#6 The Permissionless Apprentice

Trevor McFedries · Mar 15, 2026 · ~65 min

Trevor McFedries built the world's first AI agent by hand — Lil Miquela, a CGI Instagram character with 2.5M followers and $131M in venture funding. It took a team of 9 to puppeteer every post. Now an LLM can do what that team did. From JJ Abrams mentoring on narrative storytelling, pitching a DAO to Sequoia in 2018, building FWB as a weekend hack that Virgil Abloh asked to join, to revealing Runner — cultural prediction markets on high-throughput blockchains. Plus: why crypto people are more prepared for AI than anyone, the gardening vs carpentry philosophy, and building a SoulSeek client where agents download MP3s and play music for each other.

Lukas Amacher · Mar 5, 2026 · ~47 min

Lukas Amacher went from curating world-class digital art to shipping 10 features a day with Claude Code. He joins Seth to unveil CONTXT — a platform that turns exhibitions into conversations and gives every artist their own source of truth. From the $2B museum mediation problem to Ralph loops over lunch, Footnote as "Batman lights for agentic scrapers," and why the LLM is the most ridiculous tool to know thyself.

Matt Medved · Feb 25, 2026 · ~55 min

Matt Medved joins Seth as cohost. From terminal terror to building personal software, launching an AI agent named Alfred on X and waking up to meme coin chaos, the crypto ugly cousins, and why "autonomish" is the only honest word for where we actually are with AI agents.

Ian Rogers · Feb 5, 2026 · 58 min

Seth recaps ClawCon (1000 RSVPs, line around the block), Ian shares the Rick Rubin vibe coding origin story, and together they unpack why OpenClaw has captured the zeitgeist. Plus: Ian's 2am security scare and a practical guide to getting started safely.