Unchained Podcast

by

How NFT DAOs Could Shape the Next Blockbuster, Fund Poetry and Change VC

Dapper Collectives CEO and Friends With Benefits founder Trevor McFedries joins Unchained to discuss social tokens, NFTs, the creator economy, $FWB, VC snacks, DAOs, Cooper Turley, and more. Show highlights:

  • Trevor’s past, which includes a top 10 album, working at Spotify, founding Brud, creating Lil Miquela, and, of course, falling down the crypto rabbit hole
  • what Trevor’s vision for Dapper Collectives is
  • what type of activities DAOs will facilitate in the future
  • why Trevor is so excited to be working with Dapper Labs and Flow
  • what Friends With Benefits is and how the $FWB token works
  • what sort of tokens make up the Friends With Benefits treasury
  • why venture capitalists who want to be involved with Friends With Benefits need to have a good snack game
  • why Trevor is not worried about $FWB becoming a security
  • what plans Friends With Benefits has in store for 2022
  • Trevor’s response to Friends With Benefits suspending co-founder Cooper Turley regarding 10-year old racist and homophobic tweets
  • what can be done to onboard a more diverse demographic to crypto
  • how Trevor defines the passion/creator economy
  • what Trevor is looking forward to in 2022 regarding NFTs, DAOs, and social tokens

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Episode Links

Trevor Mcfedries

Work

Friends With Benefits

Additional Links

 

 

Laura Shin:

Hi, all. As you may know, a few months ago, I started a Facebook bulletin newsletter. I’ll now be opening a paid Facebook discussion group where you, and other listeners of the show, can discuss recent episodes, ask questions in advance, get access to special AMAs with myself and show guests, and more. Those who join now, and for the next two weeks, will get a special introductory price of $2.99 a month or $29.99 annually. Those who join from February 15 and onward will be charged the regular rate of $4.99 a month or $49.99 annually. We will open up the group on the 15th, one week ahead of my book launch. 

 

If you’re interested in subscribing, head to laurashin.bulletin.com/subscribe, which will be in the show notes of this episode. Again, the link is laurashin.bulletin.com/subscribe. Hope to see you in the discussion group. 

 

I also have another announcement. I have a new author website. It’s at laurashin.com. Please go check it out. I think it’s gorgeous, and it captures well everything I’ve been up to, from my book to the podcast to speaking and press. You can also find out all the contact information for me depending on whether you’re interested in pitching Unchained, having me speak or do press, or want to sponsor the show. Again, the URL is laurashin.com, laurashin.com. Enjoy. 

 

As you know, my book, The Cryptopians, comes out February 22. I wanted to share a blurb that Michael Casey, Chief Content Officer at CoinDesk and co-author of The Age of Cryptocurrency, wrote about it. Michael said, Laura Shin’s compelling, blow-by-blow account of the remarkable birth and growth of Ethereum shows that its spectacular wealth generation was not without struggle. By Shin’s telling, the story of Ethereum is a grand human drama. Its lesson is that for all the talk of decentralized, code-based virtual machines, a successful crypto project’s biggest challenge is that it must survive its user community’s internecine conflicts and rise above the egos of its brilliant but humanly flawed founders. If that intrigues you, then pre-order The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze today at bit.ly/cryptopians. That’s bit.ly/cryptopians, and the book comes out February 22, and again, you can pre-order it at bit.ly/cryptopians. 

 

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I’m your host, Laura Shin, a journalist with over two decades of experience. I started covering crypto six years ago, and as a senior editor at Forbes, was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the February 1, 2022, episode of Unchained. 

 

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Today’s guest is Trevor McFedries, CEO of Dapper Collectives, and founder of Friends with Benefits. 

 

Welcome, Trevor. 

 

Trevor McFedries:

Hi. Thank you for having me. 

 

Laura Shin:

Thanks for being here. So, you used to be a DJ, and you also created the famous CGI influencer, Lil Miquela. Tell us about your background and what you were doing before you got into cryptos/NFTs/DAOs.

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. I typically say in these kind of tech interviews that, you know, that I have an atypical background, but I feel like folks in crypto come from all walks of life. To me, mine is more typical than atypical, but yes. I grew up in the Midwest. I grew up in Davenport, Iowa, and moved to Los Angeles when I was 16, and while I was in L.A., you know, I was playing in bands, and I was doing some conflict web dev stuff and building mom and pop shop websites, and you know, real long story short, went to university, quit, and stumbled into music. 

 

I was in a rap group called Shwayze that ended up putting out a Top 10 album in 2008, which was totally surreal. You know, I had never had a passport before, and at 23 ended up going to Europe playing music, and in parallel, I was building software tools for myself and for other friends and artists who needed things. It’s like I’ve always lived with this intersection of music and technology, really media and technology, culture industries in technology more broadly. And you know, I toured as a solo artist, a DJ after that band, produced music and played music festivals, did all the things that folks who are kind of doing music fulltime do and got a phone call from some folks who work at Spotify, saying, hey, we need someone that can translate between a bunch of Swedish engineers and the music industry. Took a job at Spotify in, I think, 2011, which seems surreal now, and got to see what it’s like to be a part of a massive org and to build really incredible products, and from there went on to start Brud, which created Lil Miquela and kind of a modern Disney or Marvel with some virtual celebrities, and more recently, you know, started Friends with Benefits about a year and a half ago. 

 

Laura Shin:

Yes. Let’s explore that Brud period a little bit. What was Brud, and what was the goal with Lil Miquela?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. So, Brud still very much exists. So, the goal was really to try to create a digital celebrity and really scalable narrative. It started with this idea that media can be transformative, that in my lifetime, I’d seen more change from, you know, television programs that are grabbed in kind of crazy-sounding narratives versus public policy, so television programs like Will & Grace that are largely responsible for gay marriage in the US or The Jeffersons or other programs that helped shape the way Americans understand African Americans, and so the dream was to say, hey, in an era with more global issues than ever whether it be economic or climate or pandemic, if we could create celebrity in narratives that scale like software, that could touch billions, perhaps we could kind of nudge the whole world into being more empathetic or more tolerant or more effective at creating the change that we want realized. 

 

Laura Shin:

And do you feel that you achieved that goal with Lil Miquela? What was the impact? 

