Trevor McFedries is an entrepreneur, musician, and technologist best known for co-founding Brud in 2016, the media company behind the virtual pop star Lil Miquela, and co-founding Friends With Benefits (FWB) in 2020, one of the earliest and most influential social DAOs. Before his work in tech, McFedries was a musician and DJ performing under the name Yung Skeeter. He currently also is a part of the music duo SoFTT.

Through his various projects, Trevor has worked with brands including Nike, Prada, and Calvin Klein, as well as artists including Katy Perry, Ke$ha, Sky Ferreira, and J Balvin. His career spans music, digital art, and crypto, positioning him as a pioneering figure at the intersection of art, culture, and technology.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Katie Chiou: For those who may not be familiar with your work, can you share more about your background/journey as an artist?

Trevor McFedries: I always joke about Martine Syms’ concept of a “conceptual entrepreneur,” and I think of myself as that, probably most acutely. But in more practical terms, I'm a musician, artist, and entrepreneur. I do enough engineering to dabble, but I would say entrepreneur is the major hat. 

My journey is that I was a software engineer who stumbled into music. I was DJing and making beats for fun, and two buddies of mine and I were in this rap group called Shwayze that got signed to Interscope and put out a Top 10 album when I was 22. It was 2007, right as the internet was eating the music business. I was thrust into this position where I'd be pulled into Jimmy Iovine's office to talk about MySpace, while also going on TRL. Seeing this legacy media environment and creative culture industry pushed away by technologies, I was on the other side as well. I've lived at the intersection of art and technology for most of my adult life, and I've tried to make careers out of it.

KC: You’re most well-known for co-founding Brud, the company behind Lil Miquela. Thinking about that era must be interesting now, given there are so many more tools in place to make creating something similar to Lil Miquela more affordable, feasible, and acceptable. What was the inspiration for creating Lil Miquela—the vision, how that process might look different if you were to do it today, and how you reflect on everything that's happened since.

TM: Miquela was born out of a few things. At the core of it is this consistent throughline for me: if you were to start from first principles and ask, “Why is life worth living?” I don’t think people would say bonds or derivatives. They would say art, music, dance, food. But I noticed that capitalism wasn’t rewarding the people who do the art, music, dance, food—it was rewarding the people doing the derivatives. 

For Miquela and Brud, it all stemmed from believing that storytelling is the most important thing in the world. Christianity, capitalism as a story, liberalism as a story—that’s the reason I wake up at 8am to go to a coffee shop, and it becomes busy by 9am. We’re all being driven by this collective AI we call capitalism. I wanted to create stories that could scale to the size of Christianity. In parallel, I was frustrated by the idea that the stories being told were important, but had rent seekers between the people creating the stories and the people paying for or interacting with them.

A good example would be Rihanna. She’s on set, she didn’t write the song, she didn’t choreograph the dance moves, she didn’t even dress herself, but she’s capturing about 70% of the value of what that asset is capturing. The idea of having a pass-through vehicle like that for the people choreographing the dance moves or writing the songs was really interesting to me.

The dream for Miquela was to create entities, IP built for an emergent world. In my head that was spatial computing and digital assets. I definitely thought the AI piece would be a large part of those things. What we probably got wrong was thinking that the AI technology happening right now was going to come five years earlier and that digital assets would quickly follow. COVID-19 shifted things. It accelerated the development of digital assets and virtual economies, and AI got pushed to later. As a result, we had to shift our priorities, but it also made the cost structure really difficult. Obviously that’s changed now. Even GPT-3.5 or 4 would have been enough to do the conversational stuff we were struggling to do back in the day.

KC: What kind of tech stack were you guys using back then? How long would it take to generate a post with Miquela in it, or the costs versus what you think it would look like today?

TM: The stack was fragmented and constantly evolving. At the core of it, we put a character like Miquela into a game engine or into a program like Maya 3D and could do animations. We also composed images, often with fashion assets, taking pictures of real images and compositing Miquela into them by posing her and matching the lighting.

We built a lot of our own internal tools to solve these challenges. Most of the game engines and tools like Maya 3D were built with longer time horizons, so for a bigger triple-A game over two or three years you can really think deeply about lighting. We were using 360 degree cameras to capture environments quickly and drop those into scenes so they could be lit to match.

We were also playing with GANs, which were very popular at the time. There were trade-offs. Hair simulation is really hard, and there were certain things we could and couldn’t do. We were just trying to jam any emerging technology we could into a stack to tell stories as fast as possible. Some of those were little tools, building in-house retargeting solutions, big rigs with cameras all over them, accelerometers, iPhones for face-tracking—whatever we could use to push down costs. It was really a hodgepodge. It wasn’t elegant like just using OpenRouter and different chat APIs today.

KC: I’ve heard you talk about comparing the devtooling landscape today to how it used to be difficult to DJ before the BEAT SYNC button on CDJs became a thing. Can you talk a little more about that?

