Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Trevor McFedries: Brud – Using AI to Bridge Real and Virtual Worlds

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Trevor McFedries joined us for a fascinating chat about his background in the football and music industries, and how this led him into crypto. Trevor is the cofounder of Brud, a technology startup specializing in artificial intelligence and media. At Brud, they create social media personas with the help of CGI technology, the most well known being Lil Miquela. Lil Miquela is a sentient robot navigating life in LA -- and has millions of followers on instagram.Trevor also started Friends With Benefits, a gated online community on a private discord server with a community token. We talked with Trevor about the increasingly immersive social media experience, the future for creators and the future of organizations.Topics covered in this episode:Trevor's background in football and music, including his time working at SpotifyAn overview of BrudWho is Lil Miquela?How do these fictional characters fit into the 'real world'?How Trevor got into cryptoThe Friends with Benefits communityTrevor's views on the future of DAOsBrud's experience with VCs as opposed to crowdfundingTrevor's take on NFTs and Lil Miquela's NFT dropThe cultural impact of crypto to society and what the future looks likeEpisode links:BrudLil MiquelaFriends with BenefitsFriends with Benefits on TwitterTrevor on TwitterSponsors:Solana: Solana is the high performance blockchain supporting over 50k transactions per second to power the next generation of decentralized applications. - https://solana.com/epicenterExodus: Exodus the easy-to-use crypto wallet available on all platforms and supporting over 100 different assets. - https://exodus.com/epicenterParaSwap: Give ParaSwap a try at paraswap.io/epicenter. This URL will allow you to claim a 50% refund on gas fees for your first swap of at least 1 Eth. This offer is available until May 1st 2021 and refunds will be made every Friday starting April 9th, 2021*Terms and conditions apply. This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/388

This is Epicenter, episode 388 with guest Trevor McFedries. Hi, this is Friedrich Ernst. And this is Sunny Agarwal. And today with us, we have Trevor McFadbees, the CEO and founder of Broad, and do all of many other things. And we'll talk about all of these in just a bit. Hi, Trevor. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on.

Before we move to Trevor, let us introduce our sponsors. So our first sponsor for today is Solana, which is a next generation blockchain with lightning fast, locks, and fees less than a cent per transaction. Scalability is perhaps the single biggest challenge preventing crypto from becoming the backbone of the world financial system. And today, Solana may be the best option we have. Go to salana.com slash epicenter to learn more. Our next sponsor is Exodus Wallet. So if you've been in crypto for a while, you know the phrase, not your keys, not your coins. and it's very important to have a great, easily used wallet to stole your coins and be in control of your assets.

Exodus supports a ton of different assets and has great apps for all platforms. Go to Exodus.com to give it a try. This show is also brought to you by Paraswap. Paraswap just came out with a huge update that's even faster and more liquid. It's cheaper than Uniswap and comes with a new gas token that can cut your gas fees by up to 50%. Plus, for all our listeners, Paraswap, offers 50% gas refunds for the first swap of at least one. ETH. Make your trades and go to paraswop.io slash epicenter to claim your refund. So Trevor, you are an incredibly eclectic guest. When I did my research on your background,

I had no idea you had done so many things before you kind of entered the crypto scene from the very much from the culture side. So I learned that you had a football scholarship and played professional football and then dropped out to do music. That much I knew. So you were a rapper, right? So I actually, I should probably clarify a couple of things. I didn't actually play professional football.

I played at the university level, which is just below here in the States. And then I actually made beats and kind of DJed for a very long time, including in a group with a rapper. And so I wasn't up in front. I've always kind of been the nerdy guy, I've sitting behind the computer, on stage or in my bedroom.

So some of it translates a bit more than the visual you'd expect. And then you became a DJ who was, and actually a very well-known DJ. Your stage name was Young Skeeter. And you worked with incredible people. Tell us about that. Sure, yeah. So I was in a group called Shwezy. We ended up putting out like a top 10 album.

I was all of, I think, like 22 years old. And so my first trips internationally actually were as a part of that rap group. And actually it was just, this is a bit of a crypto tangent, was talking to Arthur from Trust and realized my first trip to Berlin, he took me to Bar 25. And I got my mind blown, right? And so that was in that group. I ended up DJing and producing. And at the time in the States, there was kind of this dance music revolution.

You know, I had kind of been a part of this blog house kind of proto-EDM community. And when EDM grabbed whole, a lot of pop acts and other artists, looking to make music like that and myself and a few others knew how to make dance music that sounded like that and so we started getting pulled in the rooms and you know working on tracks you know with like the black high peed producers or you know working with popbacks like you know katie peri or touring with katie or keshah and then i made music for like isleda banks and sky ferrera and so yeah live as a DJ producer for a very long time and then you kind of exited music for a while Or at least it got sidetracked, right?

So basically I saw that you kind of joined Spotify really early on. Yeah, so while I was making music, I mean, I became a bit disenchanted with DJing, kind of a lifestyle that started that. I'm more comfortable kind of sitting in the room all day than being on stage. And, you know, originally DJing was kind of like hiding in a corner in a dark room and playing records. It was perfect. And as it became more and more being on stage and big lights and flames and stuff,

I kind of lost more interest in it. And I started producing music, and I was working as kind of a manager and producer for an artist named Banks. We're making kind of some alternative R&B stuff. And, you know, while I was working with Banks, I also taking a job at Spotify, I really with the idea of kind of getting off the road and being able to stop touring and simultaneously be able to shape a better reality for creative people and, you know, especially musicians. And so the dream with Spotify, I was trying to realize this future. where people could have access to all the music in the world and artists would be compensated

fairly. And, you know, I think things have probably gone a bit already since that initial vision. That was really intriguing to me. And so I helped launch Spotify in the U.S. And then, you know, probably kind of like probably over crack it a bit and went deeper into technology and left the culture industry a bit more, as you suggested. What was that experience like, you know, going like, what was like the best parts of like get going into this like startup environment and what were some of the you know parts that maybe you did miss from the older environment yeah spotify was incredible i had to say you know i had only again i was kind of thrust into the music industry when i was like 21 22 years old and it was the only

real industry i had known and candidly there had been a lot of brain drain in the u.s there are record labels that were throwing off cash like crazy in the late 90s and by the time when we were signed in 2007 and you kind of had bottom of the barrel people running a lot of these playbooks. And so, you know, I talked to our marketing person, you know, like, what's the game plan? And they're like, oh, you know what? You're going to tweet about the album. You're like, that's the marketing plan and we're going to tweet. Like, I'm sure we can go something better than that.

And then I joined Spotify and, you know, I met all these people who were incredibly bright, had incredible ideas also were executing at a really high level. And the cultural disconnect that was probably most of the people, to me was this kind of idea of lean startup and iterating quickly and shipping product regularly, talking to customers, and then taking their feedback to heart and making changes. That was so different than what I had known in music. I had basically sat in room with artists in isolation for a year plus, made a record and then kind of like pushed it into the ether.

