One Genius Rule That Made This Coffee Brand Famous | EP 2262

Legendary British ad man Rory Sutherland invented a fake business on a podcast, a coffee shop appealing to the busy commuter called "Flat White or F**k Off." But it's one thing to have a post go big on TikTok or Instagram… but to turn that viral moment into an actual COMPANY is a very different challenge. On TWiST, Jason and Lon chat with Charlie Hurst, Tom Noble, and Will Sudlow, founders of the online brand "Flat White or F**k Off," about how they took a funny little slogan and turned it into a string of popular social media accounts, a line of merch, a pop-up café, and let's face it, an entire lifestyle. PLUS we've got Mog and Dubs from Subnet 75 — Hippius! Hear how they're using the blockchain for decentralized storage, and providing server space much cheaper than their famous hyperscaler rivals. This Week In Startups is made possible by: Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twist LinkedIn Jobs - https://LinkedIn.com/twist. Wispr Flow - https://wisprflow.ai/twist Northwest Registered Agent - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Timestamps: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:28 Plaud - If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 00:03:22 What is "decentralized cloud storage"? 00:05:42 How Hippius came together 00:09:57 LinkedIn Jobs - Hire right, the first time. Post your first job and get $100 off towards your job post at https://LinkedIn.com/twist. 00:11:38 Incentivizing miners 00:14:25 How many people are contributing? 00:18:42 But where does the value accrue? 00:20:18 Wispr Flow - Stop typing. Dictate with Wispr Flow and send clean, final-draft writing in seconds. Visit https://wisprflow.ai/twist to get started for free today. 00:29:55 Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist 00:35:53 The best places to eat in Dubai 00:38:06 The inspo behind "Flat White or F Off" 00:42:16 From social media to IRL business 00:53:06 The secrets of experiential marketing 00:57:28 Hospitality's "Rule of 3s" 00:59:33 Inside the Flat White London pop-up 01:13:11 Lon and Jason's Oscar picks 01:26:06 Lon went "Inside the Manosphere" Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startup. With me, Lon Harris. I'm Jason Calacanis. We have a full docket on Fridays. Yeah, we like to expand a little bit our horizons, talk to maybe some businesses that aren't strictly software-based, inside your computer, maybe talk to some entrepreneurs, and we have a really cool one that Rory Sutherland inspired called Flat White or?

• 0:25Speaker 01

  We should say F Off, I think.

• 0:27Jason Calacanis?

  F Off. Flat White or F Off?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  I'm gonna say F Off, so we don't get YouTube, we don't get booted off of YouTube.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks in 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. Whisperflow. Stop typing. Dictate with Whisperflow and send clean final draft writing in seconds. Visit wisprflow.ai/twist to get started for free today. That's W I S P R flow dot A I slash twist. And LinkedIn jobs. Hire right the first time. Post your job and get $100 off towards your job post at LinkedIn.com slash twist.

• 1:19Jason Calacanis?

  Before we get started here, we want to make sure we don't lose any of these gems. We have a lot of things we'll talk about during the show, and we tape the show live, and we like to banter a little bit before the show. We'll have a little banter in between that we cut out of the final podcast while we're queuing things up. If you don't want to lose any of those nuggets, any of those action items, any of your inspirational ideas, get a plot pin, and then you just press the button, boom, it vibrates, you get a nice haptic, it starts recording, red light, everybody knows that you're recording, you may have heard me before, hey, I'm into privacy. So I say, hey, may I record our meeting? Or, hey, is anybody else using a meeting recorder? It's now kind of table stakes. When you go into a meeting, you expect it to be recorded for AI.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:04Jason Calacanis?

  So, hey, that train's left the station. It provides massive value. Everybody understands when you're in a meeting, you know, Zoom records it. Everybody's recording it. But this one, the Plod pen, puts it right on your lapel. So when I'm skiing or, you know, I'm in meetings, I don't have to like grab my device and fire up some other app, hit the settings, just press it. And then it delightfully will make me a summary. Sometimes I'll take that summary, I'll just send a link to Lon and say, hey, this is for the talk I'm doing in two weeks.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  This does happen.

• 2:32Jason Calacanis?

  Just some ideas for you. Boom. And then he has something to build from.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Unlike a lot of these note takers, it understands a lot of the context of what you're saying. So it's not just like a wall of text that you have to go through and dig through. It fixes your grammar and punctuation. It organizes everything neatly. It looks like a human sat next to you and actually took diligent notes, but it was just your plod pen.

• 2:53Jason Calacanis?

  Man, they also have one that goes in the back of your phone that I love. So I carry both of these things with me and I travel a lot internationally and I am popping out of meetings with my team all the time and bang, this thing makes me so much more productive. You know, I still will like to have my pen in my pad here sometimes.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  The old ways never die.

• 3:11Jason Calacanis?

  It never dies, but I find myself using it half as much.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  You should check it out at plaud.ai/twist and use the code TWIST and they're going to give you 10% off.

• 3:20Jason Calacanis?

  Let's get to the show.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  It's our very first entry in our new series, Tau Plus AI. We're going to be talking to some of the very top BitTensor subnets. We talked to Mark Jeffrey, of course, of Steelcore Capital last week. Got really excited about Tau, BitTensor, this whole ecosystem. So we've got Mog and Dubbs here, the co-founders of Hippius Subnet 75. That's the decentralized blockchain powered cloud storage platform. It's sort of like a decentralized AWS or Google Cloud. So they're gonna, they're gonna come on now and show us around.

• 3:53Jason Calacanis?

  You know, Tau is very similar in a distributed fashion. Mog and Dubbs, welcome. It's an inspiring project because I remember having Bitcoin on this very podcast in, I think, 2010 or 2009, 2010, 2011, right in that time period.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  I believe it was 2011.

• 4:12Jason Calacanis?

  2011.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:13Jason Calacanis?

  Super inspired by it.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  2009.

• 4:15Jason Calacanis?

  Because it was, yeah, so very decentralized and nobody in control.

• 4:23Jason Calacanis?

  And you had this ability to move money around and store value. And then maybe it would work for transactions. Maybe there'd be other uses for it. It turned out there was only one real use. Speculation, store of value. You know, and maybe if you're trying to get from out of one country to another lawn and you got a thumb drive and you know, you're you're leaving Venezuela. You're you're trying to get back on track and you're trying to keep your your assets as you're leaving a dictatorship to to go flee. You know, there's like some really interesting uses for Bitcoin. What I found really interesting about the BitTensor project lawn is that instead of using the compute to solve cryptography problems to create this network that allowed for the

• 5:04Jason Calacanis?

  storage of assets, this one allows you to take all of that work and put it towards something productive in the world. Right. At the same time, and BitTensor has been around for a while. At the same time, you know, it started to get some, you know, early true believers. The AI revolution happened and then the need for compute happened at and it's happening right now. We're soaking in it. The data center build out so and people buying Mac Studios to run OpenClaw. We need more compute. We need more, you know, infrastructure and how and BitTensor feels like the perfect platform for that. So, Mag and Dubs, tell me how you found out about this BitTensor project?

• 5:49Jason Calacanis?

  What inspired you to get involved in it? And what have you built?

• 5:52Speaker 03

  It's actually fantastic to see so many people getting excited about it. I'm glad that Mark was on explaining you a lot of the basics. My history love affair with BitTensor sounds much like yours, only it's a couple of years older. And I remember, I'll do this briefly, but discovering BitTensor in the early days of GPT 2.5 and understanding the power of using distributed compute and distributed participation to essentially produce either a mixture of experts or to provide a better solution than calling out inference to a single provider, be it OpenAI, Meta, et cetera. And this was very early on, but what I also saw was that a lot of the very bright people

• 6:37Speaker 03

  that were building in this space. Weren't the best suited to deliver product and understand what really connected with users. And we saw an opening at that time that was really needed was the ability to visualize the network. And so we created TalStats, which is essentially a blockchain explorer and data analytics for the network. It now provides all of the trading to go in and out of subnets. It's the one site that anyone in BitTensor uses and probably has double-figure tabs open on their desktop. Not here to big up TalStats, I think I've just managed to do that one, they're ready. And then when subnets came into fruition, subnets being the ability for anyone to go and build their own incentive mechanism,

• 7:20Speaker 03

  to generate their own commodity, because in the early days of BitTensor, there was only one. Everyone was working towards one particular commodity value. One of the real needs for the network was storage. And a couple of people tried and failed to get storage right. And Doug was working with me on TalStats, helping with the architecture there. And it transpired that he had an incredible history with both node operation and decentralized storage.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  And had the, I think it takes a certain type of person and work ethic to build a subnet. You have to have thick skin, be very, very multi-spectrum talented across, and also be prepared to be learning, learning as you go. This is new technology, this incentive mechanism design is not something that really exists in production in such a way. And you're building on an ever-evolving network. And so we set about to create Hippieus. Hippieus is, as Lauren alluded, essentially AWS, Google Cloud, R2, on distributed decentralized infrastructure, storage initially.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Being perfected, essentially, the major product now is a drop-in replacement for S3. Sorry, Amazon, we're coming after you.

• 8:45Jason Calacanis?

  And for people who don't know, Amazon has a product called S3. Basically, if you need storage, you can just pay them a fee and you get a terabyte. And so with your project, you pay a fee, you get a terabyte. And that terabyte, instead of being in an Amazon data center, is where?