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. I mean, I still feel like we’re in the first inning. Thus far, we’ve had a ton of impact, I mean, 10 million-plus fans across socials. Miquela’s released songs that have been top of viral charts on Spotify globally, and so across all mediums, with still images to video and audio, we’ve had a ton of impact. Again, we’re just getting started. 

 

The bet was really kind of on this emergent, what folks are calling now the metaverse, what I called kind of spatial computing era. It’s like next shift in computing, and we always saw virtual good, the virtual economy’s, being a big part of that, and so in parallel, I spent a lot of time in crypto and Web3, and you know, we were pretty quick to embrace the NFT thing and really see decentralized governance in virtual economies as being a big part of enabling that next Disney or that next Marvel, and so we’re just getting started. We’ve got a long way ahead of us, and decentralizing Brud and turning it into a DAO is next on the roadmap. 

 

Laura Shin:

So, yes. You know, as you just mentioned, so Dapper Labs acquired Brud and launched Dapper Collectives from that. So, why did you decide to sell Brud to Dapper, and then what is the vision for Dapper Collectives?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. Certainly. A, I’ve been a fan of Roham’s for a very long time. I often joke that when we were fundraising, we’d be walking into these very serious Silicon Valley boardrooms and pitching fake people on the internet, and I’d always feel kind of guilty, but then I’d watch a guy walk out of a room who is pitching selling pictures of cats on the internet, and so we were kind of always the weirdos in these very serious boardrooms asking for large sums of money, and I always felt like it was quite brave. I thought that the thing that Roham recognized quite quickly was that most of our world is nonfungible, and I thought that was a really unique incite, and to double down into work through the bear, and to ship a product that onboarded lots of people into crypto Web3 was really, really compelling.

 

That said, you know, the acquisition came really from us raising around. We were raising around, it was going to be a little more crypto-focused because we’re potentializing the company, and in talking about partners that we wanted to work with, we fell in love with Flow. We wanted to build it on Flow. They had bigger ambitions than just, you know, a single DAO on Flow. I think they and Roham and the rest of the team understand how impactful this stuff can be and how DAOs will be at the center of all this stuff going forward, and so to have, you know, really incredible resources, people that are really aligned culturally…I always kind of joked that our team is a bunch of soft-spoken, really nice, brainy people…to meet even nicer Canadian versions of us was compelling, and so all in all, I think it allows us to do what we want to do, and to build these primitives that other folks can use and really kind of help shape this future that we all want to see come to pass, and so that was why this came together. 

 

Laura Shin:

And so, what is the vision for Dapper Collectives? What are you trying to achieve?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. So, you know, we’re going to be mainstreaming DAOs. As kind of vague as that sounds, the dream is to build the primitives that others can use to recognize and capture the value that they create, and that’s all intentionally vague as well because I think it’s really, really big, the opportunity. Folks in my world, creative people, kind of joke about how people selling JPEGs for 70 million dollars, but I think if you were to start from first principles and say what is really valuabl here? I don’t know that you’d start with equities and bonds. You’d probably start with art and music and media and food. These things give our lives meaning, and there’ve been a lot of obviously rent-seeking middlemen and platforms in the middle of that creative process who’ve captured a lot of that value, and so we think DAOs can enable, you know, media companies like our own to recognize and realize that value and to make sure it flows to the edges of the network and also allows to bring, you know, our fans and our peers really into the fold. 

 

Traditionally, they’ve been siloed. There’ve been Disney on one side and then Star Wars fans on the other, and every now and then Disney’s calling Star Wars fans to figure out what the weather in Tatooine would be like because they have more knowledge than the folks internally at Disney, and we think, you know, kind of blowing up those silos and bringing people under one roof and aligning incentives such that people can work together could be really, really meaningful and hopefully solve a lot of the pain that’s especially felt in media orgs, but really, any collective or any organization, and so that’s why we’re thinking about collectives, people coming together, trying to realize important things, and using, you know, consensus and you know, Web3, and the permits that we create to organize and realize.

 

Laura Shin:

And so, just in your vision of whatever this future is of all these different DAOs, all these different collectives, what will they be doing? What is kind of the variety of different types of DAOs that you see?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Oh, gosh. They’re endless. I mean, as someone who can probably talk about Friends with Benefits is kind of an easy answer to that question, but I think the really compelling stuff for people that are especially in our industry and media, is you know, we have a generation of Web2 media orgs that are probably quite frustrated. I think if you’re an employee at VICE or at Refinery29, you’ve probably seen some stock options depreciate tremendously. If you’re an investor, you’re probably quite frustrated. And if you’re, you know, an operator, you’re probably quite frustrated. I think that’s because there clearly is demand, this media, this content, and I don’t know that there are effective business models.

 

One of the things that I’ve always, you know…the intention that I’ve always lived with, it’s this idea that information wants to be free. You know, the people and ideas should be able to spread virally and touch people and change their world, but at the same time, the people that are creating those ideas should be able to make a living and feed themselves, and so I think NFTs, as a primitive, solved that thing. You know, they allow ideas and they allow for media to be both individually ownable and universally accessible, and so, with that at the center of this pivotal business model, can we start to create primitives that incentivize people to, you know, create those assets, participate in the creation of those assets, and then to see an outcome that rewards them, but also has one’s flow to a treasury that can allow this thing to exist and to continue to expand.

 

And so, you know, in short, incentivizing people to create media assets and then making sure if they participate in that creation, they get a piece of the upside of the sale of that media asset as an NFT and then finally flow into a treasury that allows us to…or any other org to build better tooling and do things better, faster, cheaper, whatever they see fit. 

 

Laura Shin:

Yes. You are definitely preaching to the choir as a creator and as a journalist whose career started with the internet. I worked at Newsweek.com. That was my first job, and then thewallstreetjournal.com and then thenewyorktimes.com, and I think roughly a decade after I started at newsweek.com, Newsweek was sold for a dollar, so you know, to go from, yes, this kind of…because also, the year I started working there was the year that Newsweek had been leading this story with Monica Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton, and so it was kind of a very cool place to be working then, and then just to see that brand kind of collapse, and not because the work wasn’t good, but just because of how…somehow this fallacy that information wants to be free was what the media companies glommed onto, and they were wrong. You can charge money, and people will pay for things that they want.

