37: Trevor McFedries - Creative People Should Be Rich

21:47Yeah, yeah.

21:48Trevor McFedries:What do you think the relationship, I think this is very related and it also a can of worms. Like what do you think the relationship between authenticity and creativity is? Is authenticity, I think one thing I felt myself feeling is like authenticity is almost like ridiculous. Like at least when it became an aesthetic, like is it even worth talking about? Like maybe the other part of this question would be like, is there a such a thing as like pure art or creativity or originality? I would say like there is conceptually, but when I talk about like creativity or even authenticity, it's like talking about Nirvana.

22:21You know, it's like this end state that I think you can like aspire towards, but I'm not sure that it's achievable. I do think authenticity was maybe like the, the buzzword, it was like the taste of five, 10 years ago. And because we were doing Michaela at the time, that was often a question I was confronted with by like new hires or VCs or whatever. And what I always tried to explain to them is that like, I think the city can take a lot of different forms. And I think ultimately what I'm looking for in great artwork is, is honesty, like a, you know, a, a, a connection to you who is themselves a divine bridge to something.

22:55And, you know, I actually, this is a bit of a tangent, but I was in that, uh, Timothee Chalamet, Bob Dylan moment. There was an interview with Bob Dylan where they were talking about his songwriting process and saying, you wrote these songs so long ago, you know, and he more or less alluded to the fact he's like not able to do that anymore. And I thought it was like really compelling, also terrifying because as someone who like wants to tap into that divine stream all the time, the fact that it can come and go, I'm very aware of it in a songwriting room because you watch writers that are just like, and you're like, Whoa, oh, where did that come from?

23:29But in building organizations and these kind of marathon things, it's less clear. That said, I think the authenticity piece and what I would relate that to is there are creative people who do commerce explicitly. And I always think about K-pop. You know, they didn't write those songs. You know, they didn't style those clothes. They didn't choreograph those dance moves.

23:50Trevor McFedries:But what a beautiful machine. But what a beautiful machine and appreciative machine. And I often will get into these, you know arguments with peers who are like i don't understand why you love rihanna but you hate these imposters and these people that you think are like taking attention from people that are actually creative yeah and i'm like i love rihanna because she's not telling me she's making a two michelin star steak she's like here's a cheeseburger and i'm like i do love cheeseburger this is fantastic yes i get frustrated when someone's like look at this two michelin star steak and i'm like i know all those references that you're biting just because you're you know repurposing them yeah or it's just borrowed nostalgia right and i like i actually seeing this this thing now which is quite interesting like silicon valley's gotten into cultural critique and consciousness and kind of these more abstract concepts and the very uncool humanities are getting quite cool and there's a there's a new an emergent founder who's like seen the adam curtis films who can be like and like paraphrase and these vcs are like wow how do you know that Naven McCloughan, we got it all.

24:55Trevor McFedries:I've done some of that myself. No, but I think that's why you're especially able to connect these dots. But I think, again, you can do it in a very honest way. When you're learning, it's an interest of learning, and there are people that are like, I have this new idea. Yeah, it's the first thing we talk about. This is the thing, and that's the frustration I often have, where I'm like, if you just want to get rich, like sell real estate, don't purport to be some poet or philosopher and just repurpose ideas for people that aren't familiar with them. That's where I get all riled up, Jackson. then why the borrowed nostalgia thing came up a few times in my research like why what do you mean by that and what what do you what is so frustrating about that and and specifically like i think you gave one example of uh in winehouse but like what what is the line between borrowed nostalgia and like every nothing's truly new but it can be remixed in a way that feels really new yeah i mean again i think there's like there are people who act as a divine bridge and they're able to interpret their environment and and kind of share that moment and reflect on that moment with people in really honest ways.

25:49And I think, you know, Amy Winehouse, I always use because people are like, Amy was doing nostalgia. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. Amy was taking an interpretation in a style and then parsing it through her lived experience. You know, like talking about rehab, you know, through a jazz lens is new. It's novel. She's standing on the shoulder of giants, but she's parsing it through her lived experience. That's really important. I think that the reason the nostalgia piece is so tough for me is as a millennial, we had this generation that effectively was able to do that trick at scale.

26:20Trevor McFedries:Yeah. There was a bunch of Gen X that didn't know anything, and we were like, fuck, I have the internet. I can just put on a gold chain and reference some 80s rapper and some K-rock, you know, dude, A &R guy or radio programmer is like, whoa, this is a hip-hop aesthetic with a rock thing? This is crazy. I've never heard anyone say it like that. It's so unbelievable. Like, it was like you got the answers to the test. Totally. And you could cheat in real time on the test and blow minds. And so there were all these people that effectively got to LARP all these different eras people weren't familiar with and kind of passed through these gates such that everyone wanted to tear down the gates.

27:01Like a bunch of millennials, we were like, this sucks. I want to make the decision because I can tell this is dishonest. And then we removed those gates and we were like, maybe some of the gates were good. The gatekeepers, can you bring them back? But that's my war on nostalgia.

27:14Trevor McFedries:Yeah. Yeah. Before we go on to the next thing, I just want to mention the Bob Dylan thing. I think the optimistic part of that would be, I don't know, you hear so many artists, so many musicians in particular, they just like, the songs come from God or whatever. Like it came to me in a dream, whatever, whether it's Bob Weir or Rosalia or whatever. And there's this like loose grip on that. I think that I'm Bob Dylan and I did it in the past and I can't do it anymore. Like that's pretty tragic. but I wonder if you have like a looser grip on just like, sometimes they come and I want to be ready for when they come.

27:48Trevor McFedries:But, oh man, it's gotta be hard when you. Yeah, kind of too much. I don't know much about soccer or football, but my friend Alonzo was talking to me about Messi as being this just like, this gifted savant and Ronaldo being this like workhorse. I find a lot of that in songwriting and artistic practice, you know, there are founders, you talk to a colistain and you're like, oh, I don't have that gear. You know, like I just, I don't, I'm not going to get there. But maybe if I find other ways to create edge, I can, I can get to this thing that I'm really proud of. And I respect both. And to me, it's almost like a spiritual thing, right?

28:25Like there are monks who I imagine have like this divine light. They're just connected immediately. And there are people who have to spend a lot of time getting deep into themselves and closer to God. And that's, that's how I interpret the practice. And I want to honor both. I'm actually probably more aligned with the Ronaldo because I find myself, I'm not a gifted musician. I just poke buttons and turn knobs until it sounds cool. And it's a struggle. And when I go into sessions and people say, oh, that flat fifth isn't in that chord. I'm like, I don't, is it this thing? And it's heartbreaking, but it's also this blessing.

29:01I get to find something and let it kill me. A lot of different areas.

29:04Trevor McFedries:Yeah, it's almost like you're not a native speaker, but you're trying. the other thing that's interesting to me is um you like jerry seinfeld comes to mind but there's so many creatives who talk about this sort of like i was talking to gabe whaley actually about this with the stuff they do at mischief too like they schedule their brainstorms it's actually this like seinfeld it's like he goes in the room and he has still is the illegal pad he doesn't have to write but he's not allowed to do anything else for like three hours and it's like discipline scheduled discipline sort of is like giving you the best surface area for the inspiration to happen agreed which is maybe more ronaldo like maybe you're not walking into the room as messy or whatever but there's something i think beautiful about that too which is like i'm getting i'm ready for the inspiration if it ever comes yeah and it's interesting because you could kind of argue both like you know what is it buffett and bill gates so they don't have calendars yeah or whatever and like they're effectively doing the work they're creating space to do the work but they're also creating space for like the divine lightning to strike yeah and so i yeah i think a lot again And to me, it is probably very spiritual.

30:06And the older I get, the more I could probably relate a lot of these things to spiritual practices. But ultimately, they seem to be reflections of reflections. Like, you know, you can see the fractals in all of these things.

30:15Trevor McFedries:We talked about instruments at the very beginning. I want to talk, maybe to set up our conversation about crypto. There's a couple of quotes from you and that I think are particularly interesting against this backdrop that like, depending on when you cut, slice it, although for many people, crypto is like always low status and just there's a lot of disdain. This is you. Then this thing about blockchains, about tokens, the hyper-financialization of our lives. I've had such disdain for it, but if you invert that and try to create better instruments for capturing value, you can attribute that value and pass it back, part of what you were just saying.

30:44Trevor McFedries:And then another section from you, after reading Debt, the first 5 ,000 years of money by the late anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, Trevor found himself asking, like, what is value? And he followed that destabilizing thought to a liberating conclusion. It's whatever we collectively decide it is. One of the reasons that I love crypto or an internet of value is that we have really antiquated vehicles for representing value, he says. He believes crypto enables better instruments for assigning value to all things. This idea of like value being something we can tinker with seems at the core of that.

31:21Trevor McFedries:Like, I guess I'm curious why you consistently find yourself being drawn back to this thing, despite all of the cases for doomerism and all of the disdain and all the hyper-financialization and the SBFs and all of that. Like there's some hope, dream thing that you're seeing. Like what? What is that? Yeah. I mean, there's so much in there. I think there is a spiritual and psychological war. Like, you know, there is a desire to move people to a higher state of consciousness. I don't know. There are plenty of people doing that. God bless them. They're really good at that. And I think there are a lot of people who are kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum are looking at purely utilitarian ways to like help people get to the next meal or to you know the next moment and i think what i've uniquely been able to do because of my life trajectory is you know kind of live what i say from the squat to the yacht like i i actively engage with like you know shithead crust kids crusties and like i still have all of my like Takunian anarchist friends who are on no fly lists.

32:29And I have billionaires speak in my house about AI, you know, and I think I was a function of moving from Iowa to LA when I was 16 and having, you know, art aspirations, but kind of recognizing my place in the universe as being someone that can be this connected tissue. And I think I've joked in the past that like, I've always wanted to be the chef that makes two Michelin star corn dogs. Like I moved to LA. I'd never had sushi until I was 19. I had a California roll and I threw it up. It was like too advanced. You know, I was raised on like, not even Taco Bell, I was raised on Taco John's, you know, like knockoff of knockoff.

33:05And the idea that there were people who could contribute if they had some kind of connected tissue is what I was interested in. So there is this kind of like psychological and spiritual war and they're they're kind of need someone to say like man i actually know how venture capital works like it's like two and twenty to friends of mine in like the art world they have no idea what that means and i also am like deeply rooted in the history of culture and music and i'm interested in like the right people winning and so if if i can effectively be a low status person who can larp as like a high status person and maybe a high status person that can larp as a low status person i can be this translator and use this kind of tissue and i also think from the kind of more utilitarian angle, low status games are often like the best way to repurpose value just historically when you learn the history of Hollywood.

33:55I often, you know, talking to my contemporary art friends, I'm like, if I was just a pure artist, I would be in Saudi right now. You know what I mean? Like, where else are you going to find someone who's like$3 million to like build a really compelling object? Like take a flyer, but I want it to be here. And it's de classe and people in America and be like, ugh, Middle East money. But that's what people in France were saying about America not that long ago. This was the day Class A, we are new money, we are low status. Ralph Lauren is a Jewish kid from the Bronx, Ralph Lipschitz, who changed his name to Ralph Lauren and started pretending to be a kid from Connecticut and was able to play this game so well that he created this whole fantasy that became real.

34:35And I think that's a tangent that I'm also interested in. I love Lana Del Rey because her dishonesty is so internal

34:43Trevor McFedries:internalized it's real like yeah talk about authenticity yeah like lana can tell you you know she was like living in a trailer park like smoking meth with the local like rodeo guy and i'd be like i know it i believe you my whole chest my whole heart even though you were like your dad was a domain broker and had hundreds of millions of dollars or whatever it is like you've internalized these things so deeply that like you know schizophrenia is real yes yes there's an idea I've struggled to articulate it over the years, but I think sort of more or less is that identity can be a projector and a mirror.