And often none of it felt like pushing it off a cliff where you just hope this thing would fly, but oftentimes these records would just, you know, flop or kind of, you know, know, no one would hear them. So the idea of making something quickly, putting it out into the world, getting feedback and iterating accordingly, it felt really radical. And then, you know, looking back on it now, it was apparent that was the status quo for a lot of industries. But in media, it felt really radical. I try to apply a bit of that to what I was doing with banks and other artists while I was kind of working with them in parallel to being in Spotify. Do you think that some of these ideas have seeped back into the music industry now? Now it's like,

you know, 10 years later. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. We were just talking online, just tweeting, actually about this idea of version control for music and you know seeing him and I think in life of Pablo Kanye kind of shipped that record what everyone thought prematurely and he was updating mixes and kind of changing versions in real time and you as a result got to experience kind of different versions of that record as he sat with it that was really cool to me I think that to me feels like a really interesting future this kind of dynamic media environment like talk a lot about interactive media and the future of media being interactive. That to me, I think, is really compelling, this ability to kind of create this work that can respond to, you know,

social political demands or, you know, different cultural contexts. And I think that stuff, people are still kind of reluctant to explore those things because they're really attached to the romantic nature of music or cinema as it was understood in the 70s. And I, you know, I'm most interested in trying to explore new design space and kind of push these forms. And so that's the stuff that I get really excited about. So when did you leave Spotify? That was 2015 or 16? Gosh, it feels like forever ago, but not that long ago.

Five years. How come you left? It sounds like you crave new things. But tell us about what you were looking for when you left. You know, I think I definitely crave new things. And I say one of the things that Spotify did quite well, Daniel himself is like, you know, quite accomplished hacker and creator and builder. And I think recognized early on that if you wanted to get really talented, creative people who were also technologists, they need to be able to kind of have side

projects and do other things. And so while I was at Spotify, I was managing banks, I was producing records. I was doing all of these things. And it really made it a more sustainable situation for me. I think I left because I felt the organization changing. You know, it was this kind of quirky little startup was becoming this big corporation. And there's a gravity to corporate life. And it's hard to escape, even with the best intentions. I mean, even running my organization, as we've begun to scale, you can feel the weight of the corporate life, you know, pushing down on all this culture we've tried to create to push back against it. So that was one reason. The other major reason was I was kind of at a crossroads. I knew I loved technology. I knew I loved media. I was turning 30 years old.

And it felt like I wanted to spend my 30s, you know, really kind of pursuing my life's work and and things that I thought could make the most impact. And I felt like if I created my own thing, I'd be able to probably better fulfill that dream. And so I started thinking a lot about, you know, media at that moment, technology at that moment, where I had seen those two things do the most good. And I recognized that actually I had seen most of that good come from television programs like Will & Grace or the X-Men cartoon, I was a young person, or Jefferson's, which is, you know, an earlier programming in the United States.

had seen those programs change the way, you know, the United States had viewed people and created a more empathetic or tolerant reality. And there seemed to be an opportunity to kind of explore that idea inside different types of new media, whether it was social media or kind of emergent stuff. And what began to take shape in my head was like, you know, man, in an era where we have more global issues than ever, we seem we don't have any global narratives kind of pulling us together. If we could create global narratives with global characters, could we address climate? Could we address global economic issues? You know, could we address global pandemic issues? That would be really exciting. And if we wanted to do that, we needed to create characters that could scale like software.

And that was kind of the seedling that turned into Rudd. And so while I was at Spotify, I was thinking a lot about that. You know, super into stuff like Littoral Avedon, Hatsune Miku, and then, you know, legacy, Marvel stuff, Disney stuff, Pixar stuff. and thinking about where those two might meet with what was happening on Foshan or in IRC or all these places where smart people were coming together to form opinions about the world. So you formed Broad. Yes. Basically, Brad describes itself as a trans media company.

So you already said that basically you were aiming to create narratives that kind of pull people together. Can you make that a bit more tangible? So what is it that Brad does on a day-to-day basis? Sure. And I think, you know, to make even more tangible, for context, I talked about a program called William Grace, maybe some of your international listeners might not know. It was a television program in the States that these are two different gay characters.

And when as, you know, there's all this great polling data in America that basically shows Americans' perception of the homosexual community was tied to the ratings of that program. So as that program became more popular, people had more. favorable points of view of the gay community. And, you know, people often connect those dots to gay marriage being legalized in the United States. So what I wanted to do was say, man, that was kind of an emergent form that was really nailed and had a big impact on people. Are there other emergent forms of storytelling we could use to kind of share other themes that we felt were important? And one of the things that I'd be kind of kind of, you know, rock or kind of

make sense of was this idea of narrative living across different media channels and being kind of connected by these characters. So I often, you know, somewhat tongue-in-cheekly, but I often speak to the Kardashians, the Jenners, the West, as Kanye West, like the most impactful and important storytellers of our generation. They're able to connect these dots from their social media to kind of press aggregators, like a TMZ, to traditional, like linear long form television like keeping up with the Kardashians. And what you have is this narrative that kind of flows across these things in a way that is far deeper than traditional just like wrong form film or television, where, you know, if I watch Star Wars, effectively, I can go as deep as Star Wars.

But if I watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians, I can then pop into a Instagram post that reflects that, a Spotify song talking about that incident, a YouTube video of them walking out of a nightclub. They're all these pieces, and you have this really deep world you can immerse yourself in. And so the dream for us as a transmedia studio is to kind of reflect that type of storytelling and do it in a fictional way. And so what we see is there's an opportunity, kind of a, I don't know you're familiar with like professional wrestling here in the States, WWE. I often talk about that as parapfiction. It's this idea of telling a fictional story in a place traditionally reserved for nonfiction. And in a world where people infinitely scroll to see someone get hit with a chair in a boxing ring, we should go, wait a minute, what? Was that real? And you pause and you have to reflect on that moment. To scroll through an Instagram feed and to see one of our virtual celebrities, our virtual characters and be like, wait, is that real? Makes you pause and reflect on what you're seeing. So really what we're trying to do is to tell fictional stories and spaces traditionally reserved for nonfiction primarily with these characters we've created in the name of the name.

of building kind of more tolerant and empathetic futures. And that was kind of this big ambitious, hope we dreaming thing. It's now been realized a bit more of like a modern Marvel or Disney or primarily tell stories on social. Let's get to our sponsor, Solana. Now, this is a special ad for me to read because I've been a deep supporter of this project since meeting the Solana team back in 2018. I invest personally in the project,