 

So, you know, when Dapper Labs acquired Brud, and they announced separate collectives, Dapper Labs CEO Roham Gharegozlou, who you’ve been mentioning here, told Decrypt, “The space of DAOs is probably the most interesting space to us after NFTs and very complementary to the work we’re doing, both with big brands as well as our own IP.” So, how do you see NFTs and DAOs co-existing or converging or otherwise complimenting each other?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. So, they’re probably really simple in obvious ways, right, like investor DAOs, you know, Flamingo DAOs, other examples, people have come together to collect and share in the upside of the NFTs that they’ve built, or that they’ve created…or pardon me, that they’ve bought and brought into their DAO, but beyond that, like I mentioned before, I think there are examples where NFTs, at the center of a business model but a DAO is organized around, is a really important primitive that I think is yet to be unleashed on the world, and so we’re really thinking about that. I often talk about how powerful it is that you know, the D5 folks might be familiar with a Y earn, where if you’re creating a new strategy for a vault, you can participate in the upside of that vault. 

 

You know, there is a world where, you know, a DAO is putting up bounties for coverage of a certain topic, and people are executing against the coverage of that topic, whether it be in video or written form or whatever it is, and then publishing that, you know, as an NFT, and folks are collecting that because it’s an important work. 

 

You know, at FWB we sold Matthew Ball’s Metaverse essay for half a million dollars, which is nuts, right. It’s an essay that lives for free on the internet, but I think there’s, obviously, a collectible nature to all these things with history, people collecting Time magazines, other important assets, I think you’re going to see them get fragmented. I can think of someone like yourself…or even Eric Weinstein is coming up with neologisms all the time…if you could own the first clip of a podcast as a catchy phrase, such as we’re all going to make it, or you know, something that’s become a battle cry, is that important and collectible? I think so. 

 

And so, I think there’s a ton of opportunity around taking media and all the things that we’re creating on the internet because all of us are creators and allowing people to collect bits of them or parts of them, and then as you extend that, you know, all the things that we’re creating and sharing online make us storytellers, and so I think a lot about what we do at Brud as kind of being this kind of a uber storyteller or uber creator, and if we can solve for ourselves, there’s lots of things that we can kind of hand down to the individual creator or smaller creator to help enable and kind of improve their lives. 

 

Laura Shin:

And at just sort of technical level for the work that Dapper Collectives is doing, will that all be on the Flow blockchain, or are these products that you’ll be building for any chain, or how will that work on the backend?

 

Trevor McFedries:

These are all going to be on Flow. And the reason I’m really excited about Dapper is that we are very excited about Flow. Obviously, Dieter, who’s spearheading it, is the person that invented the NFT, and so I think to be with visionary folks who can see the future and help us think about how blockchains can be built such as, you know, scalable and mainstream-able was a really big part of the decision. 

 

Laura Shin: 

All right, so now let’s talk about Friends with Benefits. Tell people what that DAO is. 

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. Wow. It’s so ambitious now. It’s probably hard to contain it in a couple sentences, but Friends with Benefits is an Ethereum-based DAO. We often talk about it like a virtual city. People describe it as a virtual social club where we minted some tokens, and if you have 75 of them, you’re allowed to participate in a private Discord in our governance and then attend live events around the world. 

 

Beyond that, there’s software products, other things that are being developed, but the nuts and bolts of it are, if you own tokens, you get to be a part of this private club or community and participate in shaping its trajectory.

 

Laura Shin:

So, at times in the past, the entry fee to the highest level of 75 $FWB was more than 10,000 dollars. Right now, it’s slightly under 4000 dollars. What do you say to people who criticize Friends with Benefits as just being an expensive or exclusive online social club or even chat group?

 

Trevor McFedries:

I usually say fork it. That, to me, is the beauty of Web3 is that all these things exist so that people can kind of build their reality. That said, I can understand how it can be a contentious thing, and one of the things that our community has done is create Fellowship programs and other programs that make sure that underrepresented people in the space are part of our community, and so my opinions haven’t always been in alignment with the community, and I think that’s the beauty of the DAO. 

 

In my day-to-day life, I’m a dictator. In FWB, I’m just another mere citizen of this virtual city who thinks that creating robust, sensible boundaries are one of the most important parts to defining a community, and I think what the community has said is we agree-ish. We want there to be boundaries that make this a space where people can have conversations they might not be able to have in other places. We want a space where people are challenged and their ideas are elevated, but we also want it to be a space where anyone who could improve this space can exist, and so that’s why things like Fellowships come to pass. That’s why we see lots of people in the community buying entities on ZORA, in FWB, so those artists can join other things like that.

 

So, in short, I understand that there are concerns, and I think that the beauty of Web3 is you can fork this stuff and build whatever kind of better thing you want to build.

 

Laura Shin:

And so, when you look at the applications for the Fellowships, what kinds of qualities are you prioritizing?

 

Trevor McFedries:

That’s a great question, and I wish I could answer it accurately. We have a Fellowships committee. One of the things that’s cool about FWB is we have all these different subcommittees. They’re all local city groups. There’s a membership committee that’s by anyone who applies to join, and there’s a Fellowships committee that’s actually, you know, headed up by a few folks, one of them being Pat Locke, who’s a very influential artist, a DJ, and producer, and those folks are looking for lots of things. I think most importantly, they’re trying to create a community that reflects the real world. I think there are, you know, definitely folks who got a head start, but you know, women, people of color, other folks who might not make up the FWB community yet, we can identify and bring in and bring you up to speed, we absolutely want to do that. 

 

Laura Shin:

And at the moment, how many members are at that highest tier?

 

Trevor McFedries:

That’s a good question. It’s constantly evolving, but usually, around 2000 that are in FWB and hanging out. I probably shouldn’t fire up Discord and look now because it may slow this thing down. We’ll say ballpark 2000.

 

Laura Shin:

Yes. Definitely don’t want to cause us any technical issues. And so, since FWB votes are one token, one vote, they can be dominated by WHALEs. Do you think that model should be changed, or are you happy with that model, or you know, what do you think of that fact?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. And so, some votes are a one-to-one vote. Other votes are, you know, one token…or one account, one vote. I’m interested in all of these little Petrie dishes of governance, trying lots of different things. That’s one of the things I’m most excited about in Web3 is becoming a speed run, yes Wall Street, and yes, the global art market, but more importantly, governance. 