35:16Trevor McFedries:And it's intuitive that it's a projector. Like if you put on, if you dyed your hair green or have a Mohawk, like people are going to perceive you differently. But after enough time, you're going to perceive yourself differently, which is pretty profound. Absolutely. Like we are who we pretend to be. And that fake it till you make it thing is, you know, one of, I think it's one of those things that's so easy to articulate, but to truly live it and to become that is a real blessing to experience. watching people overcome that imposter or whatever it is and just live it commit and you see it in la like you see the pirates yeah they're still doing like an 80s hair metal thing and they live it you're like that rocks good for you do you think there are a lot of people who are really living it in crypto there are obviously a lot of imposters but they've a lot of them left i like crypto a lot right now people are in an ai the weirdos are hanging around yeah it's just like freaks and weirdos and people that are you know probably unemployable a lot of places and they're, you know, I wonder, I haven't thought a lot about it, but I'm sure like you encounter it.

36:14You know, the other day I went to Shake Shack with my fiance, get a cheeseburger and she's pregnant. And I was like carrying all these things. And this guy just went above and beyond and helped us. I started talking to him and he was just so articulate, so curious, so thoughtful. You know, I was asking him what he did. He was going to school, told him I work in technology. He had all these thoughts about AI, you know, like really like poignant stuff, like could explain a transformer, you know, which is like what most of the DCs I engage with, like couldn't. Right. And so there is this, this kind of like neat Reddit, you know, kind of lost individuals deeply curious, but maybe doesn't have the tools to kind of contain it, articulate it such that they can like, you know, it's a parsable by whatever institution.

36:54Not quite legible. Yeah. It's just not quite legible. And, you know, some, some part of me is really interested in identifying those people and giving them power and getting and teaching them how to become legible and i think crypto is full of those people which is so fun i think that's one of the reasons i love hanging out in telegram with a

37:12Trevor McFedries:bunch of like racists and like insane anime pfp people yes there's some there's somebody human underneath there is there's someone human underneath who read the wrong white paper or the wrong something out there i did too much curtis or whatever yeah yeah totally there's okay so there's this thing that has been happening for a while that you i think are very interested in which is that attention and capital are compressing um back to the idea of things being financialized and i think this is interesting maybe through the lens of like things being legible because part of what i think financialization of things does is it brings things to the forefront um this is you you say this is the definitive mutation of the early adopter the 2000s hipster discovered bands in basements and hoarded their finds like trade secrets, terrified of mainstream contamination.

38:02Trevor McFedries:Today's equivalent, what Nemesis calls the creative director, still wants to be early, but they want everyone else to show up too, preferably with liquidity. Creative directors aren't gatekeeping, they're shilling. Being first isn't about protecting your scene. It's about getting in at the bottom of the bonding curve and waiting for your idea to graduate to the decks. Cultural capital has merged with financial capital. Great writing. Thank you. Maybe with that backdrop of like the weirdos that the internet has always been good at sort of like having a place for, like I'm curious how you think about when attention and culture are like fully financialized, does something about them fundamentally change?

38:40Trevor McFedries:Do you actually have less room for the, this was at least selfishly, like one of my frustrations of crypto is like the financialized part of it and the speculation part of it sort of like clouds everything else out. You have something that's bubbling up to the surface and all that weird stuff you were just talking about is like, hidden away somewhere and i think what i am trying to figure out how to express is that all of the stuff that's being obscured needs to be obscured because we're entering into a new era and i think it's as uncomfortable as it was even the move from like modernism to post-modernism you know like the urinal like like duchamp being like no this is an art i'd be like that's not a fucking art object like where is the craft where is the skill yes and and i i i think that's like the great tension and i applaud people in silicon valley and the broader uh you know technology world for wanting to champion what they see as art but i i think what myself and other artists have been talking about a lot kind of behind the scenes is that the act of creation is not that different from the act of speculation if you squint.

39:51This idea that you have a belief about the future and you want to express it via a medium and have it validated or perceived by your peers or maybe recognized in a market is something that all of the artists that people champion do. Because those models are so antiquated or laggy, by the time you get your work to an art fair, by the time you get the album out, by the time you get the film out, it often feels dated you know and i think what's tough for people that are actually interesting is you watch a new paul thomas anderson film and you're like oh cool like a conversation about like incels and like civil war and a bunch of like 60 year olds are like how radical this is this is a reflection of our time you're like no we're having that fight on twitter 18 months ago and so i think what what i've recognized is that all you know and i talk about in that piece a little bit is my group chats where my artists, you know, visual, uh, you know, music filmmakers, we used to talk about prestige television or, you know, new films or art fairs.

40:54We talk about fed rate cuts and you're like, wait, what happened? And I think what happened is they've recognized that there are instruments for expressing beliefs, but now allow them to be right verifiably and with financial upside in the same way they could be with an art object,

41:08Trevor McFedries:But now - It's like skipping the middle. Yeah, skipping the middle and without a 50 % vig to your curator, right? And I think like meme coins and prediction markets are like bad instruments. But when the game before was, you could bet on wheat futures if you understood weather patterns. Like they have an information advantage because they're a meteorologist. Okay, well, like I have an information advantage because I'm a cultural savant. Why can't I have 1000X asymmetric upside? And so like that to me, I think is the great tension is these people have these very narrow ideas of what like an art community is and what a finance community is.

41:40And there's like the Patagonia vests and the Bushwick babes. But to me, I'm actually interested in saying like, instead of those people living in opposition, which is a fool's game for the Bushwick babes, because these guys have nukes.

41:53Trevor McFedries:Yes. And they have financial nukes. Yes, yes. And you have like sticks, you know, bows and arrows. Like we can give you nukes too. And you can have a real meaningful advantage against these people in markets and you can have asymmetric upside in the yachts. so like why not so many of these things come down to like don't hate the player hate the game i think too or like and there's a lot of hating of the game in a broader thing that i don't know if you've written about this publicly but you kind of talk about this idea of the belief economy and you have this specific frame around making to framing to predicting that partially is encapsulated in what you just said but i think it'd be helpful for you to talk specifically about like that danko has also written about this in the shift kind of post post-modernism but like what is that shift i think it's also worth hitting on the framing part i think most people sometimes sort of feel like we're still in that totally because it's a thing of the past and then obviously this new thing yeah i love danko's piece and so there's a group of friends which maybe i would call like the new models extended universe uh and that goes to like arthur at trust citarella jessler citarella holly hernan matt dryhurst um you know the noses folks like uh dan keller is here now not part of the models like i think we've been deeply frustrated because for people that are interested in progress.

43:03And technology for us has all of this white space and all of this incredible opportunity for progress. But post Trump election, and I think the artistic world seeing technology as these enablers of dictators, of tyrants, as the Russiagate, whatever, you felt disenfranchised from both a bit. And so we've kind of had the talk in isolation for a bit about the world that we see in front of us. and then the world we encounter when we go to a biennale and just see like aboriginal artworks and wall works and sculptures that could they're not meaningly different than they were 20 30 years ago and so anything in my opinion in Danko's opinion in like the group chats this kind of like thing that's ethereal in the air that we're trying to pull out of it is this idea that the people who would have been articulating ideas about what's happening what's going to happen have taken different forms in society over the years.

44:00And the ones we're most aware of, you know, probably are in the framing I'd used in that piece were like the modernist era where the thing you produced had all the value to this post-modernist era we identified actually like the narrative and the framing around the thing had the most value to now what we're talking about with this belief economy where the thing you were able to call or predict has that same value. And I think it feels really uncomfortable for people because they're like, it's all fucking gambling now and you're like well yeah like always was meme you know what i mean like it has been there are always decisions being made and there are market forces and there you know there are outcomes that were more opaque and if you choose if you if you choose to kind of make them more visible it's uncomfortable but i think it's very real and it allows for you know new champions to emerge and i think that's the part that like we're all really interested in is predicting is very similar to creating and if you squint you know making a wall work or having an opinion about prestige television is very similar to taking a position or expressing that belief in a prediction market a meme coin or you know betting on a meta on the thing i'm looking on now it seems almost that maybe a little less so with the making part but especially the narrative the

45:20Trevor McFedries:framing part it's almost like we ran out of scarcity there like there's nothing scarce in the ability to like again i talked with gabe willie about this like going viral is like it's shots on goal like it's not even there's no novelty there's no magic there and it is interesting that sort of like consensus on the collective belief is maybe not fundamentally scarce but relatively rare and that's the thing that everyone's seeking i wonder like i don't One of the things I was thinking about a lot as I went through this is just like this feels very reactionary, even if you're right. And I think there are optimistic parts of what you're saying.

46:01Trevor McFedries:Don't we still want to incentivize people to make things? Like having all of our best people, all of our tastemakers skip over everything to the anticipating, reacting to what's going to be next. maybe we'll horse you but like i think that would if i if i were to guess what the average sort of thoughtful person's reaction to what you're saying is even if all of that's true like are we just going to be in a world where we're all like speculating on made-up memes potentially i think a lot there i think um you know talking about virality being shots on goal the other thing that i maybe didn't highlight in that piece that i maybe should have talked about more is that Like discourse is probably the, the, the probably the most important product of millennial culture, like, you know, podcasts, you know, everyone has clubhouse voice.

46:54Every dinner party you go to, people are repeating the same, you know, New York times podcast takes or whatever it is. And we live in this sea of takes with no way to sift through what's meaningful. Yes. Right. And so Marcus being a tool for seeking out information, I think is really interesting. Yes. So to speak to the part about making actual objects, I think it's really important. I just think that robotics and AI automation are going to devalue those things.

47:21Trevor McFedries:Scarcity again, yep. Yeah, and I think having lived through technology devaluing things, it's like, okay, who are people that you care about? I care about creative people, and I want them to win. Okay, well, then where do you shepherd them? I shepherd them to where the value is going. And I think what I appreciate about Silicon Valley is they want creative people to do well, but they are effectively pushing them to where the puck is, not to where it is going. And that's why I feel like even if dissonant, uncomfortable, I need to actively speak up and be like, hey, this matters. Go here. Get the resources such that you can impose your will and point of view on the world because it's important that you do because you're vulnerable.

48:00Trevor McFedries:We'll figure this out once you've won almost. I mean, I think, yes, we'll figure it out once you've won. but I also think we're being quite thoughtful about it. Like, you know, and I think it's uncomfortable to hear as well, but part of growing up is that there are people that make decisions in the world and you can either have a seat at the table and influence or not. And, you know, the all-in podcast has, you know, extraterrestrial at this point influenced as a space force. And if we can shepherd people from having conversations undialectic into having seats at the most powerful tables in the world, I would like that.

48:37In order to do that, they probably will need to have meaningful capital and meaningful amounts of verifiably correct takes.

48:45Trevor McFedries:Yes. Okay, so this is interesting. One of the things you said a couple of times, you just got at the end, is that markets are a way to get to at least one kind of truth. This is a pretty profound idea. Obviously, the prediction market kind of stuff, lots of different things. It's a market-driven truth. I'm curious what you think about, if you have any thoughts broadly on like what that truth is and if it differs from other types of truth we might have. And then on top of that, like, does that truth line up with what creative people are trying to get closer to? Maybe back to the other thing around authenticity and honesty or whatever the things maybe creatives are normally sort of trying to get at.

49:23Yeah, and this is a sticky one, right? So I guess the framing I would use is like in a pre-enlightened world, there's effectively like magic and like a divine interpretation of truth and like ideas. And I think in this post-truth environment, like there's so much takes, so much distance, you can find your truth in your research. There's been a return to magic. And I think what's interesting for me is that, again, like if you think about it in kind of like less contemporary terms, like in a tribe, there were kind of people that created magic and we're able to define what truth is. 100%. And I think that obviously the narratives and the stories that control our lives define those truths, whether it's capitalism or neoliberalism or whatever it is.