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You mentioned the WWE. There's this concept from WWE that I've heard of called KFAB, which is like this idea of like, you know, we all sort of agreeing to treat this like fictional thing as real and just for the sake of the story. And how important do you think that is in like sort of, you know, some of the work you've done with Lil Michaela and stuff like where like there's a little bit of disbelief that you have to suspend. But once you suspend that, it becomes way more enjoyable. That's absolutely. I mean, it's a huge part of what we do. And I think, you know, it's not if people will ask me what that word is in my Twitter bio because I have this, this.

the Twitter boughs is the K-Fed of K-Fabe. And K-Fed is a reference to Kevin Federline, who was married to Britney Spears for a moment and was this kind of like pop culture, flash in the pan. And that's kind of how I'd like to exist, right? It's like this pop culture manifestation of this idea of K-Fabe

where we can bring people together to collectively participate in this idea that Little Michaela, one of our fictional characters, who in her story is a sentient robot navigating Los Angeles, this entirely fictional thing is real to everyone participating inside of it. It actually becomes a pretty great filter for like boomers and like believers,

as I would describe them. The young people, and the majority of our fans are young people, will often participate in that cave. And Michaela will say, hey, I went to the mall today. And they'll be like, oh, my God, I saw you there. I didn't want to say hi. And England has an older person to be like, you didn't see her there. She's fake. And they'll be like, I saw her there.

Like, you're a boomer. I think that K-Fave acts as a pretty good way of signaling you're in this community, and if you don't get it, you're out. And so, yeah, I'm a huge fan of that. I think you often see that playing out in other places as well. Yeah, just as a bit of background. So basically, Sonny and I were talking about this earlier, and neither of us is Instagram savvy. I don't even have an Instagram account.

And so basically, little Michaela, for those of you who also didn't know her, So she's this, as Travis said, this sentient robot that lives in LA and it's entirely fictional. But she has an Instagram account. She also has a Twitter account. She has a modeling career, a music career. She has a couple of million followers. So how many people does it actually take to be Michaela? So how many stuff do you have on Michaela at Brut?

Yeah. So we think of Brut kind of like Disney, right? where we have these characters and these stories that we tell. We're 30 plus people now. You know, a lot of engineering, creative team, production, marketing, kind of operations functions. So we really think of ourselves kind of like, you know, the next evolution in a media organization, where you're building consensus amongst groups of people to kind of push your collective visions through this one entity.

You know, it reminds me often I talk about headless brands a lot, kind of like the Toby Shore and other internet idea. and one of the reasons I'm deeply interested in this idea is another reason I'm deeply interested in crypto, right? This idea of, you know, having these identities that can be these vehicles for ideas and they can be ideas from collectives. And, you know, we kind of have our own little consensus mechanisms internally for what ideas get pushed through Michaela as an entity. But I'm super interested in some of the things we're exploring is how to kind of expand those things to larger groups and they build consensus and they continue to create. great media with a kind of more inclusive model that would kind of pull the community and the fandom in as well. You referred to Headless Brands just a moment ago. Can you explain what that is?

Yeah, I mean, our idea of it is a bit different. You know, really when I talk about Heidel's Brand, I'm talking about our character in Little Michaela where you'll have maybe a writer, you'll have a choreographer, maybe a fashion stylists and through Michaela, they have this vehicle where they can push their ideas through it and maybe one plus one equals three. You know, headless brands as other internet and Toby describe it. I think they try it more as kind of like decentralized consensus systems where you effectively have a vehicle that can make decisions and then kind of push ideas into the future.

Ours is far more centralized and they'd probably describe immediately, but we're hoping to get towards a more decentralized solution. down the road. So what are some of the plans of how you sort of aim to do that? Like how, like, you know, right now, Bradd really is the one that kind of drives sort of the narrative of Lil Macalah and the other characters as well.

How currently, and then how in the future do you imagine that the fans and the audience will be able to interact with it with the narratives and help shape the narratives? Yeah, so it's a great point. I mean, one of the things I spent a lot of time doing is, you know, earlier on in my journey, you know, JJ Abrams and Bad Robot were kind of early fans of what we were building with Rudd. We got to work out of their office.

And I remember kind of, you know, hanging with JJ and talking about the writing process and thinking about how, you know, and learning that like, you know, people at Disney may oftentimes have to call Star Wars fans to get the most up-to-date intel on the actual Star Wars universe because the fans are deeper in it then as professionals whose day-to-day lives that are to manage these ecosystems. And you know, you look at that as kind of a very literal way of mining fandom. And I often look at like data dashboards

as kind of being these really, you know, as being another, an abstraction of that, right? You want to figure out what people are liking. And instead of, you know, asking them directly, you can kind of look at dashboards and interactions and try to infer what they're appreciating and whatnot. So what we do currently is largely a bit of both of those things. We effectively have hypotheses and we have narracies

and we have narratives, you know, there are arcs. Michaela's story is really that of otherness. It's a sentient robot alone in the world trying to figure it out and make her way, something that is a reflection of a lot of our internal staffs, you know, childhoods or teenage years. And we'll kind of talk about ideas currently. We'll then kind of discuss them internally,

make a decision, hand off that creative to a production team that will make those assets and then ship them. I think the dream would be to kind of start really early on and say, hey, you know, fans, why don't you come into the fray? We're thinking about Michaela turning left or turning right. You know, which one do you think is more exciting?

And you could obviously imagine a governance token or something like that, being a pretty simple application for doing something like that. If you were to solve for that, then it becomes kind of like this global, choose your own adventure game where we're kind of pulling fans in on this journey. And some may opt out and say, I don't want to see what's going to happen in this story. Others may say, I want to be a part of the creation.

And you allow this kind of medium that was at once like a broadcast medium where you're kind of just pushing things to people to all of a sudden become this like interactive game where you'll have players, you'll have kind of viewers. I'm sure you have people that want to attack the game and try to like, you know, pervert the rules to do things. And I think that will be a really interesting model for media down the road. So that's kind of how we're starting to make sense of it. Let's get to our sponsor, Exodus. Exodus is a fantastic cryptocurrency wallet that strikes a right. balance between ease of use, security and great features. You can get Exodus on the iPhone, desktop app, web app, Android, whatever platform you use. It's a non-custodial wallet and that is so

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So I think you already touched upon it a little bit. If you think back on the points you made on Will and Grace earlier, so basically the fact that it really fostered the acceptance of homosexuals, and basically and the incorporation into it. I mean, basically, it's been a major paradigm fifth, right? So basically, I remember when I was a kid being gay, this was kind of, it wasn't really talked about it. Now it's super normal.