 

I’ve seen some cool things around, you know, one account, one vote. That does open you up to civil attacks and some other things, and one of the things that we’ve kind of innovated on that I’m quite proud of is this Proof of Raver concept where people that come to our live events fill up their token gauge, so if you come out and dance, you’ve effectively validated that you’re a real person, and so there’s a world where if we’re throwing up events, we effectively have this civil-proof Proof of Raver list that we can then have vote on things, and so there are lots of tradeoffs, and I think trying to build novel solutions like throwing a fun party people want to come to where you can kind of validate humanity with honey versus with vinegar, or in other kind of creepier ways that may be being funded out there, people maybe are talking about on Twitter a whole bunch. We can solve some of these things and build better governance models because it’s all a jump ball right now. It’s all to be defined. 

 

Laura Shin:

And do you know that…at the start, I think you had somewhere in the ballpark of 10 percent of all the FWB tokens. What percentage do you have now?

 

Trevor McFedries:

That’s a good question. Providing liquidity means IL for days, and so I don’t know. I think probably somewhere in the ballpark of five percent. Again, it fluctuates. 

 

Laura Shin:

And is that something that people just, you know, seem okay with because you are the creator? Or do you see kind of, you know, more, I guess, initiatives to try to democratize things even further?

 

Trevor McFedries:

I would love for the tokens to be as democratized as possible. I think, thus far, what we’ve tried to express to the community, I think whenever it’s thrust back, is that we’re going to iterate quickly and change things that don’t feel right, and so we do these things called seasons, so every season we just come up with a theme, and we say hey, in the previous quarter, previous three months, these things went well, and these things went poorly. And just the things that went poorly, we’re going to do X and double down on the things that went well, we’re going to do X. And so, I think one of the things that we’ve had a lot of success with is not trying to set, you know, really fix ways of understanding how this thing will look. We want to be able to change. We want to be able to tweak things. We want to be able to build the most sustainable, resilient FWB we can even if we get started as kind of a weekend ha-ha project. 

 

Laura Shin:

And so, what are some of those things that went well, and then what are some of the things that you guys have been trying to improve upon?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. I think live events have gone really well. You know, candidly, we’ve been able to bring in a bunch of really special people. Alex Zhang is the mayor of FWB, and he really oversees the day-to-day, and he was very bullish on live events. I think my crypto history and scars of the past have led me to be wary of things that are off chain, but there was a clear demand. People had built really meaningful relationships in Discords and on Telegrams and on Twitter and they wanted to hang out in person and hug each other, and so throwing events that were, I think…that looked and felt different than a lot of crypto events and you know, bring people together in spaces has been incredibly bullish for our community. People want to be a part of those things. 

 

Beyond that, I would say the Fellowships Program has been incredibly well-received. People have really enjoyed that. We’ve tried other things, even things as simple as Discord channels in the era of Clubhouse when there were lots of really high Clubhouse. Say, Elon Musk in a Clubhouse channel, whenever it was, we would create these Discord channels. People would kind of chat about it happening in real-time, and okay, fine. Not that compelling, and so we shut it down and forget about it. 

 

But you know, beyond that, every day is an experiment. Right now, some of the people in the community are making an yerba mate drink, an FWB-branded drink. There’s an FWB festival coming to pass, so the community takes this thing wherever they want to take it. 

 

Laura Shin:

And I have seen that currently FWB has a 53-million-dollar market cap, so I’m assuming that’s sort of what your treasury is. Maybe I’m wrong about that. 

 

Trevor McFedries:

That, to me, I think, is the token price time, the amount of tokens that exist, so a million tokens times 53 bucks is probably how Coindego’s getting that. 

 

Laura Shin:

And so, what then is the treasury for the DAO?

 

Trevor McFedries:

I would need to go look, as far as USD terms, but we did a…I think you may have seen the community voted on a…I guess what’s the proper…a treasury diversification where a16z, Capital, Legion, others, you know, Kindred came in and purchased FWB tokens that were locked up in exchange for USDC, and so in that treasury, you’ll find Ethereum, actually, some WHALE, which could be a cool thing you discuss as well is different DAOs doing treasury diversifications. I think the kind of hedge against outperformance of either, or the kind of launch of communities at whole, and so in our treasury, you’ll have some WHALE, some Ethereum, some USDC, and maybe some Airdrop shitcoins. 

 

Laura Shin:

And wait. Just describe the WHALE in more detail. 

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. So, for folks that aren’t aware of WHALE…but early on our journey, there weren’t a ton of community tokens, and it was largely ourselves and WHALE, which was started by I believe it was a pseudonymous character named WhaleShark, who wanted to create this token that could have a say or participate in all of this NFT collecting, and so WhaleShark had a ton of really important stuff, and we were really excited about the ways they were exploring their community. They were actually doing things that were pretty different from what we had done, and so actually Cooper Turley on our team and WhaleShark had known each other, and they had talked about, hey, maybe we should float it to the community as of doing kind of a token swap, and so, you know, we can hold X amount of WHALE. You can own X amount of FWB, and you know, that way as this thing plays out, we kind of have this incentive to go support each other and help each other.

 

Laura Shin:

Huh. Okay. It’s interesting. One other aspect of all this that I find fascinating is the VCs that you mention that now are participating in funding, as you mentioned Li Jin of Variant Fund, so what is the purpose of having venture capital involved in this basically like a social club DAO?

 

Trevor McFedries:

You’re asking a very good question, and I think one of the questions that the community asked over and over and over again. It’s like, yeah, they want to be involved, but why? And so, one of the things that was very intriguing for me was, traditionally in my life, I’ve had to walk into a boardroom full of, you know, 13, you know, scary, impressive people and pitch them as to why they should give me money, and I think, for the first time in my life, what we had VCs pitching the community.