• 9:02Speaker 03

  All around. It is distributed between the participants. I'll switch over to Dubs in a minute for the technical side of it. But essentially, distributed with fail safes. So you often see this from time to time because many people don't understand that S3 probably powers, I would guess, 60% of storage and products on the internet. And very often, when you have these huge network outages for the internet, it's usually one of two things that have gone down. Cloudflare, bless them, they are amazing, or an S3 data center or pipeline somewhere. And suddenly, you've got, you know, American Express is out, Mastercard is out, and all these other services are out. Netflix isn't working for a couple of hours.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  And of course, they're hugely important infrastructure providers within the internet. But much like so much of the evolution of what we're doing, by distributing and decentralizing it, we create these fail safes.

• 9:57Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:41Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:46Speaker 04

  Right the first time and get $100 off your first job posting by going to LinkedIn.com/ Twist. Terms and conditions apply.

• 10:53Jason Calacanis?

  Who are the people who've contributed their hard drive space to the network? And then I guess maybe you could walk us through how it gets distributed and what the performance is like, because if the hard drives are all in one data center with a massive pipe into it and Amazon has all that, I would assume that they're going to outperform a distributed network which has to piece together and maybe it doesn't have the throughput or the speed or am I wrong? Maybe have you architected it to be faster? Or just cheaper? So usually you get like a couple of those things. It's either faster and you know, more stable, but not cheaper, or it's cheaper and stable, but not as fast. You know, when you're talking about storage, you get to pick two. So how does it work?

• 11:37Jason Calacanis?

  And then who's putting their, who's contributing the storage? Dubs?

• 11:41Speaker 05

  I will try to be not too technical, but basically we created a protocol ourself, which is called ARIAN. And we made it from the ground up. We started on the basics on distributing everything to the miners. And we selected miners using incentive mechanism. So basically the incentive mechanism is something you design and it constantly change over the time because you want to have some performance in some point. You get the performance you have already for some stuff. And that's a duty of bit and sorry is like you can modulate your algorithm or your incentive mechanism to get the miners adapting what you need. For example, you need like to have more speed, you will put more effort on waiting

• 12:26Speaker 05

  more on the speed of the of the network. So you can have more, yeah, more throughput. But the way we did it's because like the big question would be, yeah, cool. But what if the team is goes down or stuff like that? I trust more Amazon. We developed something that is crush map also on, well, we Get the crush app and we adapted it for the decentralized storage, which is basically mathematics. You can calculate exactly where your file is on which miner it is. And everything is backed by the blockchain. We have a blockchain for H's that we run and we write everything as a log, if you want, in the blockchain. So you can explore where your file is, how it goes.

• 13:10Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So to translate that for the audience, maybe who isn't as technical, when you set up a subnet, you get to define how people earn their tokens on that. And what you can decide, if you're doing one based on storage, is saying, hey, I care about uptime. So in order to earn the tau and to get tokens as being part of this, you need to have a certain level of uptime. You need a certain level of speed. So I need this amount of throughput. If you don't hit those things, you can't participate. Or if you're faster, maybe you can participate at a higher level. But that's what the tau platform allows you to do, correct?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. What we're doing is designing an incentive mechanism that's very fluid. So you can actually adjust that to say, as Dub said, hey, I need the miners to be faster. It's great. We've got all the storage and the latency is fine, but we're suffering a bit on speed. Let's push miners to optimize for speed.

• 14:02Jason Calacanis?

  And so then they can say where they're, wherever they're storing it. And I want to ask this question for the third or fourth time. Who's contributing the hard drive space? Because that's what like, somebody wants to know. So let's get that out of the way right now.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  Anyone with redundant storage, who has the expertise to optimize for the incentive mechanism. So it is not mom and pops at home with an extra 20 gig on their hard disk. It is usually people with data centers or infrastructure. You could technically be doing it at home. But I would say that currently it's those that understand BitTensor, they're able to read an incentive mechanism and optimize their setup for it. But it can be anyone. That is the beauty.

• 14:46Jason Calacanis?

  It's open to anyone. It's permissionless then. But you do need to have as a prerequisite, Lon, knowledge of BitTensor. You have to be highly technical to be able to go read the incentive structures and align with that and build that software. And You need to have hard drive space that would make it worth joining this, which I'm going to read into it. If you must know some of the people who put storage on the network, mog, or you must have asked some friends maybe to seed it? Would these be data center people? Like, are they?

• 15:18Speaker 03

  No. In the early days, BitTensor miners are a strong community, and we got a lot of feedback from them. But the reality of BitTensor is most people are optimizing for incentives. So they'll do anything they can, including cheat, to maximize incentive, which is very good for making sure your incentive mechanism is.

• 15:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so it's ruthless. Show me an incentive, I'll show you the outcome. They might go find and do arbitrage. There might be some data storage company that is doing a sale on, you know, storage, and they buy that, put it into the network to leverage that. And they're just constantly on the lookout for cheap storage, and they're going to optimize for that.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Yes, but we can, of course, score for reliability and continuous uptime and metrics and such. So, yes, but we don't know. The answer to that is no, we don't have a closed circle of people that we know. The miners that mostly get in contact with you are those that are complaining about something.

• 16:12Jason Calacanis?

  So then let's talk a little bit, Dubs, about who's using this. So how long has HIPIS been offering storage? And how many people are contributing storage? Like, the total number of people contributing storage? And how many people, you know, in the last 30 days have used storage, let's say?

• 16:33Speaker 05

  We have 256 slots on BitTensor. It's the UIG, where the miners can bring storage in. We make something that we can split that. So basically, maybe mog would be better to explain that. But you are able to have a family and then bring more server to it to make a cluster. So every miner is able to bring a cluster and make redundancy between his own nodes.

• 17:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so that's what is technically possible. My question, how many people are providing storage currently? Because I know these projects are nascent, they're very young. So how long has the network been offering storage? And then how many people have contributed storage so far? You must know those numbers, even if you don't know who they are, right?

• 17:17Speaker 03

  I'll grab it. You can actually go to hip stats and see a lot of this. But because we have, which is the network explorer for Hippieus. And as we've evolved, we've just implemented Arian recently to get rid of a huge amount of redundancy. So there was a perceived drop in files stored. But you can see there currently 351 terabytes stored, of storage available. And what we're doing at the moment is onboarding large sort of subnets within BitTensor as our core test audience. But what we're doing is appealing to developers who are already using AWS as just a simple drop in to replace what it is that they're doing.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  So obviously, the requirements are pretty simple. It has to work as good as, and of course, it's cheaper.

• 18:08Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So the answer to my question, we have 351 terabytes online across. I love the fact that this is all transparent, because now you get to see the network growing. And you know, you can build confidence in it. So when we're looking at this, Lon, we have 350 terabytes up and running. Okay, it's a modest amount, but these are nascent projects, as I've said. And that's what we do here at This Week in Startups, is we try to get on things very early so that we can understand them. And this is super disruptive. There is 100% of the nodes are online. Then we have total tau burned, is that what that is there?

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Yes, I actually spoke to Dubs about this. I don't know if I like this metric or not. Within BitTensor, there's a lot of conversation around some, a term that I actually coined called "alphanomics." And I don't know how deep you want to get into this, but every project within BitTensor, every subnet, has its own alpha token. And the way that BitTensor's flow of emissions is designed, in layman's terms, is

• 19:11Speaker 03

  It will not reward wastage. So you can't just say, hey, you know, the, the, the investors in BitTens are thinking my project is worth 5%, so I'm just throwing that to all my miners. So we were one of the very first projects to say, hey, you know what, we're only paying the miners for what is used. So although our miners get 41% of our emissions, we only actually pay out for the used storage, which directly translates to revenue. There's no free storage on Hippieus unless we decide to pay for it on your behalf, if you happen to be a startup.

• 19:41Jason Calacanis?

  Lon, this is going to be one of our big questions. Hey, which subnets should you own tokens on? And which subnets are being run by the most sophisticated entrepreneurs? Or are they being run by hippies who just want to change the world? Or is there an investment opportunity? Or is it a nonprofit? These things can be anything, you know, based on, you know, when I've talked to Mark. Sure. So we have to then validate the nodes as investors. And then also as, you know, just strategically, where are these going to go? So there was another line at the top there. Explain to me what the, the final number there is in that row. I want to tell you about a product I'm obsessed with, and everyone in tech seems

• 20:22Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:05Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:37Speaker 03

  Yes. So what's interesting here is Hippieus is the first and only BitTensor subnet that has its own blockchain. With this could go down a whole rabbit hole of my BitTensor expertise. But essentially, the BitTensor blockchain records only the incentive that subnets. Essentially, the incentive landscape, the current scoring and transactions within the BitTensor blockchain. And that was not enough to have verifiable on-chain storage for a storage network. So we created the first subnet to have its own substrate blockchain. But aligning with the principles of BitTensor, this was pre-subnets having alpha tokens. So not having its own secondary token, not trying to extract value from BitTensor Tau.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  Of course, as things evolve, now all subnets have their own token. But in short, that's the block number for the Hippieus blockchain.

• 22:30Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, and then you can click on miners here and we get a rank and we see the weight. What, where do we see like the total number of miners? And what's the point of this heads-up display?

• 22:43Speaker 03

  As Dubs explained, what happens is that although there are 256 slots available,

• 22:50Speaker 03

  that's like saying, I'm going to limit my business to having 256 suppliers. I don't need more than that. However, each supplier can have their own sub-supply chain that you are only interfacing with 256. So what you see there is child. And what will actually be happening, which is not quite in place yet, is as the network expands and the demand expands, miners will compete and have more and more child nodes. So there'll still be 256 slots, but let's say you need to provide more storage in order to compete. You may need two, three, four, five, six, seven child nodes.

