Trevor McFedries

Founder, Runner · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderentertainerinvestor@whatdotcd ↗eatskeet.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Trevor McFedries is the founder of Runner and co-founder of Friends With Benefits. He previously co-founded Brud, the media studio behind virtual influencer Lil Miquela, and worked as a music producer and DJ.

12statements → 1claims → 0claims resolved → 3.75/5average certainty → 2.58/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated →

1 not checkable as stated how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 1 opinion · 9 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Trevor argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

289 words/min while actually speaking · 3.5 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Trevor McFedries: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 18 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 4,547 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Trevor McFedries is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

What they said12 Episodes1

Everything Trevor McFedries said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

McFedries: Media companies should build IP from single characters up to films

“Traditionally you kind of started with this like longer form asset, like a Star Wars, and then you kind of iterate in like a Star Wars video game, comic book, all the way up to like a lightsaber you could buy at Target. And so you have this pyramid that moves …”

Trevor McFedries Mar 31, 2023 ▶ 14:53 Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela

Insight

McFedries: Compelling characters drive new platform adoption, not empty virtual worlds

“I always thought that like a character would pull you into emergent platform. So like, you know, Pikachu is the reason you get Pokemon Go. You know, you don't want to just walk around your yard scanning stuff. You want to follow Pikachu somewhere.”

Trevor McFedries Mar 31, 2023 ▶ 20:08 Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela

Prediction Not checkable as stated

McFedries: Generative AI will accelerate media's race to the bottom

“This kind of race to the bottom in a lot of media is going to, like, that bottom's going to hit far quicker because of AI. It's going to be really easy to be good at things.”

Trevor McFedries Mar 31, 2023 ▶ 29:08 Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela

Insight

McFedries: Backward-looking AI models will cause repetitive media feedback loops

“It's going to be really hard to be excellent, and because, you know, models effectively are backwards looking, data kind of begets more data. I mean, you're going to have some, like, nasty feedback loops, not entirely dissimilar from, like, what happened to Ne…”

Trevor McFedries Mar 31, 2023 ▶ 29:22 Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela

Insight

McFedries: Unlimited celebrity availability could devalue virtual engagement

“The variable rewards component of social, that kind of like brain hack of a slot machine brain hack is what makes a lot of social experiences sticky. And so the idea that you could just, you know, message Emma Chamberlain and she responds right away or pops up…”

Trevor McFedries Mar 31, 2023 ▶ 44:47 Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela

Insight

McFedries: Modern Disney or Marvel Should Be Built on Social Media

“If you were going to build a modern Disney or Marvel now, you probably wouldn't want to start in comic books or in theaters. You'd want to start where the eyeballs are, which was, you know, really on social”

Trevor McFedries Mar 31, 2023 ▶ 3:29 Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela

Opinion

McFedries: PG-13 ratings neutered middle-ground cinema and TV

“In a post PG-thirteen America, like movie ratings really neutered kind of like middle ground of cinema and television where I used to have these kind of like John Hughes films.”

Trevor McFedries Mar 31, 2023 ▶ 9:02 Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela

Insight

McFedries: Minimizing novelty and maximizing familiarity drives adoption of novel media

“And if we minimize as much of the novelty as possible and keep as much of it familiar as possible, I thought we had a better chance of succeeding.”

Trevor McFedries Mar 31, 2023 ▶ 5:21 Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela

Insight

McFedries: Audiences engage with media aimed 5 to 7 years older

“People engage with media that it's like five to seven years older than them.”

Trevor McFedries Mar 31, 2023 ▶ 8:51 Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela

Insight

McFedries: Narrative media businesses are like fashion businesses requiring endless novelty

“Narrative is, you know, like unthinkably hard, right? You know, there's all kinds of books you can read about why you shouldn't build like narrative driven media businesses, because you, it's like building a fashion business. Like you have to keep things inter…”

Trevor McFedries Mar 31, 2023 ▶ 14:23 Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela

Disclosure

McFedries: Brud operated as a tech company using weekly data science on content

“We really tried to build, you know, a technology organization disguised as a media organization. So we had like data science teams every week bringing back what worked and what didn't, building taxonomies on images and videos.”

Trevor McFedries Mar 31, 2023 ▶ 16:05 Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela

Insight

McFedries: TikTok creators compete globally, not just in their social graph

“And so, effectively, if you're creating media on TikTok, right, like, you're not even competing for attention in your following, in your social graph. Like, you're competing against the globe.”

Trevor McFedries Mar 31, 2023 ▶ 24:30 Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
Digital Humans and the Story Behind Lil Miquela	Mar 31, 2023	19m

Trevor McFedries

The record, in short

How they sound: speaking style how? →

Appearances (1)

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