50:13And so the thing that I'm interested in truth right now and in markets being able to, I guess, reveal truth is that, and this is, again, an uncomfortable reality, truth is subjective in a lot of ways. and what you're seeing i think in capital markets at the highest level is this unwinding of this like efficient markets hypothesis and retail effectively like running over some of these value investors and steve cohen's of the world and you're like what what's going on and i think the idea that we can stay retarded longer than you can stay solvent is like quite poignant like the wall street bets thing like there there are p ratios and then there are a bunch of like retarded redditors who are like no actually those don't matter and effectively at some point there's a tipping point where like a p ratio which is just a meme you know it's it's truth but it's it's a collectively accepted truth like it's by the way when we say truth here i think what we kind of mean is consensus exactly and i and i think like at some point consensus tips and and i think that's that again is the opportunity right and i think that's what like great what i would describe as like creative people do.

51:25You can tell, you can be Karl Marx or the Chicago school boys or whomever you want. And you can come up with a narrative that people internalize and manifest and turn into real actions in the real material world. And all of a sudden that is the dominant form of our everyday lives and truth. Again, you're pulling me into cancelable territory, but like - I think it's really interesting.

51:50Trevor McFedries:I think it's really interesting. I guess we've been talking a lot about it from the lens of the creative person. One of the first interviews I did, or early ones, was with Jacob Horn. And he had this line where he's basically like, there's a difference between speculation and gambling along the lines of your belief economy, which is like speculation is sort of putting weight behind or stakes behind something that you want to be more likely. I guess I'm curious how you're thinking about that now and how you're thinking about the ways that like having more hard incentives versus soft incentives from the like crowd to push the tastemakers or whatever else we want in a certain direction like one version of this one instrument is meme coins sure like i think a lot of people look at that and they're just like what like this is this is yeah there's nothing here what is and you can be as specific or not specific as you like but like what is a version of this that is good for creatives for all the stuff we talk about for musicians for visual artists for like even just cultural tastemakers like what do you think that starts to look like where regular people can be at home with their favorite creator or favorite artist or whatever and like speculate on them in a way that i'm investing in five likes or whatever yeah yeah totally um so i think you know try to set the state of play right now jesse walden kind of describes his current meme coin moment as like the 4chan moment.

53:16And there is like an emergent Reddit or Twitter moment that will allow people to kind of, to have these takes in a synonymous or anonymous way and find community and kind of do all the things that social media and those kind of, those chans, those evolved chans enable us to do. The crush I have meme coins is, you know, a bunch of degenerates in the wild, wild west effectively launching tokens that represent some idea or meme. and then people speculating on how much attention they will get. The problem, in my opinion, and I think the pros, in my opinion, are we've created an instrument that allows creative and cultural people, people at least aware of how information flows.

53:57Trevor McFedries:Bushwick girls or whatever. Tibet, right? And it may be some Bushwick girls yet, but there are, you know, it's the Franks and the guys. The Telegram guys, the weirdos. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, it's like Fortnite kids. Yes. You know? And I think it's really unsexy for people to go look at a bunch of like Spurgy Fortnite gamers who are, you know, betting on whether Ani, Elon's like AI companion will get enough attention or not. It feels bleak. But it also has opened the aperture such that you can squint and see a world where if you have an information advantage on whether skinny jeans I had tweeted about will become popular again or mainstream again, I think it would be fantastic if you could express that belief and have the asymmetric upside that Bill Ackman has.

54:45Bill Ackman has fucking takes. Why listen to Bill Ackman? More than ever. Yeah, because he has billions of dollars from taking asymmetric bets, I need to approach some girl and say, may I meet you? Why does he have influence and why couldn't the Bushwick –

55:00Trevor McFedries:Being at which, the internet may have memed that into being a real thing now. I know. It actually probably does bang. If I was a single man, I might go out there and see who's brain rot is me at the local bar. So I think what we would need, I think, is a few things. I think you need attention instruments that can persist. the time horizons for meme coins right now are so small i mean even if you think mom donnie is going to be mayor and there are 400 mom donnie coins a you're not gonna pick the right one but even if you do it might pump and rug in two hours and if you're a person who isn't uh your average fortnite enthusiast those attention spans are too small for you to pick the shouldn't probably win on that note for a second um i think most people who have like ever heard that example are just like oh obviously it's prediction markets like prediction market like could you talk about maybe an example of something that you think is like better served by whatever it is that you're pointing to that's more nebulous rather than like there's something about whatever sports and politics that are pretty deterministic yeah like so yeah i think prediction markets are great deterministic i think things that have like kind of discrete outcomes i think skinny jeans is a maybe skinny jeans is a soft one right and so i think a couple different things um so we'll start with obvious i think there are soft things that don't have uh probably resolutions that everyone could agree on the scale a little bit yeah and so the question for me often is like okay if this thing is soft and squishy and we can't get an elegant resolution that's probably better sort of the market where people can vote with their dollars i don't know how much attention it's going to get and you can just see a real-time scoreboard the other thing is i think um you know the illiquidity of prediction markets and the lack of fungibility.

56:37Yeah. To me creates a lot of interesting challenges. And beyond that, like bonding curves are magic. You know, like if you haven't played with meme coins and you do, there's a very regular occurrence where people will bet$10 and make a hundred thousand because of the convexity of those bonding curves and, and, and the way they're shaped on the other hand, And if you get a 20 % return on a prediction market, that's fantastic. A 2X, 3X is fantastic. Because most of these markets, most of the liquidity in these books, whether it's sports or politics or everything, there are these sharps that are so advanced.

57:14Like the edge is off 2 % or 3%.

57:16Trevor McFedries:It's interesting you say that. I think most people's intuition is actually like the correct thing is that you can get a 20%, like the prediction market thing. and that the$10 into$100 ,000 is actually like a broken novel feature of it just being weird and like immature. Yes. And you're almost saying the opposite. You're actually saying like that's the thing. Yeah, I think like to me, and I think this is like maybe as bizarre as like Duchamp's Urino, like the broken and immature is the alpha and what artists are great at. Like Duchamp being like this thing you piss in is art is not something that a market would value.

57:50Trevor McFedries:Yeah. And I think that is, you know, like Warholian tin can, you know, soup can, like that is effectively what bonding curves allow people to create a market and be like, no, actually this is important. And you're like, that isn't important. That's slop. And you're like, no, trust me. And what great. Well, this back to slop becoming punk maybe. I don't know. Totally. And I think what like great collectors have been able to do historically is like take the side of that bet and be like, yeah, I want all these Warhols. And this basket guy that can't draw, I think it rocks actually. and I think that that is the opportunity on both sides of that market.

58:23Trevor McFedries:I want to talk a little broader about speculation. I don't know that it just feels like the gambling the sort of speculation in culture is out of control. People are starting to talk about it and your big kind of maybe not counter but at least thing that's cutting through a lot of that is it's rational to speculate. A couple of things from you. All the crypto ideologues will tell you that the trenches are the death of crypto and it's all extraction and brainless, but they're wrong, obviously. For my POV, the trenches are a lot of people making very rational decisions about how they should spend their time and their energy to create the best outcomes for themselves and their loved ones.

58:58Trevor McFedries:I also think they're underserved, lots of people building for devs, creators, vibe coders, whatever, but not a ton of people building for someone trying to turn $20 into$40 to buy Chipotle. Obviously, there's this sort of silly, super micro version of this. There's the broader financial nihilism thing. What are you seeing? What is happening for 20-year-olds and why is it rational to speculate? I think a couple of things. I think often I get frustrated because the things that are happening for 20-year-olds are the same thing that were happening when we were 20-year-olds in different moments, right?

59:30We were like young people who wanted to make a mark on the world. And in order to do so, we needed to prove ourselves. And oftentimes, we could go to like low-status domains and do things in order to build up an XP to get a shot. And in parallel, you need to survive. And so whether it was clipping sneakers for a generation or for me, like building eBay auction pages for like, you know, my grandparents, you're going to look for alpha. And so I think that's happening. But I think what's really awesome is like a version of the Internet that I was drawn to as a young person reading Kevin Kelly, whatever, is happening.

1:00:02There's effectively this entirely online economy that's existed. People are spinning up meme coins. They're paying people and putting digital currencies all over the world without permission to manage a Discord or a Telegram or to bag work in whatever way. And it's a totally like online behavior being paid in an online currency. I think it's what people dreamed of.

1:00:23Trevor McFedries:The irony is it's not metaverse shaped enough or something. And as a result, people are like, it doesn't look like EVE Online. And so it doesn't count. Totally. Or it's uglier than I wanted it to be. Yeah. And what is, I think, and I had similar sentiments. So I started talking to the people in the trenches and it's like, who are you? I'm 21. I live in middle of nowhere, Missouri. I work at a bookstore part-time. And while I'm there, I reply guy, Ansem with like CAs, like, you know, tokens he should buy. And I'm able to turn$20 into a hundred dollars. You know, I make 12 bucks an hour working at this bookstore.

1:00:56I could work eight hours or I could just reply guy, Ansem for an hour a day and be up a hundred bucks. I'm like, absolutely. It's rational. Absolutely. You should be doing those things. And it speaks to probably what will come and it's uncomfortable because it's new.

1:01:09Trevor McFedries:But I think again, and because we don't believe in the underlying thing to go back to the other thing, which is actually like being ahead of consensus. Most people in the world don't believe is productive or something. Yeah. And I think it's, it's, it's easier to be out of step when you're already low status and like perceived as like, you know, de classe. say. And so I think that's often where the alpha is. Like, of course, if it's consensus, like any great investor, you know, contrarian, it's be contrarian and right. And I think a lot of great investors these days, I don't think are that contrarian, which is maybe part of the momentum moment, which I also kind of think speaks to like the tipping of a sufficient market thing, you know, is like, I think what a lot of investors have learned also is that, you know, we don't need to name any of them, but the really intelligent ones are like, you can create media arms and you can shape consensus yes and so you can make yourself right yes by having the hordes follow you so you can take gigantic bets shape consensus and be right which is what hollywood was so good at forever you know manufacturing consent and hollywood forgot that or they just lost their leverage they're still fantastic at it but they've lost their leverage right like what they had was they had a corner they had they had a monopoly on distribution media and so now that people can do it i think the people that have capital and media arms are like oh we could try to pick or we could just king make and be right long enough to exit it's funny how when you say it like that it sounds a lot very similar to the new thing that's happening it's like one last thing on this uh there's an excerpt from uh the piece i referenced earlier that danko wrote on this uh we're calling prediction, kind of the successor to postmodernism, but he gets something interesting.

1:02:51Trevor McFedries:I'm curious for your take on which is he says, how early or late you are to something is now an essential component of your relationship to that thing. The timelines and reels represent what is going on are increasingly about a single metatopic. Are you predicting it or is it predicting you? This has become the main thing that you feel. And it is a complete break from the postmodern aesthetic where your consumption was wrapped in an unthreatening fuzzy blanket. It doesn't matter what time of year you arrive at Whole Foods to buy strawberries, the farm stand simulacra is recreated faithfully. The prediction aesthetic is a new thing and rejects postmodernism.

1:03:24Trevor McFedries:Quote, I want to feel something even if it hurts. And this is like, it at least sits next to the it's rational to speculate thing, which is like, is there something else also happening here, which just like we all want to feel something again like gambling is both rational but also like in a flat algorithmic society it's like volatile yeah and i and i think gambling and rat is rational is provocative and there's there's so much i can say but i think you know there's a lot of that dinkle piece i really am aligned with there's others that i'm not but i think he's pulling exactly the right thread i think one of the things you're pulling out here that i like is and this is like kind of dark but i remember i got on an airplane once to fly and um i was like i should look at my tweets to figure out like what the last tweet i have this plane goes down and like it was like a crashing to think but in the exact moment after that i had this thought where it was like at least no more email you know like there was we live in this life that like lacks finality to this extreme such that like you know at the end of my life the kind of like the thought of it was like, damn, at least you would get, you would be able to like, you know, I'd send an email ever again.