• 23:27Jason Calacanis?

  So you're building a team. In order to move up the rankings. And so 256, you know, a standard number in compute. It's, you know, you know.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  I mean, we have to speak a little bit about the evolution. This started as an IPFS network. And we, we basically pushed IPFS to its limits, especially in terms of what developers needed in terms of absolute latency, immediate availability. I'm not going to go into the issues of IPFS. But as a result, and as happens with a bit of tense of thinking on your feet and realigning, this Arian upgrade, which is unique to Hippieus, was built in order to solve so many of the problems of decentralized storage, so that it is as fast as AWS.

• 24:16Jason Calacanis?

  And IPFS, for people don't know, is kind of like a protocol, like HTTP will be the, you know, sending you your webpages. And what's interesting about this is you can see how much they've stored, how much bandwidth. And then there's a final column there, strikes. Is strikes good or bad? Strikes in baseball is you missed. So what's a strike?

• 24:36Speaker 03

  Strike is never good. Dubs, what's a strike?

• 24:40Speaker 05

  Well, basically, behind the scene, we have something that's that ran a ZK proof. Because you cannot like prove every miner to know if they have everything. So you send them a computation. You ask them to calculate something. And if they don't calculate it correctly, that's mean they miss a file. It doesn't download it fast enough or transfer is fast enough to have. So they get a strike. If they are not, if they are not up or not able to provide a file when you download it, they get a strike. You need to know that basically a file, when you send a file to Hippieus, it's divided into certain chunk. Everything there is a code, code it. So basically, we could lose 60% of the network. We should be able to serve still the file.

• 25:25Speaker 05

  Because that's the biggest problem with decentralized storage miners come and go. You need to save the files and you need to be able to reconstruct the files. So that's what we did and that's why we put this mechanism in place. So we can judge the miner, expose the proof to the users and they can see it. And even miners can know where they are good or bad and improve.

• 25:51Jason Calacanis?

  How long have you had the network up and running? Obviously, this is a very nascent technology. This is super inspiring. You could take, you know, thousands of participants around the world who work at data centers or have extra server capacity could be competing here to put their unused storage or finding storage that's super cheap in China, in Malaysia. Somebody's got a data center lawn and they got access to a bunch of, you know, closeout hardware and servers. They bought them at a discount. They racked them, they stacked them and they had free electricity from a hydro dam. This was kind of like the story of Bitcoin. People went and found the cheapest power. They went and found the cheapest compute and they then won the game of making a Bitcoin.

• 26:33Jason Calacanis?

  Here, the game is how, what's the cheapest I can put storage onto the hippest network?

• 26:40Speaker 03

  So to answer the first question, how long has it been going? Just almost exactly a year, just under a year. But in that time, as you can see on these graphs, there has been a huge evolution. As I say, initially with IPFS, what happened is we had at least five copies of everything and miners, bless them, decided that as they were being rewarded for the storage that they were serving, they essentially started uploading huge amounts of data to the network to try and optimize their scoring metrics, which was not particularly helpful.

• 27:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so just to, they were like, hey, I put the storage up here. Let me see how it works. They wanted to make sure that the game was and the flywheel was going, but they weren't actually customers.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  If you're being paid for the amount of storage that you're putting up and it's costing you less to use that storage and you're being paid for supplying it. Then yes, you have a little bit of a feedback loop issue there.

• 27:38Jason Calacanis?

  And incentive, right? We're back to incentives. If there's nobody using the storage, I'm going to just back up all my photos times 10 just to fill up the storage because I've figured out the arbitrage, right? So there's arbitrage in all of these tau networks and just all the subnets and tau itself is arbitrage, right?

• 27:57Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 27:58Jason Calacanis?

  That's the, that's the actual beautiful thing, Lon. It's the Right. virtuous thing is that everybody is doing that arbitrage incessantly. Now, you could have moments where people are doing it non-productively is I think what you're saying.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  What's happened is the Arian update that's been deployed. I mean, I think probably in total in the back end of month, but really being pushed in the last few weeks with some supporting applications. And for this, I'm talking about pull weights and Hermes, which Dubbs will talk about. Pull weights is essentially hugging face, but built on BitTensor. And Hermes is something that I'm hoping Dubbs will explain, but it's essentially huge data transfer specifically for models orientated around BitTensor, but can be used outside of BitTensor. And now what's happening is we've been working with a lot of subnets and satisfying the needs of their development teams. And we've reached this point now where suddenly everyone is coming back and

• 28:58Speaker 03

  going, this is great. This is working exactly how I need it. Thank you, guys. So I sometimes would like to reset all of this, these graphs and say, hey, can we start from a couple of weeks ago? But that wouldn't be fair to do. And I think the history is important.

• 29:14Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. And transparency. Lon, any questions here about where this is all going? And obviously, this is just a starting point. We're just trying to learn here on This Week in Startups about this, not financial advice. We don't know where the, I'm an investor in Mark Jeffrey's fund and a partner there so that I can learn. Sometimes I invest to learn. Other times I learn and invest. This is a clearly invest. Get my attention and then learn and learn. That's what I'm doing here. And these are all nascent projects. I can't tell you which subnet's going to work, which one, where the value will accrue, where the most participation is. But we just want to learn. And this is one that was like, super interesting to us. But any questions, Lon, from you or insights?

• 29:55Jason Calacanis?

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• 30:57Speaker 01

  I mean, I think I'm just, we were sort of talking about it, like, how much this is almost like a marketplace for storage? Like, are you concerned in general about like, unit economics? Like, how many, how many tokens do we need to give miners to make it worth them? Like, because I know you're trying to, you know, undercut the AWSs of the world. Like, how much of your sort of work is going into, like, thinking about, like, how Uber would, like, well, the drivers have to make enough to make it worth driving, and passengers has to be cheap enough for them to be willing to take? Like, are you thinking a lot about it as a marketplace like that?

• 31:30Speaker 03

  Yes and no. You see, it make, because of the BitTense incentivized infrastructure, the distributed nature, they, the miners will always compete to undercut the AWSs and the R2s of the world. It's, it's a given. And we already significantly, and if you actually go to just hippieus.com, and look at the front page there, which is a little bit more hippieus, I You can see the price calculator and you can work out if you go to pricing for yourself, the the price difference for what your storage needs. Actually, the main focus is not on needing to provide or the miners providing the storage. At this point, it's about getting the confidence of the developers and the users, splitting our time between developer orientated functionality

• 32:12Speaker 03

  through through API, through through code, and then also that balance, which is something I feel quite strongly about, which is the consumer side. I remember speaking to Raul Paul last year about this, and he said, Look, come back to me when I can literally do a one click replacement for my Dropbox. That that, you know, that's, that's always been my thing. Replace Dropbox, replace Nextcloud, Owncloud, or anything like that. And there is a console that you can see where you can literally go on, you can select it, and you can you can upload data immediately from your your computer. Now, I have 50 gig from my desktop that's stored on here that I access all the time. I actually use this as the backup and file system for my Clawbot.

• 32:53Jason Calacanis?

  Very smart. So is Hippie Hippieus's software is an open source project?

• 32:58Speaker 03

  There are elements of it. The miner code is open source because the miners are forced to iterate. There are large elements of it that are open source, and then there are some proprietary parts to it.

• 33:09Jason Calacanis?

  And is it a private company, a nonprofit project? Are you two the CEO and CTO? Tell me about the corporate structure, yeah?

• 33:19Speaker 03

  Hippieus is part of a private company. It was incubated by the parent company of TauStats, who have incubated a number of subnets, of which I am the CEO.

• 33:31Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, what's the name of your company?

• 33:32Speaker 03

  The well, TauStats is the operator is the main operating name. The actual parent company is called T34, which is a company incorporated in Dubai. And because so much of BitTense is done on the fly, from a corporate structure, the aim is to have Hippieus on its own feet as an individual entity. We've been very, very lucky, and it's always been a belief in mine is to prolong equity and release of equity until you really accrue value within your Company. I've never been a fan of just selling ideas in a dream. I would rather sell provable value. And I know that when that time comes, Hippius will have to be a standalone corporate entity. It's in the roadmap for 2026, but the ability to support and iterate fast

• 34:17Speaker 03

  has taken priority, which has got us to where we are. So all subnets and BitTensor itself follow the same tokenomic principles as Bitcoin. All fair launch, no pre-mines.

• 34:27Jason Calacanis?

  No ICO nonsense.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  No ICO. There are many subnets who have raised equity through private companies. We haven't. The subnets that we incubate are fortunate enough that we can allow them not to have to go down that route because I personally believe selling equity in your business too early on is negative.

• 34:45Jason Calacanis?

  I love that, by the way. It's a it's a great startup founder approach, a very mature one, which is, hey, let's make sure there's some value here before we start taking capital. Of course, there are some people like myself who love to give risk capital, knowing, hey, 90% chance. Moog.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Well, we used to have that offer to us early on and I would turn around to the investors and say, you know what I'm going to do with your capital? I'm just going to buy Tau.

• 35:08Jason Calacanis?

  Right, exactly. Well, and this is also complicated, which is why I, you know, I partnered with Mark on Stillcore because I knew he knew you and he is spending literally 14 hours a day trying to figure this out. And, you know, you could tell from

• 35:22Speaker 01

  All the time, yeah.

• 35:23Jason Calacanis?

  Well, we're going to just keep asking questions here and having the leaders in Tau and BitTensor come on the program. Moog, Dubbs, thank you so much for sharing the project.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  This was amazing.

