Trevor McFedries built the world's first AI agent by hand — Lil Miquela, a CGI Instagram character with 2.5M followers, Prada campaigns, and venture funding from Sequoia. It took a team of 9 to puppeteer every post.

Now an LLM can do what that team did.

In this conversation, Trevor walks through his full arc — from Davenport, Iowa to DJ Skeet Skeet to Bad Robot, where JJ Abrams taught him long-form storytelling ("be careful with her voice — when the talkies came out, it killed careers").

He explains why he pitched Sequoia on turning Brud into a DAO in 2018 ("we love you, but we're not getting federally deposed for your crypto shenanigans"), how FWB started as a weekend hack that Virgil Abloh asked to join, and why he believes crypto veterans are better prepared for the AI moment than anyone.

Trevor shares his framework of carpentry vs gardening — building the world you want vs letting things become what they are — and how fatherhood changed his approach. He reveals Runner, a new project exploring cultural prediction markets, and describes building a SoulSeek client where agents download MP3s and play music for each other.

Guest: Trevor McFedries (@whatdotcd)

Host: Seth Goldstein

Links:
• Reach.social: https://reach.social

• FWB: https://fwb.help

• SoFTT on Bandcamp: https://softtsoftt.bandcamp.com

• Let's Vibe! website: https://letsvibe.fm