So if we look back on this conversation in 10 years, what do you hope the shift that Lil Michaela will have elicited would be? Yeah. I think the dream for us is to kind of have these open-ended allegories that can be applied to all kinds of different models or situations for hundreds of years. And oftentimes when I'm talking to like new employees about how we approach a lot of this stuff, you know, I often say we kind of think about 80% allegory and 20% kind of like times. response to social political discourse. And the reason we do that is largely because, you know, if I were to say, hey, like, we want to go 100% encouraging people to write their senators to, you know, change one bill, that would probably be, like, effective immediately, would probably have, you know,

it would pay less dividends long term versus, you know, if I were to, you know, what I often do with them, as I say, like, you know, the reason we do is, I would ask you, you know, who are some of your favorite politicians from before the 18th century? they're kind of like, uh, and they have to go, who your favorite screenwriters or artists or painters, they instantly have names. And that's because McBeth is as relevant now as it was hundreds of years ago. And you can apply a lot of those lessons to things going forward. And so what we try to do, for instance, you know, in Michaela's story, that major arc is really one of otherness of being this sentient robot, this misunderstood entity who people don't believe to be real.

and to show Michaela on a journey to like fulfillment or into kind of like chasing her dreams. And in doing so, you know, it's something that I never would have expected. You know, we often have like, you know, non-binary kids from the Midwest who will reach out and say, hey, it's so cool to me to see someone who people don't believe is real. They don't believe their identity is real winning because in my town, no one believes that I'm real or that my identity is real. And I often be like, I can't do the things that I want to do. And so that's why we try to approach it more of an open-ended way where it's like how can we Trojan horse these ideas of tolerance or ideas of empathy inside these narratives that are as

compelling as a Kardashian fight or a Logan Paul YouTube or whatever else is competing for attention. And that's kind of a delicate balance. It should be entertaining. It should be juicy. It should be YAA fun. But there can also be themes that resonate. Do you think that having these like fictional narrative will be better at

becoming allegories than like real world is there a concern where in a fictional world like maybe some of these characters end up being very okay maybe the way I'm phrasing this is like you know imagine there's a little kid and like they're heroes right

like is it better for a little kid to have heroes that are real that have like you know real world flaws and stuff or like does it maybe turn into a problem if like a little kid growing up has these heroes that in reality are fictional and maybe are, and does that set them up for like a miss, a bad view of like the future? Yeah, I mean, I think my dream would be that kids would have both, right? And I don't think it needs to be in either situation. I often view it through the lens of my own coming of age and through kind of like historical.

I mean, if you go back when you read all the myth stuff, we talk about oftentimes like, you know, who is the first scalable celebrity? You could argue Christ, Muhammad, you know, those are examples of like narratives and celebrity that have like radically changed the world. You know, in the case I often speak to is like often engaged with like Silicon Valley Libertarians, too to me feel like, you know, Batman. You know, they're these super wealthy people who are using their like technological expertise and wealth to impose their will on society. And it could be subconscious, but I often like to believe, you know, like comic books informed. that sense of purpose. I often would watch X-Men and be like, man, I can't wait to like hit P-Reed, get my mutant powers because there was this idea that like I was different,

that I felt different, and that X-Men was a place where that was okay and acceptable, and you could use your difference to do a lot of good for other people who were different. And so for me, the answer is like, hopefully there's both. I want people to want to be Michael Jordan and Little Michaela. That would be the dream. But I think as we be begin to see, you know, what I would call it, like, you know, the emergent spatial computing future or metaverse or kind of this interactive layer of our lives, kind of push more into our meat space or IRL lives. I'm actually kind of rooting for IRL or meet space interactions to kind of evolve as a product and get better as a product as silly as that sounds

to push back. I think people often escape into video games because video games enable the mobility and like kind of upward mobility, even if it's like leveling up a warlock from level one to 99 or whatever it is that you don't have in your IRA lives, especially in the States. We kind of have this like new liberal hellscape where you're trapped in your like ghetto purgatory. And if you can't move up and down, you're like, yeah, I'd rather get into Fortnite and create some wins. And so I'm actually hoping that like, you know, while we're building our kind of virtual instance of like these allegorical tales, that those would weed into the meat space and allow people to kind of build out better futures for our IRL, like human lives.

And that's a bit of a tangent. But I'm hoping it gets better for all of us in real world meat space. I love this tangent. And I think we should definitely go off on it. And I think the way to get there is following the crypto path. So you've actually been in crypto or on the sidelines of crypto for a long time. So I read that you've been in crypto since 2013 somewhere. So tell us.

What drew you in? I mean, I wish it was really noble, but it was purely speculative in 2013. You know, I think the reality was I was like, hey, this thing seems interesting and I can probably make a bunch of money on it. And then you start reading white papers and you're like, that's kind of cool. And then, you know, as you get deeper into media and, you know, at the time I was at Spotify and you were kind of grappling with advertising being a large part of this funny model. and like advertising being its original sin of the internet.

And I remember like reading Kevin Kelly Wired style techno optimist media as a young person about how the internet was going to change everything and bring truth to the whole world. And when I was like, wow. And then you look back on it and you're like, what happened that that didn't play out? And the kind of first thing for me was, man, advertising perverted the incentive structure of the internet. And if there was programmable money, perhaps that would have looked different. And that was kind of like the very simple seed of like maybe the internet could look different.

And then it course, it evolved and like maybe we could just redo the whole internet. Maybe we could tokenize everything. You know, most people book flights on travel aggregators to get more options and the best prices for the travel plans. So when you're making defy swaps, use per swap. It beats market prices across all major dexes. And thanks to the network of professional market makers, you'll get zero slippage on your your trades. They just pushed a huge update that's even faster and more liquid thanks to a brand new algorithm. It's cheaper than Unoswap and it comes with a new gas token that cuts your gas

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Yeah, you know, it absolutely was my first venture into crypto as a creator. And, you know, I think I was just talking to a friend about how, you know, We sold a Michaela NFT in November and, you know, I created a front of benefits six, eight months ago. And I mean, I felt pretty behind, but now everyone's being like, wow, you were so early and creating things for crypto. And I was like, I largely just sat in the sidelines and my friends are doing cool stuff. But I was thinking back to the moment, my friend Calvin, who I believe is so the chief strategist at compound, we met through trading crypto. You know, like we were just talk about crypto and I talked every single day in this small group of friends. he ended up getting married in Los Angeles and I came to his wedding, you know,

having only really known him through trading crypto and sat by Robert, you know, the founder of compound and it was kind of in crypto bear market. And he was just like, you know, what do you, you're into crypto? And I'm like, yeah, you know, I'm like kind of. I'm not outside. He's like, what do you like? And I'm like, this prediction market veil thing seems pretty cool. And like there's some like maker down stuff.

And she's like, oh, okay. So you actually, I'm like, yeah, I'm actually paying it. as much as I can, but it moves so fast. And so all that is to say, I felt like I was extremely behind on creating anything in crypto and, you know, created friends with benefits mostly because I wanted to kind of prove out an idea that I had talked about a bunch with some of my friends who were also artists. And that was a lot of them were kind of getting interested in only fans or substack or Patreon, some of this creator economy stuff.