• 35:34Jason Calacanis?

  Really interesting and we'll have you back on again in, I think, maybe three months and talk more. And then when I'm in Dubai, Moog, I'm a I come to the region for Founder University in Riyadh every six months or so. And so next time I come by, I'll definitely come and let's have a Let's go to O'Farrelly Brothers. Have you been to that place, O'Farrelly Brothers?

• 35:55Speaker 03

  I haven't.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  In Dubai? That's a place in Dubai?

• 35:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a really great chef who's on TV. He's like a TV chef, but he's got a really great...

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Is that a Jordanian?

• 36:03Jason Calacanis?

  It's a Jordanian. I think it's Jordanian. This is O'Foley Brothers. Let me show you this, Lon.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Yes, I put it, or Folly Brothers, I think, is how you do it.

• 36:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, or Folly Brothers. My man in the region took me here, Zaffer. And these guys are like TV chefs or whatever.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Wow, it does, yeah.

• 36:19Jason Calacanis?

  These brothers are incredible chefs. One of the great meals of my life. And you can see, they got every award you can imagine.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Well, I'm reading, not only do they have a Michelin star, they're in the Michelin Guide as one of the world's 50 best restaurants in the world.

• 36:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  That's not an easy thing to get.

• 36:37Jason Calacanis?

  And you go there and like, you know, I'm just, I'm showing you a couple here, Lon, but when I went there, they were... The guy, you know, they talked me up before I got there, right? Oh, Jason Calacanis coming on, yada. So that was very nice. And then they start doing this. They start bringing out like the Barry Wine beggars' purses kind of situation on, you know, these incredible array of pedestals and whatnot. And they have this foie gras on a cloud sorbet dome and, you know...

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Presentation.

• 37:09Jason Calacanis?

  The presentation.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  If you're gonna crack the Michelin top 50, it's beyond just everything tastes really good. It's beyond just great service. They take care of you. It has to be beautiful. It has to be like a work of art on a plate, really.

• 37:21Jason Calacanis?

  Right. And this is the guy. This is the guy. Like, if I lived there, we'd be best friends because we just vibe totally. And he's got those crazy glasses like me. And we literally just sat for an hour and talked food. And the restaurant's beautiful. Here's the restaurant. Really tall, iconic restaurant. You had a ton of choices, Lon. One after the next was more inspiring. You know, that's like one type of experience. You know what's another type of experience?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Just, just one. You got one choice.

• 37:49Jason Calacanis?

  Just one.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:50Jason Calacanis?

  But really, wow.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:51Jason Calacanis?

  One done great, or you go in for the Michelin star and you're creating a 16 course. My friend Rory Sutherland, who's been on this podcast a number of times, he works in marketing, he did like a clip.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  He was, yeah, he was on, he was on another podcast, he was on Jamie Lang's podcast. He's an iconic British ad executive and author, former vice chairman of Ogilvy and Mather. And so he was having this exact same conversation, he was saying, he's tired of Starbucks, he's tired of these kinds of places, you always end up in this long line, everybody in front of you is getting the double half frappuccino with mocha.

• 38:23Jason Calacanis?

  Two pumps.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, like, kind of crazy thing. He's like, I'm in a hurry, I'm a commuter, I just want my coffee to get, I got places to be. So he was saying, his dream, he just is imagining it on a podcast. He's saying his dream would be a business called Flat White or Fuck Off. And you're only there to get a Flat White, it's an orderly and quick and easy process to get a delicious Flat White. He was just throwing this out as an idea, but three guys who are listening, Charlie Hurst, Tom Noble and Will Sudlow, they have turned this Jason into a brand and a business. And we have them here to talk to us about it today. Welcome to the Flat White or F Off guys.

• 39:01Jason Calacanis?

  Let me just start by telling all of you blokes to fuck off for taking this genius idea from Rory. I hope you cut him into the cap table. Is this a, is this a pop up, a put on, a publicity stunt, or a real business? And I don't know who speaks for the company here, you've got three founders, that's a red flag, but okay. Who's in charge here? Who makes the final decision? Who speaks for the group?

• 39:27Speaker 06

  Well, it's everything all at once. We all speak at the same time. Yeah, we always.

• 39:32Jason Calacanis?

  I knew this was gonna happen.

• 39:35Speaker 06

  No, I think, you know, it's, it's everything that you've said there really, all at once. I think we're taking this journey as it comes and sort of rolling with the punches, which I know in your guys' world is probably absolutely insane, but we don't really do things like traditional businesses. And we sort of own that really, but yeah, you know, Rory gave us his blessing and we're trying to do the best with that blessing and make something pretty spectacular hopefully.

• 40:01Jason Calacanis?

  No, wait, who saw Rory on the podcast? Which one of you? By the way, that's Charlie Hurst talking right now. So Charlie, you seem like you're the leader. You're the CEO.

• 40:10Speaker 06

  I'm just the gobshite.

• 40:11Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 40:13Speaker 06

  I just want to talk to the mouse.

• 40:15Jason Calacanis?

  I can tell Will's going for this. Will's going for the throne. Fuck off, Will. I quite like fuck off.

• 40:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I saw the, I saw the clip. I saw the clip and I'm a freelance graphic designer. So I build brands for a living. That's what I do as part of my business. And I saw the clip and thought, that's a great brief that no one's really touched. I wonder what would happen if you tried to bring some visuals and sort of a brand idea to life of Rory's joke. Because again, you know, he has all these great business ideas. He's a man of many mad ideas, but no one's really ever tried to take that and build it into it. So it was just meant to be a bit of fun.

• 40:51Jason Calacanis?

  So you designed the iconic logo and the cup?

• 40:54Speaker 06

  I did. Yes. Yes, indeed.

• 40:55Jason Calacanis?

  Which is what first drew me to it. I was on my, one of my social feeds and Rory and I are friends. It's been on the pod a number of times. And I see the iconic cup go by and I hear his voice. So I stop on anytime he's doing like a little micro lesson. I'm like, oh, I gotta stop in here. Rory's always got something interesting to say. But then I see the cup, but it's playful and fun. It's cheeky, Charlie.

• 41:17Speaker 06

  I've got, I've got that. I think I've got the cup somewhere, actually.

• 41:19Jason Calacanis?

  Well, here, I mean, just.

• 41:20Speaker 06

  On my shelf, there it is.

• 41:21Jason Calacanis?

  It's, here it is.

• 41:22Speaker 06

  You can see it right there next to a, next to a Johnny.

• 41:25Jason Calacanis?

  And it's got a star, you know, in the U. So, you know, with all these books that have the F off. Tell me about, you, you build the brief and then these are your mates, I take it? Tom and Will are your mates? Or these are just randos that?

• 41:40Speaker 06

  We hate each other, really. No, we didn't know each other before this, before this started. So I put it on LinkedIn, just as a little PR piece. And then that got the attention of Mr. Tom Noble, who enters the story.

• 41:53Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Okay. So Tom, who are you?

• 41:54Speaker 06

  So we are all randos online.

• 41:57Jason Calacanis?

  Your online randos, but apparently with some skills.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  A bunch of reply guys who found each other.

• 42:01Jason Calacanis?

  Charlie's got the design skills. He makes something iconic. He puts it online. He's of action in the world, Lon. As I always tell young people who are like, how do I make it? I'm just like, make something. You're either creating or you're waiting. You're creating or you're waiting. That was something Kevin Pollak told me. So now what's your involvement, Tom? You're just, you got no job and you're sitting there scrolling, looking for something to do? What happened?

• 42:23Speaker 06

  So I build websites and tech. That's the day job. And then I decided like last year, I wanted to get into the content creation. So I saw this. I wanted to make some YouTube videos about building things.

• 42:33Jason Calacanis?

  So you're unemployed. You're unemployed. Got it.

• 42:35Speaker 06

  Isn't everyone really?

• 42:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we all, we're all the same.

• 42:38Speaker 06

  Freelance on him.

• 42:39Jason Calacanis?

  Freelance, unemployed website builder.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Hey, I wrote this show, guys. I didn't do anything. It's over.

• 42:46Speaker 06

  I'm AI, who knows?

• 42:48Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So Tom, you're looking for work.

• 42:49Speaker 06

  So I reached out to him.

• 42:51Jason Calacanis?

  Just on email?

• 42:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I reached out to him. I wanted to make some videos. Just LinkedIn Messenger. I just said, that's cool. Do you want to do it? And I didn't know who he was, Charlie.

• 42:58Jason Calacanis?

  So just email him.

• 42:59Speaker 06

  And he got back to me.

• 43:00Jason Calacanis?

  And where are you? You're in London?

• 43:02Speaker 06

  No, no, I'm based in Cheltenham, which is two hours away from London. Charlie's actually based in Sheffield, which is two hours north of London.

• 43:08Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so you guys can't even afford to live in London. You guys are in the burbs.

• 43:12Speaker 06

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  I'm sure it's lovely in Cheltenham.

• 43:14Jason Calacanis?

  I love it. This is great. So you emailed Charlie. You're like, I have nothing going on as well. Let's go. And that somehow Will, and Will looks like he's a marauder. So tell me the next step. How does Will get involved, Tom? What happens next, Tom?

• 43:28Speaker 06

  So.

• 43:29Jason Calacanis?

  Continue.