 

So, we had a Discord meeting where investors like Brian Watson through Spark and Chris Dixon and Steve Jang, you know, Tina from Paze and others came in and basically made their case, and I don’t want to speak on behalf of them, but I think some of the things the community really recognized and really resonated with was, you know, these weren’t trading funds that were going to buy tokens and dump on us. They’re interested in holding these things for, you know, four to seven years minimum. They’ve got quite a bit of expertise in building organizations. They know how to navigate some of the things that might come up whether it’s hiring or regulatory or X, Y, or Zed, and more than anything else, I think the community vibed with them, which is maybe…I don’t know how you would build a taxonomy of fives, but Steve Jang, especially, had a really interesting, good snacks. One of those the community asked was what snacks do you guys like throughout the day, and so Steve, his snacks resonated, and the community was like, we like this guy. He gets it. We want to give him more.

 

And so, look, these are some of the novelties and interesting things that come up with direct democracy is, you know, people having a say, and sometimes snacks sway the vote. 

 

Laura Shin:

Wait. You mean actual, physical snack that he’s munching on throughout the day?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. So, it meets in Discord, so it can be kind of shitposty, right, and people were like, okay, what do you want to do? You guys seem shady. I don’t know if I should trust you, and they dissuaded a lot of those things. I think made really compelling cases for how they add value, and by the end, it was like, all right. So, you guys are saying the right things, but as a real litmus test, what do you do on the weekends, and you know, what do you enjoy for snacks, and you know, I think some people could have said, seeing that as I’m on the Carnivore Diet and trying to run 100-mile marathon, I only eat, you know, X, Y, and Z, but no, these were FWB kids and so appreciation for Japanese kawaii snacks or other rare snacks made them think that these folks were real hits, and so, yes. Having a good snack game can get you exposure to a DAO in this wild, wild world we’re being a part of. 

 

Laura Shin:

I love it. I find this hilarious. So, as you mentioned, Alexander Jang is dubbed the mayor of FWB, and he said, actually, in an interview that he used to hate crypto and the people in it, and I guess, he obviously feels very differently about FWB. So, who are the people that are involved in FWB, obviously, besides the BCs that we mentioned just in general kind of the everyday person that’s in it, are they people who are normal crypto people? Are they non-crypto people who just heard about this? Or what’s the mix?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. I think one of the things that FWB has kind of been known for is having quite a different makeup. I’d imagine for most of FWB if you were to say, you know, what does your knowledge prove, they’d be like, I don’t really know, and I don’t know if they’re interested. 

 

I think, you know, what really spoke to them was this world where you could create value for people that are putting it into the ether, and so as a result, a lot of them are artists. A lot of them are musicians. A lot of them are folks that have kind of lived adjacent to technology, maybe not in it full-time, and then there is a good cross-section of the pure technologists that I think want exposure to people they wouldn’t find at, you know, a traditional crypto conference. 

 

Some of the most vibrant channels in FWB are the parenting and skincare channels, and so you know, the selfies and fits channels. As much as NFT general chat goes off, people are as interested in figuring out how to be better parents, and there’s something about the signal-to-noise ratio in a group of people that all have ownership in the thing that really kind of increases the signal or reduces the noise, and so there’s all kinds of little magic this stuff has clicked up that I can’t put my finger on and definitely can’t take credit for, but I think one of them really is a high signal-to-noise ratio in all of these little subsets and little mini boroughs inside of our virtual city. 

 

Laura Shin:

Huh. Yes. I guess the way you’re talking, it’s sort of makes me think of how people have their crypto…sorry, their Twitter lists, and if you could just kind of have that one contained list as its own, you know, chat group that then has its own channels. I guess it’s sort of what it’s like. Anyway…what were you going to…

 

Trevor McFedries:

I was going to click like a group chat. If you had hugged most of those people in that Twitter list, and there was kind of some real interactions that kind of tied you all together and made you want to go above and beyond responding to how to help a child that’s teething, that’s how I would describe it. 

 

Laura Shin:

Okay. Yes. Yes. Because yes, it starts offline, but yes, you’re right…or online, but then it goes offline, which I find very interesting and fun. 

 

All right, so in a moment, we’re going to talk about some of the questions around FWB, but first, a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. 

 

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Back to my conversation with Trevor.

 

So, I have been wondering, are there concerns that FWB could be a security? Because just based on the definition of a security as applied to crypto tokens, if it’s an investment contract with the expectation of profits dependent on the efforts of an identifiable party, then wouldn’t the value of this token FWB be determined by the group members of FWB?

 

Trevor McFedries:

That’s a good question, probably one I would leave up to the lawyers, but you know, in our understanding, in our talking with lawyers, well really what we’re, you know, offering is a ticket, right. And so, a ticket into the club, and you know, oftentimes tickets have a secondary speculative value, but they all kind of have this utility of coming into the club, and so I’m definitely not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice or financial advice or whatever other disclaimer I’m supposed to give, but I’ve talked to some, and that’s how they describe it. 

 

Laura Shin:

And so then, when FWB is trying to figure out what it’s going to do or not do, are there any particular activities that the group either tries to discourage or stay away from in order to not cross any of those lines?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes, certainly. I mean, it’s a very common thought like, hey, we should start a fund from FWB, and we’re, you know, pretty quick to be like, hey, that probably feels like a regulatory no-no. I don’t think that we want to be in the business of that, and so we don’t do that. I think what we try to do is throw events, and some of the events happen on Discord, and some of them happen IRL, but you know, having those tickets in the form of tokens allows you to participate in those things.

 

Laura Shin:

And so, FWB did recently publish a post on its plans for 2022, and one of the more interesting aspects was you mentioned you’re going to have an FWB directory. Can you describe that and also the technology that will enable that? 

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. And really, I should have Mike Bodge and Dexter and others who are on the product team can speak to that more accurately because I’ll probably flub it here, but at the core of it is we have a lot of interesting folks, you know. Throughout the years anyone participating in conversation, and I think the idea that you could more accurately find these folks, engage with them, and figure out things to collaborate on has always been compelling. It’s quite tricky with the kind of limited service area you have inside of Discord and building Discord bots, but beyond that, I think, you know, reputation on-chain is important, and people are thinking a lot about that, and so we’ve an opportunity to kind of create a membership directory that says, hey, here are the things that I’ve expressed that I’m great at, and here are things that I’ve participated in. Here are things that, you know, my on-chain activity that says I have domain expertise in and then allow folks to connect dots and try to do cool stuff together. 