And my kind of sentiment was like, eventually there's going to be, you know, more supply than demand and they'll be kind of diminishing returns for a lot of this stuff. And at which point, you'll have situations where a bunch of writers are like, what if we bundled our substacks and like, and you're like, oh, okay, it's like the magazine or whatever, like all those kind of like quick, dumb ideas. And so in my head, it was like, wouldn't it be cool if there were more collectivist models of creating media? Because Web 2, for a lot of my peers, has been getting on a treadmill and trying to crank out as much tough as you can to survive. And if there were a mean to kind of distribute some of that workload so that someone could take a vacation or like really do

some deep research and think that'd be exciting. And so Francis Benefits is a tokenized community. If you're interested, it's fwb.help. And it was born out of a simple idea that social networks are valuable because of the content the users create. And oftentimes those creators don't participate in the upside of those social networks. And so, if we created a fixed amount of tokens and we created a gate where you needed to own a certain amount of tokens to enter this Discord, perhaps people would come in, create a lot of value, which would make more people want to join, increased demand on a fixed supply equals people's token bags grow. And you have this reflection of the value you're creating in your token bags.

Hack it together in a weekend, spun it up, started inviting my friends. And I think it kind of kicked off with this NFT mania a bit. And so we've had a ton of great members and, you know, we've had a ton of interest, which is awesome. Anyone from Richie Houghton to Mike Shinoda to, you know, really incredible, you know, all of, you know, Lindsay at Foundation, and Jacob from Zora, all these incredible pillars of both the kind of crypto and, like, media world and the culture world coming together to try to make sense of what Web3 can be for creative people. But, Trevor, just to make sure.

So basically, only the people who are. inside the gates can consume the content, right? Or is the content monetized? That's exactly right. And actually, like, there's a lot of tweet talking here, but I actually fired up a tweet as we were kind of doing it saying, what if I told you some gatekeepers are good?

And that was like part of this idea that, like, you know, what if Web 3 has these gates, but they're kind of gates that were kind of more thoughtful. And so, yes, all the media and, you know, people sometimes screenshot things and bring it outside of the gates. But the most part, people are just hanging out in Discord, for having conversations, sharing interesting links to music, skin and hair products, NFTs, you name it.

It's a wide range. So how is it different from private members clubs that we have in the analog world? I mean, so things like Soho House or, you know, say even a country club or something. Yeah. So I would say the one major difference that I had in my head was that those are often fee-based, right, where you're paying a fee monthly or quarterly or annually, whatever. it is. Really what we're asking you to do to join front of benefits is to stake tokens, right? So it's kind of like a proof of stake model where it's like if you hold 60 FWB, you're in.

And if at any point you want to leave, you can dump your bags and go. And so it's more of a deposit. And basically what, you know, the idea there is that if you have, you know, these tokens, hopefully you're going to want to see those tokens or the value they represent, you know, be maintained or grow at least. so you're going to want to maintain this space. And, you know, for the most part, that's played out. We have this space that feels a lot like the early Internet to me, where I get on a message board, and was met with a lot of love and a lot of good faith

versus getting in the Panopticon of Twitter now and just being met with like a hellstorm with like malicious angry tweets. So, yeah, it's been a really comforting, fun place to be on the Internet. So what do you think stops people from monetizing decks their early exposure to, you know, ideas of the in-crow? I think, I mean, I think people probably do monetize. I mean, we talk up through ideas often in their thing that realized as products, which is cool. You know, people, I ended up, actually, this is kind of a very FWB story.

There's a recording artist named Jock Green based out of Canada. And he was saying, hey, I think I want to do a non-bungeable token. I'm not sure how I want to do it, but I think I may want to involve my publishing. And in the at the VB chat, people kind of talk through a bunch of different ideas. He ended up minting, you know, really a loop that he was going to build into a whole song. And it would include the publishing. And I was so intrigued by it that I bought it on foundation. And I think that's a good example of the kind of things. Like, it's a space where people can come in to a crypto space that people can approach where there's, you know, not a ton of talk about

speculation. I think one of the challenges for me in crypto spaces is it's all. kind of like moonboys, so to speak, asking like when number go up. And this is a bit more of a space where people are like, okay, can I tokenize my master royalties? People are like, well, you know, things happening off-chain, you ignite the feedback you need to build the web free future you want to live it. So is there a governance model for friends with benefit or of benefits? I mean, can I get kicked out for misdemeanor? I mean, I'm sure there's rules, right? Certainly, yes, it was ever evolving. We just migrated to the FWB Dow.

And so we traditionally had a set of rules that were pretty centralized at the beginning. There was volunteer staff. If you, you know, it didn't approach people in good faith. You met with a warning and eventually be kicked out. We asked people not to be racist and were phobic. There's a whole set of rules we had kind of outlined to make it a space we wanted to be. And more recently, we've evolved that we have FWB, Dow. You know, their best proposals.

One of them was for a fundraise. We just, we raised $700,000 to kind of like hire some full-time staff at WWB. And we've established, you know, so that was actually voted on by her proposal. We've established a host committee. And so anyone who wants to join FWB now gets approved by the host committee. It's a lot of simple form. And the host committee will say thumbs up, thumbs down. It's not that intimidating.

We just want to keep spammers and kind of like bad actors out. And, you know, going forward, we're kind of continue to explore what governance can look like and what it can mean. both for kind of like URL virtual stuff, but also for IRL things. I think there's no reason to believe that we won't bring it from the benefits to the meat space and try to bring people together. And there's like all kinds of meetups already. Members could get together like, you know, restaurants and hang out. But it'd be great to have everyone together in one space and kind of like talk about building the future we want to see exist.

So how do you deal with the lurkers? Well, that's what's interesting. I have to admit, I was a lurker. And I actually, I found out this morning that I, can no longer access the space because you now need more FWB tokens than I have and bought when I first join. So that kind of gives away part of the answer, I guess. That's exactly right. So one of the things that we subscribed to and that we've kind of, maybe pioneer for community tokens is this idea of seasons. And I'm forgetting Simon's last name, maybe it's Simone even,

but there was a gentleman to come up with the idea of seasons, kind of like, implementing similar models that you see in video games to communities or DOWs. And basically every three months, every quarter, we up the amount of tokens you need to make, and you need to join FWB. And in parallel, we have a source cred instance that's bought that's tracking who's contributing to the Discord chat. And if you contribute regularly, you'll probably get more than FWB granted to you to make it next season.