• 43:30Speaker 06

  So I reached out to Charlie and said, do you want to actually do this thing? And he says, only if we can get Rory's permission, because I didn't actually know it was Rory's idea at the time. I'd never heard of it. I thought it was Charlie's. So I said, should we do it? He said, reach out to Rory and then if you do that, then we should do it. So I put it on LinkedIn. I thought, I've seen these campaigns to try and get celebrities happen before. So I thought, why not do it? Because the worst that could happen is it just falls into obscurity and no one sees it. So I posted it on LinkedIn and it gets about 5,000 views, but someone connects me with an email like a few days later. But I went on Twitter or X and I said, cause Rory, I tweeted. tweeted at Rory, can I have your blessing? And three people saw that tweet and one of them was Rory.

• 44:11Speaker 06

  And he said, yeah, blessed off you go. So I went back to Charlie and I said, well, you know, we now need to do this thing. I actually made a TikTok at the same time. And the part one TikTok got, it's on 250K views straight away. And then the second TikTok of, yeah, yeah. So that's how we knew it was going to work. Well, I say work, that's how we knew that people would actually like care about this thing. And then I made a part two, which was where Rory actually said yes. And that got another 100K or so, both those videos today, 400K, that's on TikTok. And then on Instagram, it's on like 500K. And this whole thing has got like 10 million impressions so far. So before we took the idea. And then within, within a week of even like speaking to each other, we had about 400,000 impressions on social media about it. So that's how we knew that.

• 44:56Jason Calacanis?

  And this is the classic lean startup or startup engine playbook from 20 years ago, Lon, which was run some experiments. Put up a landing page and see if anybody reacts to it. In the modern era, it's let me make a launch video. Let me do a TikTok. Let me write a blog post or let me do a creative brief. And then when you do that, if it gets energy, now you don't have to build it for a quarter million dollars or a million dollars and see if anybody responds to it. You build it for five hours of work, 10 hours of work, see if anybody responds. And then if you get some energy back, you're like, wait a second, there's something here. Let's keep following, you know, what we're doing here.

• 45:36Speaker 06

  A hundred percent. So I do a lot of vibe coding as well. So like a vibe code websites. And then it's even easier to not even vibe code the website, just make a video about it and you get the traction there.

• 45:46Jason Calacanis?

  So you're truly unemployed. You're like doubly unemployed. You're a vibe coder and you build websites.

• 45:52Speaker 06

  I'll pitch for some work on this show. Yeah, absolutely. So, um, yeah, it's basically using the attention. It didn't, it hasn't validated the business at all, or the business work, who knows? It validates that people will actually like care about this thing. It validates the attention and it's easier to sell something if it gets attention than not. So it sort of worked out in the end.

• 46:12Jason Calacanis?

  It was multiple levels of focus group because it was like Rory said this thing. And then these three random guys were like, hey, that sounds great. I would want to be involved in that. And then they start posting things and other people are like, hey, that sounds great. It just, the tale grows in the telling at every level more people get sucked in.

• 46:27Speaker 06

  A hundred percent. Because when he said it.

• 46:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, because when he said it on the podcast, it went viral. When Charlie posted about it, it went viral. When I asked Rory, it didn't actually go viral, but there was two instances of it going viral. So it was a viral topic. And then I put the TikToks out and it went viral again. So you have instances of like, there was four viral videos.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  It's what the creator on TikTok or X, they're like, if you have something that works, it goes viral, just retweak it a little bit and post it again. Like, you already know it works. There's no reason not to like, keep hitting it.

• 46:57Jason Calacanis?

  Well, what's so great about this-

• 46:58Speaker 06

  I have a viral post on LinkedIn that I posted four times. It's gone viral and got 100,000 views every time.

• 47:04Jason Calacanis?

  Nobody remembers. You might as well keep going. What's really interesting about this is it really goes back to memes. And like, really in the Marshall McLuhan, like, 50 years ago memes-

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Going way back.

• 47:15Jason Calacanis?

  Which is, yeah, the original idea was, there was something inside of the idea that was so powerful that it would spread virally, you know, or like a virus from one brain to another, but it was contained. The idea was self-contained in as a unit, as a life form. And, you know, FWFO, just that phrase, flat white, F off, is such a concise, understandable way of demonstrating the tyranny of choice. Now, if I say tyranny of choice, that's also very appealing to people who are intellectual, etc. But it doesn't manifest

• 47:54Jason Calacanis?

  itself in the same meme-like fashion. Tyranny of Choice is a very famous study and article from like, HBS, or, you know, what these MBAs did, which I'm gonna guess Will's the token MBA here. But I'm just taking a crazy guess. I think he's the business head, because he looks very serious. But that tyranny of choice was, they realized, giving people, you know, 400 chairs to pick from, not a great idea.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  It's what we see every time you log into Netflix. There's so much shows, there's so much content, you're like-

• 48:26Jason Calacanis?

  And what do people go to?

• 48:28Speaker 01

  You get paralysis and you don't know what to choose.

• 48:30Jason Calacanis?

  Decision paralysis. And what they realized was, small, medium, large, and then maybe something for the whales that's off-menu. So, or, you know, extremely high-end, extremely budget, somewhere between the two, right? So when you're booking a hotel room, they're like, here's the presidential suite, here's the suite, 1,500 a night. Here's this like tiny little room in the back alley. Then here's the junior suite and people are like, I'll go through the junior suite. It's got like, it's got a desk, right? Makes it just easier for people to quickly, hey, I'm just going to be in the room for eight hours. I'm overnight. I don't care. I'm not going to be working. I just want that one. I'll use the desk in the lobby.

• 49:10Jason Calacanis?

  So anyway, the tyranny of trees, but just something about this meme specifically, flat white, which triggers something in your brain because you've heard of a flat white. It's a new beverage.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  See, I was gonna say this.

• 49:20Jason Calacanis?

  If you're from America and then F off is just.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  I don't think this works with a latte. I don't think this works with an Americano. It's a flat white. It's like, oh, what is a flat white? Like America is like, we've heard the term. We don't necessarily know exactly what it is, which makes it feel elite and special.

• 49:39Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's, and it's even got a little bit of a punk rock thing. It's, it's known for coming from Australia, but in fact it was created in New Zealand. Anyway, I'll let the Kiwis and the Aussies.

• 49:49Speaker 06

  Don't get into that controversy.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  I'm not, yeah. I don't want to go. Know that one. Wow.

• 49:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's just, anyway, when you're in Australia, people order flat whites and they are religious about it. And they will comment on it and there is no other beverage. And if you order anything else, you're, yeah, you're screwing up the queue.

• 50:11Speaker 06

  It is insane because you talk about it as the meme, like there's flat white being that drink that's well known. And then you've got Rory's involvement. Then you've got the logo and the brand, which is looking, it looks amazing. Then you've got the word in it as well. You have all these things that add together, like the perfect storm really, that turn this thing into, that's why it keeps going viral all the time. We just mentioned on the other podcast that we posted on Instagram. It's like 300,000 views now already. It just keeps going viral, this thing, just because, and like the way the words are laid out, just, just everything about it. It's, we sort of looked onto the concept.

• 50:43Jason Calacanis?

  And just to be, and to be clear, a flat white is a double shot of espresso with like a micro foam, not like your cappuccino foam where you're like, is there any liquid here? I'm going to, I'm going to tilt the cup back and it's gonna. Give me a mustache and then burn my lips off when the actual liquid comes? No, it's a microfoam. It's a very fine foam that is liquidy but foamy. It's like a five or six ounce drink.

• 51:10Speaker 06

  New Zealand people will tell you that you can have a 12 ounce flat white. It's four shots of espresso with the rest of the milk. So it's all about that ratio. Like you said, the two to one ratio of milk to coffee. Then, you know, again, we sort of get hung up on this. This, you know, we only serve one thing, flat whites. But, you know, we're also trying to get away from the pretentiousness of it and sort of say, you know, it's a milky coffee. You know, if you like a latte, a flat white is just a stronger taste. It's still a milky coffee at the end of the day. So we're trying to get past that snobbery that's come in the speciality coffee industry, especially with all these different customizations and roast levels and, you know, shots of syrup and all that stuff.

• 51:54Speaker 06

  It's just too much and we just want to get back to, again, the simple product that's done really well and that's all we do. We got all this momentum and then me and Charlie were like, what do we actually do? Because, you know, I've got no experience running a coffee shop. He's barista trained, Costa. But then we're like, what do we actually do? So we were thinking about what to do and then I got a message in my TikTok DMs that said, hi, Tom. And it was just that because TikTok doesn't let you send more than one message. And I hate ambiguity, so I responded. I just wanted to know what was going on. And it turned out it was Will's wife saying, like, love the concept. We'd want to help out in any way we can. So I went across London and I saw that Grey Goose was doing an event where Will and Lucia were doing and met them, saw the sort of production that they put on. So they run production.

• 52:38Speaker 06

  And then I called Charlie straight away and said, we need to get these guys involved because they could take this thing to actually be an incredible thing, which was the pop-up. They were behind it.

• 52:46Jason Calacanis?

  So Will, you're a...

• 52:48Speaker 06

  This is Will.

• 52:49Jason Calacanis?

  Will, you run an experiential marketing company? What's your story? Yes. Yeah, so I run an experiential marketing agency called Ask the Impossible with my wife Lucia, who reached out to Tom. And what we do...

• 53:01Speaker 06

  Broadly speaking is we translate the stories that brands want to tell in a variety of different ways. So PR stunts, marketing, experiential, whatever it might be, whatever story they want to tell, we work out the best way to tell it through production. And, you know, we, we know Rory, we know him now personally, but at the time, we knew all of his concepts, principles. I'd read his book, I'd seen all these podcasts he'd been on. And it just felt like a really lovely opportunity to get involved and try it. Do, you know, as, as Charlie said earlier, put the test to the test. So it was, you know, we work with brands and we love our clients, but to be able to do something that's, you know, ours and sort of steer it. There was some, you know, some real joy in being able to do that.