 

And I think that’s actually one of the cool things…one of the cool things to me, is you know, stuff like sound, that .xyz, that music in a key platform, largely born out of FWB, people hanging out and meeting in there and saying, hey, we should build stuff, and so it would be amazing if we could facilitate more of those interactions and create more teams and partnerships to go build cool stuff. 

 

Laura Shin:

Yes. Something that I thought was so cool is that the identity batches are nontransferable NFTs, and all just dynamically evolved based on the activity. Is that an automated thing, or is it…it must be automated if it’s based on your activity?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. And I imagine part of it will be automated, maybe some of the old stuff as well. I haven’t been nearly as involved as I should be in that product stuff, but I can do a little follow-up with you and send you some notes. I imagine a lot of it will be automatic as it’s an on-chain and there are probably pretty simple ways to structure those things. 

 

Laura Shin:

Yes. I think it was really cool. 

 

So, you know, we’ve been talking about kind of issues of exclusivity, inclusivity, and obviously, recently in the news, there were tweets by one of your cofounders, Cooper Turley. These were nine-year-old tweets, and so he was probably about 16 at the time he made the tweets, but they did express racist and homophobic sentiments, and FWB ended up announcing that it was removing him for a minimum of two seasons. I did notice there were a lot of critical comments on the Twitter announcement calling the thread sanctimonious, criticizing FWB for punishing him for actions from almost 10 years ago or saying things like, these punishments amounted to cancel culture. What’s your response?

 

Trevor McFedries:

You know, I never want to take up on behalf of FWB, but I think, you know, what I was really proud of is that FWB had plans in place for any of these kind of things. The code of conduct that was built by FWB members that Cooper participated in, the community made a decision, and that was that. 

 

Now, as far as me, personally, you know, I can’t really speak to the…you know, how the comments being interpreted as being homophobic, but as far as the racist stuff, people, I think…the things people were really upset with were him using the N-word, you know, saying nigga in tweets, and as a Black person, I know Cooper extremely well. I’ve known him for years, and there’s not a racist bone in his body. You know, stupid White kids say N words because he likes listening to rap music, in my opinion, absolutely yes, and I think what I wanted to see happen was someone who made some big mistakes, pay their debts, and then get reintegrated into a community that they can contribute to, to make it better for a lot of those marginalized groups, and I think that’s why any of us, or a lot of us, do this stuff is we see an opportunity to help people that could use that help, and Cooper, while he can write some silly tweets, you know, people going to say, well, these are kind of fortune cookie tweets where he’s talking about how DAOs are going to change the world and may be hyperbolic, the young person who I think really believes a lot of those things, and so what I’d love to see is Cooper pay his debts, get back, and get involved, and contribute, and help people, and I think that’s the path that he’s on, and I’m proud of FWB for setting the tone and creating a playbook that, hopefully, others can use and improve to make sure that we all feel safe, and that we all feel heard, and that we all want to participate inside of this thing that we’re all co-creating. 

 

Laura Shin:

Yes. The homophobic part came from I think a CoinDesk article, but they didn’t actually show those tweets, so maybe that was misinformation or something, but they did…

 

Trevor McFedries:

I think it was correct. He was using, you know, an F word, a slur that, you know, I didn’t want to speak on it because, you know, I’m not queer. I don’t participate in that community, and I don’t want to interpret how it would have been felt by others who are, but as far as the racism stuff goes, I can speak to that. 

 

Laura Shin:

Okay. So, kind of on the same note, I did see that back when you were with Brud doing Lil Miquela, a New York magazine reported that Brud only accepted venture capital from firms with a woman or person of color in a position to write them a check. The magazine also said that you and your then co-founder, Sara Decou, said that you hoped that the impact you would have was similar to the impact of…well, yes…you mentioned this earlier, Will & Grace. And I am obviously, very well aware as a woman, myself, and as a woman of color, that the crypto and NFT space have been criticized as not being very diverse, so what do you think can and should be done about that?

 

Trevor McFedries:

I mean, to me, the best thing that can be done is onboarding and kind of hand-holding as many people as you possibly can into the space, so I think the demographics are such that if you go out, and you bring in the best people, the most talented people you can find, you know, you’re going to be identifying people of color and women because they’re really freaking talented. 

 

And so, one of the things that I don’t think we’ll talk about is how difficult user interfaces are for a lot of these things, and I think, you know, that can be kind of paternalistic in that the idea that people can’t pick these things up if they’re, you know, kind of shown how to do it to me is incorrect, and I think it actually facilitates playing nice, each one teach one dynamic, so what I often do is, you know, just sit down with people and show them how you get onward into Web3. Here’s how you install mita Mask. Here’s how to install Phantom. You know, here’s how to figure out what this crazy Flow blockchain is, what we’re building, how to buy a Top Shot, and I do a lot of that stuff. I think that’s the kind of tactical, on the ground stuff. 

 

But beyond that, I think some of the stuff that we’ve done, you know, at Damper and FWB, by creating products that are, you know, maybe more compelling to folks outside of traditional finance or technology, whether it’s buying MBA highlights or coming to parties, is a great way to pull people into this pipeline and get them involved. 

 

Laura Shin:

Yes. That’s true. Yes, because it’s just more integrated into kind of their normal activity, whereas I feel like some of the more financial stuff it just feels a little bit overwhelming for kind of an average person.

 

Trevor McFedries:

Certainly. Commutativity.

 

Laura Shin:

So, you have such an interesting background. I mean, we only, you know, glossed over it at the beginning, but because you have so much experience in the music space and with, you know, friends of yours who kind of started out as, you know, just an everyday person who then became household names as musicians, I wanted to ask you, you know, what your thoughts were about this passion economy or creator economy. And before we actually get into this question, can you define those terms as you see them?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Oh, man. So, I think it’s largely attributed to Legion, who’s defined this kind of passion and creator economy, and as I understand it, when it was originally defined, it really was designed to represent creators who were now trying to build businesses around their output in ways that the kind of more mainstream platforms wouldn’t have been able, Instagrams, TikToks, Youtubes of the world. A lot of those folks, stuff like Patreon, OnlyFans, Substack, and I kind of see them as Web2.5, as these interstitials, where it was clear that consumers and fans wanted to buy things directly from creators that they liked, and there weren’t very effective tools for doing so. 