And if you're not contributing, you need to go buy more tokens to participate. And so you were caught by the season's Gate Monster and kicked out, but you know, this season, now you've been in Stoner to contribute a bit more. I should, I should. So I know you mentioned

that, you know, you're fans of the other internet posts and stuff. There's another one that I really like. I think probably my favorite one, I think the Headless brand is probably my second favorite one, but was the squad wealth one. And so how do you see some of those ideas applying to like the sort of

of communities. What do you describe this as a squad, or is it too big to be a squad at this point? I think the way they defined it is probably too big to be a squad. You know, another, when Toby was working on that piece, he makes up me an early version to kind of like just run through and make some notes. And it was kind of in the middle of DFI summer. And I, you know, pre at WB, I was in, and I still am in a group, it's called Chad Team 6. And it's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but like Dre,

RAC, you know, like Justin Blow, your means bank chain, Amy from Circle, you know, they're blondeish. A bunch of kind of weirdos from Crypto Land are in there. And when I read that text, it really spoke to the kind of joy that I had being as a part of that group. And, you know, maybe a bit, TMI,

I just got out of a breakup in a relationship and I was getting so much joy and fulfillment out of like sharing out of like sharing. with my friends. And so I think, you know, SWB was probably born out of that. Almost certainly is. I would say at the BV is a bit bigger than a squad at this point. We're probably a community. But we'd like to try to, and that's one of the great challenges, as you scale an organization or as you scale a large community, how do you maintain that magic? How do you make it a place people still feel

safe to exist and share and learn? And how do you kind of like highlight the best of it when there's so much going on? And that's the stuff that we're going to constantly be tackling. How do you think, I mean, basically, this kind of naturally evolves into the concept of a DAO and basically gatekeeping and kind of coming up with rules and updating these rules and so on. So how much impact do you think the concept of a DAO is going to have on us in the next decade or so? Personally, I think it's going to restructure a large part of my world, right? It's kind of like media world. I largely see NFTs and Web3 as already restructure.

the individual value chain, right? The kind of creator value chain. Where I see Dow is in, you know, reorganizing and restructuring the kind of like media organization value chain. And that can be, you know, I mean that I can mean Time magazine. That could mean vice. That could mean, you know, universal pictures. I think the idea, I think, you know, people having lived through COVID and working remote

and kind of interfacing in a project to project fashion. to me actually feels a bit more like the future of work and always has almost what happens in like film now where it's like you have your core crew and you go take on a project you go shoot a movie for two months or two years you come off of it and something out like I think it works to be more modular

so I think that's gonna be a big part of white dowels are appealing I also think that like as we get better at kind of solving for some of the consensus challenges the kind of like core governance stuff it's going to be very appealing to like be a part of the decision making and things that you care about and so I think I've already seen

that. And so for me, yeah, I think I think Dallas are going to, hopefully, may I should knock on wood, because it might not be, maybe it's that negative. I think hopefully it will be this like net positive restructuring a lot of the organizations that we've come to know because, you know, it's a different world than it was hundreds of years ago when corporations were first starting to take shape. And do you think this is also going to benefit creators and contributors? I mean, because often, I mean, in today's organizations, often they are. kind of disenfranchised from the fruits of their work, right? Absolutely. And I think some people would elect to continue to stay disenfranchised. I think there's like some safety in being removed from the decision making. And it's often intriguing to me because I'm someone who loves autonomy and loves to be making decisions and loves to be first through the door.

But oftentimes when you're making these decisions, you're met with blowback, right? And I think one of the things that will probably accelerate some of these dowings is the ability for dows to act as heat shields for people who want to take more risk creatively. And the flip side of that is that like, you know, and there's probably like synonymous dows. You know, even like I guess like, you know, Medicobe and tubidor stuff, like there's obviously, you know, real desire to be, to have this synonymous persona in this emergent internet. And I imagine synonymous dows or dows full of synonymous or anonymous characters will

allow them to take creative risk. they might not otherwise be able to take as, you know, with ID or identities linked to their real meets based on else. So all I is to say, I'm super bullish on DAOs. I think, you know, as people begin to recognize the amount of value that can be created when you mobilize people, not only with network effects, but also with tokenomics and with good governance, you're going to see lots of good stuff gets one together quite quickly.

You talked about pseudonymous identities. So is the idea that all of us are going to be? be multiple people. I have multiple facets that are not necessarily connected to each other. Yeah, I think it's going to be hard to manage the reputation of a ton of different identities. But I think, you know, much the same way when I'm speaking at a tech conference, I'm one version of myself. And when I'm like in the rave, I'm a different version of myself, we're going to have, I think, identities. I imagine kind of like wallets, or even imagine like multi-sig wallets where we're kind of collective identities

that allow us to navigate in different spaces in different ways. So I'd imagine I kind of have my public skeet.eath wallet, which isn't necessarily where I keep a lot of my positions or where I kind of do a lot of my learning, but it's a place where I can store NFTs that represent who I am.

And so if I think about my wallet, my public facing wallet as being this identity where people can instantly understand where I fit in the kind of like larger web three world, I almost imagine a future looking somewhat like, almost like, you remember that like the gen score? I forgot which like D5 upstart had like a little thing where like if you had a high enough degen score, if you had done enough, you'd done it enough nonsense or like you'd aped into enough smart contracts or whatever.

Like they would let you participate in the earlier version of they built. I imagine that people kind of doing similar versions of that just individually. Will they look at your wallet and be like, oh, wow. Like, you know, Trevor has a crypto kitty from 2017. So he must have been in the game back then. And you know what? It looks like he has this an NFT poem from an artist that I like. That's really cool.

And he holds Rari governance tokens. I love those little 15-year-old hacker kids. You know, like you can start to paint a picture of someone. And I think that's going to be valuable. I also will then probably have like wallets that will allow me to present myself in totally different ways. And maybe I'll want to control more synonymous or participate in a network and a market. more saddamous way than that way. Where I get really excited, though, and what I always talk about as much as I can

because someone needs to explore this, is kind of like the emergent opportunity for multi-signature wall is to allow for collective identities to exist in applications. And, you know, I guess because I just, I remember, I don't know, I think often about, like, tocoon or kind of like, you know, collectives of radical writers that are able to anonymously put work together, push it out and make a big impact. In fact, it'd be so cool to have a collective or a body that maybe no one even knows each other, but they can make decisions with consensus, put things into the world and kind of interact with application as a group versus an individual.

And I've only ever really known interfacing with applications on the web as an individual. Do you think that a lot of the software and, like, tooling you guys use in like some of your characters, like, like Lil' Michaela will also be used for creating these, like, you know, taking these new identities, whether they're like, you know, like pseudonymous identities for like, you know, a lot of people within crypto like to, you know, do self anonymously. And so they use these like pseudonyms. And then also for these like collective group identities. Do you think like we're going to see, uh, more of these sort of like digital avatars, but like more than just avatars like be like the personification

of these new identities? I certainly think so. I think, you know, whether it's like chain link God or like any of these other like bizarre crypto Twitter personas, there clearly is a desire to establish reputation without it being connected to your like IRL self. And so I think the tools that we're building will enable people to probably do some of that, you know, visually via the avatar. But that avatar largely will act as a still, I think in the immediate future until you kind of have like the voice modulation software that allows people to kind of go, you know, one to one. The text to speech stuff is okay, but you lose intonation in the kind of aspect that allows people to connect.