• 53:43Jason Calacanis?

  Love it. So you connected with the concept, you're a fan of Rory's. And you maybe had some cycles and you're like, this would be a fun project to do.

• 53:54Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 53:56Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so what happens next then? Okay, you had an insight into the, to the brand itself?

• 54:00Speaker 06

  I mean, it was a bit of everything. So, so we, I mean, as I say, I mean, we, we, we love Rory. We love Rory's work and we always try to apply it to the work that we do. And I guess the, the principle that I love most about Rory's thinking is when he talks about creativity to go viral is about pattern disruption. So you have to do something really unusual, unexpected, in, in some ways completely insane to, to, to capture the attention and the imagination of people. And I guess that's what we've done with Black White is do something that's, if everyone's operating over here doing the same thing, demonstrate the same thing. And then you're operating over here doing something completely different. Not only does the attention shift to you because there is no one else, there is no one else over here doing their thing.

• 54:45Speaker 06

  But also it allows you to do what you like. It has a sort of freedom and it's not Rory. But it's Will Guidara, but Rory talks about him a lot. And he says, don't go to your competition and figure out what they're doing well and then copy it. Go and figure out what they're not doing well and then do so much better.

• 55:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 55:02Speaker 06

  Do all the other stuff really well. So that's

• 55:03Jason Calacanis?

  I had Will on this podcast.

• 55:05Speaker 06

  That's what I was trying to do.

• 55:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that that insight was a very interesting one to me, Lon. I had Will on the podcast. He's got that great book Unreasonable Hospitality.

• 55:14Speaker 06

  Right.

• 55:14Jason Calacanis?

  Actually, I think it was in The Bear as well. And some of the stories were in there. So the story in The Bear where they go out and get the pizza and then bring it so they don't miss Chicago Deep Dish.

• 55:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 55:24Jason Calacanis?

  Was something from Eleven Madison.

• 55:26Speaker 06

  Oh, I didn't realize that's a true story.

• 55:28Jason Calacanis?

  Eleven Madison, they overheard, they had this really great moment, Will and Lon, where they would try to like overhear conversations. They would eavesdrop. And they heard and they always were aware that when people showed up with their luggage, that they were a VIP in some way because they either got off the airplane and came to Eleven Madison. It was the first thing they wanted to do. Or it was something they absolutely couldn't miss to the point at which they brought their luggage to the thing and snuck in Eleven Madison before they left the city, New York. And one of these people who was leaving New York said, we did everything. We hit everything. We did Broadway shows, the this, the Central Park. The only thing we didn't have, one person said jokingly, was dirty water hot dog.

• 56:14Jason Calacanis?

  Will Guidara sends somebody, goes running out into Madison Square Park. There's a dirty water hot dog he buys, four dirty water hot dogs, runs them back to the thing. And they deconstruct them, put the greatest mayonnaise, they put, they elevated, blah, blah, blah. And then they drop it and say, we didn't want you to leave New York without having a dirty water hot dog elevated with truffles and caviar or whatever. Boom, breaks people's brains. But the story you're referring to, Will, is they took everybody to the number one restaurant. I don't know if it was Gnome at the time, whatever it was. And they said, just write down what didn't work or what sucked. And I think one of the guys wasn't a wine drinker. A lot of chefs are into beer. And he tried to get a beer and they're like, yeah, we have this beer, like they have a beer at a Michelin star restaurant.

• 56:56Jason Calacanis?

  And then their guy was like, hey, you know, what kind of coffee do they have? They're like, yeah, we have coffee, you know, like you can have an espresso, a flat white, whatever. But they didn't like know what the beans were or whatever. They get back. They say, okay, you are the beer sommelier, you are the coffee sommelier. When we go, we say, would you like a wine? Or would you like to talk to the sommelier for wine or sommelier for beer? And then like, there's one person in every party is like, you have a beer sommelier? I've never experienced that before. That was the magic. Yeah, Will?

• 57:26Speaker 06

  Exactly that, exactly that. In the cafe industry, I guess that's why we get the little cards where you get the stamps. And as a great, so as a great web, she calls herself the web psychologist. Her name's Natalie Nahy and she writes a great book on online psychology and how to encourage people to, you know, navigate websites the right way and click buttons and so forth. And, you know, place it in a different place and it encourages people to click it more and all that sort of stuff. And she said that when it comes to the journey of that little stamp card, if they give you one stamp, you're more likely to throw it away than if you give, they give you, say, three stamps of the 10. Cause once you're into that journey, you want to then complete the journey.

• 58:02Jason Calacanis?

  So the trick is to give you three.

• 58:04Speaker 06

  A couple of extra, they give you a couple of extra and they pretend to be generous, but actually you're more likely than complete that journey of getting the stamps.

• 58:11Jason Calacanis?

  Now you've got two partners in crime, maybe three with Will's wife. And you're off to the races. What happens next?

• 58:17Speaker 06

  Will and Lucie came on board. We had the production, we had the design and we had the content creator that is Tom. All great recipes for a great, successful viral brand. So we get going, we start delving into the coffee industry, you know? Cause again, we're all really from marketing and sort of design backgrounds. None of us are in the coffee world. So it was really important to us to really educate ourselves on that. If we're going to do one thing, we have to do it really, really well. And so, yeah, we get going, we, we move on and we get a partnership with a place called Fireheart Roastery. And, you know, when we were looking for the perfect bean for the flat white, we have quite, you know, big interest in brands, you know? A lot of people are interested in this brand from an industry perspective.

• 59:01Speaker 06

  You know, they're not used to the speciality of just doing one thing. You know, the margins in coffee are ridiculous. People often say we're actually quite insane restricted it down to one thing. And still there'd be determining whether that's right or wrong yet. But yeah, did loads of coffee tasting, picked the beans. And then it was all about the production then of getting the physical space ready, the, the activation of how we're going to first tell the joke of flat white or fuck off. And we had a location, it was at Russell Square, it was something that me and Tom acquired before Will and Lucia came on board. But what we realised quite quickly was the momentum was growing so much and it was going at such rapid pace that we had to up our expectations.

• 59:41Speaker 06

  We moved to a bigger location, Altranet, which has a massive screen place in London, Tottenham Court Road. You know, we were thinking we would get 600 people on the day, we were upping that to 1,500. So, so eight days out, yeah, we really upped our expectations and it was a lot of sleepless nights, getting the graphics ready for the screens. Will, I know for a fact the production went into overdrive just before then. Yeah, I think it was eight days out, wasn't it Charlie?

• 1:00:13Jason Calacanis?

  What was people's reaction and did people come up and ask for a non-flat white to experience everybody yelling "F off"?

• 1:00:24Speaker 06

  Yes, yes, they did. A lot of people did. A lot of people walked past, they looked in, they saw it and they're like, "Oh, is that actually what's gonna happen?" And I said, "Yeah, I always remember there was a 70-year-old woman and she was like, "No, there's no way you'd say that if I asked for something different." I said, "Well, go on, go and see." And she did and she got her fuck off. And then she loved it so much that she then actually went and bought a flat white. She wasn't a flat white drinker. But, and weirdly, it's the older generation that liked this way more than everyone else. Didn't realise that until, until the day. But there were quite a few who asked for it. One of the standouts for me was when the police entered the space and we were like, "Uh-oh."

• 1:01:02Jason Calacanis?

  Oh boy.

• 1:01:03Speaker 06

  What, like, "Oh no, are they gonna tell us that we..." Section 5 Public Order Act, "I'm sorry, you're gonna have to come with us" situation. But no, they asked for cappuccinos and lattes. We told them to fuck off. We gave them some lattes and they had a great time.

• 1:01:15Jason Calacanis?

  I love it.

• 1:01:16Speaker 06

  It was the biggest, it was the biggest "F off" of the day, I believe. The baristas behind the bar really said it with their chat.

• 1:01:20Jason Calacanis?

  Well, they're carrying guns over there. I don't know if you know the Wieners circle, since we're, we're deep into this stuff. They're behind the counter and whatever, you know, you come up and you order and they just roast you and they just abuse you to a level that is like Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. I don't know if you guys know that Conan O'Brien skit, but... I wanna have a cheeseburger.

• 1:01:47Jason Calacanis?

  Oh wow, that's probably why we didn't, wow, that was probably why we didn't, I'm gonna need to bleep that one out. Wow.

• 1:01:55Speaker 06

  We're not taking that to that.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, wow.

• 1:01:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, uh, yeah, so that's that. We can take that off the screen for now at the bleep that or post.

• 1:02:06Jason Calacanis?

  Well, bleep it out. No, just bleep it. It'll be fine.

• 1:02:08Speaker 06

  There's the one thing eleven Madison Park didn't serve up.

• 1:02:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:12Speaker 06

  It's also worth mentioning that this is a barista's dream. They love this. All the baristas want to do is help them to go away. That's it. That's literally it. So they dreamed about it.

• 1:02:23Jason Calacanis?

  You must have had the-

• 1:02:23Speaker 06

  We're their dream job.

• 1:02:25Jason Calacanis?

  You must have had the conversation that it would be interesting, funny, um, at some point to add a skew, to add an option or not. So how do you think about somebody saying, um, I'm lactose intolerant?

