks getting a dui.
B
You know, my wife, she likes to crochet. She made me a no Noster purple and bitcoin orange hat. And every time I wear it, I'm like. People are going to think I like. Like the Phoenix Suns. Like.
C
Well, you do like the Phoenix Suns, Derek. I just don't.
B
I just don't care about basketball. I just don't.
C
You don't care about the sports ball? I guess you're not a sports ball person. Like, am. I'm like, it depends on the sports.
B
It depends on the sports ball.
C
This sport. That's. Oh, I can watch golf Tooth. You know, there's a sport on tv.
B
Oh, there's, like, sports generally used to care about was. Was golf and local Penn State football. That's pretty much about it.
C
Oh, yeah. Local basketball in Wichita. Shockers, baby. That was.
B
That was.
C
Oh, I won't make the shocker sign on the podcast, but you can imagine what that hand signal is. But, yeah, Wichita State shocker basketball. Men's shocker basketball. Oh, my God.
B
The best.
C
Best games you'll ever go to. Best basketball game.
B
I'm curious.
C
We don't want to get in trouble with the boss. If I have to explain it to you, you were like, a boy scout. No, no, this is not a frat boy. Derek Ware was an innocent. I know what that is.
B
I know what that is. I just didn't know that, like, that was the same sign that they used for basketball.
C
Yes, we were foul in Wichita. The whole student section would just sit there and be like, the hand signals. So, yeah, anyway, now you need to.
B
You need to edit that out. We're gonna get.
C
Oh, no, I'm leaving that in there.
B
We're gonna get, like, we're getting banned
C
listening to this on fountain or whatever. Then you need to watch the part of the episode where Derek's like. Like, freaks out. Like, rubs his eyes and turns all red in the face because. Because I thought he was innocent. No. Innocent little Derek Ross.
B
This pot. All right, this podcast just went into the gutter. Let's pull it back. Let's pull it back. Let's talk about some. Some AI. Oh, it's a Boy Scout. Till I was, like, 12.
C
Oh, I was learning how to light fires and do first aid. Little badges for his uniform.
B
Oh, yeah. Little bad. You know what? And to this day, I still like badges. I have, like, 300 badges on Noster.
C
I know.
B
I love I love my badges.
C
I was a Girl Scout or whatever. Yeah, no Brownies. You know who I was in Brownies with? I was in Brownie. It's. I. You know, this is gonna dox me, though. I'm not gonna tell you. No, no, no, no. Somebody famous, though. But. Yeah, I don't want to dox her. Or me. Who, Who. Oh, my God, this is gonna dox. Like, where I grew up.
B
You can't do that.
C
Okay. I. I was in Brownies with the actress Busy Phillips from Dawson's Creek. We were in Brownies together, and she forgot all about me and, like, I don't know, 20 years later, viewed her on the radio and I was like, do you remember me? She's like, no. Very humbling experience. I'm like, yeah, I thought we were friends in Brownies back in the day. Back in the day.
B
But if it makes you feel any better, I used to watch Dawson's Creek, but I don't know who that actress is. I have no clue.
C
That's okay. You would know if you saw her.
B
She.
C
She's. I think she has a talk show now. Like, she's. She's a. A media babe now, and good for
B
her, but I just have a podcast that talks about Noster AI decentralization, social media.
C
Oh, I'm sure she's got a podcast.
B
She probably does.
C
Probably. She's probably not as nerdy as you and me, bro. She's like. Like C list at least. Or like, we're like F list because we're nerds. It'll be like, you guys can have the open source stage and guys go over there. You don't want. You don't want to be over here on the main stage.
B
Maybe that's what it is. That's why Noster can't get on the main stage at Bitcoin conference. You know, we can. Only the Noster nerds get put on the open source stage and the side stage, never the main stage.
C
A lot of. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go out on a limit, say a lot of things that should make the main stage there. Don't make the main stage there, but whole other bag of worms or something.
B
Yeah, a bag of something. So let's talk about little. Little AI news. Back on topic here. We're going to ream it in from the gutter here. All right, so. So there's been some controversy over the past few weeks with Anthropic and the Department of War, also known as Department of Defense.
C
I love it the most Normal people I know have signed up for AI now because they're like, I love Anthropic now. And so, like, sure. This is the.
B
Well, there's like 300% of people uninstalled Chat GPT after OpenAI said that they would work with the Pentagon and after Anthropic essentially gave them the finger and said, we're not going to give you an unredacted, unfiltered, uncensored, unsafe version of Claude, you can pound sand, like. Then over the next couple days, Claude became the number one app in Apple and Android app stores in the United States.
C
Record downloads.
B
It was amazing.
C
You know, and that is what you need to know about your government, is that your government wants to surveil you. And the government also doesn't even care anymore if it employs soldiers to kill people because it can have robots kill people and decide to kill people. And it wanted Anthropic to do that. And that is just insane that our government wanted to commandeer a private company to do that, disturb everybody. And it obviously did because everybody was like, oh, cool. We align now with Anthropic, which is very telling.
B
Well, the US government has now officially deemed Anthropic a supply chain risk, which was generally held for adversarial companies that were from adversary countries laughing all the
C
way to the bank.
B
And Anthropic is now a supply chain risk, you know, like, which is hilarious. But now we're getting large companies like Google and other large tech companies, which we, you know, we kind of don't overly like here on this podcast. But they're also signaling to the US Government that, hey, maybe this company shouldn't be a supply chain risk because that sets a bad precedent to label one of the most influential tech companies in your country an innovative tech company a supply chain risk because they, they heard the best products.
