I don’t know anyone who is as consistently ahead of culture than Trevor McFedries. I talked to him about culture, markets, technology, curiosity, why selling out is punk now, and why creative people should be rich.
Trevor has lived many lives: touring DJ who produced a top 10 album, co-creator of LilMiquela, Founder of FWB.. among many others (go watch the last 10 seconds of Katy Perry‘s I Kissed a Girl music video).
Today, he’s the founder of new co Runner and is 1/2 of electronic dance duo SofTT. He also has a fantastic nose for weird, bridges high and low status worlds across culture, capital, art, and tech, and truly lives natively between the frontiers of tech and culture.
We talked about:
Why the only creative people who can “opt out” of the algorithm are trust fund kids
How cultural capital has merged with financial capital
Why speculation is rational
The belief economy: from making → framing → predicting
What he learned working with Kanye for three months
Finding new subcultures in the dark corners of Telegram
Why he’s long humanity despite everything
I also included some favorite lessons from Trevor below. Enjoy!
Dialectic Ep. 37: Trevor McFedries
Dialectic Ep. 37: Trevor McFedries - Creative People Should Be Rich is available on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and all platforms.
18 Lessons from Trevor on Alpha, Art, and Arming the Artists
Alpha lives at the edge. When you’re low status, being out of step costs nothing. If it’s consensus, you’re already too late.
$300K is harder to raise than $3 million. To get opportunity, you need to prove yourself. To prove yourself, you need opportunity. The system rewards legible ambition over scrappy potential.
Be the connective tissue between worlds. Low-status people who can LARP high-status—and vice versa—become translators no one else can be. Trevor calls it “from the squat to the yacht.”
Selling out is punk. The only people who can afford to opt out of algorithms are trust fund kids. “Never ask a woman her age—or an indie musician why their parents have a blue Wikipedia link.”
Borrowed nostalgia isn’t creation. Amy Winehouse wasn’t doing nostalgia—she parsed jazz through her lived experience. The complaint is raiding the archive and repackaging references for audiences who don’t know the sources. Standing on giants requires bringing something of your own.
Cheeseburgers over fake steaks. Rihanna serves a proverbial cheeseburger and owns it. The frustration is when people serve you a cheeseburger and call it a Michelin steak.”
Honesty over authenticity. Authenticity is nirvana—aspirational but unreachable. What matters is open and honest connection to something larger.
Making → Framing → Predicting. Modernism valued what you made. Postmodernism valued the narrative around it. Now we’re in the belief economy—where what you call has the same cultural cachet as what you create.
Artists are speculators in disguise. Great art and great trades both express conviction about the future and hope the world catches up. Duchamp’s urinal and memecoin creators hear the same dismissal: “That’s not the right kind of creativity.”
Give the Bushwick babes nukes. Meteorologists get asymmetric returns betting on wheat futures. Why can’t people with cultural information advantage? The Patagonia vests have financial nukes—arm the artists too.
The trenches are rational. A kid in Missouri can “reply guy” crypto Twitter for an hour and turn $20 into $100—or work eight hours at the bookstore. Of course they speculate. Maybe this is the online economy Kevin Kelly dreamed of—it just doesn’t look like the metaverse.
Make sure you love it or hate it. When Trevor buys art, he buys what he loves or what he hates; never the forgettable middle. The narcissism of small differences means the stuff that offends you might just be your taste, slightly out of tune.
Build universes, sell things. Music streaming doesn’t always pay, but Charli xcx committed to building a universe around Brat and brought people into it. Modern media rewards building worlds people can inhabit and Charli was willing to play that game.
Culture went from top-down to middle-out. It used to trickle down from weird art kids to Vogue to the Midwest. Now it’s inoffensively optimized to capture the most mindshare. You can find the same coffee shops and yoga pants in East Berlin, Bushwick, and Beverly Hills.
Boundaries define communities. Inclusivity is good UX. But exclusivity—the feeling that you’re not allowed in—is what creates value.
We crave finality. Bitcoin hitting $100K was sick because Trevor was rich—but sicker because he was right. In a frictionless world, that scoreboard clarity feels crucial. It’s no surprise people rush to sports betting and prediction markets to feel something.
Parenting is gardening, not carpentry. You may want an oak tree, but it’s a lemon tree, and it’s your job to make it the best lemon tree it can be. World-beaters who make reality bend don’t get to apply that force to their kids.
Curiosity is the inheritance. If there’s one thing he wants to give his son, it’s the hunger to keep asking, keep poking, keep learning.
Description
Trevor McFedries (X, Instagram, Wikipedia) is a musician, technologist, and entrepreneur. Today he is the founder of Runner and 1/2 of electronic dance duo SoFTT. Previously, Trevor was co-founder and CEO of Brud, the company behind Lil Miquela that was acquired by Dapper Labs; Founder of FWB (Friends with Benefits); early artist in residence at Spotify; and a touring DJ who performed as DJ Skeet Skeet, was part of the rap group Shwayze, and produced for a range of artists.
Trevor’s work emerges from a tension he’s lived with throughout his career: the gap between who creates cultural value and who captures it. Growing up poor in Iowa and entering the dying music industry in the late 2000s, he witnessed firsthand how the instruments that capture value rarely benefit the creative people who generate that value. This has run across his entrepreneurialy work, from building virtual pop stars to a range of crypto projects that hope to give creative people more upside.
Trevor bridges culture and technology, art and capital, and high and low. I’ve met few people who are as consistently ahead of culture. His perspective challenges both the art world’s disdain for commerce and Silicon Valley’s shallow engagement with culture, arguing instead for creative people to play the game on the field and build the instruments that will make them rich. Today, he’s focused on how that may end up being as much about predicting what’s next with stakes as it is actually making things. We also talk about authenticity and honesty, why he continues to spend time in crypto despite it being low status, why speculation is rational and selling out is punk, how power comes from consensus, his keen nose for weird—especially on the internet, briefly working with Kanye West, and his forever optimistic curiosity.
Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams build their best work. Notion is also where I compile research for episodes and the home of my new site where you can find all links and transcripts. My “What are You Building This Year feature with Notion on Instagram.
Timestamps
0:00: Opening Highlights
1:18: Intro to Trevor
4:12: Thanks to Notion
5:21: Start: Creative People Should Be Rich
12:03: Creative Ignition, Infrastructure, and Why Selling Out is Punk
21:49: Authenticity, Honesty, Divine Creativity, and Borrowed Nostalgia
30:15: Low Status Games and High Culture, Cultural & Financial Capital, and Crypto
42:08: The Belief Economy: From Making -> Framing -> Predicting
48:45: Markets, Power, Consensus, and Truth
58:22: Speculation is Rational
1:06:34: Developing a Nose for Weird, Being Early and On Time
1:19:06: Unfettered Cultural Spaces on the Internet
1:26:33: FWB, Community, and Exclusivity
1:31:02: LilMiquela, Online Storytelling and Celebrity, Touring as a Performer
1:45:41: Softt, Music as a Way In, Music as a Business
1:52:45: Culture & Business
1:54:38: Kanye
2:06:20: Optimism, The Next Generation, Parenting, The Stuff that Counts, and Cerulean
2:17:55: Thanks Again to Notion
