Using AI to Bridge Real and Virtual Worlds

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 388 with guest trevor mcfederies hi this is friedrich hans and this is sunny agarwal and today with us we have trevor mcfaddens um the ceo and founder of broad and do 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 uh solana which is a next generation

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it's cheaper than uniswap and comes with a new gas token that can cut your gas fees by up to fifty percent plus for all our listeners paraswap offers offers 50 gas refunds for the first swap of at least one eth make your trades and go to paraswab dot io 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 um had a football scholarship and played professional uh football and then dropped out to do music that that much i knew

so you were a rapper right so i actually enjoyed 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 i made like beats and kind of dj'd 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'm 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 then you became a dj who was and actually a very well-known dj uh your stage name was young skeeter and uh you worked uh with um incredible people tell us about that sure yeah so i was in a a group called swayze we ended up putting out like a

top 10 album um i was all i think like 22 years old and so my first trips internationally actually were as a part of that rap group and um 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 left my mind blown right and so um that was in that group i i ended up djing and producing at the time in the states there was kind of this dance music revolution you know i kind of been a part of this blog house kind of proto edm community and when edm grabbed whole 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 into rooms and you know working on tracks you

know with like the black eyed ped producers or you know working with pop backs like you know katy perry you're touring with katie or kesha and then i made music for like isaiah banks and skye ferreira and others 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 kind of it got sidetracked right so basically i i saw that you kind of joined spotify radio early on yeah so um 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 a room all day than being on stage and you know originally djing was kind of like hiding in a corner in a dark room 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 um and i started producing music and i was working as kind of a manager and producer for an artist named banks we were making kind of some alternative r b stuff and you know while i was working with banks also taking a job at spotify really with the idea of kind of getting off the road and being able to stop touring and simultaneously be able to shape uh you know a better reality for creative people and you know especially musicians and so the dream with spotify albums which are trying to realize this future where people could have access to all the music in the world and artists would be compensated uh 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 us and then um you know i kind of like probably overcrack it a bit went deeper into technology and left the culture industry a bit more as you suggested what was that um experience like you know going like what was like the best parts of like get you know 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 have 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'd been a lot of brain drain in the u.s there were record labels that were you know throwing off cash like crazy in the late

90s and by the time we were assigned in 2007 you kind of had bottom of the barrel people running a lot of these playbooks and so you know i talked to our our marketing person you know like what's what's the what's the game plan like oh you know what um you're going to tweet about the album you're like that's that's the marketing plan and we're going to tweet like i'm 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 apparent to me was this kind of idea of you know lean startup and iterating quickly and shipping product regularly talking to customers and then taking their feedback you know to heart and making changes and

you know that was so different than what i'd known in music i had basically sat in rooms with artists in isolation for a year plus made a record and then kind of like pushed it into the ether and often times of like pushing 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 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 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 tried to apply a bit of that to what i was doing with banks and other artists while i was kind of working with them and parallel to being in spotify

do you think that the some of these ideas have seeped back into the music industry now now that it's like you know 10 years later yeah i mean it's funny they were just talking online just tweeting actually about um you know this idea of version control for music and you know uh seeing him and i think in life of pablo kanye kind of shipped that record 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 this ability to kind of

create this work that can respond to you know social political demands or different cultural context 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 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 um 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 and 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 are 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 these things and it really made it a more sustainable situation for me i think i left because i felt the organization changing um you know it was what 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 and 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 i knew i loved technology i knew i loved media i was turning 30 years old and it felt like i wanted for 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 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 and grace or the x-men cartoon when i was young person or jefferson's which is a you know an earlier uh program in the united states and 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 see 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 rud and so while i was spotify i was thinking a lot about that um you know i was super into stuff like um literal abaddon 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 4chan or in irc or all these places where smart people were coming together to you know form opinions about the world so so you formed brad yes basically broad describes itself as a trans media company um so you already said that basically you you were 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 broad 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 just maybe some of your international listeners might not know it was a television program in the states they feature two different gay characters and when as 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 began to 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 telling you but i i often speak as 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 this narrative that kind of flows across these things in a way that is far deeper than traditional just like long-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 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 you have this really deep world you can immerse yourself in and so the dream for us as a trans media 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 under family with like professional