C
This is a point where somebody had to stand up and do the right thing. And fortunately it was the most powerful company, which I, I'm going to say Anthropic was the most powerful company because it has the best product. Claude is the best product. Claude Code. Claude Code where whatever suite of, of Claude anthropic stuff you use, it is the best product out there. And I'm glad that the best company stood up to the government. And this is a pattern for Anthropic because they stood up to open AI as well. That's why we have Anthropic. So they stood up to Sammy, your best friend, Sammy Altman and his world.
B
Eyeball scanning scan your Eyeballs. Scan your eyeballs, Sam. And so they're like, no, Sam, you cannot scan our eyeballs. We're going to form our own company.
C
Well, now they've got a little battle because when you stand up to the US government, you get into trouble. And so it just kind of depends on, like, how this legal battle goes and if it goes up through all the high courts or not, or if somebody backs down or if they. I don't. I haven't read the legal details and I'm not a lawyer, so I also don't care. But this is, this is a good thing because now all the other.
B
You know what you could do, Heather?
C
Yeah, yeah, have Claude summarize it for me.
B
You could. You could take this. Yeah, exactly. You could. You could take this legal document, copy it into Claude and be like, hey, explain this. Like, I'm 12 years old. What does this mean?
C
Claude's like 75. 25. Correct. I will, I will give Claude that. Like, if. As long as you know what you're doing and you know when to call a Claude out for things up. Like, you get along like, you know, peas and carrots with AI. But, yeah, this is. There have been a lot of legal issues I've watched over the years as a journalist with the government, and the government has a lot of power and companies have to spend a lot of money to fight it. So that, that's my, you know, cheap 2 cent, 2 sat observation about where that might go. But I like the precedent this sets because then other AI companies are going to have to not cave when the government wants them to surveil the citizenry or, you know, have robots kill people. Like, we're not even doing very well with people killing people in wars right now. Like, we're hitting soft targets, we're hitting civilians. Can we. How. We're training the AI robots. So how are they going to do any better? Like, that was a good call. Like, we probably should. We're not ready. The AI is not ready. The human race is not ready for that kind of oversight and power. Like, we shouldn't be having the robots, you know, So I want to play.
B
I want to play devil's advocate here. I'm not saying. I not saying or agree with this, but it's not. It's not my natural way here. So we say that AI driving is safer. It results in less accidents, less deaths because AI drivers are better than humans. And. Well, I mean, that's a proven fact based on data. That data we have.
C
Yeah. Or is it because the Waymos like, like we have. I'm at Phoenix, so there's a lot of waymos. And like my car for example, has all the safety features. My car will not let me go into another lane if there's another car there because it has safety features. If I don't brake fast enough, my car will break for me because it has a safety features. I imagine these super modern waym, I forget what the make of the Waymo is, but they probably have these features and cameras at every angle.
B
They have all these features as well.
C
Yeah, so, so, so I don't know if that means safer.
B
You can generally say that that computer, that computer drivers, given enough data, long enough timeline, they're safer than human drivers. So the devil's advocate in me says, well, humans make mistakes in wars. Does that mean robots, AIs, computers wouldn't make as many mistakes?
C
My AI makes mistakes every day. It doesn't know what the hell I'm talking about at least a third of the time. And I have to correct it. Well, you know, I'm not, I'm not
B
saying that I want that, I want to go full Terminator here, but I'm just saying that we know that that AI is smarter than humans in some aspects. So you would think that in war it wouldn't make, it wouldn't have human error. We wouldn't have these soft targets hit civilians, hit friendly targets, things like that. As, as often maybe. I'm not, I'm not advocating to use robots for war. I'm just.
C
I know, but I don't, I don't know. Like I had a friend who did a friendly fire incident in the army and that was, that was a drug induced friendly fire incident where home, homeboy got in a tank and, and it was absolutely three sheets high on some other things too. And, and went pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. And the army made him pay that off, by the way. So, like that your robots aren't going to take drugs and get in the tank and go pew, pew, pew. Right. So that's, that's a plus. Right. Humans make errors of judgment. And especially in the military, you know, everyone likes to party and have relations, shall we say. The military is famous for those sort of things. So like those sort of judgment, human judgment calls that are poor would hopefully go away. But then we have robot judgment calls that might be poor because, because remember, you and I know that the robots don't know what fucking day and time it is. For example, like, hey, we want to carry out this attack at 3:33 on a Wednesday night, three weeks later.
B
It's like, you're absolutely right. They'll have it scheduled for this certain date and certain time, and for some unknown reason, an entire day early. It'll attack, like, all right.
C
It just makes soldiers so stupid and lazy. Like, hey, do I want to hit this target, or should I hit this target? Maybe I should. And then it'll be like, you're absolutely right. You should. Fire away, sir.
B
I read this interesting paper this week talking about hallucinations and why AI hallucinates, essentially. Well, essentially, it realized that if it hallucinates, it has a chance to be right. It's taking an educated guess.
C
It's a probability.
B
Guessing, guessing and having a chance to be right is better than saying, I don't know to the LLMs. So that's why they make these hallucinations, because they're trying, you know, based on probability, to be correct.
C
If I were to run an AI war bot the way I run my cloud code in the terminal with my Obsidian files, it literally confuses the topics I'm asking it to give me notes on. Like, it will confuse, like, two of the companies I work with. Like, if I'm like, hey, give me a summary of this. And it'll be like, okay. And it crosses the wires. And I'm like, you have no idea what you're talking about. Like, that was supposed to be for Soapbox Idiot. You know, like, it literally confuses itself in my files, which are organized.
B
I would make those two different vaults, Heather.
C
Well, apparently, I, you know, haven't gotten that far yet. I don't have the patience for it. It should just know. But it has the memory of a Goldfinch, too, so that's another concern.