1:04:35And it was, it was a bizarre thought, but it reminded me of the lack of finality in our lives, like more broadly, you know, like all of your ex-girlfriends, your eighth grade friends are in your cell phone, in your Instagram feeds. Like we lack finality in a lot of our lives. And I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's tough, right? Everything is so ambiguous.

1:04:52Trevor McFedries:Everything's frictionless. And I think it's really comfortable to watch a basketball game and watch it resolve and things that provide finality, a scoreboard, it's actually really comforting. And so I think there is something about staring at a hyperliquid perp and being like, damn, I'm up. Damn, I'm down. Like, it's concrete. And I think there's a difference there between gambling as how people understand it. I think there's a misconception that people think people go to the slots in Vegas and they go to win or to lose. They go to be in the machine zone. They go to be in the machine zone. They go to disappear, right?

1:05:26And I think that's very different from being confronted with the finality of you're up or you're down. I think like, you know, like they do a good job of obscuring that, right? And I think what -

1:05:39Trevor McFedries:Do you think crypto is more the machine zone or is it more the actual simulacrum of finality? I find that the finality of crypto, and they blur, which is concerning, right? It's like people have recognized that there are opportunities to implement more of machine zone into these things. but that's probably more common in fantasy sports or whatever than yeah i mean you could argue you know whatever draft kings or whatever it was all kinds of places to get lost in the machine zone or in like you know just mobile games yeah um but but that said i think instagram reels for that matter yeah i think but i know when i talk about the finality like yes the hyperliquid perp i think is compelling because you're like i'm up or i'm down but also the scoreboard of like i was right versus i was wrong on a take on a belief like in a messy world where everything's so subjective and unambiguous like bitcoin hitting 100k was sick because i was rich but it was sicker because i was fucking right you know what i mean and like i think that's something that people feel across the board yeah i love that answer a lot uh i want to shift a little bit i think still connected you i've explained you to people many times over the years and i always refer to you as sort of the person who's like most consistently like ahead of culture um and part of that i think is that I'm sure of everyone you know, you're not the most that, but you are, and maybe specifically, you're super on the frontier of both technology and of culture, which are like kind of orthogonal things.

1:07:02Trevor McFedries:So many things, like obviously early music stuff, crypto, Michaela, like there's a tweet from you in November, 2020. Obviously, this was resonant to me. You said gaming is replacing music as the linchpin of emergent social scenes and it makes everyone 30 plus I talk to really uncomfortable. You're the first person to ever mention blitogram to me. Like there's so many of these things. And critically, I think the edge of culture partially means what's going to become consensus, but critically it means weird for now. And so I guess my question is what do you think has caused you to develop such a nose for weird, particularly in one that actually resolves to consensus?

1:07:45Yeah. It's a good question. I will say I'm actively trying to be more on time now. I think this is important for people that I care about.

1:07:56Trevor McFedries:But I think, so this is a tangent, but I'm going to have a child in March. Congratulations. Obviously, it provokes a ton of thoughts, but one of them is what you hope to offer them. And to me, it's just so clearly curiosity. I don't care what it is that he's going to be into, but I wanted to be deeply curious. And for whatever reason, I mean, I could probably, I could probably psychoanalyze myself and say, because I was like a poor black kid who was good at sports, but put in like the alternative and gifted classrooms and like middle-class white Iowa, I was like consistently othered and like wanted to find places to, to, to a impose my will, to create suffering for other people.

1:08:50It made me feel uncomfortable. And so it was like, it's why I played football. It was partially to be good and loved, but also to like break a quarterback's ribs when I like came out the corner, you know? And it was also the reason when we did times tables and math class, we're like, I was going to fucking win, you know, cause I want to feel good. But also I wanted to let you know that you're, like you're, you're not better than me. And I think that that was also the sport. That's what Nemesis was talking about. Like in some respects, I grew up in a pretty anomalous era. Like I'm 40 years old.

1:09:21I was 15 in 2000. And I lived through this moment that I reflect on. I actually want to write something about. Maybe I should. That's been, I think, pretty detrimental to a lot of millennial men. And that is like historically, like I'd watched Saved by the Bell, which is an 80s. I don't know if you've ever seen when I was young. And I was like, it's weird that the really buff jock guy is the cool guy. because I'm 14 now and the cool guy is the angular art guy. Like the coolest movie in America is Garden State and like Zach Braff is a sex symbol. And like Pete Wentz on the cover of Rolling Stone

1:09:54Trevor McFedries:with his shirt off and is the coolest guy. And when I went on LiveJournal or like these dating apps, the mode was effectively you put like the five books you like, I'll put the five books I like, and if you like the same books, we should date. And I was like, damn. That may have been correct, honestly. And I think for nerds, candidly, it is. And then there was this cultural shift where you watch technology, which was the dominant cultural force, move from the nerds who talk to their shoes to the MBAs that took over. And you watch dating apps go from you write your books and I write my books to Tinder, which is really normal.

1:10:31We make eye contact at a bar. We keep looking or we don't. And Instagram, where it was like, dang, you look good in a bikini. Lots of likes.

1:10:39Trevor McFedries:Yes. And I was kind of knocked off guard because I was like, whoa, this is like hyper heteronormative and masculine and sexual. And I was taught to like meet a young woman. I should tell them that we should get married and like they'll be my punk rock princess. And then there's this like Zoomers being like, hey, baby, we should link, you know. And so I think there I lived through this like bizarre moment where nerds dominated culture. And it was it was celebrated to go into a record store. and you know i remember as a kid i i went to a christian sleepaway thing in iowa and my friend's older brother was in an mxpx cover band which is just like kind of niche pop punk band and i was a kid and i watched him play and i was like that was awesome and i went to the cd store in the mall north park mall in davenport iowa and i was like i want to get this punk rock thing i think it's like something xx and they were like no effects and i was like yeah that's it and i got a no effects album i got into punk i went to the punk record store and i was like i like no effects and they're like that's fucking whack you know this is what you should be into and they pushed me into like fugazi and like you know all of this stuff that defined me i'm still straight edge i'm still punk and like it was really celebrated to be deeply nerdy and inquisitive and so i think i wanted to win at that sport also and so when i got into no effects i needed to get to grind core or like needed to be at noise shows where they're running vacuum cleaners through distortion pedals like that was the final boss I had to get to and I just don't think that's that compelling anymore it is interesting that I suspect if you surveyed I don't know five different generations you'd get like the it's the pendulum swinging it's like a sine curve and like maybe one thing that's weird about it is like while you're kind of living it media is lagging and pop culture is lagging and so you're you're sort of disoriented I don't know like I also wonder if just like the extremely into something thing is always going to win out over like the extremely curious the extremely curious always wins out it maybe takes like a lot like you i don't know what stretch of your life you weren't cool but like it probably didn't take that long ultimately for you to like for things to resolve well i think that's the interesting thing is like so obviously like cool it's a different axis sure but like um if you were to talk about like pop cultural cool it's it's not clear to me that being super curious is the path whereas i think like you know the people that i see winning the cool game right now oh maybe because those people are on time to go back to your earlier yeah i guess they are curious but they're curious of like the the contemporary moment yeah and they're less interested in the historical context and i think it's because things move so fast it's like not clear that you need to have that knowledge yes And I think that's, like, I remember that brat moment, the Charlie XCX brat moment, and it felt kind of like the last hurrah for, like, the world that I knew.

1:13:39Yes. Where it was like, here's Charlie, who honestly I've known since she was 16. We did some of our first sessions together in America in my bedroom in Silver Lake. And as someone who's always been so knowledgeable, so bright, so talented, and was finally able to make the music that responded to people. But I also think more importantly, a lot of the kind of Bushwick elite, you know, like the publicists, the people at Spotify, they were able to be like, this is what it should be. Like someone making interesting, most advanced, get accessible music that references a moment that's important culturally and kind of elevates it and twists it.

1:14:16And I remember at the height of that, going to look at the Spotify streams and being like, wow, this is amazing to see. And I looked and I was like, oh, this song has like 200 million streams. that's crazy and I just went to look at the most streamed artists at the moment and like ahead of her was like The Neighborhood you know which is like a band like that hadn't reached a record in a long time and hadn't thought about but made like really playlistable music or like Charlie Puth to me who is like savant but like you know quite boring and so I took it as this accomplishment

1:14:47Trevor McFedries:but I'm still well aware that there are tons of things most people have never heard of that are You're going to do far bigger numbers than that, which was able to capture, you know, whatever it is, Bushwick extended the global Bushwick. You started that answer by saying you're trying to be more on time. Yeah. It's not surprising. You say like one thing that has been like Michaela is maybe the best possible example. But like you've been early, arguably too early to a lot of things. and I have to imagine that there's like some internal, like the honest version of you is way too early and that's awesome.

1:15:25Trevor McFedries:But like back to all the commercial, like I don't know, what is that feeling of the, obviously on some level like being on time has really obvious positive outcomes, which is like it's commercially resonant. Your things maybe actually get to go the distance versus be the thing that the kids today are inspired by. Um, yeah, but I'm curious what the psychological thing is there. Yeah. And I think, uh, you also get old and tired. Like, and I think that, and you kind of hope that that slows you down. Like part of that Bob Dylan statement was like, oof, that's terrifying. Yeah. Um, and I will probably go on a tangent again, but, uh, one of my best friends, the guy named Sam Teller, Sam and Elon were looking for a place for the gigafactory.

1:16:11and in parallel, I had been really fascinated with this idea. This is like 2016, 2017, with getting all of my favorite brilliant people to move to Iowa. Like I was like, man, it's actually pretty awesome. Four seasons, drive to Chicago in two hours where I'm from. Like what if we just all went back and we did what you did in Williamsburg or in Silver Lake here and you own property. And that evolved into this thing called actually ceruling and it was like a plan. And I was like, I think there's a way to reverse brain drain. It is kind of cliche tech road to be like, I'll start a city. But I was like, we can go and we can basically work with economic development directors to give us incentives to move there.

1:16:51And Sam was like, you're totally nuts. But like, we've been close to the people in Tulsa. And we're talking about building a factory there. They're really in these kind of ideas. You should just go and talk to these people. And so I went and long story short about this guy named George Kaiser. Billionaire, oil guy. Unbelievable. Unbelievable guy. I think famously he was the first person to identify Obama and really back him when it was deeply unpopular. But I met him, and he was probably one of his late 70s if not early 80s. And he had built this Disneyland in the center of Tulsa with free buses that go there.

1:17:21It makes me want to cry thinking about it. And when I met him, I met him, and we were on this walk. He tries to walk multiple miles a day. And he was talking about how he wants to make Tulsa this cultural center. And he's like, I love what you're talking about. We should do this. We should bring this here. and he was like, I have all these consultants that are talking to me about what I can do to make this the center of culture. And one of them said I should do an EDM festival. And he was like, I don't think that's right. I think for a couple hundred million dollars I could move all of Broadway and theater and ballet here.

1:17:49And I was like, you're fucking right, dude. Don't let these 22-year-old McKenzie fucks tell you you're wrong. You're fucking so right. You know what I mean? He's brilliant. It's such an inspiration to me still. Wow. But what I also saw in his eyes was this person who was talking to me and he was like, what you want to do, I need you to do it and do it now. Because like the clock is winding down for me. And it was like deeply inspiring, but also somewhat terrifying because I'm someone who's just had endless ideas. And I don't know that it will just stop one day. But I do know that I'll be confronted with a reality where it's like, I'm running out of time.

1:18:26I'm running out of time. I'm running out of time. And so all that is to say, I think that like, you know, the Bob Dylan thing was terrifying, but also inspiring in that potentially I could slow down and be right and have enough resources that I could start to paralyze and do a lot of things and try to chew through this list.