• 1:02:44Speaker 06

  Well, we do offer oat milk, so we do offer an alternative milk. So yeah, so we, we had this conversation with Rory when we met him. He was, he was a bit flabbergasted at first when we said we were gonna do oat milk and dairy milk, because his, his idea was purely flat whites. And we sort of tried to negotiate with him in a way. It was kind of interesting trying to talk to the man himself of, you know, human behavior about this sort of thing. Went, well, you're alienating the audience so much to Milky Coffee that it doesn't feel very fair for people that are lactose intolerant. They can't enjoy the brand as well. You've got to have some, some way of flexing around those dietary requirements. Now, your answer to putting a latte on there or, you know, a black coffee.

• 1:03:24Speaker 06

  It, well, the answer's in the name. You know, I feel like the name really resonates that if we lose that part, you just end up like everyone.

• 1:03:31Jason Calacanis?

  So decaf, F off or?

• 1:03:34Speaker 06

  F off.

• 1:03:34Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:35Speaker 06

  F off.

• 1:03:35Jason Calacanis?

  Right? If it's a full F off.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Even in a normal coffee shop.

• 1:03:38Speaker 06

  It's an interesting one.

• 1:03:41Speaker 06

  So it's interesting because in the, in the summer, maybe we have an iced flat white, because it's still a flat white. We need to discuss this. Working on it.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a very, that's a very.

• 1:03:51Speaker 06

  But it was, well, it was really interesting in, in, oh, you go well. Gone, I know you go Tom. Supply. Say, the really interesting thing, when we, um, when the first videos went viral, we got so many comments and a lot of those comments were asking about the milk. So like, we'd be idiots to like, a- avoid the customer feedback. Like, it was, it was overwhelming. There must have been, although, most, those two videos each got probably 200 comments and like 50 of them were talking about the milk. And it, you know, it's, we're still making flat whites with oat milk. They're still, it's still the drink.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  I think that's fair. I think that's a category. Yeah. It's like, if I get a latte and I put soy milk in it, that's still a latte.

• 1:04:29Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the, I'll, I'll give the counter argument. I'm gonna take the other side of this one. I know I'm outnumbered. People who order oat milk are generally annoying virtue signaling hippies.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Some people just have trouble with dairy.

• 1:04:40Jason Calacanis?

  Sorry, I don't know. I don't know. I get the feeling.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Everybody's a dairy person.

• 1:04:43Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I don't care.

• 1:04:44Speaker 06

  Some people get a funny tummy. This is, this is Jason's podcast. Let Jason talk. Let Jason give his point.

• 1:04:51Jason Calacanis?

  It's fine. I, I know that there's probably some hippie dippies here on the program who, but you want to tell them to F off strictly because they will lose their minds. And say, but my tummy, but I, I object to cows and you know, cows are tortured and blah, blah, blah. And you say, yeah, we love to torture cows to get the milk. That's what we do here. And then you just, it gives you another level of dunking and those people will be the most vocal and offended and will spread the meme.

• 1:05:22Speaker 06

  Well, we do, we do. We don't look it to be hated. Yeah, it's, um. I mean, I would say a lot of people are disagreeing with us still about just doing one thing. I don't think we need to get that controversial. We're still getting a lot of people to this day, moaning about the fact we only do a flat white.

• 1:05:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I can, maybe I'm taking it too far.

• 1:05:39Speaker 06

  In time, we can go to more people, but for now. We can always bring up our political opinions and put that on the ground as well to get extra controversy.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Donald Trump, F off. That's what it's.

• 1:05:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Well, no, the reason I bring this up is.

• 1:05:52Speaker 06

  If we really want to get cancelled, yeah.

• 1:05:54Jason Calacanis?

  And when people come up and they order one, are they getting theirs that was ordered at that time and it goes in the queue? Or are they just queuing? Flat whites and you just walk up and grab one?

• 1:06:03Speaker 06

  Yes and no. Yes and no. So the. Percentage we discovered of dairy to oat is about sixty percent dairy to forty percent oat.

• 1:06:13Jason Calacanis?

  Well, higher than.

• 1:06:14Speaker 06

  So proportionally, it's about, I mean, just under half and half. So um the one of the ways we wanted to interrogate in test Rory's theories is, well firstly, you can't make a flat white, you can't sit there and wait and then someone picks it up five minutes later because after a couple of minutes, it's too cold, it's too dead, it's too, well, unintended flat, the bubbles deflate, it tastes disgusting. So you kind of have to make it live, but there's a there's an onus on speed and we have to make it fast. So um once a queue starts to build and we rationalize this whole process, once when someone appears for the queue, you know they're having a coffee because we don't do anything else. They're not asking for anything other than the coffee.

• 1:06:49Jason Calacanis?

  Right. And you got a fifty fifty shot, basically, yeah.

• 1:06:51Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, we start grinding the beans, we can start making the coffee, you can put the the running the espresso through. And by the time they've tapped and paid, their coffee is ready or the espresso is ready and it's just a question of oat and dairy. And then in theory, if we've got five or six, I'd say for easy maths, ten people deep queue, we know about six are going to order a dairy and about four are going to order an oat. So we just slightly overestimate. And then by the time those ten have progressed through the queue, a few more have joined. So it was just a case of keeping up with the numbers. But one of the funniest things about the Brits love a queue, but also they hate there to not be a queue because they don't want to be the first in. So whilst we wanted to do things

• 1:07:31Speaker 06

  really quickly, we also needed to offer a few free coffees to the first few people just to get it going. So otherwise.

• 1:07:37Jason Calacanis?

  What's the optimal queue? What's optimal queue, Will?

• 1:07:41Speaker 06

  I I mean, it varies. It's so for our for our pop up, from ten or fifteen people, I mean, we we got the the service down time, the service time down to about fifteen, twenty seconds of flat white.

• 1:07:54Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. I heard you say you got Rory's blessing, but who owns this business? What's the equity? This is America. You're an American program. We talk about these things. I know in England, everything's like, oh, well, the king owns a piece, the queen owns a piece, this prince owns a piece, and then we, you know, are servants to the queen and we genuflect and we get a pittance. This is America. We we talk cap tables here. You guys are all equity partners here. Tom is your idea. I don't know, Charlie, who gets, who owns what?

• 1:08:21Speaker 06

  Third, third and third.

• 1:08:22Jason Calacanis?

  What does Rory own?

• 1:08:25Speaker 06

  The idea.

• 1:08:25Jason Calacanis?

  He just gave you, he gave you his blessings?

• 1:08:27Speaker 06

  To us.

• 1:08:28Jason Calacanis?

  Nothing.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 06

  They just gave it up. We, we, we, we have had conversations with him loads about it and where it was going and stuff. And he's, he's just really happy to see the idea come to life.

• 1:08:37Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:08:37Speaker 06

  And I think Rory's got a lot going on and he's always happy to give us his time in, in absolute abundance, you know, every time we meet him, it's a mini podcast in itself.

• 1:08:46Jason Calacanis?

  We gotta fix this. Here's what I want you to do. Just, I'm gonna throw this up the flagpole. We'll see if anybody salutes. I want you to take one percent off the top and tell Rory, we're reserving one percent royalty to you forever, like the McDonald's brothers didn't get from Ray Kroc and he screwed them out of. You're gonna do a reverse Ray Kroc and you're gonna tell him, we're gonna put this one percent into an annuity. It's gonna be like, uh, you know, a trust.

• 1:09:14Jason Calacanis?

  You take it or you don't, you tell us who to donate it to, but we're giving you the one percent royalty forever. And that's the royalty royal trust. You know, like you have the Queen's Trust and all this other stuff and whatever. You're just saying this is the Rory trust.

• 1:09:29Speaker 06

  We're gonna call it the royalty.

• 1:09:31Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, royalty. Thank you. So this is like, now we've got a real, we've got a Rory royalty.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  Just know that if you take any of Jason's ideas, this is what he's gonna charge you. There's no free, there's no free ride.

• 1:09:43Jason Calacanis?

  I understand.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  There's no stop by your pop up and give you some advice. It's one percent.

• 1:09:47Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, you put Rory in an impossible position, because if he says he wants a piece, then it doesn't, it's not very Rory-esque. He's, that's not his vibe. So you have to force it on him and say, Rory, there's a Rory, Rory tea for you. It's in a Rory, the royal trust, the Rory trust. Take it or leave it. We're gonna put it in there and it's gonna be on the website and it's just gonna grow over time. People can figure out our revenue, because it's one percent royalty and we're just gonna skim it off the top and put it in there. That's it.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  This is a very expensive podcast appearance for these guys.

• 1:10:19Jason Calacanis?

  I don't care. I think it'll drive 10% more usage of the brand.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  We're gonna have a hard time booking the show if it's 1% off the top every time.

• 1:10:27Jason Calacanis?

  No, the brand goes 10% more. Yeah. Go ahead.

• 1:10:28Speaker 06

  Jason, you said you like the idea and you think it's gonna work. If you invest in us, we'll consider that, yeah.

• 1:10:33Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I'll invest in this, I think. Well, I need to know the economics of this. You know, there's a... The format, the next level of this is figuring out the overhead, because coffee is an overhead game.

• 1:10:47Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 1:10:47Jason Calacanis?

  And it's a price per square foot game. So you have to make a really thoughtful decision here. If this is going to be a third space where people hang, and if it's a destination, or it's a commuter thing. And if... Then you're gonna have to be as ruthlessly about that as you are about the menu. So if this is truly ruthless capitalism, then what's the minimum square footage? And the cheapest way to provide the service to the most people, which would be some sort of algorithm of lowest square footage, highest foot traffic. And that's like a kiosk, whatever. And the way you know this was, there was some sort of...