TM: A question I’ve kept coming back to over the last 18 months has been: “It’s going to get really easy to make things. What does the world look like where it’s pretty easy to make most things?” That feels familiar to music. It used to be hard to make music. You needed a big studio. If you go to the Capitol Records building in LA, the huge basement is a reverb chamber, an actual cave they built and installed microphones all along so they could make a blip and record how it echoed off the walls. Now I can have a reverb plug-in in Ableton.

To me, the challenge will still be distribution. We’re all competing for a fixed amount of attention. In parallel I’m pretty fixated on how capital will form around ideas. It’s easier and cheaper to make stuff, but you still need some amount of capital. In my life now, it’s easier to raise $3M than it is to raise $300K, and I think that will persist. Capital formation is where crypto becomes really special.

There’s a generation of young people that fully believe that if they’re going to escape the trenches, they have to put capital to work. Can we give them better ways to do that? Can crypto enable that? I think so. It feels like the next chapter of my life is thinking about distribution and capital formation and trying to invert the dynamic of “eat the rich” so that people can actually become the rich. Be your own trust fund. That’s effectively the message I want to communicate. 

KC: How has your thinking around crypto as a tool for capital formation changed since when you first started Friends with Benefits? 

TM: Back then, it was clearly nerdier, probably more utopian, and attracted a different kind of personality. What’s cool is I’ve lived through enough hype cycles that I’ve started to recognize things I would have done differently.

I remember when I was making dance music in the early 2000s. It was me and a bunch of interesting people making dance music that was distorted and loud and crazy. Then Madonna started showing up. will.i.am started showing up. So much of me wanted to reject those mainstream artists bringing our music to the normies—“They don’t get this, why should we water it down so they can understand it?” When they started doing that, I basically stopped DJing in 2011-2012.

I went to Ultra in 2012 and thought that EDM was over. People were throwing cakes into crowds, doing songs with mainstream pop stars. This sucks. This has to be the top. And it continued to get bigger. I felt the same way about emo and Warped Tour culture when Green Day played arenas. This dynamic just doesn’t go away. It’s foolish to abandon something because the demographics have changed. Ultimately you can steward the thing.

When I got into the Solana trenches, I talked to kids that were basically me when I was 15. They’d say, “Bro, I live in the middle of nowhere Ohio, I work part time at a bookstore, I need to escape. The best way I see to escape is to reply-guy Ansem.” I’d think, “That’s silly, I never would have considered that,” but they’re right.

When you make six figures a year, it doesn’t make sense to reply-guy Ansem until he maybe picks up one of your calls and you turn $100 into $1,000. But $1,000 is a big deal. I rode my bike to work until I was 19; I couldn’t afford a car. I totally get it. Who am I to take this uppity position of “building for normies is lowbrow” when ultimately that could accelerate more people out of having to fight for every hour of their day? Hopefully they can use more of their mind and body to tackle bigger problems than survival.

I think a lot of us are lucky enough to be focused on self-actualization. We forget most people are fixated on survival. Kids today are so locked into their phone just waiting for the next opportunity to get out of the trenches. Giving capital to people who are just trying to survive so they can actualize and chase their dreams is extremely net-positive to the world. I’m happy to spend a lot of time doing that. 

KC: How do you think about your relationship to being online? There often seems to be two diametrically opposed views: embrace the sloptimism versus protect your attention.

TM: There are a couple of different things there I could pull on. I would hate to disparage those playing the game on the field. I was spinning up blogs on MySpace, writing lines of JavaScript, getting more friends so I could command attention. It was clear to me that power laws go both ways. People want to back successful people, but you need someone to back you before you’ve been successful. The catch-22 is real. You have to find an emergent surface area to prove you can be spiky.

I would never look down on someone trying to be a winner so they can get resources to go play mainstream games. You’ve got to live on your phone to prove you can win. Go do the thing.

I also think we no longer have a choice. There used to be an internet where you could stare into the abyss and it wouldn’t totally stare back. Now we live in a world where if you stare into the abyss, it not only stares back, it iterates back. The same way I felt stories were super important with Miquela, they’ve become even more important. There’s an ever-decreasing time between model updates. A nefarious model or AI is spitting a story back to you. It’s a story machine.

If I ask, “What’s the best song over the last 10 years?” and it tells me this song because of X, Y, Z, it’s created a story I’ll repeat at a dinner party and effectively psyop someone else into also believing it. When that person goes back into the LLM or reads the blog about why that song is good, because it has all this training data, the next model run learns how to iterate on the story it told me and reach even more people more effectively. 

We’re in an arms race: who can tell better stories—humans or the models? Stories dominate our lives. Christianity and capitalism are the why, not the reason, 90% of our American lives are the way they are. If a story can out-compete, those stories can really change things.

It’s important to always spend time on your phone, but also to inject human stories into your phone. Be mindful of your cognitive security so you’re not being one-shotted. Talk to humans. Share humanistic stories with the world via the internet. Push back.