1:18:46Trevor McFedries:Yes, yes, yes. And maybe you get satiated by the time the grim reaver comes knocking or Brian Johnson is able to extend me into perpetuity or whatever it is. But I think that's part of the reason I want to be on time is this like, you know, very human fear of the clock stopping. that's quite an answer on a maybe a lighter note uh or maybe not uh what are you obsessed with today maybe outside of the speculation stuff we talked about um which i know you're spending a lot of time thinking about like what are you obsessed with today that you think the rest of us are going to catch up on hopefully soon oh wow or just anything else that's been firing that's sort of since i know you were really interested in streaming streamers for a little a while yeah yeah uh i mean i think that i'm absolutely interested in this i'm trying to think of things that are maybe less obvious uh i'm very interested in telegram uh i don't think not because of crypto at all but because i've been able to stumble into these portals where like teenagers seemingly can be very free and like because i'm a non i sometimes they let me in but there are these channels where they all upload mp3s and they talk about the music they're discovering and it's really interesting to me to see something that they're into and like the the kind of like revisionist history of what they think was really important when i was 20 and i'm talking about it um but beyond that like these channels where they're able to do what i was able to do on an internet that wasn't so neutered um like i often get really upset thinking about you know the open window was acceptable on youtube or really any of these platforms save for maybe x like i just don't think tyler the creator could release the yonkers video right now on youtube why because he hangs himself you know and like you know the there there's the you know i went and watched um one of my i was playing a show in san francisco with my dj duo and I was reminded of this band Girls.

1:20:48There's a song called Lust for Life. And it's such a perfect encapsulation of a San Francisco that I knew. It's like young, like the 50 ,000 art hoes in San Francisco, like it used to exist. And like, if you watch that music video, like it's an encapsulation of like this radical band and these radical art hoes and like queer kids hanging out in bathtubs and clapping and jamming.

1:21:08Trevor McFedries:What I was reminded is, I don't even know that that would be allowed because it's like, you know, young people, nudity or whatever it is. And so in these dark corners of Telegram, you're seeing it like I'm watching them post and it feels like Tumblr and like on blogs. There's like, you know, there's stuff that is horrible, like Thinspo and like, you know, anorexia posting and cutting and, you know, all the goth cliches of Tumblr that I saw that felt somewhat like rites of passage. but why i why i had been probably misinformed to think that stuff had gone away that you were living in this really like you know progressive young like people are still dealing with all these demons and they're manifesting in the same ways that i'm familiar with and that we we push them to the margins but they still exist and i think what's what's interesting for me is is you know hearing them talk about culture and their experience there are the cliches that i'm familiar with on youtube but when you talk to these these people and you know i've now kind of like doxed myself as like boomer and some of them they're able to just give me like unique insights and so i guess some maybe it speaks like a pendulum that constantly swings the way you're talking about the things i'm interested in now are like these these unfettered cultural spaces on the internet like it it sounds silly and quite trite because a lot of us remember that but most of the stuff we interact with now is mediated by like algos you know it's really interesting you say that because my next the next thing i want to talk to you about and that it's come up in so many conversations I talked about with a few people on the podcast, Eugene way, like the consensus view is actually that there are no subcultures on the internet anymore.

1:22:44Trevor McFedries:The consensus view is that like, for whatever reason, lack of friction, so many other things, like we have this like total flattening. You, you've even talked about like Iowa city being more culturally interesting in New York. And I have to wonder or imagine that part of that is that it relates to something else you've said, which is that New York is the soundstage for the internet. And because of that, like everything in New York, it's the other thing. It's every Mexico city, New York, every, every coffee shop, it looks the same. It's really interesting to me that you have found obviously for a while in discord.

1:23:13Trevor McFedries:And now in this other place, it's like, where on the internet can you actually knock it in? Yeah. And that's, what's allowing for the fertile ground and the flowering and the interestingness. And like, by definition, it can't be surveyed. Certainly. And that was like one of my great gripes of like the woke moment was like, you know, inclusivity is, is incredibly boring you know as like the one black dude getting vc funding i was like actually like this sucks i think we should have boundaries boundaries are how you define society and like people should be exceptional and they should be of all kinds of all walks of life absolutely but we shouldn't be like any old in this place like berghain's not special because suits get in and increasingly less interesting because some suits do get in uh and so i think like boundaries are absolutely important and exclusivity is like i i want to write this thing in praise of exclusivity, but I was still the CEO of a company.

1:24:02And, you know, and so I was like, maybe I shouldn't get fucking canceled. But I absolutely couldn't agree more. Like, and maybe that is at the core of what I've, you know, I have very fond memories of getting fake IDs to get into shows, you know, and go places. And it made those experiences sweeter and richer. And maybe it's all psychological, but maybe it is those boundaries.

1:24:22Trevor McFedries:How do you, how do you find these? Like, is the finding of these telegram groups sort of like getting into the party or is it something totally different like yeah i guess i think what's nice is i've developed i think by doing the homework have just developed a taste for bizarre like when i buy artwork right i buy stuff that i love or that i'm hate you know and i often find that like fuck i hate that ends up being like i love that in six months it's doing something to me that's causing a reaction it's not not it's not the middle yeah but i think ultimately it's like this narcissism of small differences where you're like this is so close to a thing that i am they put like this water down or this like this thing that i hate i think the thing that kind of got me into this telegram was some really wild super addd you know clip to an old breakcore song that i vaguely recognized with just all kinds of like anime and like Wojax and memes cut up and it was shared from this and you can see the forwarded thing in telegram from Armageddon I joined Armageddon and it was all this and you know it's people being blown up by drones in Ukraine like Russian kids sharing like you know Crystal Castle's derivatives or whatever it is and you can just start clicking into the other things that are being forwarded from a lot of them sucked some of them were like really interesting and then I just keep clicking and some of them get shut down or whatever curiosity is the engine though yeah and i think just like developing a palette for like what what is actually good i don't think a lot of people stop and think critically is this good is it good and that that that is oftentimes people are like what can i do to be successful i'm like you can you could just stop and do the homework like why is your podcast so excellent like you went and read all this stuff about me instead of like winging it and most people don't have time to not wing it or the kind of like wherewithal to do it but just don't wing it but it also it's just like you have to care like clear like the reason you can do this is because you care yeah totally i am that's absolutely right whatever the program busts bust ticket theory of excellence whatever it's called like it does ring true like i i do love this shit i want to find new things yeah yeah speaking of at least some of the stuff you're talking about particularly around exclusivity uh and another thing you were early to um probably not on time although who knows friends with benefits yeah and DAOs, and obviously the bread stuff too, building dapper collectives.

1:26:49Trevor McFedries:I want to talk about the exclusivity part specifically, but maybe before we get there, I guess just what stands out from that era of a bunch of things, which is crypto highs and lows, COVID, getting super into Discord, building at least the cultural DAO, and now you also have some distance from it? Yeah. Still a member, still very excited about FWB. I think what stands out, I think what was clear to a lot of us is that what crypto is doing is effectively speed running like a history of markets and organizations. And most of these trials were going to end up in the exact same place that we were.

1:27:25But I think it was important with this new coordination layer of the internet to be like, maybe things go different.

1:27:31Trevor McFedries:Let's give it a go. Let's give it a go, right? And we can run these experiments pretty rapidly. And so let's give it a go. um fwb was interesting because i was still pretty uh i was still of the belief that people would like fork things copy ideas iterate on them and i think at the moment we were in the crypto cycle we were kind of more of like an extraction layer and so the idea was to like come up the primitive where it was like hey all you've ever known this was before crypto was you know even remotely mainstream in my opinion and the idea was okay you've only known networks where all the value accrued to the people in the middle of the vcs and the founders and employees like there's there's a world where you can create a network where the value accrues to the people who make it interesting yes and we created like super dumb tokenomics but by the way you made this at least you messaged i got a message in fall 2020 which was pre any nft stuff like pre any web 3 like this was quite this was really really primitive i think for people and i think the idea was just to like create a spark with the dream that and that's been some of like the bummer of michaela and this it was like here's a primitive it's exciting for you to go expand on it and people were like yeah we just want this i'd rather just like cash out on this thing and like move on to the next thing that has some momentum and then cash out um and so i think there's still plenty of room for people to create these these spaces that you know value can accrue people that make them interesting at wb is doing a decent job of it now i think one of the challenge was in the gensler era it was pretty impossible to kind of accrue value to a token uh without getting into trouble and so their other hands were tied but now it's like better time than ever well that's kind yeah one of the thoughts i had is like oh my gosh what a time to try to do a new version of that 100 you know it's more maximally commercial or whatever but yeah maybe on a related note to that like what's the relationship between community and exclusivity like can those two things actually are they necessary for each other are they at odds eventually it's a good question i don't know that really interrogated it like deeply but like on the surface for me at least i think they they live in harmony and live in tension and i think i like to optimize for attention um like whenever like bottles taxonomy of players i'm like you kind of need these griefers you can fuck the achievers so that you they have something to play against uh i often get like frustrated people talk about politics and they're like fucking aocs and tucker carlson's and i'm like you absolutely need those things like you need that dialectic so to speak and so i think for me communities are place are places where boundaries can emerge and they're like petri dishes right and so there's this kind of this idea that you have you know this primordial soup that turns into a community and the community can spawn like a lot more primordial soups that spawn into these like boundary communities and i'm not totally sure how one emerges or one begets the other but that's how i see it in my head yeah on that maybe on that note like can i guess my question was going to be can these things scale maybe part of what you're saying is like scale doesn't mean them getting infinitely bigger it means spawning off new replicas or remixes or something yeah i think at the height of fwb what i loved is there are people that only hung on the trading channels and there was like just the parenting bros yeah they were just sharing and there were different parts of their lives but to me it felt like oh there's the green point crew and like there's you know like the red hook crew or whatever you're like sick and so yeah i think i think that's that's how i do it and i think those communities should have a kind of an active tension and you know outlets for resolution that tension begets like really important and interesting things yeah we talked about a little bit little michaela uh i think you were i met you you had just started michaela maybe uh it was very very early on and even then you had these kind of two really prescient ideas i think which is one and maybe this is a little bit controversial to say, but like the artist is the bottleneck.

1:31:18Trevor McFedries:So I think one thing that you were kind of feeling around particularly the music side of things. And then maybe almost conversely, this is something you said relatively more recently, but celebrities are a team sport. And I think like, it's so interesting to think about that. That was like 2014 or whatever. Like we're in a world today, you mentioned this earlier, like we use the word creator. And yet what we mean by a creator is the person who controls the distribution. like we live in a world that is completely dominated by the individual who is like the leverage point of distribution and even if there are other quote-unquote creative people behind them they have no leverage um bands are dead la la i guess i'm curious one like to to think back to like what was in your head back then and then more importantly like it feels like things have gone the direction you were a little worried about like even more extremely do you have hope for creativity feeling like a team sport again?

1:32:10Certainly. And certainly, I think the thing I was responding to with the artist being the bottleneck is they're kind of diminishing returns and it's creating this crabs in the barrel dynamic that I don't think is positive. And so there, I think, were opportunities to create, like, I think it was like pass-through vehicles, right? Like you could think of Rihanna as this like giant, like rent-seeking middleman. Like everyone's on set waiting, and rihanna's got another blunt of smoke in the in the trailer like i guess we're all waiting and so the idea that you could have these pass-through vehicles where you could you know have value created by this entity on behalf of whoever is behind it these visionary storytellers choreographers whatever it is technologists and yeah mickey mickey 100 and i think the things i like to pursue are things that are exciting kind of spiritually because they poke at something that I think is really important to the community that I care about, creative people, but also meet this tech moment.

1:33:13And for me, I think it was less about the technology stack purely as much of this idea of like zero marginal cost reproduction and like aggregation theory and all these ideas that I felt like were radically changing this world. I was like, okay, how can we judo that? How can we kind of use it against itself to kind of like reward people for being dismal by it? That's cool. And so that was, I mean, And then I think what's more often than not in my life, when you start trying to do those things, maybe this is what like hippies mean when they mean like going with the universe or whatever, like you start doing those things and all of these other things start emerging quite elegantly where you're like, oh yeah.