 

I think what we’ve seen with Web3’s evolution of that, where it’s like, yeah, I want to buy something from this creator that I love, but I also want to have, you know, ownership of that object. I’d like to be able to have a say in, you know, what this person is doing, and I think that’s what people are expanding on now, are the people’s compelling experience that you’ve seen communities, whether it’s Bored Apes or FWB or WhaleSharks, whatever it is really, really pay attention, and then, you know, move quite quickly. 

 

Laura Shin:

And so, what problems do you think that this technology will solve for creators, and kind of what are some of the more creative things that you expect to see them do that wasn’t possible with Web2 or even 2.5?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. I mean, I would say the really exciting things that I’m pumped on are creators being able to buy a home or start a family, things that should not be crazy. Just get back to square one, be able to make a living. It’s a sad reality that a lot of our favorite creators are barely skating by and are really on this treadmill where they have to crank out enough output to stay top of mind just so they can capture attention and platforms can sell…have to get that attention that they can get a small cut. 

 

What I’m looking forward to is people creating interesting economies. I often joke that when I was first playing in bands, like hardcore bands, you know, we had to decide between a drummer who was 16 and not very good at playing the drums, a drummer who was 14 and really good at playing the drums, but none of us could drive, and the 16-year-old could drive, and so we had to make a decision, and there were tradeoffs, and we brought him into the band, and we were able to play other places. 

 

I often think that you know, creators that are on the road are going to see someone like that, someone who has a traditional finance background who can think really uniquely about the economies he can build around his own, you know, DJ and his music, and think, man, as part of our band, as part of our team, you know, maybe we need public relations, but maybe more importantly, we need a community manager with tokenomics chops who could help us think about how we can take our output and build economies against it such that we can not only survive, but thrive, and so I think you’re going to see the makeup of creative organizations and bands and creators change as people recognize there’s a lot of value to be captured here if they have the tools and the know-how to realize it. 

 

Laura Shin:

And what are some of the things that you feel that technology could do someday for creators that are not yet possible that you know, you hope would be developed I guess in the next year or two?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. I think in the next year or two you’re definitely going to see narratives that are not only, you know, participatory, but you know, potentially shaped by fandoms. So, you can imagine a world where a Spiderman comic is being unveiled panel by panel, and then a Choose Your Own Adventure-style way that governs token is deciding the outcome of this narrative. I also think allowing communities to participate inside your media is something I’m pretty excited about, so oftentimes there are Youtubers that are funding editors, and I think there’s ways to engage a community to participate in the edit of what they’re doing, and as that, you know, as it performs well, having them participate in sharing some of that value and upside. 

 

And then the really simple stuff, I think there’s opportunities for NFTs to create markets for creative works that otherwise might not have had markets, so my friend David Rudnick talks a lot about poetry, and I couldn’t agree more. You know, I think we live in a world where the value that poets create is really not reflected in their quality of life or the way they live, and so I think the idea that I could participate in kind of collecting poetry or different written text, and you know, I could potentially, you know, speculate the time horizon that’s 30 to 100 years versus, you know, the really kind of short windows we have now in intention to commune where we don’t know if Vine will be here tomorrow or if Flickr will be here tomorrow I think really changes the game. 

 

And so, the major themes for me are creating economies around markets and markets for things that otherwise wouldn’t have had them, like poetry or contemporary dance choreography or whatever you like, and then the flipside of that is allowing capital to think with longer time horizons because we have decentralized networks that are going to exist for far longer than Flickr or any of the other kind of graveyards of digital media companies that last a few years. 

 

Laura Shin:

And so, for the poetry, and you mentioned music and also the choreographed dance moves, what does that look like? Obviously, the NFTs that have taken off so far really tend to be visual, you know, either art or video, so what do NFTs look like when it’s applied to something different like poetry or dance?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. I mean, I think it’s going to take a market maker to come out and signify that these things have value, but you know, the poetry one, to me, is pretty straight ahead, platforms like Zoar that allow you to mint text and then, you know, collect and trade that text. 

 

If someone is able to create a work, you know, and have that work gain a ton of cultural significance, and that work has some provenance on-chain, I imagine people are going to want to collect that, and I think, you know, in the kind of really obvious ways. I imagine that kind of point of entry will be, you know, kind of the meme neologisms, whether it’s stuff like we’re all going to make it or, you know, you got rugged, or things that feel more crypto native, then expanding out into, you know, whatever 2023’s equivalent of BlingBling is, right. These slang terms that capture any kind of rise in cultural Zeitgeist in to becoming mainstream, and if you kind of collect that and own that, I imagine would inspire others to come up with other phrases or ideas that could be collectible. 

 

As far as contemporary dance, I mean, it’s clear that dance trends on TikTok are really important. If you’re someone who’s able to shake that, if you’re someone who’s working at a ballet who’s doing really impressive works, I’d like to hope that in the near future people recognize how important that stuff is, and they want to put it inside of their wallet because it will become a status symbol of a different kind, and they can play status games that maybe have a more historical bent than an astronaut floating through space or whatever is trending now on Open Safe. 

 

Laura Shin:

And you know, obviously, you did work at Spotify, so what do you kind of see happening when you look at something like Sound.xyz, which you mentioned before, you know, like an NFT version of music gaining popularity against the current models for consuming music?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Again, I love a lot of folks at Spotify, and I love Dan, and I think what I’m excited about in music NFTs is just another outlet for creativity. I think when you’ve seen certain artists really thrive, the kind of Billie Eilishes of the world who have made music this kind of genre-less that can live across playlists, that is built for kind of a certain type of listening experience…I think in TikTok, you’ve seen the same…these mediums allow for certain artists to thrive, and what’s great for me is I often, you know, while I love Spotify, we talk about how, myself as an artist, I always knew that I had fans that would spend, you know, maybe one or two would spend 10,000 dollars on a release, and I’m sure of plenty that would nothing on it, but by, you know, charging the same fee for all of them, there are probably some inefficiencies there, right, and so I think what you’re seeing is more experimentation that’s going to allow for artists to find different ways to capture as much of the value they can in working.