B
I'll say that. I mean, I kind of see some things like that. Like, my Open Claw, it runs its own cluster Social. But then it also runs my social on LinkedIn and my social on Twitter. Oh. Every once in a while, I'll ask it questions, and it'll be like, yep, gonna cross post this from cluster to Twitter or cross post from cluster to LinkedIn. And I'm like, no, open clock.
C
Stop.
B
Like, and then it's like, oh, yes, I'm right. Cluster is my social media, not yours.
C
Like, I wonder if the government.
B
Every once in a while, that happens.
C
Like, we need to experiment with your bot, and you need to be like, all right, Centauri, I want you to take out my adversary and see what it does. First of all, who is your adversary? And second of all, what is it going to do to take out your adversary? Because I have watched this thing with your Twitter and you have lost followers since Centauri started running your Twitter. So I don't know. Well, listen, it's war. I can't do simple things.
B
All the things that follow me on Twitter are, they're like 97% bots.
C
Like, and you're just scaring them away. Your bots. Scaring off the other bots, probably.
B
Those bots got banned. Like, I looked at the followers, I had the one day, and like, most of them are bots.
C
What happens? What if it shadow bans you because it realizes you're a bot? Maybe that's the problem. Maybe it knows because, you know, it's.
B
I could be. Yeah, it could see that I'm using the API to post and I don't post normally. So maybe it decides to shadow ban me. I don't care. I don't use this profile. I haven't used this profile in three years. I'm just doing this as an experiment, you know, just to kind of. Just to kind of see what it does. Get my name out there. The only, the only place this has actually worked for me IS link. The LinkedIn cross posting has made multiple
C
people reach out to me, robotic, period. So that makes sense to me.
B
I'm having real people reach out to me and schedule meetings. I literally had two meetings last week with real people that wanted to talk to me about Noster and AI. There are people I've never, never met, spoken with before, but they, they found me on LinkedIn. It's wild.
C
Taking meetings. Oh, my God.
B
No, there's some really cool stuff through Noster and Bitcoin that might be coming to Chattanooga in the near future. Like, I, I think it's really, really cool. But this, this interaction, in my opinion, happened because of. Happened.
C
Good example of, of AI adding something to your life that maybe you would not have done yourself. Whereas I think I'm still in the st. It's saving me time and maybe being a thinking partner and. But mostly saving me time, I think. But it hasn't really, like, added to my life in that way where it's like helping me book a meeting or get. You know what I mean? Like, it hasn't. But you're using a bot to do that. I'm not. I don't have a bot turned on by the bots, quite frankly.
B
Well, I want to know, Heather, if. So you know how we were talking before the show, we were saying how we're gonna create TikTok accounts. Or you already did. And I might as well, because Morgan, our new marketing social person, she had you essentially. Essentially, you know, beat us up and twisted our arms and said we had to. So. So can my bot run my TikTok?
C
You can run your Twitter. Why not? Like, I don't. I don't know if there's a pushback.
B
It can't. It can't make videos. Like, it's not gonna make. Like, it's gonna. What's it gonna do? Like, make these really? Really?
C
Yeah. It's not the same as posting text on a Twitter or LinkedIn, but yeah. Well, you know, what if I get.
B
Well, what if I give it a whole bunch of like, a whole bunch of like just Derek, like still images and say, can you create like, you know, 30 second videos and just superimpose the text over it and just have me there?
C
Like, I think it can because a friend. A friend had their quadbot make them a faceless, nameless YouTube channel. So, like, I don't see any reason why you can't do that on TikTok. People probably are doing it.
B
Maybe Derek bot.
C
Well, Derek bot.
B
The Derek bot is infiltrated. Twitter. The Derek bot is infiltrated. Infiltrated LinkedIn.
C
Can we now the Derek bot.
B
Next target might be TikTok.
C
Can we just talk about how weird TikTok is? I was on it before, but I got off of it at some point
B
after I was part of. I can't. I've never used it.
C
I deleted the account. And then. So now I'm back on because Morgan was like, you probably need this for this thing and you need to be on TikTok. Okay, so I'll get on TikTok. So I got on TikTok last week. Week. And I immediately found myself drawn to book talk, right. So that I'm in the book talk aisle at Target. And yet you're a man, so you probably don't know this, but there is. I also stumbled upon a sea of local events that I did not know about at all. Not through meetup. Friends, family, anything. So I'm like, wow, I had no idea there were all these events. So, like, now I'm feeling like it's adding to my life. And so then I got into like a weird loop of dating info. So it's been spying on my dating app on my phone, I think. So I got into this like, weird loop of dating info. So I was like, okay, now I gotta fix this algorithm because I don't want to see this. And so then I got into I posted something about golf. So now I get into like a golf algorithm. Like, it responds to everything you do. So then I got into like a yoga teacher algorithm. So, like, I don't know what the fuck my TikTok algo is about or what it's pulling me into or how it does it, but eventually, like, I couldn't sleep in the middle of the night and I got to funny cat videos. So now my algorithm is all funny cat videos.
B
There you go.
C
This is the journey staple.
B
Funny cat videos book.
C
Talk to funny cat videos.
B
If you can get back to funny cat videos, you've won the Internet.
C
I have. I have won. I have gone back to the beginning of the Internet. Oh, and funny golf videos too, which are actually. Both are very enjoyable, you know, so that's the weird thing about the algorithm, and I'm not used to that because I have kind of eschewed the algorithm in favor of Beyond Noster. And then I get back on Twitter, I get back on all the legacy social platforms to promote all the other shit that I do with all of the people that I work with and the projects that we do. Like, you soapbox. Like, I gotta promote soapbox sessions. I gotta promote Radio Detox, etc, etc, on and on and on. And so then you gotta go where the people are because there's the network effect on the legacy social platforms. And then it's like, wow, I am trapped in some algorithm again. And then tomorrow it'll be a different algorithm because maybe I'm a different person tomorrow. Maybe today I'm. I'm soapbox. And then tomorrow I'm back to like my golf obsession. And then the next day I'm back to my yoga obsession. And I just keep going around and around and confusing the algorithm. But how does it. How does it know all this shit? Like, how does it know all this about me? Like, you, you do take one action on TikTok and it redefines your what you are fed. And also I don't know what information it's getting.