wrestling here in the states wwe i often talk about that as perfection it's this idea of telling a fictional story in a place traditionally reserved for non-fiction 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 non-fiction primarily with these characters we've created in the name of building kind of more tolerant and empathetic features and that that was kind of this big ambitious hopey dreamy thing

it's now been realized a bit more 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 and my company course one is super deeply involved in the solana ecosystem including running the biggest validator so what's so cool about solana well we all know that scalability is the single most important issue facing the blockchain industry today and the solana blockchain is an amazing solution for it the network supports thousands of transactions per second with 400 millisecond block times and over 500 validators the special thing about solana is also

that it's not a sharded blockchain it's a single blockchain hyper optimized for performance so that makes it really easy to maintain composability between all of the apps on solana so that they work together seamlessly now and forever the solano ecosystem is growing at a rapid pace and it's a great place to build your project or just get involved with the community so go to solana.com center to learn more you mentioned uh the wwe um there's this like concept from wwe that i've heard of called kayfabe 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 nice people will ask me what that word is in my twitter bio because i have this this this twitter box is the k fed of kayfabe and k fed is a reference to kevin fetterline who was married to britney spears for a moment and was just 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 this pop culture manifestation of this idea of kfabe 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 um it actually becomes a pretty great filter for like boomers and like believers as i would describe them the young people under the majority of our fans are young people who often participate in that cafe 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 you might have some 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 like you know you know and 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 sunny 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 for those of you who also didn't know her so she's she's this um as trevor 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 and she has a modeling career music career she has a couple of million followers so how many people does it actually take to be michaela so how many staff do you have on michaela at broad yeah so we

yes we think of bride kind of like disney right we have these characters and new stories that we tell we're 30 plus people now um you know a lot of engineering uh creative team production marketing kind of operations functions so we really think of ourselves kind of like a you know the next evolution in a media organization where you you're building consensus amongst groups of people to kind of push your collective visions through this one entity um you know it reminds me often i talk about headless brands a lot kind of like the toby shore and other internet idea and i i'm one of the reasons i'm deeply interested in this idea is the reason people 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 we kind of have our own little consensus mechanisms internally for what ideas get pushed through michaela as an entity but um i'm i'm super interested in some of things we're exploring is how to kind of expand those things to larger groups and to build consensus and they continue to create media with a kind of more inclusive model that would kind of pull the community and the fandom in as well you refer to headless brands just just a moment ago can can you explain what that is yeah i mean our idea of it is is a bit different um you know really when i talk about this i'm talking about our character in little michaela where you'll have maybe a writer you'll have a choreographer maybe you have a fashion stylist and

through michaela they have this vehicle where they can push their ideas through it and maybe one plus one equals three um you know headless brands as other internet and toby describe it i think they they try it more as kind of like decentralized consensus systems where you effectively have a you know 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 there so what are some of the plans of how you sort of aim to do that like how like you know right now brad really is the one that kind of drives sort of the narrative of uh little michaela and the other characters as well how currently and then how in the future do you uh imagine that the

fans and the audience will be able to interact with it with the narratives and help shape the narratives that'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 um you know jj abrams and bad robot were kind of early fans of what we were building with brad 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 often times 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 than those professionals whose day-to-day lives are to manage these ecosystems and you know you look at that it's kind of a very literal way of

mining fandom and i often look at like data dashboards as kind of being these really um you know as being an another an extraction 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 is largely a bit of both of those things we effectively have hypotheses and we have narratives you know there are arcs michaela's story is really that of otherness it's the 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 we'll 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 you know being a pretty uh 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 the 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 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'll 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 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 the 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 critical because what's the point of crypto