1:33:44And they're spending a ton of money on AR. And so all of these like, all the infrastructure is emerging that I can use to do this stuff. And spatial computing and digital goods, these ideas that I cared about or generative media that I cared about, just like things started popping up and like, you know, Huckingface emerged and I'm going to give you a clam. And I was like, this is fantastic. We could scale.

1:34:03Trevor McFedries:2016, I think. Yeah. And they were still a conversational kind of like chat bot tool. When you're, I think you can identify things that are kind of floating in the ether and two pretty like dominant parts of our lives, whether it's, you know, technology and culture and kind of start letting the ball roll in the right direction. You can kind of roll with it. I think the challenge as you highlighted for me is that people interpreted a lot of these behaviors and things that we did at the surface level and then virtual influencers. And because we were so attached to the bit of being in the story for the Michaela thing, we didn't want to speak up and kind of break that fourth wall when I think ultimately we should have made it clear, like, no, no, no, no.

1:34:39We're building Disney. We're not building virtual influencers. The reason people care about Manila Blahniks is not because Carrie was just shilling them because she was fucking rad and she made you want to be her and you could be her by buying Manila Blahniks.

1:34:54Trevor McFedries:I think the other thing, too, is that unfortunately because of the timing like people took Michaela at the gimmick yes it was almost like it can never go farther than this because of how new it was that was one of the first things you ever said to me is like I'm building marvel for pop stars yeah um and specifically like this thing you've talked about plenty which is like it ultimately came back to the narrative certainly I think one challenge of the modern internet is that there's very little linear. Like everything's constellation. It's fragmented world building. You're speaking to a moving army and you're moving while the army's moving.

1:35:31Trevor McFedries:I don't know if you ever read, one of the things that came up when I was talking to Gabe was this piece Brad Trammell wrote called Athletic Aesthetics. No, but I love Brad. It's like, it's worth reading. I'll send it to you after. And he sort of describes where we're going with this, which is just like, it's not even really about what you're saying or what you're making as a creative or influencer. It's just about like having the audience keep up with you. And yet I think you were really, really thoughtful about trying to tell like true narratives with Michaela. I'm curious what you think great internet storytelling looks like now.

1:36:00Yeah. And I think it's some contextual things there because it's easy for me to forget even. But I started making Michaela in April of 2016. And there were still chronological feeds. We're like pre-Trump, right? And so there was a lot of adoration for tech. and when Michaela first started getting traction, you know, like Dazed, all these outlets were like, look how fucking cool and interesting and smart Trevor is, like visionary guy. Wow, wow, wow. And then I think the Trump moment, you know, really kind of inverted the politics of celebrating technology, but also the changing from these chronological feeds to algorithmic feeds really presented a wrinkle for us as storytellers because the thing I always try to elicit with people who are hiring is like, this is panel by panel storytelling.

1:36:43It's the same as comic books.

1:36:44Trevor McFedries:People are keeping up with us. Yeah, yeah. It's the same as a comic book. You're reading panel by panel by panel. How can we start to create a behavior where people learn to start from the beginning? Can we do some of these things that when you go by The Sopranos, you don't just start a last season, like kick it off at the beginning. And by the time we are starting to kind of like get some of those things working out, I was like, surprise. No way. Oh, wow. Okay. So the challenge shifted, of course, to like how can we participate in this more dynamic social media that I think brought stars like Cardi B to life.

1:37:16She's so good at a clap back. She's like the opposite of Cary Grant to me, where he just stands up and performs the things that was written. Her whole skill is like, fuck you, Cardi B. She's like, fuck you, bitch, suck my dick. And you're like, yeah, wow. Like, you can't strip that. That's amazing. That's Cardi. And so the challenge begins.

1:37:32Trevor McFedries:She's a highlight reel almost. Yeah, but also like, how can you be dynamic? How can you, you know, like in borrowing things from Hollywood, from game studios where they're working on these like, you know, these long time periods and producing a finished product can you instead try to develop systems that can be dynamic you know weekly bibles all those kinds of things almost interactive yeah almost interactive uh unrelated to that but related ish to michaela about sort of like being a person who's a touring musician or a person on the road you said one of the things i was trying to do with little michaela was create a model where people who were disenchanted with being public figures could share their work without having to deal with what it means to be a public figure.

1:38:14Trevor McFedries:It can be miserable. The court of public opinion will try to destroy you as fast as they'll champion you. The idea that you could just create this figure, this avatar for you to share your creative wares through was really intriguing to me. And then there was another tweet I found, I think on the day Bourdain died, where you said, what strikes me most is his passing while on the road working. The loneliness I felt while professionally DJing was such an isolating experience. How do you vent to anyone about a job or a life that is viewed as the dream? you've since been a touring musician uh after you wrote that granted with a with a pal a buddy what is your relationship been like to that sort of maybe especially with like the touring music bookends of so much of your life like are any reflections on that kind of that idea yeah i think djing you know it's funny how you stumble into things in life and life is largely a game of luck to me but i was really lucky in that when i turned 19 i dropped out of university i so they they created this stuff called final scratch pro where you could install linux and then dj with mp3s on traditional turntables and i was like that's crazy and then swato came out and it made it easier to do that and it created this dynamic where i was in san jose that's a whole other long story about how i ended up there but i ended up going there because i wanted to be close to silicon valley like I had read about this was for school for school yeah so I went to San Jose to play football and ended up hating it for lots of reasons and ended up there for lots of reasons wanting to go into so yeah I was very lucky and I think kind of reframe it's like I was very lucky to be in San Jose at the moment that I was because I was interested in tech interested in business and I was reading things and I was really frustrated that I didn't have and I couldn't raise capital to start a business and I was also reading these books about brand building and I was like man I'm actually pretty good at that because I pirated Photoshop.

1:40:05I pirated Illustrator. I know how to build a website. I could do that part, but I don't have like capital to create a product. And then Serato came out and I was like, oh, I can like download MP3s for free and make myself the product and brand myself. I created a MySpace and this blog and all these things. And I think I was also very lucky in that I'm very good at being isolated. I can sit in front of a computer for 10 hours a day and get lost in it. And I'm very comfortable with that. And DJing, as I became quite popular, was a lot of that. It was just, you know, me driving myself to the airport, me parking a car, like walking to the airport by myself, sitting on a plane for six hours, you know, saying hi to a promoter, going back to my room, preparing a set, playing this show where you have this really bizarre -

1:40:51Trevor McFedries:Like the barbell almost. It's like complete isolation and then like in a mob. Yeah, but the bizarre thing, and I think I wasn't able to maybe elicit with that Bourdain tweet, is the really difficult part is you're getting all this attention, but it's almost like empty calories. You know, like you're the center of attention and everyone's looking at you. They're kind of looking through you. It's like, hey, monkey dance. Kind of, yeah. Like, you know, there are millions of times I'd be teaching this. I'd be like, hey, do you know where the bathroom is? And it's like a nice reminder, like, yeah, I work here.

1:41:17Like, I'm an employee, you know? You can think of yourself as a talent, but you're like, oh, it ain't that way. Sorry, you know?

1:41:24Trevor McFedries:Not I'm a big fan. Where's the bathroom? Yeah, and like very bizarre things where like you know not and this is maybe too crass of the electric pod but like you'd be djing and there'd be like some rich guy in a booth and he'd be like hey man you'd be like why hi he's just like i don't know what you're doing later but i've always wanted to see my wife look a black guy and you'd be like what like and i think he understands you're contained here yeah you know like you effectively like are like you are like the monkey on stage and so you're like yeah all right like i'm sorry i had a very beautiful not interested thank you like whatever it is but it's I don't treat you like a person.

1:41:58No, yeah, you're dehumanized, but you're also getting a lot of attention. And it's very hard to come back to your friends and be like, I'm living the dream, but. Yeah, I'm 21 and flying all over the world to play music and making more money than my friends who are doing investment banking. But I'm also deeply unsatisfied in a lot of ways. And so that was like the really tough part with the Bourdain thing is like, you could ask people what the dream job is, like travel in the world and eat the best meals. With amazing people. And be famous. Yeah, and I think it can be really, really tough.

1:42:27Trevor McFedries:what did you learn about identity through the Michaela process of either like running that account or even just thinking about the different personas you guys were going to create yeah and and I've expressed this a little bit before like some of the seedlings of Michaela stem from me being really intrigued with this idea that I could make a song and put it on SoundCloud or YouTube and have someone talk shit about it and really feel bad viscerally you know and be like one comment by the way yeah one comment no likes that snare sucks you're like damn maybe i should change the snare and you're like and you know this this idea that i had also been able to live as like a little script kitty hacker in these spaces on irc whatever the kid that were like clearly very white you know they're like weren't a bunch of and like white people saying incredibly racist shit in chats but i could kind of live inside of them and kind of embody this thing that was different and there was this idea like wow wouldn't it be and everybody isn't like a novel this wouldn't it be interesting if people could effectively like embody another person physically on the internet and feel what it means to have someone be like you know you're ugly yeah and what was bizarre is that like working model was very real you know like i've never been a woman on the internet and never in my life have i ever thought i should change my eyebrows you know but people would be like look at her ugly eyebrows and i'd be like damn should we change the eyebrows and i'd be like whoa it must be fucking crazy to be a woman on the internet because i've just you know what people will say a lot of things about this this podcast but i doubt they'll critique my eyebrows uh and so there was a lot about identity and i think one of the things we tried to explore was this idea of like post-physicality and us being these post-physical creatures and like some of the best moments were when we would get messages from young people who be like i'm 13 and non-binary and live in like missouri and no one believes that i'm real and like you're not real but you're doing amazing things and that inspires me wow wow that is so cool uh and that stuff is like you know when i look back on it making employees rich and making people who are fans of michaela feel seen and heard the way x-men was for me like that was always the dream is like i was this weirdo and i remember being a kid being like when i get my mutant powers like they're all gonna pay um but like that that that to me was like easily the best part of that stuff that's awesome i mean with michaela it was like gnarly like it was walking the first of the door catched all the arrows i remember reading that and being like so fucking true like wow i think you've done plenty of that too in your life yeah and i think it's i think like yeah i think again having a child has kind of reframed a lot of this stuff where it's like, it was just kind of me against the world.

1:45:17And again, we haven't talked about my personal life, but like, it's always kind of been me against the world. And that's been very liberating for me. You know, there wasn't a lot of collateral damage for me to like, you know, I have my mom, my sister.

1:45:28Trevor McFedries:You can take risks. Yeah, but we were already at zero. You know, there was nowhere else to go. And so it was like, your mom's a retirement plan or she doesn't. And so like, let's take a big swing. And if I fail miserably, I was already supposed to be here. A little bit about music. there's an article on soft the south florida trance team that's right uh we want to not think too much with our brains and just feel the music with our bodies you're a brilliant dude who is i think people can tell can like brain blast with the best of them and yet as i think both conceptually but also maybe even like physically you've always done a really good job of like both high and low and i think that's like part of what's in that quote a little bit but i'm curious how music has helped you with your ability to move between spaces and be in high-low.