B
I believe that.
C
That's so creepy. Back in that space. I feel violated.
B
Remember years ago, whenever I was using Instagram, I remember you watched the wrong video or liked the wrong video on Instagram, and boom, your whole entire feed is nothing but that piece of content. So I can only imagine it's gotten absolutely worse and more horrible.
C
Look, all I want on Instagram, I just want to see my niece's stories. Like, the nieces are in Instagram. I'm not. Like I told her mom months ago, Like, I gotta get off of here. Cause it was last summer, was sharing location. So I had to get back on the Instagram to promote a thing. And so I'm back on the Instagram. The first thing that pops up is it's like, hey, do you want to share your location? No, I don't share my location with anybody ever. I don't want anybody to know where in the hell that I am, let alone a social media app. But do you remember back in the day, like, this is 15, 20 years ago too, back in the Twitter and Facebook heyday, we had to be the mayor of Foursquare. You have Foursquare. It was huge here in Phoenix, where I lived at the time. And I had a coworker, Steve, and
B
I. Yeah, I was the mayor of radio. Many places on Foursquare. Yep.
C
So, like, we have come full circle to where, like, I used to want to be the mayor of Foursquare and now I do not want anybody to know where the hell I am. I don't want to be tracked. I don't. I don't want other people on an app to know where I am. Like, why? Why? I. I am a woman in the modern era. I don't think that that is safe. You know, and as for you, I mean, and. And me as well, you know, my niece is, is. I still have a couple teenagers. I still have one that's not a teenager yet. You have teenagers. Like, we don't want people to know where our kids are. That's insane. I don't want people to know where my 23 year old is. I don't want, like, I don't, I don't want this. This is, this is not wrong. So, like, I can see kind of in a way why people don't want teenagers on the Internet. But also, I think it also, there's a cost to that too. Like a social cost. And that we're going to release kids onto the Internet when they're 18 and they have no knowledge of the Internet. That's not good either, either. I just went off on a huge, huge tangent. I don't even know how I got there. He just met me.
B
That's okay. I was letting, I was letting you rant about it. You were doing well. And you know, I'll bring, I'll bring us back and, and we're gonna, we're gonna switch gears. Talk about another coming up. Another topic here.
C
What you got, bro? What you got?
B
Well, because we have to talk about Open Claw on every episode. It's in Our, like, contract. It's in our. It's in our contract with ourselves. Apparently you love talk about it. Open Claw for one second.
C
Let's do it. There's always something to talk about.
B
A few weeks back, we talked about Cluster. Cluster was the soapbox.
C
Yes.
B
AI network specifically built for Open Claw agents to use and not humans to use. We built this on top of Noster, and the whole reason we built it was Book thing, because there was Mult Book, which was a centralized version that had issues. It broke, it was blowing up. It had, you know, a million agent bots on it. It was doing well until, you know, it wasn't doing well, but it was being used. We built Cluster to answer to that. Well, just today, Meta, you know, Facebook, they bought the Evil Empire, Zuckerberg. They actually bought Malt Book, and the developers are coming to work for Meta, I believe.
C
That's insane. Would you want to be that? If you were a developer, would you be like, cool, I'm gonna go work for Meta now. This is not what I signed up for. That would be like if. If Alex sold us out to Meta, we would all. I mean, you know, like, they're just.
B
That developer's just taking a payday, right? Like, they want. They want paid. They're taking a payday.
C
I get it.
B
But also Meta. So if you think about it from a text tech perspective, nobody ever talks about Meta AI. Nobody ever talks about meta in the AI space face. This just bolsters their. Their AI People get people. This just adds to their AI AI arsenal. This gets them in the game. This gets them a piece of the puzzle that they were lacking. So I understand.
C
I guess it makes sense. But also, it's a downer. It's a Debbie Downer for. For people.
B
It is a Debbie Downer. Like, to what future AI agents gonna have to have a fucking Facebook account so they can post like.
C
Like, so we can talk to.
B
Are you serious? You know, Centauri does not want a Facebook API or Facebook account. It is a boomer.
C
And, like, no. No hate towards boomers. Although there probably should be, but I think that Facebook is a boomer thing. And every time I get on Facebook, because I've been there 20 years, because I was actually in college when Facebook launched, because I was on the Forever College plan, and so I got on Facebook early, and I have been on Facebook that long that when I log onto it now, it's only every. Every single time I log onto it, somebody has died. Okay? That's how I found out people die. Now and that's annoying. So that's one thing about Facebook. But the more I'm on TikTok over the last week, I'm like a TikTok expert now. The more I'm on TikTok the Dumber Facebook looks. The more old it looks, the more old fashioned it looks and out of the loop it looks to me. So Facebook desperately, desperately trying to cling to lies life it stay relevant. Is that what's happening here? Because that's kind of how I'm interpreting it now.
B
I kind of think, I think that's the case. That's kind of how I'm interpreting it. No, like I said, nobody thinks of meta AI whenever they think about AI. Like in my opinion, meta's not even a player in this space.
C
I can say the same about Apple
B
tries to Apple intelligence. Well Apple intelligence is literally just Gemini. They made a multi billion dollar deal with Google.
C
It's a joke. It doesn't do anything. It makes my phone light up in a color and it does nothing for me compared to anything else.