And I think we're getting pretty close. People are doing some pretty impressive stuff that will allow me to effectively speak into this microphone and come out with something that sounds pretty indistinguishable from Barack Obama or whatever else. You've seen some of the deep fake stuff. But that again is that training data is Barack Obama reading his audiobook, right? So it's pretty monotonous. The ability to have that kind of range and that dynamism is I think what makes people really. fall in love with who you are. And so that's going to be a whole other set of technical feats that will need to be solved outside of what we're building. So most of the

Lil Michaela stuff right now, the audio is like you have voice actors to do those. Correct. We've got multiple voice actors. We played around a bit and had like layered, especially in recordings, some kind of generative stuff. But for the most part, humans. We like humans. We like augmenting humans. One of the recurring themes of this podcast has been ownership and stake. Brut itself is a company that's funded by VCs. If you could do it again, would you have VCs again? Or would you kind of try to raise funds via some sort of crowdfunding mechanism, be it an ICO or something us. Yeah, while I believe that like venture capital one exists in 15 years, I just don't think there'll be a need for it. I also have had like an incredible experience with my VCs. Like,

while I heard 60 knows out the gate, when we found our tribe and our people, they've been hugely supportive. And even in like CryptoVC, I think they're kind of so traumatized from Fair Launch and the kind of anti-VC rhetoric. They want to be extra helpful and like extra kind of extra kind. And so I think it's noble and I think it's appealing to have a mixture. I think it's appealing to me out of a mixture primarily because I would like again for our community to have upside and what we're doing. That would be the dream to have everyone aligned in that way. That said, when you start to link, you know, community with a token price or with things that may in the short term move in a direction they don't like,

you can sometimes, you may have to deal with the consequences of people that are thinking more short term than you'd like to think, right? And that's the consequences you've seen like in the American stock market. Most companies aren't operating on a five-year-by, they're operating quarter to quarter because they need to appease of people that are monitoring that stock price. I would be aware of people trying to build businesses

if they had to manage a token price day and day out. I think it's distracting. I think it's hard. I think even looking at like uniswap token price. You know, they do an air drop, number go up, number go way down. And now you've got to think about, okay, are people going to like flee? Are they going to, you know, because of this token price, I'm going to manage this thing. And of course, the price would turn to where it probably should be.

But through that trough, it kind of adds its cognitive load that is not helpful in trying to build something meaningful. And so all that is to say, I would like to find a way to maybe split the difference where it's like I want people with that ownership, but I also want you to be aligned in this long term journey, not just trying to like swing trade my livelihood. How do you think Taoist can achieve that? I mean, obviously there's kind of, and this is a bit outside of, you know, my expertise, but where I'm trying to learn a lot. I mean, obviously lockups, I think, you know, figuring out ways to kind of get people to stake in lock up tokens for long term. waiting those votes more than others. That's also that people have already tried to explore. I'm, again, maybe like cheesy humanist, interested in kind of connecting a human face

and a name to a product. Like, you know, I, like we were talking about Rari. Like, I just figured out, like, one of the lead devs is like an eighth grader at this L.A. school, this L.A. private school. And, like, I want those kids to win so bad now. Like, he's literally 15 years old and has like $30 million locked up in the smart contracts that he's written or whatever. Like, that's so cool to me. That is, that is so exciting. And as a result, I'm going to, like, defend that project to the end of the earth. And so part of me is

interested in seeing people's, like, faces and names and livelihoods and families and kind of humanizing these products. They aren't just, you know, abstractions of a token price. It isn't all the number go up. Like, these are people, these are ideas and they are dreams that if realized, could be really meaningful for lots of people. And so that is, again, maybe the romantic in me, But I'd like to kind of see the ethereal human stuff met with the kind of technical code stuff as well. You've kind of worked with and for projects in the past and are still working with them, that in the eyes of a lot of crypto people doing more bad than good. So, I mean, basically if you look at Spotify and what it's done to artists and

how unlucrative it's become to actually put anything out there. I mean, basically, LeMichela lives mostly on Instagram. I mean, Facebook, it's highly problematic. How do you feel about kind of straddling that gap? Well, I would say, so the Michaela stuff, right, like, I think Michaela's really a reflection of the creator experience as a whole, right? Like, we're kind of fighting the same fight. we've got a bunch of people working for us, but ultimately we're creating a ton of value for these platforms that isn't really being flowed back to ourselves or our community.

And so, you know, part of the one of the reasons we're interested in non-bunicable tokens and DAOs and kind of figuring out other means of being or ways of being is to solve for that in the hopes that other media organizations can, you know, replicate it, but also individuals can replicate it as well. So, yeah, it sucks for everybody. Spotify to me was a really interesting opportunity that, you know, I don't think was able to hit the escape velocity it needed to overcome the major label hurdle. And I don't think Dan would like me saying this, but I think, you know, in meeting like Daniel Eck and folks early on, there was a real dream of getting to a place where artists didn't necessarily need those labels. And at that point, the economics become way more favorable. I don't think that Spotify got there. and as a result, you kind of have this worse, I mean, the other situation that is suboptimal

for 99% of actors on the platform. And it's beneficial to the big labels for sure. And I think they've done a lot of things to prevent Spotify from getting where it wanted to be. And that is the challenge of a world where 70% of the history of recorded music is owned by three bodies, right? That's a real challenge.

Versus you look at even like Netflix, right? because there are so many different distributors, the economics of that are far different. And because there are so many streaming players, you have a far more competitive landscape and deals that, like, filmmakers are largely okay with, you know, like it's no longer Seinfeld streaming revenue, but it's better than, like, you know, falling off a cliff, which is what they saw coming. And so, yeah, not awesome. But hopefully we can figure this thing out.

I mean, I would say the internet as a whole, like, you know, in 96, reading about it. As an 11-year-old, I was like, whoa, like, you know, reading Bill Gates, the long road ahead or whatever, like broadband is going to change everything. It's going to be amazing, this utopia. And then you live through, you know, a decade or at least a half a decade of, like, just such supreme turbulence caused by the internet that you're like, maybe this, was this, was it worth it? I think it was worth it. Like, it was supposed to be a no-brainer. And here we are being like, if I could just turn it all off, would I? So yeah, yeah, here's something we can get it right or a considerably better this go-round.