 

Laura Shin:

And so, out of all the different kind of NFTs at the moment, what are your favorites? Or which ones are you watching?

 

Trevor McFedries:

I mean, I’m a huge fan of the folks at Catalog. I think they’re doing really great stuff, and they have a really great curatorial ear, as far as music NFTs go, Sound I’m very inspired by as well, and I guess, you know, disclaimer, investor in both primarily because we’re all talking about how to solve this music pain point, especially in real-time. There’s a marketplace in Solana, Formfunction, I’m really pumped on. I kind of see it as an Etsy, you know, a kind of more indie space for artists to create work that otherwise might feel out of place contextually in an open sea of swarm PFP projects or something like that. You know, and beyond that, huge fan of the Coordinate team. I think thinking about different models for compensating people is a really fun design space. We’re all working in different ways. I don’t know that getting a check every two weeks as it’s standardized is the way it needs to look.

 

So, anyone who’s thinking about that stuff, people who are saying, hey, you’re on norms that were created in the industrial era, I think we’re doing things differently now. Maybe we could approach this piece differently as well. So, it’s really wide open, and I feel like that’s the joy and maybe kind of the pain of Web3 is just trying to keep up with all of these novel ideas and try to make sense of what’s real and you know, what’s graft. 

 

Laura Shin:

And so, obviously, after this last fall seeing the ConstitutionDAO just kind of come up out of nowhere, catch on very quickly, I think a lot of people are expecting to see a lot more interesting and crazy initiatives out of DAOs this coming year. What are your thoughts on where you think DAOs could go this year?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. I think, you know, I’m intrigued heading into some midterm elections in the States how people will think about using DAOs to potentially shape public sentiment or have influence in the outcomes of political elections. You know, I’ve been impressed watching Coin Center and seemingly unknown lobbyists in DC raise awareness about crypto and Web3, and I think as folks recognize that there’s a couple trillion dollars that have flowed into this new influential group of young people primarily, they might want to kind of bend their will towards those folks, and so I think, you know, there’s a lot of discontent…you know, latent discontent in this country that could be mobilized by engaging with Web through community, and so that’s one thing I’m excited about for DAOs is you know, governance, informing, macro governance, especially around things like climate that I’m quite passionate about. 

 

Beyond that, I do think the kind of not-so-novel ability to raise dollars quite quickly for causes, whether it be buying a Constitution or other things isn’t going away anytime soon, and so I think you’ll see more attempts to raise dollars to do really novel things. I’m hoping it lends itself more towards open-sourcing dialysis versus…I don’t know…buying rare video games, but that’s the kind of stuff that I’m really excited about for DAOs is Governance, thinking about new and future work stuff, and then if you’re going to pool a bunch of dollars, can you use them effectively to create real-world value.

 

Laura Shin:

Huh. When you talk about that dialysis thing, I mean, I guess that would assume some kind of specialized knowledge or working with people who have that specialized knowledge, so it is just more like a fundraising effort to then connect to the right people, or what would something like that look like?

 

Trevor McFedries:

I think that’s, you know, one of the bigger challenges, right. When we get in the kind of wildly sort of hypothetical far outside my paygrade, I think we’ve joked about on Twitter, you know, buying the rights to, you know, medications and open-sourcing them through DAOs, but there are all kinds of challenges in that and bringing it to practice in real life, but I think pooling capital, you know, it seems quite silly to folks in crypto because Ethereum flies around. But being able to pool that capital is often one of the most difficult parts of realizing any of these kind of more outlandish moonshot ideas, and so if you can kind of drum up support, and you have these giant coordination mechanisms like Twitter or something with a layer of capital on top of them, you can do more than just, you know, show up and flash dance in a flash mob like in early 2000. You actually can put that capital together and try to change something systemically, and so that is directionally where I’m thinking about. It would be identifying talent, hiring them, and realizing things. It could be as simple as saying, hey, there’s a really rare illness, and you know, the medication costs 10,000 dollars a pill, and we could probably buy it 50 million dollars, and maybe it only helps 100 people a year, but change their lives.

 

So, you know, that’s the kind of stuff that’s far outside of my paygrade, but I think the ability to pool capital is meaningful and novel, and I think it feels, you know…it doesn’t feel quite that novel to us. We’ve been in Web3 for a long time, but for folks outside of it, it’s a big deal. 

 

Laura Shin:

Finally, for social tokens, which I think are very relevant creators, what are you kind of looking forward to this coming year? Where do you think those are going?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Yes. I mean, there are seemingly lots of platforms and protocols that are, you know, taking on I think what a lot of folks always talk about, which is like, you know, the stock market for rappers or whatever it is. There is, you know, some seeming demand for speculating around talent or kind of allowing folks to participate in markets they understand, you know, probably better than a Goldman Sachs executive. I do think that NFTs have an opportunity to kind of step onto the community token, so slip into the turf, and maybe shape what that looks like as well. You’ve kind of seen of that with the PFP projects where if you hold an NFT participate inside of Discords and other kind of like governance in a different way.

 

And where I’m kind of most intrigued is seeing how people can extend some of these token benefits on-chain versus kind of the easy stuff, you know. IRL I think is great. Say, if you hold this token, you can come backstage or whatever, but I like to see people kind of extend and be challenged themselves such that hey if I live in the right regulatory environment, can I allow you guys to participate in the creation of this tour, and the upside of the ticket sales? But that’s all, you know, crazy stuff. We’ll see if that comes to pass. 

 

Laura Shin:

All right. Well, this has been such a fascinating conversation. Where can people learn more about you and your work?

 

Trevor McFedries:

Oh, man. I’m generally just kind of trolling and shitposting on the internet, but if you want to participate in some event, it’s whatdotCD, what.CD on most of them, and then yes. If you want to email me, you can just do trevor.mcdfedries@dapperlabs.com. 

 

Laura Shin:

Perfect. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on Unchained. 

 

Trevor McFedries:

Laura, a pleasure. Thank you very much. 

 

Laura Shin:

Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Trevor Dapper Collectives and Friends with Benefits check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Anthony Yoon, Daniel Ness, Mark Murdock, Shashank, and CLK Transcription. Thanks for listening. 

Unchained Podcast