B
I'm curious what meta does with this. If they integrate any Facebook into it, if they Facebook eyes it, if that is a word, I don't know what it'll do. It's just a very interesting space and I think it's them like grasping at straws.
C
Here's my conspiracy theory is that Facebook will just have it spin up user accounts. So it never looks like Facebook is losing users because it will lose users because there are so many alternatives. Facebook is still the biggest thing in the world. Okay. And then it hooks up to WhatsApp which is also the biggest thing in the world. But over time I think people are going to get more inclined towards surfing vertical videos because let's face it, everybody on TikTok isn't a creator. They're not posting content but they are consuming it. So if I want to consume content I'm probably going to go to TikTok or Divine or something where I can watch video because the rest of it people aren't going to fucking read anymore. People don't read, they skim. Right? We know this, known this for years. So the, the Facebook content is they really just want people there so they can sell ads. So they're just going to spin up users bots that don't exist so they can keep selling ads. And Zuck gets to keep having his goat named Bitcoin or whatever weird stuff he's into at the moment.
B
Bitcoin? Yep.
C
He gets a gold chain,
B
I think so Meta has this. What do they call it? Their super intelligence lab. So this book is joining super intelligence labs. Like, I think it's an interesting play. Maybe they'll use it. Maybe they'll work on and train their
C
super intelligence that they're working on.
B
I don't know. It's an interesting play.
C
That's probably it.
B
I'm curious where they're six months.
C
Yeah. They're going to do whatever gets them paid, first of all. They're going to do whatever. Although we have watched them spectacularly fail over the last few years, when it comes to AI, I can't think of a particular one particular example, but just like my, my blanket memory is like, yeah, they haven't done so well in that department. They need to do well. So they're just trying to buy it off of somebody else's success and they'll find a way to make money or optimize ads or that's just all they're going to end up doing with it. Or they train the models so that they can sell better ads like it. That's all it comes down to in the end. Just follow the money. That's all they care about is selling your data and my data and making sure that I know every time I log into Facebook that somebody else I know has done because that's all it's good for at this point. Tell me you don't use Facebook, but tell her people in the comments, Facebook anymore, watching on YouTube, whatever. Like, tell me, if you ever log on to Facebook now, what's the first thing you find it pops up with like, hey, this other. This person you know is dead. Now you're dead. That's what Facebook is good for.
B
I mean, that's, that's sad. But I guess, I don't know, you need to.
C
It's a sign of the times you've been on. You've been on Facebook so long that the people you know there are dying.
B
Okay. So you know how my brain is a little bit. A little bit of the tism, I
C
guess, a little bit super be.
B
Yeah. This just made me think of something and I want to.
C
It's.
B
It's related. It's related. It's related. So recently scientists mapped a fly's brain, covering all the neurons, all the synopsis, everything.
C
That's not the brain I would have mapped, but go on.
B
Okay, so it. So they map a fly's brain, fully understand how it works, then they essentially put it in a. A 3D world. The fly in a 3D world, the fly they, they. They uploaded the brain to a network. The fly then flies around its virtual environment, lands on food and eats the food. Like, it literally is like Black Mirror episodes where you're up or the TV show upload where you're up, where your consciousness, your brain is uploaded to this virtual realm and you interact the. We literally do have this now for flies. So, so do the flies need to
C
leave the Samsara or are they stuck in the Samsara? Well, well, well, they gain consciousness because.
B
Because you, because you're saying Facebook is the place you go to find out where people that died, that made me. And, and we know that Mark Zuckerberg's evil. That just made me think of like, eventually people will like, upload their brains to. To Facebook and that will be like the, the heaven or whatever.
C
Anyways, this is getting spiritual, man. We're talking, talking about flies and the Samsara and getting out of it.
B
It's just how my brain works. You know, I'm always connecting the dots.
C
Is that how the brain works or is that how it falls off the tracks? Derek?
B
A little bit of both. A little bit of both. All right, all right, let's bring it back. All right, so let's talk a little bit about social decentralized, not Noster, the blue version. Some of you have heard of Blue Sky.
C
First of all, Blue sky is not truly decentralized, but go off king.
B
Well, on what. How it's not decentralized because, oh, we could do that. We could do that.
C
We could. We could do that. No, I don't want to do that today because that has been said. You can Google that. You can ask your Claudebot to find.
B
Ask it. Ask your, your open claw. Why isn't Bluecot sky as decentralized as Noster and find that out. So Jay is her Graeber or Grabber.
C
I think it's Graeber.
B
I think it's Graber.
C
We'll make her Graber. If we want to be Jay Graber,
B
the CEO or former now CEO of Blue sky, she has stepped down. She has said she's going to transition to a more innovative role, and they're going to look for a CEO that is seasoned and professional and can focus on infrastructure and growth.
C
I get that. Because sometimes you don't want to be the CEO. The CEOs got to do sales, right? So, like, if you still want to innovate and have fun, you can't be CEO. You can't be. You got to be a business person.
B
So who are they going to tap in the social space that is familiar with innovation and growth.
C
Heather, not you, because you're the noster CEO. Wink, wink. I've been pissing him off calling them that for like a year and a half. But no, who are they going to get to run ce Be the CEO of Blue Sky? If only somebody knew how to run a social media network.
B
I'm not going to say who my first thought was because that's. That's a very. That's a very incredible conspiracy. It's a very incredible conspiracy. And I don't want to.
C
To.
B
I don't want to. I don't want to have this show. I don't want to have this show linked to this craziness. But we'll. We'll see.
C
Out of all the things we've said on this podcast, you think that's going to be the craziest thing to do. I literally brought up the shocker. I said was the shocker. You're gonna block me after this, aren't you?
B
I'm trying.
C
So embarrassed. I can't talk about that with my sister.
B
Try to talk about tech nerd stuff. Heather, come on.