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you think back on the points you made on will and grace earlier so basically the fact that it really fostered the acceptance of uh of homosexuals and basically end the incorporation into it i mean basically it's been a major paradigm shift 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 it's it's super normal so if we look back on this conversation in 10 years what do you hope the the shift that little michaela would have elicited would be yeah i i think you know 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 timely response to social political discourse uh 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 and immediately would probably have uh you know it would pay less dividends long term versus you know if i were to you know what i often do with them and i say like you know the reason we do this 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 are your favorite screenwriters or artists or

painters they instantly have names and that's because macbeth is as relevant now as it was hundreds of years ago and you can apply a lot of those lessons to things going forward so what we try to do for instance you know in michaela's story that 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 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 feel like i can't do the things that i want to do and so that's why we try to approach it in 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 y a and 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 is there a concern where in a fictional world like some maybe some of these uh 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 think my dream would be that kids would have both right i don't think it needs to be in either uh situation um i i often view it through the lens of my own coming you know coming of age and through kind of like historical i mean if you this you know you go back and you read

all the myth stuff we talk about oftentimes like you know who was 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 um you know in in in the case i often speak to is like often engaged with like silicon valley libertarians true to me feel like you know batman you know they're these super wealthy people who are using that like technological expertise and wealth to impose their will on society and what could be subconscious but i often i like to believe you know that like comic books informed that sense of purpose uh i often would watch x-men and be like man i can't wait to like hit puberty and get my mutant powers because there was this idea that like i

was different that i felt different and that that actually 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 um i i think as we begin to see you know what i would call like you know the emergent special computing future or metaverse or kind of this interactive layer of our lives uh kind of push more into our meat space our irl lives i'm actually kind of rooting for irl or meat space interactions to kind of evolve as a product and get better as a product as silly as that sounds to push back i mean people often escape into

video games because video games enable the mobility and like kind of upward mobility even it's like leveling up a warlock from level 1 to 99 or whatever it is but you don't have in your irl lives especially in the states you kind of have this like mulerable hellscape where you're trapped and you're 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 but those will bleed into the meat space and allow people to kind of build out better futures for our irl like human lives um 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 i read that you've been in crypto since 2013 somewhere so so tell us what drew you in i mean i wish it was really noble but it was purely speculative in 2013. uh you know i think the reality was i was like hey this thing seems interesting and i could probably make a bunch of money on it and then you start reading white papers and you're like that's kind of cool actually and then you actually get deeper into media and you know at the time i was at spotify and you were you're kind of grappling with advertising being a large part of this this funding model and like advertising

being its original sin of the internet and i remember like reading kevin kelly wired style techno optimus 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 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 of course it evolved into like maybe we could just redo the whole internet maybe we could tokenize everything [Music] you know most people book flights on

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2021 and refunds will be made every friday starting april 9th we'd like to thank pariswap for their support of epicenter i don't know whether this was your first venture into the crypto sphere as as a creator but you created this platform called friends with benefits tell us about that and tell us what that does yeah you know i absolutely was my first venture into crypto as a creator um 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 fronts of benefits six eight months ago and i 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've largely just sat in the sidelines and my friends are doing cool stuff but

i i was thinking back to the moment my friend calvin who i believe is still the chief strategist at compound um he got 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 haven't only really known him through trading crypto and sat by robert um you know the founder of compound and it was kind of in crypto bear market and he was just like you know what what are you you're into crypto and i'm like yeah you know i'm like kinda i'm outside he's like what do you like and i'm like this this prediction market veil thing seems pretty cool and like there's some like like make her down stuff and she's like oh okay so you

actually i'm like yeah i'm actually paying attention 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 um 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 sub stack 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 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 sub stacks and like and you're like 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 stuff as you can to survive and if there were a means 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 forensic 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 and 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 this reflection of the value you're creating in your token bags hacked 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 you know members and you know kind of a ton of interest was awesome anyone from richie haughton to mike shinoda to you know really incredible you know

all 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 web 3 can be for creative people but trevor just just to make sure so basically um only the people who are inside the gates can can consume the content right or is the content monetized that's exactly right and actually like 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 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

for the most part people are just hanging out on discord having conversations sharing interesting links to music skincare products uh nfts you name it it's a it's a wide range so how how is that different from private members clubs uh that we have in the in in the analog world i mean so things like soho house or you know say even 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 benefits is to stake tokens right so it's kind of like a proven 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 it's more of a deposit and and basically what you know the idea there is that if you have uh you know these tokens hopefully you're going to want to see those tokens or the value they represent you'll 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 we're already getting 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 um so yeah it's been it's been a really comforting fun place to be on the internet so so what do you think stops people from

