The Puppet Becomes Autonomous (Trevor McFedries)

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 GoldsteinLinks: • Reach.social: https://reach.social • FWB: https://fwb.help • SoFTT on Bandcamp: https://softtsoftt.bandcamp.com • Let's Vibe! website: https://letsvibe.fm