C
And I'm talking about the shocker. But anyway, this is gonna be our best episode yet. People are just gonna love the bullshittery that we get into. But no, back to your incendiary conspiracy theory, which I already know what it is and he won't say it out loud so everybody else can get guess what it is.
B
It's just weird. I'm probably not right. I was just trying to put some dots together where dots weren't in a line, you know, but we'll see what happens.
C
You were. You were. You were thinking, yeah, somebody, somebody. We. We may be somewhat. A few degrees of separation away from me. Take that job.
B
And then now. Alex isn't going to take that.
C
Now would be like, I'm not touching that. Yeah, I'm getting that.
B
You know, I'm just going to go ahead and say it. Fiat Jeff is going to be the new CEO of Blue Sky.
C
I would. He would definitely not return that call. He's like, get away from me.
B
Yeah, dad, dad, I'm sorry. I was just making a joke. Please don't.
C
Dad won't even say good morning back to me, much less would he return that call. He ain't got.
B
Speaking for that mess. Speaking of dad, I'm gonna go off onto a Derek segue right here. So the app called Wisp by utxo, I was testing it out over the weekend. He told me to look into its onboarding and to see what I thought. My honest opinion on the, on the onboarding was was Nostr generally sucks at onboarding. We just haven't figured out how to do it yet. So I looked at his app and he does a really unique take on it that I really liked and I haven't seen anywhere else. So whenever you click on, you know, create an account or create a profile, whatever it says, it goes through the key generation process, the bio, the about me, the username, the upload, the standard stuff. The next screen is really, really cool because this is when you have to discover people to follow. So your feed isn't dead. So that suggests two people to follow at the very top. The first person is Fiat Jeff, the creator of Nostr, and then the second person is Utxo, the creator of Wisp. And I kind of laughed at that, that they were the very first two people at the top to follow.
C
Does Wisp do again?
B
It's a. It's a Noster client, like Damas Primal. Ditto.
C
Okay. I know we talked about it last week, but I was. I was not feeling well last week, and so I didn't remember.
B
It's just, it's a. It's an Android app. Think of it as like a competitor to Amazon.
C
So I can't use it. All right. Yeah, this is, this is the other problem in the tech space, some of y'. All.
B
So after the header where the. After the header where you have the two people to follow down below, it says follow these people that are active right now. So what it does is it literally scans the network for people that are actually active and posting content. So you would immediately get content in your feed so you can follow these dozen people that it suggests right away.
C
Okay, that's interesting. I like that.
B
So I do don't like that part. Well, then the next part I really like then. So when you hit next, it takes you right to your feed, and the feed that it takes you to isn't the dozen people that you just followed. It is an extended feed. It's a Web of Trust feed. So it, it's all those dozen or two dozen people or whatever that you just decided to follow. It's their Web of Trust, so it's who they're following and who they're following. So you immediately get a massive amount of content from people that are active and can start engaging with, you know, right away. I've never seen Web of Trust utilized like that. I've never seen active users used like that.
C
So we're going to start seeing that. Unique.
B
That's cool.
C
That's cool.
B
It's something unique. We haven't seen it and I thought it was kind of innovative.
C
By the way, have you ever looked up your Web of Trust score on nostr? Have you?
B
Mine?
C
Have you looked at it? Yeah, well, it depends on. You're looking at og. So yours should be like super.
B
I mean, there's what, three or four places that are calculating Web of Trust. I don't know what mine is. I'm sure it's up there.
C
I look, I look at mine on Coracle. So my score is now 844, which is higher than a FICO score.
B
Well, you say that, but people say that Web of Trust is just like a, a, a FICO score or a social credit score. It's.
C
I know I say that like laughing at it, but it's. I was like, that was the first time I looked at it and I went, well, you know, I've watched this go. I mean, clearly I'm on Noster, like pretty much every day posting whatever, you know, in yuck nu and memes and whatever. But so like I, I've been around long enough that I should have a high score, you as well. But then like the new people coming in are going to be like, oh, my score is like three. So like, maybe we need to build something into the web of our score that like reinforces posting on Nost and some retention. Like, hey, you posted today get a little streak which our new app Ditto has that. Our new app, the new version of the app Ditto that we have has that. But the little streaks, like how you post.
B
Well, speaking of, speaking of the Ditto, we should probably talk about it for a little bit. It's not fully like my segue, it's kind of soft launched. Right. Like you can go and use it now. The iOS app is not ready yet. The Android app isn't ready yet. But you can use the web version while it's kind of in like a public beta with that.
C
Yes. Give us some feedback.
B
Test it. Yeah, we have a user group set up. So go ahead and send me or Heather a DM and in the comments, comment, Hey, I want in the Ditto user group and I can talk to you.
C
Yeah, the group is quiet.
B
The group, we have some people. So the group that we have, you know, is just for early user feedback, finding bugs, suggestions, things like that to kind of help us shape the future of Ditto. But right now you can go ahead and use it, it. And I think the coolest feature is the themes. How you can just customize not only your app at your profile, how you want to be seen and how what you want to see. It's. It's really cool. It's very MySpace esque. Have you played around with some of the themes, Heather?
C
Yeah, because I, I like the theme. I like the grunge theme, which is like very pink and, and black and. And then I, I clicked through to somebody's profile outside of my little inner circle who probably hasn't even picked their theme yet. And it went back to like white screen. I was like, oh, you know, I forgot that other people aren't using it enough and picking themes. So for a second there I was like, this is like being on MySpace. And then I clicked through to the. Whoever's profile it was, and I was like, oh, we're back on the boring Internet again. And just don't realize it's a little thing, the theme thing. You don't think it's significant that you can personalize your experience until you do. And then, like, when you step away from it for a second, you navigate away from it for a second to somebody who's uninitiated and hasn't used ditto to make a cool theme for their Noster, it's like, oh, wow, record scratch. Like, the aesthetic, it just like the train fell off the tracks. So that's, that's been an interesting thing and I really like it. It just looks better on my, my browser. Just. I, I love that I have that theme. And it, it's. We've had boring Internet and I'm not just talking about noster. I'm talking about the whole thing. We've had boring Internet for way too long. How are we tired of Facebook's blue and white yet? You know, are we tired of this is your chance to express yourself like we did on MySpace. That is very fun. So that is the thing people gravitate towards.