monetizing dex their early exposure to to you know ideas of the in-crowd uh i think i mean i think people probably do monetize i mean we talk up through ideas often in their thing realized as products which is cool um you know people i ended up actually this is kind of a very fwb story uh there's a recording artist named jock green based out of uh canada and he was saying hey i think i want to do a non-fungible token i'm not sure how i want to do it but i think i may want to involve my publishing and in the f3b chat people kind of talk through a bunch of different ideas he ended up minting uh 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 like it's 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 space is it's all kind of like moon boys 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 and people are like well you know things happening off-chain yeah you can get the feedback you need to build the web 3 future you want to live in so is there a governance model for friends with benefit or of benefits or i mean can i get kicked out for misdemeanor or uh i mean i'm sure i'm sure there's

rules right certainly yes what's ever evolving we um 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'd be met with a warning and eventually be kicked out we asked people not to be racist there's a whole set of rules we kind of outlined to make it a space we wanted to be in more recently we've evolved and we have fwb dow um you know there have been proposals one of them was for a fundraise we just we raised 200 thousand dollars to kind of like hire some full-time staff for fwb and we've established uh you know so that was actually voted on my proposal we've established a host committee and so anyone who wants to join fwb now gets approved by the host committee they fill

out a simple form the house committee will say thumbs up thumbs down um it's not that intimidating we just want to keep spammers and kind of like bad actors out uh and you know going forward we're gonna 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 from the benefits to the meat space and try to bring people together i mean there's like all kinds of meetups already members could get together at 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 lurkers well that's what's interesting i have to admit i i was a locker and i

actually i found out this morning that i can no longer access the space because [Laughter] you know you now need more fwb tokens than i have um and boot when i first joined so um uh that that kind of gives away part of the answer i guess that's exactly right so um you know one of the things that we're we subscribed to that we've kind of made pioneer for community tokens this idea of seasons um and i'm forgetting simon's last name um maybe some won't even uh but there's a gentleman that came up with the idea of seasons kind of like implementing similar models that you see in video games two communities or dows and basically every three months every quarter we up the amount of tokens you need to to to

make you need to join fwb and in parallel we have a source cred instances this bot that's tracking who's contributing to the discord chat and if you contribute regularly you'll probably get more than enough 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 you were caught by the seasoned gate monster and kicked out but you know this season now you ever decided to contribute a bit more i should i should so so i know you mentioned that you know you you're fans of uh you know the other internet posts and stuff uh there's another one that i really like uh i think probably my favorite one i think the headless brand is probably my second favorite one but was the uh squad wealth one

and so how do you see some of those ideas applying to like the sort of communities would you would 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 um you know another when toby was working on that piece he made something an early version to kind of like just run through and set up some notes and it was kind of the middle of d5 summer and i i mean a pre at the wb i was and i still am in a group is called chad team six and it's a bit tongue-in-cheek but um like dre rac um you know like justin blau uh you know mean spank chain amy from circle uh you know viv blondish a bunch of kind of weirdos from crypto land are in there

and when i read that that that text um it really spoke to the kind of joy that i had being as a part of that group um and you know maybe a bit team i just got out of a breakup as in a relationship and i was getting so much joy and fulfillment out of like sharing alpha with my friends and so i think you know fwb was probably born out of that almost certainly is i would say fwb is a bit bigger than the squad at this point we're probably a community but um 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 how do you think i mean basically this 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 um 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 in kind of like media world i i largely see nfts and web 3 as already restructuring the individual value chain right the kind of creator value chain whereas where i see dows is in you know reorganizing and restructuring the kind of like

media organization value chain and that can be you know i i mean that i can mean time magazine that could mean vice that could mean you know universal pictures i think the the i mean the idea i think you know people having lived through covet and working remote and kind of interfacing in a project to project fashion to me actually feels a bit like the future of work and always has almost what happens in like film now where it's like you have your core crew when you go take on a project you go shoot a movie for two months or two years you come off of it something else like i think it works to be more modular so i think that's gonna be a big part of why dials 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 uh and so i think i've already seen that and so for me yeah i think i think dallas are going to hopefully uh may i should knock on wood because it might not be maybe it's not negative i think hopefully it will be it's like net positive restructuring a lot of the organizations we've come to know because you know it's a different world than it was hundreds of years ago when corporations were starting to take shape and do you think this is also going to benefit fit um 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 i it's also been 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 this some of these dial things is the ability for dows to act as heat shields for people who want to take more risks creatively um and the flip side of that is like you know and they'll probably like synonymous dials you know even like i guess like um you know medical and troubadour stuff like there's there's obviously you know real desire to be to have a synonymous persona in this emergent