1:46:18Yeah. And that was interesting because we're a bit trolly, but there's this tension that it's a product of being born when I was born. I never had anything, but I was very lucky that it was very chic to have nothing. The Blur song Common People could blare through a nightclub when I was 20, and it was very real. a lot of the rich kids wanted to be common people and go to the shithole dive bars and hang out where me and my actually like poor friends were like playing records and it was comforting in that i could just thrift clothes and still participate in you know high status los angeles society uh at least and in parallel a bit heartbreaking like they were definitely you know one of my one of my best friends when i moved here was a guy named adam moonbez his dad is less moonbez uh the former like ceo president of viacom and you know we had tons of amazing interactions just from being in proximity to him i remember because his dad was head of viacom was hanging out one day he was like dad you should give trevor a radio station like he's fucking good at music and like we're young and i was like honestly i would crush a radio station like no idea how to sell ads or whatever it is but like just being in proximity people that could think that big was really comforting but i i also think that the ability to develop a palette the ability to understand how some of these modes of thinking are our superpowers and the desire to pass them down was really interesting and so yeah i guess like it's kind of the same answer i've always had but like music and being good at music and i guess i'm realizing now also provided me a lot of power because of exclusivity like because i was the dj at hot nightclubs i would regularly have people walk up to the booth because i worked there and be like this is my business card i'm a producer at warner like i'd love to come back here sometime if you ever need anything i'd be like dang that's like a power broker you know and he'd be like by the way actually we need a dj for a movie that we're in could definitely get you paid well and i'm like bet i will text you and you will get back into the nightclub next week yes and if you watch the haunting of molly hartley some like weird horror movie there's a party scene that i got paid like five thousand dollars to dj in for one night when five thousand dollars was like an insane amount of money.

1:48:50Wow. You know? And so I think for me, what music was able to provide was like a path for a low status person to create something or create something of value or something that was scarce that people of high status wanted and the ability to transact. That would be like a really like, really a kind of like crass way to view it. But I think that was increasingly important. I also said like getting a job at Spotify early, like being able to get people in North America, Spotify, it was really cool. Yep.

1:49:17Trevor McFedries:Yep. You know, like Lewis Hamilton or whomever, like, one of Spotify is like, bet, bro. I got you. Thanks, man. If you ever need anything, it's like, honestly, like, I might. But I think that's probably a pro tip for anyone out there that's looking to, you know, do things. It's like figure out places where you can create leverage and provide access to people that are of high status or high power. And you can call in favors when the time is right and skip steps. This is, I'm sure, a can of worms. We don't have to spend a lot of time on it. But I found myself sort of wondering, I don't know, I worked at UMG 10 years ago or longer.

1:49:49Trevor McFedries:Like if this sort of like music just sort of feels like it's, at least with the internet structurally wants to be free more than maybe any other medium. And so I guess if that's true, is there a business model for music? Like does, is it just real world scarcity? Is it patronage? Like do you, one, I guess, do you agree with that at all? And like two, if so, does it tie into some of this other speculations that you're thinking about? Do you have any idea? Definitely. I think it's interesting. like music maybe or anything else i think i would i always wonder if that was like a function of file size because it seems like to me it's always it's less about file size is obviously a huge part of it but it's more that um like you you hear a song once you're not like i'm good yeah you're like i want to hear it more like you actually need before you like it you need to hear it five times good point when you watch a movie you're like i saw it i'm good so it has a little bit more like oh you should have to pay twenty dollars to see it once yeah music listening to a song is a way to build fandom with the artists yeah you know obviously i've wrestled this for a long time i would say immediately it's not clear to me as a business model that that makes sense for selling music i think one thing that's been great for soft is we've built a fan base that deeply cares about music and they buy our stuff on band camp and it's far more than i ever could have imagined through band camp again it's not i can't live in this home on band camp but i i don't know I don't have a good answer for that.

1:51:11I think what is starting to emerge is that if you can build a universes, there's lots of opportunity to sell things. Yes. And I think the brightest of the bunch understand that. Yeah. Whether they're capable of doing it is a whole nother task. Cause it's, it's taxing here. It's not what you love. It can be really hard. And so I, what I think was most impressive about Charlie in that brat moment, she's so smart. She's so, so, so smart. has always been so smart. And I think recognized the game on the field and was able to commit and do the thing. And, you know, we're not, when I see her, it's daps and highs.

1:51:48We're not close. But when I see her do like, you know, big television adverse or converse things, I'm like, get it. You know what I mean? Like you probably had to sacrifice a lot of emotional discomfort to commit to this bit and this story and this world that you were building when you're just a really gifted songwriter. Yeah.

1:52:06Trevor McFedries:You know? Yeah, this is, I mean, in a much smaller level, this is even just the artists who love to make music and don't want to tour. Totally. Yeah. And, and I think I've always tried to be a realist about this and told a story to musicians about when I was 16 playing in a hardcore band and there were two drummers and one had a car and we were like, he's the worst drummer, but he's got a fucking car, you know, like we can go play shows other places. So he's the drummer. A lot of life that's like that. Yeah. And so in some respects it's like, yeah, if you want to play shows, you got to have a car.

1:52:38if you want to be a famous musician, you got to make the fucking TikToks. The noogies.

1:52:44Trevor McFedries:I got a handful of miscellaneous things before we wrap up. Okay. First from our friend Alex Ang, he asked, I asked him when I should talk to you about it. His question was, is there any point where culture actually prices into tech and business like in this real way beyond just narrative and marketing? Like, is it actually become a core business driver? Maybe it's some of the stuff you're thinking about, but it's a, it's a tough one for me. I think the immediate answer for me is like, I don't know, you know, but I understand that I probably think about culture in different terms. And so my friend, Julie Young, who's brilliant.

1:53:22She is. I think understands culture more than almost anyone. And I don't think she would ever describe herself as someone, but it's so adept at identifying things that matter. Like OMG, LOL dolls, you know? I remember her talking to me, yeah. And like those blind boxes, like, you know, like she was so good at identifying that. And so I think in that Silicon Valley will be able to weaponize the young girl to shape like meaningful societal change in the way that Hollywood's been able to, I think there's a path there. it's still not clear to me that hollywood has been able to make or it's looking by being able to actually shift from the kind of like early adopter crossing the chasm model of technology and like software adoption i do see really intelligent investors thinking about that and trying to go downstream and shape the hearts and minds of really you know young people such young women and then having that work upstream for now i still see like go identify early adopters and then work upstream.

1:54:25And so I'm not a buyer holistically of that just yet, but I imagine I have blind spots because I am somewhat of a fucking hater as well and probably refuse to see some of these things people are acknowledging.

1:54:38Trevor McFedries:I promise this is not a gotcha. You once described your involvement with him as Kanye collected me for like three months. And then you also said, he's the greatest of my time. He's a genius. I will ride with Ye forever. Yeah. I mean it's tough but yeah what maybe especially up close since you got to um experience it like what was so magical what is so magical about that guy

1:55:05I think what was, I'll say it was magical for me and what is so magical about him, maybe more broadly, but, and it'll be a little bit of story time.

1:55:22I got a text message from a big venture capitalist that said like, hey, Kanye is doing some investing. He told him about you. He really wants to meet you. It's okay if I give him your phone number. and I'm driving to the Beverly Hills Hotel, the counter downstairs, I don't see the spot, to try to like win back my ex-girlfriend at the time who was kind of with me through the startup thing. And you can understand how partners who are dealing with people with running startups can be miserable was like, I'm not into it. I don't want to date this version of who you are. And I'm like, yeah, cool. I go to breakfast and by this, you know, good blessings of the Lord above, I'm like hey this is insane I'm sorry but Kanye's texting me and he says he wants to meet right now like would you be down to hang with Kanye and I guess for added color it was right after like the MAGA moment so there was the kind of first break of like Kanye she was like yeah oh of course and so I'm texting Kanye he's like I want to meet right now I'm like are you in LA he's like yeah I'm in Calabasas where are you I'm like I'm at the Beverly Hills Hotel he's like cool i'll be there in 30 and i came to you yeah and i was like oh uh and we're sitting we finish our meal i get a text i'm out front silver tesla i'm like cool i told him i'm with you know my ex-girlfriend it's like great we climb into the back seat of the tesla and like kind of dap him over the top and so that's a friend in the front seat and what we started to reveal is that like what i love about yay is that he's like a 13 year old boy who's so curious and so excited and he was so excited to meet me it was bizarre you know where he's like hey uh uh like you know i'm just like excited to hang out with you you know like we can do whatever you want we can go to venice i think he thought like tech people like venice you know and i was like i was like oh i don't i don't need to go to venice he's like oh we can do whatever like uh like yeah we can go, we can go wherever.

1:57:25He's like, maybe we just go for a drive. And we started driving and we get on the 405 and he's like, uh, if you want, we can go to like Calabasas, you know? And I was like, Oh, okay, cool. You know? And we're just talking. And, uh, my girlfriend at the time, it was an urban planning and an architect. And he was like, you're an architect. I love architects. We started talking about that stuff and we're both geeking out. And he said, we should get you to work on some stuff. And I'm telling him about bread. And he's like, Kim just invested in some nuclear stuff. I want to be investing. and it was infectious.

1:57:54You know, we went to the studio and he played me a bunch of the record with him and Cuddy and we talked about it and, you know, his homies were there challenging him about the MAGA hat while he was there, like very transparent. But, you know, we went to sit down and I had been wearing these Vivo barefoot shoes that I'm still barely into. And he was like, what are those? And I was like, are these barefoot shoes? I really fuck with them. and he effectively went on this like anti-nostalgia rant which is one of my rants yes you know and i have my ex who's seen me give that rant a million times he was like i love you on some new shit like i get so tired of seeing these fucking same old like clones of forces or whatever and she just looks at me and she's like you guys deserve each other you guys deserve each other you know and And I think what I, you know, what was so special about Ye was that boy-like energy.

1:58:52And I watched him meet Tyler, the creator, and, like, tremble. You know, in this moment, Tyler's not Tyler who's won Grammys. Tyler is, like, this kid with a kind of cool thing. And he's, like, shaking, you know, asking him questions, like, really in awe. And it's like, you're the guy. Wow. You are Kanye. And this is just Tyler. And he approaches so many people that way. and he's so curious so funny so so so funny and you know at the time he had bought all this property in calabasas and went to build a new rome and you know it was like you can be the tech guy the clothing guy the tech guy and we flew to italy to meet up with vanessa beecroft and like you know i'm like an insane connie fan and we're we're at the you know the the kind of private terminal at LAX and like getting carted onto the plane, you know, and like we're flying whatever it is, 10 hours next to each other.

1:59:46And he's showing me stuff and we're talking, I'm giving him ideas. And I, and the thing I remember most about Kanye was like, I've always had ideas that are just crazy. Like you can't, you can't say them out loud, you know, cause they're not feasible. And with Kanye, it was this constant process of like having an idea. And then like, that's nuts to me. like kanye would want to hear that and i remember we were sitting at axel vervort's castle in in belgium with benetha beecroft and tremaine and a bunch of other people that he wanted to be like a part of like this new rung and like build this world and they're going through the designs of what the the property could be like and talking about it and it's up against the mountain and there's like an air strip there and they're showing me that and it's up against the mountain and I remember like the X-Men in the cartoon, you know, they would take off, a mountain would like open up and the blackbird would like come out or whatever it was.

2:00:42And I was like, that'd be sick if the plane came out of the mountain. And I was like, I can't say that. And I was like, Kanye would want to hear that. And I was like, damn, Kanye, what if like the airstrip came out of the mountain? And he was like, we gotta do the out of the mountain. And like the architect is just like looking at me and it's like, we're not gonna get the rights to like have the plane come out of the mountain and he's like i'll call donnie you know i'll call donald i'll call donnie like we'll figure it out the plane's coming out of the mountain and i was like honestly it rocks like like it's just cool to be around someone who's like so unafraid to be unabashedly nuts and like say things and get you know an eighth of the way there uh and so there was obviously a ton of other madness and you know while we're sharing all the alpha with dialectic and because it's like less precious now, you know, there was a moment where he wanted to like buy bread and have me run Yeezy.

2:01:40And then, and like, you know, imagine going to Sequoia Capital and be like, so here's the thing. How do you feel about Kanye West exit? Like, what is the company? I'm like, it's an LLC. He owns a hundred percent.