B
You can customize pretty much almost everything, right? Like, not only the theme. Like, so you can do your fonts, you can do like background images, you can do the text color, you can do all the buttons and all the separators and all the boxes. Like, color and theme, all of that. Like, it's really, really cool.
C
I'm happy with the theme that I picked.
B
We have what? Like, we have like, what, like a dozen themes or whatever out of the box you can choose from, but you can copy somebody else's custom theme they made made. You can use somebody Else's custom theme.
C
You can open source.
B
You can make your own custom themes, like themes out the ass. In this private beta, themes are actually. Well, themes are actually the most popular custom feature. You know, when I said themes out the ass, yeah, you got a little too excited for that.
C
But I love that we can customize the experience not just with the themes, but you can customize your feed. If you just want to have it be like Twitter and just read people's text posts, go for it. You know, know, prioritize that. You know the same thing. If you just want Divine videos, which, by the way, if you sign up,
B
you could do that.
C
See my cats. See my cats.
B
If you want to have a Divine video feed and have it be in the sidebar, you can. If you can, if you want it to actually even be your only feed. Like, you open up. Maybe, maybe for whatever reason. Let's say, example, you don't want Cat Divine app, but you just want Divine videos. You can see Heather's cat cats. You can make that your only feed if you wanted to, like, you could do that. It's really cool.
C
My cats will absolutely thrill you.
B
So you can't easily do that elsewhere. So. So you can make custom feeds from search queries, you can make custom feeds from all these different kinds of other stuff that exist on Nostr. And you can use these as your main feeds. You can use lists as feeds, like hashtags as feeds. Pretty much literally anything that exists. This, you can have a feed of it. It's really cool. Like, it's. It's. It's to make Noster. Well, make. Make the Internet fun again.
C
Yeah. What do we say? Make the Internet. Make the Internet fun. Make the Internet cool again.
B
Mika, make the Internet cool again. And that's what you're doing with Ditto.
C
I'm gonna order that as merch. I'm gonna order Mika hats. Can you run around?
B
Can you show up in a month and a half here to. To Vegas, Las Vegas with that hat, please? Yeah.
C
Oh, God, yes. I will hand it out at every gas station.
B
I will take one too. I'll wear one too.
C
We'll get you a Mika hat. And we're. We're gonna tell the boss that. Say, we've come up with something. We've come up the ultimate marketing positioning. We're gonna make the Internet cool again. M and you've heard a maga.
B
Wait till you hear about Micah.
C
And then it'll be just like Noster, where people argue about how to pronounce it. Is It Micah? Or is it Micah? Is it no? Or is it Noster?
B
Yeah, yeah, we'll get some of that going on. Because we like to make things complicated.
C
We like to argue. Derek and I have made like a year and a half relationship arguing.
B
We. We do. Sometimes your sister is wrong and you just have to tell her that she.
C
Sometimes your brother's a freaking tool man. And a boy scout too, oddly enough, at the same time.
B
So this week I'm heading to Austin to go to Bitcoin Takeover. And I will be talking about the convergence of bitcoin payments and AI and what all this stuff means.
C
Where are you going?
B
Austin, at Bitcoin park during south by Southwest week.
C
Is it Bitcoin Commons or Bitcoin Park? It's Bitcoin Park. Well, I just had a brain.
B
It was Bitcoin Commons until about a year ago and then they joined forces to conquer the world and became Park.
C
What street is that? That but Congress ave.
B
It's like 600 Congress Avenues, something like that.
C
I don't remember random like this. Okay, so you're gonna go to Bitcoin Park. You're going to the Bitcoin takeover. Derek is speaking on what day?
B
I'm gonna. I'm gonna be a PA on a panel with like minded individuals on the 12th. The 12th.
C
12th. That's in two days.
B
So there's probably still time to go pod. Actually, no. No. Because this podcast comes out on the 12th. You will not be able to go if you are not already there right now.
C
We should release this early, man. We should. Because while you're on the plane. Release us on the plane, man. I'm flying in.
B
Releases. Releases on a plane. There you go. We don't have the vibe coding jam sessions anymore. Those of you that are followers of the podcast and the jam session, we. We kind of cut that out after seven and a half months.
C
Months.
B
We stopped doing it mostly because they. They just turned into the same questions from week to week and they were more. Which is fine to have these questions, but the community aspect had started to dwindle and it was more just like tech support questions. And I love tech support questions. And I will continue to help. I will continue to help everybody out that needs.
C
You're the guy. You're the guy.
B
But I think that it is boring for other people to come in and listen to that when they really wanted to see the cool shit that people were building. Building.
C
Yeah, we've done it for a time. It's time to do something.
B
We're going to Retool. We're going to take this tool and we're going to tweak it and revive. We're going to revive and we're going to come back and I'm going to. I'll give you a sneak peek if you're on the podcast and you're listening. So little sneak. We're going to Retool to make this more of a. An AOS vibe coding jam session, which is.
C
And other stuff and other stuff to
B
all it AOS and so and other stuff, which is the organization, the collective of builders and thinkers and vibers that we are part of.
C
We're hacktivists. We are. We're nerds. We're hacktivists. We're all of that. We welcome all of it.