internet and i imagine synonymous dows or doubts full of synonymous or anonymous characters will allow them to take creative risks they might not otherwise be able to take as you know uh with ids or identities linked to their real meat space health so all i have to say i 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 put together quite quickly talked about pseudonymous identities so is the idea that all of us are going to 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 and i imagine kind of like wallets or you've even imagined like multi-sig wallets where we're kind of collective identities that allow us to navigate in different spaces in different ways um so i'd imagine i can't have like my speak.eth wallet which you know obvious you know is it a site where i keep a lot of my positions and where i kind of do a lot of like my 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 as my public facing wall as being this identity where people can instantly understand where i fit in

the kind of like larger web 3 world i i almost imagine a future looking somewhat like um almost like 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'd done enough you don't have nonsense or like you ate into enough smart contracts whatever like they would let you participate in the earlier version of build 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 cryptokitty from 2017. so he must have been in the game back then and you know what it looks like he has this a nft poem from an artist that i like that's really cool and he holds ferrari 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 value 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 uh uh there are a network in the most honest way in 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 wallets to allow for connected collective identities to exist in applications and you know i guess because i just i remember like i think often about like tycoon are kind of like you know collectives of radical writers they're able to anonymously put work together

push it out and make a big impact 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 you know interact with an 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 like a lot of the software and like tooling you guys use in like some of your characters like little michaela will also be used for creating these like you know taking these new identities whether they're like pseudonymous identities for like you know a lot of people within crypto like to you know do stuff anonymously and so they use these like pseudonyms and then also for these like collective group identities do you think like

we're gonna 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 i mean 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 an 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 the intonation and the kind of aspect that allows people to connect and i think we're getting pretty close uh people are doing some pretty impressive stuff uh that will allow me to effectively speak into this microphone and come out you know 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 that trading data is barack obama reading his audio book right so it's pretty even on this 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 need to be solved outside of what we're building so most of the uh little michaela stuff right now the audio is like you have

voice actors to do those correct we've got multiple voice actors um you know we played around a bit and have like layered uh especially in recordings some kind of generative stuff but uh for the most part humans we like humans we look augmenting humans one of the recurring themes of of this podcast has been ownership and and stake broad itself is is a company that's funded by vcs if you could do it again would you would you have vcs again or would you kind of try to to raise funds via some sort of crowdfunding mechanism be it an ico or something else yeah while i while i believe that like venture capital won't exist

in 15 years i just don't think there'll be a need for it i also had like an incredible experience with my vcs like while i heard 60 no's out the gate when we found our tribe and our people they've been hugely supportive um and even like crypto vc i think they're kind of so traumatized from fair launch and kind of anti-vc rhetoric they want to be extra helpful and like extra kind and so i think it's it's 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 in what we're doing that would be the dream um 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 you can sometimes yes 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 kind of consequences you've seen like in the american stock market most companies aren't operating on a five year but they're operating quarter to quarter because they need to appease the 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 in day out i think it's distracting i think it's it's hard i think

you're looking at like unit swap token price you know they do the airdrop a number go up number way down and now you gotta think about okay are people gonna like flee are they gonna you know because of this token price i'm gonna manage this thing and of course the price returned to where it probably should be but through that trough it kind of adds this 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 to have 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 daoist can achieve that i mean obviously there's kind of this is a a bit outside of um 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 and lock up tokens for long term and like winning those votes more than others um that's also 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're talking about rari like i just figured out like one of the lead devs is like an eighth grader at this la school this la 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 dollars 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 doesn't all 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 um again maybe the romantic in me but i'd like to kind of see the ethereal human stuff met with the kind of uh technical code stuff as well you you've kind of worked with and four projects in the past and are still working with them that in the in in the eyes of a lot of um crypto people doing more

