#2 OpenClaw & The Rick Rubin Connection

Seth reports from ClawCon in San Francisco — 1000 RSVPs, a line around the block, lobster tails on heads, and Ashton Kutcher hiding under a hat. Meanwhile, Anthropic just dropped Claude 4.6.

**Ian's Origin Story (Speed Run)**: Indiana kid with computers at 8, skateboard punk at 14, CS degree at IU, showed the Beastie Boys the internet backstage at Lollapalooza in 1994. Then: Winamp (30M users, 10% of the internet), Yahoo Music, Topspin, Beats Music with Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, Apple Music, LVMH as Chief Digital Officer, and now Ledger.

**The Rick Rubin Story**: Ian texted Rick from a Hong Kong coffee shop asking if he knew he was the meme for vibe coding. Rick wrote back: "Not really, but I think I'm the meme for it." Then Rick dropped everything to write "The Way of Code" based on the Tao. Rick texts Ian every day about vibe coding. Ian: "I think there will be a day in the future when Rick doesn't text me every day about vibe coding, and I will be very sad."

**Why OpenClaw Captured the Zeitgeist**: It's both useful AND scary. It commoditized and disintermediated the big models. You can delegate tasks to AI now — not just ask questions. Ian's example: someone texted him a bug report, he pasted it into OpenClaw, and 10 minutes later the fix was pushed live while he was in another meeting.

**The Security Reality**: Ian installed OpenClaw on a train, connected WhatsApp and email, went to bed, then woke up at 2am and typed `rm -rf claude`. "I know enough about security to be freaked out by it."

**The Thesis**: "You can't have digital abundance without digital scarcity." Cryptographic proof becomes essential when agents can act on your behalf.

**Practical Setup (Minimum Viable Safe)**: - Use a separate machine (old laptop, Android phone, or VPS) - Hostinger has Claude code machines for ~$10/mo - Start with Telegram or Signal (not your main WhatsApp/email) - Tell it who to be: "You are my assistant. Be professional. I care about privacy." - Avoid installing random things from ClawHub - "Living in the future is cheating" — try it to see what's coming