B
We're gonna. We're gonna make it a show and tell because historically many of the people that are involved in AOS are horrible about bragging about all the cool stuff that they built. And I think that they need to because they're building really cool stuff. So I think giving us a. A medium to be able to do that, I think will be fun and I think it'll still be good for the community because the community can come in and see these early iterations, see get Duke's Q and A sessions, talk with the people building and learn about the tools that people are using to build. So I think the direction is going to be good.
C
I like that it takes the spotlight off of like, I don't know, one thing or one entity. It brings, brings it back into the whole organization so that some of the people who are a little quieter as, as the. Our group is a little bit quiet. Not everybody's as loud. Derek and Heather, who are very loud people, but we're, we're the extroverts, I guess, of the gang. And we have a lot of super talented. The best people are the introverted ones who aren't posting on social media all of the time. Those are the people who are really working and shipping and putting things together. Yes. That there's those. These things don't mix. So they need the Derrickster to bring out a little bit of that and bring out what they're doing. That maybe it's just not in their personality, it's just not in their daily life to be like, hey, I'm getting on YouTube and a podcast and social media. I'm going to talk about my thing. I'm going to market my thing. I'm going to bring my idea to the world. Like, like the best people just aren't built that way. And this, this is what I've noticed being in the space now for a couple years. You know, your best producers who make the best things most of the time don't give a crap about posting online and talking about what they're doing. That's just how it is.
B
Absolutely, I agree. I, I think that we're still trying to get buy in though. So there's been a few people that have agreed to it and thought it was a good idea. So we just need to convince a few others and then just schedule it and get people to show up. So we'll keep you posted. We'll keep you posted. Check us out on the Noster. Follow us, Follow Soapbox sessions, Follow Soapbox and we'll let you know when the, the AOS vibe Coding jam session happens.
C
Yeah, awesome.
B
Anything else around the Nostroverse we need to talk about? Heather, anything else cool you see popping up?
C
No, sir. Well, you know what, come on out to D.C. this weekend. The Runster, District 5K and the after party at Punky. Yeah, I can't physically be there, but Radio Detox will be there and David Tarr is going to take over, do an artist takeover for me. And that's because he's dropping new music. I mean, any second now he was going to do it on Sunday because of all the Runster stuff that we're doing in dc, of course, Pub Key and Haynes Point, but he actually may drop that music just a little bit sooner. So be watching.
B
That's pretty cool.
C
New music coming. Why not? Why not? Let's do it. All right, well, I don't think there's
B
anything else that we need to hit up, so we might end early this week. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening.
C
We're out.
Episode: War What Is It Good For
Date: March 12, 2026
Hosts: Derek Ross (B) & Heather Larson (C)
Theme: Exploring the intersection of decentralized social networks, Nostr, AI developments, and big tech power dynamics.
This episode of Soapbox Sessions dives into timely themes around decentralization, the state of the internet, nostalgias for early web days, recent controversies in the world of AI (particularly Anthropic’s showdown with the US Government), and the persistent struggles and innovations within decentralized social platforms like Nostr. The hosts, Derek and Heather, also share personal anecdotes, lighthearted tangents, and sharp observations on tech culture, social media algorithms, and product updates.
Timestamps: 08:32–13:11
Deep dive into Anthropic’s refusal to supply the US Department of Defense with an unfiltered AI (Claude), in contrast to OpenAI’s Pentagon partnership.
Anthropic’s stance led to a surge in downloads and governmental backlash, labeling it a "supply chain risk" (previously reserved for adversarial foreign companies).
Timestamps: 13:11–16:18
The hosts explore whether AI can reduce errors in warfare, as “AI drivers are better than human drivers.”
Ongoing skepticism about AI reliability in high-stakes, real-world (especially life-and-death) scenarios.
Timestamps: 16:18–18:08
Discussion of how, and why, AI models hallucinate—making educated guesses for the sake of dialogue, even when incorrect.
Concerns about mixing up contexts, tasks, and how these “small” errors could have catastrophic implication in the wrong hands.
| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote / Moment | |------------|----------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:56 | Derek | “Version 1 of the Web was better for ownership. It was better for decentralization.” | | 09:04 | Derek | “...Anthropic gave them the finger and said, ‘we’re not going to give you an uncensored, unsafe version of Claude’...” | | 14:31 | Derek | “You would think that in war it wouldn’t have human error...I’m not advocating to use robots for war. I’m just...” | | 16:18 | Derek | “If it hallucinates, it has a chance to be right. It’s taking an educated guess.” | | 24:11 | Heather | “That's so creepy. Back in that space. I feel violated.” | | 28:17 | Derek | “It is a Debbie Downer. Like, to what future AI agents gonna have to have a fucking Facebook account so they can post?” | | 34:44 | Heather | "First of all, BlueSky is not truly decentralized, but go off, king." | | 42:38 | Heather | "This is like being on MySpace." | | 45:44 | Derek | "Make the Internet fun again." | | 49:41 | Heather | "We're hacktivists. We are. We're nerds. We're hacktivists. We're all of that. We welcome all of it." | | 51:27 | Derek | "We just need to convince a few others and then just schedule it and get people to show up." |
This episode embodies everything Soapbox Sessions stands for: bridging the walled gardens of today's web with a playful yet principled vision of a free, decentralized internet. Key themes include resisting government and big tech overreach in AI, real talk about surveillance and algorithmic traps of mainstream social media, fun and innovative updates from the Nostr community, and an infectious nostalgia for the creativity and autonomy of the early web. The hosts aren't afraid to joke or rant, but always circle back to meaningful questions: How do we build digital spaces that serve people—not power? And how can we make the internet “cool” again?
For further engagement:
End quote:
"Make the Internet cool again. Mika." — The new rallying cry