Some part of me is interested in, instead of rejecting screens or rejecting being on your phone, finding ways to trick them and use what they’re good for to dismantle them. It’s an insurmountable task to try to pick out the AI. Instead you’ve got to, for lack of a better phrase, poison their training data with really humanistic things so they come back with really humanistic things.

KC: Do you have thoughts on what it takes to be a good “ideas guy”?

TM: There’s the view of ideas as things that already exist. They’re there for us to discover, effectively in this giant black box of the universe. We have to walk around it and search through space to find them. The way we all find ideas is by standing on the shoulders of giants, people who came before us.

Being an ideas guy to me is having great ideas, and great ideas are often differentiated. You can get good ideas just by doing different things. It’s silly to me that Virgil (RIP) just didn’t look on Tumblr and people thought, “Damn, what a sick visionary,” simply because he was looking through physical books and taking things from sources in the physical world around him.

There’s still a ton of alpha there. A lot of my alpha comes from buying books, old art magazines, old fashion magazines, and reading through them. There’s lots of interesting stuff to mine that isn’t on the web, isn’t in the first ChatGPT output or first Are.na search.

KC: How has your own relationship with technology changed over the past five years or decade?

TM: One of my real skill sets is picking from firehoses of information. I’m 39, but feel Gen Z in my soul because I was terminally online and developed an intense threshold for information digestion. For a long time I thought I had real alpha just from downing information. But now, because so much of it’s been poisoned by AI slop, it’s not clear the returns are nearly as impactful as they were in the past.

Sources of truth—maybe I’ve realized that little quip: “Only listen to new music and only read old books.” I’m finding myself only reading older things. When I go on Twitter it’s like, “Oh, that’s an interesting concept,” and I go to the comments to see if it’s signal or noise, and it’s just AI slop. I can’t tell if it’s signal or noise or how people are responding. My media diet has changed. The spaces where I could get a lot of signal are becoming noisier. I have to move to places or spend more of my time in higher-signal spaces. 

KC: You’ve spent a lot of time in crypto. Have you spent a lot of time in AI? Do you think those go hand in hand? Do you think of them separately? Can one succeed without the other? How do you think about the relationship there?

TM: I think they both could survive independently. It’s pretty clear there’s a ton of capital interested in interfacing with AI. There’s probably more opportunity in crypto because it’s underexposed and has the stigma. It’s a bit of the ugly duckling. A lot of the really smart people I’d be scared to compete with are working at AI labs. Crypto is back in this place where you are working against really creative underdogs who might not have the resources or horsepower to get where they want to go. You can read the tea leaves, collaborate with them, or build things adjacent to them and do really cool stuff.

KC: How has your experience of trying to explain crypto to other creators changed over time?

TM: It’s hard to go to a creator who’s already doing well and say, “Hey, want to launch a token?” They’re like, “Not really, it’s scary, I don’t want to be associated with this thing people have been hurt by.” That makes total sense.

If you’re a creator that’s still just trying to get by, and you have a thing that can open that aperture for you, it’s really compelling. We’ll need to partner with bigger creators at the start to communicate the outcomes that can be had. Ultimately I don’t think this is built for someone who can raise millions of dollars with two phone calls. It’s made for someone who needs $300,000 to get their idea off the ground. Nothing exists between bootstrapping and VC.

KC: Do you want to talk a little bit about what you’re working on currently?

TM: I recently put this product called Shillforce out into the world, that we’re now calling Reach Social.

I started this company with Nicole de Ayora, my former co-founder at Brud who was at VICE before Brud. She’s wicked brilliant and a very good complement to me. I think of it like Alphabet or Meta: there will be many companies inside it. 

The umbrella company is called Copiapoa Technologies Inc. Copiapoa is a cactus I became enamored with because it will kill off part of itself to survive different climates. That felt apt for this moment for creative people. There are so many dogmas you’re going to need to sacrifice to survive and actualize. We want to lean into that tension. This world has already been really tough on creative people the last 20 years. It’s about to get harder. 

“Survival pending revolution” is a quote I’ve been aligned with. You need to survive. We need your ideas in the world, and they need to permeate. Make the Reels. Use the AI. Do what you have to do, because ideas and stories are important.

The first thing we built was Shillforce, an attempt to build a better marketplace for attention. There are plenty of people who can get attention for your ideas. They have plenty of time. They can take assets you have, chop them up, repurpose them, and you can pay them to do so. It’s effectively a bounty system built on Solana. You put up 1,000 USDC or 1,000 of your own token, give people media assets, and have them turn it into bangers on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube Shorts. People really liked it—I’ve never built a thing where everyone wanted to use it, which was a little scary. As a result we turned it into a public good, and relaunched it as Reach.social. 

The second thing we’re building is currently still in stealth. It allows capital to form around cool ideas and projects made by creative people. That’s something we’re excited to explore. Who knows how it will manifest once it’s out in the wild.