2:01:57Yeah. It was, it was amazing, you know? And then, and like, like it was all incredible. like Kim was brilliant and so sweet and like so good with him and that part was like tough for me because like we're not homies like you know I was part of life for a moment and oxygen didn't go through and we stopped talking and four phone numbers later like we don't talk but like you know it was it was really incredible to watch Kim with him and the kids and I think all of it was like inspirational in a lot of interesting ways because I think he's you know I can be quite complicated and he's complicated in a more extreme way but in similar ways yeah and it was it was interesting to see what worked what he had built around himself and what didn't

2:02:40Trevor McFedries:what an amazing thing to be someone who inspires other people to say their crazy ideas yeah like a blessing it really was super super special do you if you could say anything to him Do you have, maybe you don't need to say it on the podcast, but I'm curious what, or even just like having watched the last few years, like do you have any sense of what happened?

2:03:08To me, it's, a lot of the things are, Kanye is so good at intuiting what matters and where there is strife and where there are problems and where there are things to be addressed. he's not very articulate verbally and i i think people struggle with that because you got to like kind of like rant for 30 minutes and when you dig through it you're like whoa actually that was that was really brilliant but it's tough to parse and in parallel that boyish like wonder is a surface area for attack yeah and and i think there are people around him with good intentions I think Rick Rubin was probably someone who in a very unpopular time had more libertarian beliefs in the music business.

2:04:05And I think when people see like Rick and Tyler Cowen do a podcast or something, they're like, that's crazy. And I'm like, I don't think it's that fucking crazy. If you've been to Malibu, there are a lot of people who are kind of like hippies who lean more libertarian. They do like classic, like, you know, sort of like lib or something. And I think my read was that someone like Rick was able to show him what ideas are really important to Kanye, to Ye. And, you know, Ye's boyish wonder and curiosity was met with people that were able to exploit it for other means. And it's a tradeoff, right? Because it's what makes him so special is this kind of like his ability to absorb and be deeply curious.

2:04:50and to take things at face value and be kind of childlike. But I think it also has caused him a lot of pain and that's like hard to watch. Yeah, it's tough because some part of me doesn't want to say that because it kind of gives, it makes me a Kanye apologist and he's an adult. But I also, just spending time with him, are aware of how impressionable he is. And that's kind of tough to watch. and that's like a really hard thing to rock for people someone that can be so influential so powerful so wealthy so you know someone with so much more bravado and confidence can also be someone who will take something at face value from someone you know as someone who's like the creator at the moment was like so much smaller than he was right um but he recognizes the kind of you know the aura has kind of been perverted by the end of the aura of someone like he can kind of see you for who you can be and what you are what you're bringing to the world not what you are and i think that's uh that combined with the boyishness capabilities it can be a dangerous

2:05:58Trevor McFedries:combo yeah it's interesting the when you first started talking about it some of this obviously a lot is clearly different but the other person who obviously kanya knew who has a boyishness that can be really frustrating to me, but also manifest so amazingly as Elon. It's interesting that there's some, yeah. Good point. Yeah. I think a pair of separate ideas from you. One, you say a whole generation has come of age, not knowing real criticism. I think that was a random tweet. And then computers are creation machines. iPads are consumption machines. When you think about the next generation, are you worried?

2:06:33Trevor McFedries:Are you hopeful? What are you most concerned about? I am like long humanity. And so I think we'll figure it out and we'll be fine. It's funny, I randomly delete so many tweets. I'm like, yeah, you found a lot of these ones. There were a lot that were deleted. Yeah, I'm like, respect. I'm not holding you to it either. No, no, I lifted the consumption one from some book I was reading. I think more or less said that. I really do believe that. I would love for my child to spend time on a computer hacking and stuff, trying to make things versus passively engaged, consuming something. I'm really not that worried.

2:07:08if anything i'm like very inspired yeah i i think the kind of like making sense of gen z it's been beaten into the ground gen alpha there's there's an artist named two hollis yeah and his mother katherine is someone i've known for a very long time and her other son is in a hardcore band called start today that i love and when i look at two hollis and i see what he's built it's incredible and i look at his instagram and he's posting uh on main pictures of him looking incredible with a song by seven angels seven plagues which is just like deep cut hardcore band from milwaukee i believe that i was into when i was you know 15 i'm like man there are still people that are deeply curious and it is being rewarded and i think that's fantastic both of them by the way both of them are kids start today into hollis check him out

2:08:04Trevor McFedries:i know of uh to all this from drew but i it's great when you when both your kids are are that there's something mom's pretty cool yeah uh maybe i guess on a slightly related note but like on the optimism there's something happening around the populist stuff obviously zoran lately like you're this weird sort of anomaly for so many reasons including like sort of techno-capitalist sort of anarchists i know you're a big bernie guy like any views on like what's happening and where that's going i mean i feel like i'm taking crazy pills sometimes uh no because it just feels like it's a it's a status quo like people who are comfortable with status quo people that aren't you know i think people can can cut that and put that a million different ways but to me like the mom donnie thing is not that dissimilar from you know any populist thing it's like anyone like you know watching marjorie taylor green say things she's saying in the last two weeks you're like and people resonate it's like yeah people are frustrated and i think that's the hard part with me kind of like mainstream dnc politics is like people are very comfortable and they've had very good outcomes from the way things are but most people aren't yeah and and i i really struggle with that i yeah and and that's a whole other rant about growing up in iowa what most of my peers are doing and have multiple friends parents kill themselves post nafta you know we had oscar meyer plant alcoa plant a john deere plant and when those plants left or some of them did rather like the hurt was so palpable people who were making 100 grand a year 70 grand a year and could provide for their children in unimaginable ways, all of a sudden couldn't get a job at 7-Eleven.

2:09:52And I remember that feeling. And actually, you know, funny enough, the first time I used Claw 3.5, I felt that feeling. For yourself. Where I was like, oh my God, this is going to displace a lot of people who move symbols on screen. And what white collar NAFTA could look like, to me, is still really scary. and hopefully people smarter than I are trying to figure out how to mitigate some of those pains.

2:10:21Trevor McFedries:Conversely, we talked about this at the beginning and there's lots of potential black pills. You continue to lean on optimism. Why? I think I'm just a believer in the human condition. Like maybe it's silly and quaint, but I believe in us and I believe in the goodness of us. and i think to lose that is almost worse than death right you know and so i i would like people you know i'm having a child and confident love like are you gonna have children a lot of people i don't want to be kids in this world and i'm like you have to bring kids into this world we need people like you are good people to create children that have been raised right that have like the right moral compass that are going to go and like make this place better and of course everyone's got their own beliefs and i want to push into anyone but like anyone out there who's morally righteous and a virtuous person like crank them out we need good ones the good little ones fighting the good fight there's a really old i think on like an old blog like young skeeter blog you say the only peaceful constraints i've known in this world are music and friendships that allow for freedom damn uh what did you mean any reflections on do you even remember what you meant i definitely don't but i also know it's so funny it's like that blog it was like such a great outlet for me for such a long time but i i do think you know yeah i i felt so much discomfort in my life and music is again this kind of like divine bridge you you can hear something and feel something off and joke it like loud music and flashing lights so simple so primal that's kind of what's getting out with the high and the low right yeah the monkey in me is just like wow everything is fine and good friendship i think because of the circumstances of my upbringing and my kind of kooky family, I have been able to build, you know, different familial units.

2:12:31I'm always reminded around Thanksgiving. Like my friend's givings have been the most important Thanksgiving in my life. And I just, I just feel this, this, what a blessing. There's, I think it's like a DJ Boring song where he samples Bob Geldof. And Bob Geldof, you know, a popular figure, Live Aid, I believe, was the event he did back in the day, like Help Africa, one of those big, like, get all the musicians together to do things. And as I understand the story, his wife was an MTV presenter. She interviewed the lead singer of NXS, this band. Anyway, they fell in love. He was a heroin addict. Bob had two daughters with this woman.

2:13:12She ends up overdosing, lead singer of NXS, you know, accidentally hangs himself. and later on in life, Bob's daughter Peaches, who I knew a little bit from just like partying in LA, also tragically passes. And he's sampled in the song talking about grief and he's talking about grief and he's talking about life and he's talking about, you know, just more or less being on holiday with his family and like looking out from a dinner table and seeing his like grandkids and his kids dance and like that being all that matters, you know? And it's incredibly poignant, but for whatever reason, that met me at the right time in my life.

2:13:51And it was like, that is all that matters. I mean, it's like being a post-Hoffman me where in my startup days, my best friend Harley was like, you want to get a coffee at one on a Tuesday? And I was like, no, I have work. But now I'm like, yeah, let's get a coffee. And I can get back to this thing later tonight or whatever it is. Spending time with loved ones is really important, so make time to do it. And again, so obvious, but it took me a while to get there.

2:14:14Trevor McFedries:You brought it up a few times. you're having a child uh how do you hope to be changed gosh in so many ways i can't even imagine already we were at an ultrasound and they were showing they're like you know parts of my son and they kind of quickly move over his brain and this thought of like that's the brain you have to protect the brain it was like this primal thing where i was like i gotta protect the brain i've how to protect that thing's brain. And I'm really excited to be blindsided by those things. You know, there's the obvious stuff, like, you know, I'll never get to experience ice cream again for the first time.

2:14:54But I get to do it with, like, and that's going to rock to be like, wow, ice cream, welcome to fucking ice cream, dog. Like, there's so many cool ice creams for you to enjoy. That's going to be great. Other than that, I'm just kind of excited to be blindsided by the whole thing. I just know I can plan all I want. I just know, I will say, while we're sharing nuggets of wisdom on this thing, I go to this conference that I love. And I always go, it's kind of an unconference. You sit around and talk about cool stuff. But I go to the dad session every year. And let me go for like close to a decade now.

2:15:25And one year, a gentleman was talking. And he was like, how many of you think that you're a better father than your father was? And a bunch of hands raised. A bunch of hands didn't raise. And they're like, how many of the hands raised have kids that are older than 18? And they all put their hands down. And they were like, yeah. Like when my kids were seven, eight, nine, 10, I was a hundred percent better father. By the time they're like 22, I was like, I don't know actually. And what the person who brought this up highlighted, he was like, everyone in this room, you're like world beaters. You've done incredible things, impossible things.

2:15:59You make the world bend to your will. And he said that the thing I think is important for all of you, the younger parents is that like parenting isn't carpentry, it's gardening. and like you may want this thing to be an oak tree but it's a lemon tree and you just got to make it the best lemon tree it can be and i was like wow that felt really so i've just tried to sit with that and be like you know it's easy of expectations of what my boy can be and he's in the 95th percentile right now so i'm like we got a chance of the league you know do what you couldn't do you do what i couldn't do but again if he wants to be you know god forbid an artist can do that too.

2:16:42Trevor McFedries:One last thing. You actually mentioned it. I didn't know it was going to be a land project, but there's an old email of yours that I followed the link on. And there's a domain called actuallycerillion.com. The language on the website is just this. Okay, I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquoise. It's not lapis.

2:17:18Trevor McFedries:It's actually cerulean. Some people obviously know the reference, but what does that mean to you? It's a quote from the Devil Wears Prada, which is, you know, one of my favorite films. But to me, I think it reflects the sentiment I've probably brought up far too much in this podcast, that there are people that introduce important ideas into the world and they can be discounted and they can be made to feel small or unimportant. And I would much prefer a world that celebrated Cerulean because it's not just blue. It's actually Cerulean. Trevor, thank you. Thank you very much, Jackson. This was great.

2:17:53Yeah, a pleasure.

2:17:55Trevor McFedries:Thanks for listening. I'd like to thank Notion again for presenting Dialectic and for being such an amazing partner as I explore and interrogate the wonderful, craftful, soulful people that I get to talk to here on the show. One thing that was exciting this past week, and I'll show the link on Instagram, I did a little feature with Notion where they asked me a handful of questions about how I'm thinking about 2026, what my goals are, what my process is, advice I have for creative people. I'll give you a hint. It's as it took me too long to figure out, listen to yourself and then just start. And even how I'm using Notion as I create dialectic, I'll link that in the description.

2:18:30Trevor McFedries:Thanks again to Notion and thank you. I will see you next time.