37: Trevor McFedries - Creative People Should Be Rich
All linked references & transcript available at dialectic.fm/trevor-mcfedries.Trevor McFedries (X, Instagram, Wikipedia) is a musician, technologist, and entrepreneur. Today he is the founder of Runner and 1/2 of electronic dance duo SoFTT. Previously, Trevor was co-founder and CEO of Brud, the company behind Lil Miquela that was acquired by Dapper Labs; Founder of FWB (Friends with Benefits); early artist in residence at Spotify; and a touring DJ who performed as DJ Skeet Skeet, was part of the rap group Shwayze, and produced for a range of artists.Trevor’s work emerges from a tension he’s lived with throughout his career: the gap between who creates cultural value and who captures it. Growing up poor in Iowa and entering the dying music industry in the late 2000s, he witnessed firsthand how the instruments that capture value rarely benefit the creative people who generate that value. This has run across his entrepreneurial work, from building virtual pop stars to a range of crypto projects that hope to give creative people more upside.Trevor bridges culture and technology, art and capital, and high and low. I’ve met few people who are as consistently ahead of culture. His perspective challenges both the art world’s disdain for commerce and Silicon Valley’s shallow engagement with culture, arguing instead for creative people to play the game on the field and build the instruments that will make them rich. Today, he’s focused on how that may end up being as much about predicting what’s next with stakes as it is actually making things.
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Speaker A: The broken and immature is the alpha and what artists are great at. This is like maybe as bizarre as like Duchamp's urinal. Duchamp being like, this thing you piss in is art, is not something that a market would value. You know, like Warholian tin can, that is effectively what, what bonding curves allow people to create a market and be like, no, actually this is important. And you're like, that isn't important, that's slop. And you're like, no, trust me. I think what like great collectors have been able to do historically is like take the side of that bet and be like, yeah, I want all these Warhols.
And this Basquiat guy that can't draw, I think it rocks actually. And I think that, that is the opportunity on both sides of that market. I've been doing these kind of like, uh, gatherings at my home to connect Silicon Valley friends and artist friends. And I brought all these artists together who aren't on, you know, those, in those X feeds and aren't aware of this stuff, but have, you know, being all really important work. And they were here and the AI people were kind of assuming that they would like agree with that sentiment, but they were like, you know, the AI is don't have intuition, which is why they can't do great art.
And all of the artists were like, I don't know, I think a lot of that stuff is really good. And they were kind of like, wait, what? Whoa. And so I do think there's absolutely going to be a moment where slop is punk, but I also think what's clearly interesting now are the models themselves. It will be probably uncomfortable for researchers at the big labs to be like, I'm the artist? Speaker B: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 37 with Trevor McFedries. Trevor has lived a few different lives, including as a musician, an entrepreneur, a technologist, and a curious internet person, among other things.
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