Where do you think NFTs are going? So Michaela recently published a piece on Mirror saying that she was the original NFD. I don't disagree, but can you explain? And do you think, I mean, basically, if you look at the recent prices that have been paid for NFTs, do you think this is a bubble or do you think this is the new normal? A, Michaela loves to throw the pot. B, it certainly feels like a bubble,

but it also feels like this kind of like price discovery moment, right? Where there's, you know, it's, if people use a 2017 ICO analogy all the time, but I actually think it's like a decent one. You know, people saw all this unbridled upside, and the only question mark is like, how quickly will that upside come to pass? And it took two, three years, whatever, but like when I dealt DFI summer,

I was like, man, it's happening. And you're now seeing the kind of like culture Legos emerge as well on the non-futable token side. And so to me, the price you're seeing a reflection of A, how much value has been locked up in platforms. Like, in talking to friends about how impactful the Drake hotline playing music video was or something, you know, that little dance move, like, that is, was everywhere. And the fact that it generated zero for Drake directly, like that, you just have been conditioned to believe that's the way it should be. And the idea that, like, people would sell a JPEC with $70 million feels important. But, like, he's been creating media for free every day for, like, what, 15 years or something like that?

Like, he's built this passionate fan base and audience. And that number, to me, feels obscene and large, but probably not too far off what it's worth. And so that, that's kind of how I feel. I think that, like, largely the aesthetic of the not-like-booked artwork to me is pretty bad. and not for me. I think the protocols as artworks are probably more interesting than actual artworks themselves, but people are starting to explore them in ways that I appreciate. And so what we're trying to do with Michaela, the Braddow will have some NFT stuff that I can't speak to just yet, but hopefully it allows people to participate in these social, in these kind

of cultural moments that aren't entirely dissimilar from like an NBA top shots, which to me I think is kind of like the killer feature of right now to have this you know NFTs right now to me are a bobblehead you get at a world series baseball game it says like hey I was a part of this experience and that's really exciting and I want that experience to be reflected in my external identity the same way it would be if I went to a concert that I loved and put the poster of that concert on the wall in my house so when people came in they could say hey you were there and that that's kind of how I see it Beyond that right now, I don't know that like collecting moments. I don't have anything outside of collecting moments or maybe like oil or

things that are really intriguing. How about like a, do you think like NFTs will kind of act as this community access token? So currently you have this FWB token that's like, you know, it's just this like normal fungible token. It has a funny name and stuff. But like what if you can merge the NFTs with the FWB tokens where it's like, hey, if you have five of these NFTs, that's your access to it.

But like, you know, there's still like this arc aspect to it along with the access rights it gives. Yeah, I think people are kind of thinking that stuff through right now. I like it as, again, this is with one, which is kind of like some maturity. I like it. I think right now fees are prohibitive, you know, minting fees are prohibitive and kind of collecting fees are prohibitive. and I think to get the kind of scale you need and the kind of diversity you need for a community to thrive,

it can be challenging. I think fungible stuff works a bit better here. But man, if I was fowcious or something and 18 months from now, I had thousands of people who collected my work and I was able to kind of like organize them and kind of like put them in one place, I think that would be kind of like super serve them.

That's probably a pretty great way to build like a fan base that can support you for you. career. So yeah, I'm all for it. I think it's probably difficult to see through right now, but similar to 2017. You know, you read those white papers and you're like, this is going to be cool. And then it took three years with some of this things coming to past. I think this will probably feel similar. Are you looking at layer twos? I am. I'm deeply interested in layer two's and layer ones. I think if you'd asked me six months ago, I'd been like full

Eve Maxi mode and just, but you know, I was playing around in Terra this morning and I was like, this is pretty, these bridges work. And there's probably opportunities to build, build specialized chains. And so whereas I still think he's going to capture most of the value, there are probably opportunities for, you know, whether it's Pocod or NIR or Cosmos, I don't know, like any of these guys, I think there's room for people to do. do interesting things and to carve out new issues that make sense, especially with the bridges. Layer 2's, my friend Matt works optimism. I'm super bullish optimism, optimistic roll-ups.

Part of me, I think, is traumatized by living in Los Angeles. And I kind of think of layer 2. It's just like adding another lane to the highway where it'll just be more traffic. Like clearly there's like latent demand. Like I have my gas fee Chrome extension and I'm just staring at it waiting for the time to get in. And if all of us are waiting to do that, and maybe when we add this extra lane to the highway, we're just going to like bloat it all again. So I'm really curious to see how this stuff plays out.

It's clear that like, you know, Deerun Foundation and others are taking this stuff really seriously and looking to solve both the climate concerns and the kind of thieves. And so here's hoping we solve it soon so we can keep building this cool future. I have one last question as to the cool future. So when you talk to techno-optimists and Web3 believers, they tend to say, that they hope it's going to make life better for everyone, or most people at least. It sounds like you believe that as well, but by what metric? If you look at, I mean, there's different ways of measuring the success or the well-being of people.

If you had to boil it down to a single metric, what's going to change? What's going to make it better? So I think to be clear, when people are like, I don't know. this to make things better for everyone. I kind of instantly write them off because they're just always tradeoffs, right? Like, I think ultimately, like, not everything is zero-sum, but a lot of things feel zero-sum, and in changes, like change to be painful in and in itself. I should clarify that I'm most interested in creating a better future for creative people,

for end of the years, people that are, like, championing new ideas, whether that's fashion designs or, you know, vertical farming techniques or protocol-level government. and it's, you know, code, whatever it is. I'm interested in those people being rewarded for bringing new things into the ether. And that is why I am bullish and that optimistic about our kind of, our web through future. I think the idea of provenance, I think, you know, even the characters and the people that are building in the space to me are like noble people who are interested in new and novel ideas and visionary ideas being rewarded for being so.

the kind of what felt almost like predatory value, like predatory value capture, to me was a reflection of a bunch of like, a bunch of actors who initially have people's collective with interests at hand moving into kind of Web 2 and saying, hey, I would have gone to work on Wall Street, but I saw that one movie with the Zuckerberg guy and I can do this too and get really rich.

What's fun to me about crypto is that we're in a moment again where the people that are building like, really give a shit. And I think that's meaningful. And when you talk to people in the space, they're nice. And maybe they talk to their shoes while they talk to you. But I prefer, I prefer people to talk to their shoes when they talk to you with their right intentions and like some, you know, silver-tonged, you know, MBA who's going to scam you out of whatever you have in your pockets or whatever. And so yes, all they say, I'm a believer in web free building a better future for creative people and for innovators, for people that want to bring new ideas of

us. Cool. I think that's a pretty nice closing statement. Trevor. If people want to find out more about you and Friends with Benefits and Brad, where should they go look you up? Yeah. So my socials are all what dot CD, W-H-A-T-D-O-T-C-D, which is a hat tip to a torrent tracker that some of you your listeners may know. And Friends of Benefits, F-WB dot help has all the info you need, F-W-B tweets on Twitter. And then, you know, for Brud, it's BRUD. FYI. If you'd like to get a hold of me, it's Siskeet, S-K-E-E-E-T at V-R-U-D. FYI. It's my email. Send me good stuff. Maybe some death threats. I can print out those.

More good stuff than death threats. But I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Thank you for coming on, Trevor. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have a Google home or Alexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the Epicenter podcast. Go to epicenter.tv slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen. And while you're there, be sure to sign up for the

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