bad than good so i mean i mean basically if you look at spotify and um what it's done to artists and how unlucrative it's become uh to actually put anything out there i mean basically lynn mckayla lives uh mostly on instagram and i mean facebook it's it's highly problematic how do you feel about kind of straddling that gap well i would say so the the michaela stuff right like i think mckayla'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 one of the reasons we're interested in not vulnerable tokens endows 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 the 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 um and i don't think dan would like me saying this but i think you know in meeting like you know 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 it's fine if i got there and as a result you kind of have this worse i mean they have a situation that is is sub-optimal for 99 of actors on the platform and it's it's it's beneficial to them to make 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 percent 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 half a decade of like just such supreme turbulence caused by the internet you're like maybe this was this was it worth it i think it was worth it like it it was supposed to be a no-brainer and here we are being like if i could just turn it all off would i um so yeah here's something we can get it

right or a considerably better this go-round where do you think nfts are going so um michaela recently published a piece um 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 um 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 mckayla 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 or whatever but like when i felt defy summer i was like man it's happening and you're now seeing the kind of like culture legos emerge as well on the unfortunate hooking side and so to me the prices are 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 bling 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 you've been conditioned to believe that's the way it should be and the idea that like people would sell

a jpeg for 70 million dollars feels abhorrent 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 not probably not too far off what it's worth and so that that that's kind of how i feel i think that like largely the aesthetic of the nonprofit 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 that i appreciate and so what we're trying to do with michaela the red dow

we'll have some nft stuff that i can't speak to just yet but hopefully it allows people to participate in these social and these kind of cultural moments that aren't entirely dissimilar from like nba top shots which to me i think is kind of like the killer feature of right now to have this you know nfcs right now to me are a bobble head 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 of 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 i don't know

like collecting moments yeah i i don't know let's see anything outside of the moments maybe like euler beats and 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 art aspect to it along with the uh access rights it gives yeah i think people are are kind of thinking that stuff through right now um i like it as thing and this is what

once was kind of like some maturity i like it i think right now fees are prohibitive you know minting fees are prohibited and kind of collecting fees are primitive and i think to get the kind of scale you need 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 ferocious or something and you know 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 you know kind of like super serve them that's probably a pretty great way to build like a a a fan base that could support you for your 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 for some of this thing to come to pass i think this will probably feel similar are you looking at layer twos i am i'm deeply interested in layer twos and layer ones i think if you'd asked me six months ago i've been like full eve maxine mode and just but you know i was playing around with tara this morning and i was like this is pretty these bridges work and there there's probably opportunities to be able to 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 polka dot or near cosmos i don't know like any of these guys i think there's room for people to do interesting things and carve out new shoes that make sense especially with the bridges layer twos uh my friend matt works optimism unsuper bullish and optimism optimistic roll ups part of me i think is traumatized by living in los angeles and i kind of think of layer two 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 v 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 gonna like bloat it all again uh so i i'm really curious to see how this stuff plays out

it's clear that like you know therian foundation 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 and soon so we can keep building this cool future i i have one last question as to the cool future so when when you talk to techno optimists and web 3 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 um i mean there's different ways of of measuring the success or the um 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 where people are like i want this to make things better for everyone and i kind of instantly write them off because they're just always trade-offs right like i think ultimately like not everything is zero-sum but a lot of things feel zero-sum and in changes like change can be painful in and of itself um i should clarify that i'm most interested in creating a better future for creative people for innovators people that are like championing new ideas whether that's fashion designs or you know vertical farming techniques or protocol level governance 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 ambulation and optimistic about our kind of our web3 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 um what felt almost like predatory via you know value like predatory value capture to me it was a reflection of a bunch of like a bunch of actors who initially have the you know people's collective best interests at hand moving into kind of web 2 and saying hey i would have gone and worked 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 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 that talk to their shoes while they talk to you with the right intentions and like some you know silver-toned you know mba who's gonna scam you out of whatever you have in your pockets or whatever and so yes always say i'm a believer in web3 building a better future for creative people and for innovators people that want to bring new ideas to pass 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

um my my socials are all what dot cd w h a t d d which is a hat tip to a torrent tracker that some of you your listeners may know and uh friends of benefits fwb dot help has all the info you need fwb tweets on twitter um and then you know for brett it's brud fyi if you'd like to get a hold of me it's sasquite s-k-e-e-t at b-r-u-d-f-y-i it's my email send me something good stuff maybe some death threats i prefer not those more good stuff in death threats but 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

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