• 1:11:31Jason Calacanis?

  I got pitched on this, which was a mobile bicycle with a coffee setup on the front, and you would drive it and park it places. So not even a food truck version, but a mobile bicycle version. And I don't know if that ever worked out. But that's where we have to put our thinking caps on, because once you get a rent, once you have 10k a month in rent, the idea blows up. It's just not gonna work. And then you need to add SKUs, right? Let's talk offline. I'll have you guys back on. I think we need to answer that question. This has been amazing. Guys, congratulations on finding employment in two of your cases. And I think this actually, I think you've...

• 1:12:09Speaker 06

  Congratulations on your investment.

• 1:12:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, absolutely. Let me know who to make it out to. Is it Will's wife? Is it Tom's Bitcoin wallet? Where am I sending this investment? Cash, cash in the post. Go and follow Flat White or F Off on Instagram. Just search for it. They have an incredible Instagram. I think I could raise a syndicate for this. I think I could put in like 100K myself. I might need to do it personally because it's outside of what I do, but I think I would put like 100K personally and then raise a million dollars for my syndicate.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  That's what Jacob was saying. We're going to put coffee in our Core Six at lunch.

• 1:12:46Jason Calacanis?

  No, definitely not. It's not that kind of business, but I get with the syndicate. I've got a bunch of lunatic investors who might be interested in doing this. Time for your favorite.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  My favorite.

• 1:12:56Jason Calacanis?

  Your favorite.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  Off duty.

• 1:12:58Jason Calacanis?

  Me too. It's a great way to end the week.

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  So I do, before we get into streaming recommendations, I do have a few. I wanted to talk about, it's the Oscars on Sunday, Jason. I don't know if you knew, Oscar ceremony is coming up.

• 1:13:09Jason Calacanis?

  I put my Oscar pick in.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  I saw that you entered our Oscar pool. So I just want to, real quick, what do you, what do you think of the crop this year? What's your pick for best picture? Have you seen a bunch of the Oscar movies?

• 1:13:22Jason Calacanis?

  I haven't seen enough of them. I do think.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Here's the best picture nominees. Secret Agent, Begonia, Marty Supreme, Train Dreams, F1, Sinners, Frankenstein, Hamlet, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value. I know you saw One Battle because we saw it together.

• 1:13:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, we saw it together. I think Sinners and One Battle are going to sweep the whole thing. Because, you know, the Oscars is a very political, woke, virtue signaling, hand wringing, precious kind of thing. They want to feel good about who they pick. And I, I tried to watch Sinners twice and it just was so boring at the start. I couldn't get through it.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  It's great.

• 1:14:02Jason Calacanis?

  I have, you know what the problem is? I think. And in fairness to the film, both times I watched it was on a plane. And a plane is suboptimal. I have to watch it in my movie theater.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  You gotta watch it with the good sound so you can hear the songs.

• 1:14:16Jason Calacanis?

  I have a movie theater in the ski house. That's where I do most of my watching. I did go to the theater to see Begonia. And I was fascinated by that film. Very arthouse, very experimental. So I like that that exists. On Paul Thomas Anderson Films, One Battle After Another would be in my bottom, like way down in the bottom of my list. Because, listen, there were aspects of it I liked. But I think people like it for the wrong reason. I think it appeals to the left because they think it's like a rallying cry kind of a film about this moment in time and they think it's actually anti-right. What I took from it was horseshoe theory, all the extremists are giant losers.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:15:00Jason Calacanis?

  With nothing going on in their life, the left and the right are both idiots on this like horseshoe theory when like both extremes are retarded.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  It is to sort of live these principles all the time. That like, you know, like DiCaprio, he's part of this revolutionary movement, but there are indications that he also just likes the ladies and he's a big part of it. He's sort of in it for himself. And when it comes down to the family, that's the divide. It's Tiana Taylor's character, perfida Beverly Hills. She's so committed to the cause that she's like, I'm gonna leave my child, I'm gonna leave this life.

• 1:15:35Jason Calacanis?

  Right, she's an actual believer.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  Activism and then you get him and it's sort of like, well, not really, he wasn't really that committed, he just liked the lifestyle.

• 1:15:42Jason Calacanis?

  And the other guy on the right, played by Sean Penn, is also in it to meet hot chicks.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  Personal, right, it's about himself and his ego and he wants to be part of this elite.

• 1:15:50Jason Calacanis?

  But it's also about hot chicks. And it's like, when you look at movements like this and you look at, or like cults and this kind of thing, a lot of times it's like really loser guys who are just, don't have game with girls, who are trying to meet girls or try to status, whatever. Anyway, I didn't like the film for that reason.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  I think all that's in there, but I do think like Sensei Carlos, like Benicio de Torres' character, like he's a heroic character and he is associated with these left-wing sort of protest movements.

• 1:16:18Jason Calacanis?

  He definitely is trying to actually accomplish something.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:22Jason Calacanis?

  Not from white privilege.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Exact, that's the dynamic between him and DiCaprio is this guy's put so much work into this, he's got this whole setup.

• 1:16:30Jason Calacanis?

  It matters to him. With the two white characters, they're just in it, like, they have white privilege and they have the ability. Like, it's actually giving the opposite message. These people just have privilege. They can F around and be part of movements because they have options in life. And if it doesn't work out, they can always go back to their next option.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an interesting critique. I think that's, I think I can see both, both sides of this argument.

• 1:16:51Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, it's not a great film.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  It's pretty good. It's really.

• 1:16:55Jason Calacanis?

  It's a good film. It's not great. And when you, you cannot put this film anywhere near the master, which is his masterpiece, or There Will Be Blood, which is what other people would consider his masterpiece. It's one of those two.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  There Will Be Blood is my favorite. Yeah.

• 1:17:08Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, fine. I flip-flop between those two. What's your number three, then? Is it master, There Will Be Blood, the master, and then?

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  I mean, I think I would, yeah, I would probably go like Boogie Nights versus One Battle, sort of right there. I like Phantom Thread a lot, too. They're all great. It's hard for me to pick.

• 1:17:21Jason Calacanis?

  You can't put this film.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Licorice Pizza is the only one that I didn't like as much.

• 1:17:25Jason Calacanis?

  You cannot put this film anywhere near Boogie Nights. It is a steep drop-off after Boogie Nights.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  I think it's, I don't know. That, the road scene is really great. Well, we could talk more.

• 1:17:32Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's what's gonna win. Then I think it's, you know, a bunch of the sinners actors win. I think the Oscars so white thing is still in people's brains. So I think that they're.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  Well, best actress will probably be Jessie Buckley from Hamnet, or Rose Byrne from If I Had Likes I'd Kick You, which is great. I like that one a lot, too.

• 1:17:48Jason Calacanis?

  I need to see that one. That one looks like it would be appealing to me.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  It's on HBO Max now. That one's on HBO Max.

• 1:17:51Jason Calacanis?

  I love Rose Byrne. Anyway, so, anyway, the Oscars, to me, has never been relevant. Not since they.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 1:17:59Jason Calacanis?

  It, it used to be like, we could sit there and be like, well, Dances with Wolves are goodfellas. Like, these are, it's, I don't know. It just feels like it's not about cinema. I'm in the Bret Easton Ellis camp.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  Yes, there's a lot of politics to it as well. You're, you're, you are correct.

• 1:18:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's not enough about the films and the actual performances, because if it was, then certain things would just break out. Like, the fact that... What was the Scorsese film that just got totally snubbed?

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  Killers of the Flower Moon?

• 1:18:30Jason Calacanis?

  No, Wolf of Wall Street.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  Right, Wolf of Wall Street.

• 1:18:33Jason Calacanis?

  Because, like, who, in this climate, who could vote for that? It's like, yeah, a bunch of, like, you know, white guys doing cocaine and stealing money from retail investors. Like, it makes no sense that, like, there's nobody likable in that. It doesn't fit any of the garb. Anyway, I'm gonna put it all aside. What do you think's gonna be the two biggest winners in total Oscars? I'm gonna say one battle after the other's gonna get the most Oscars and right behind it, Sinners, like, they'll get like five or six each?

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Probably, I think that is probably right. I think, I think it's probably gonna be about two, three, I would say, maybe three or four for Sinners, and one battle is gonna do, do very well. Looks like probably, I would say, supporting actor, they've got a good chance. Obviously screenplay, director, picture, they're gonna get a lot of the big ones.

• 1:19:17Jason Calacanis?

  Did you see the Frankenstein movie yet?

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  I've seen all ten. I've seen all the Oscar nominees.

• 1:19:20Jason Calacanis?

  What's up with the Frankenstein movie? I like...

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  Uh, it's, it's beautiful, it's gorgeous, it looks amazing, the sets are incredible, the makeup's incredible. Well, no, that's two different movies. Maggie Gyllenhaal did a movie called The Bride with her and Christian Bale.

• 1:19:36Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Frankenstein, this is a different film.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein is a much more faithful adaptation. It does take some liberties. It's a faithful adaptation of the book.

• 1:19:45Jason Calacanis?

  Now I understand why I'm so confused, because I saw the whole press tour for Maggie. I did see the first 15 minutes of the Frankenstein one.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Right, that's the one with Oscar Isaac is Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi is the creature. That one's more like the book. The Bride is like this feminist 20th century reimagining that gets real freaky and it's all different. It's more like a comedy.

• 1:20:07Jason Calacanis?

  For me to get through films now, I have to go to the movie theater.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  It's tough. It's tough at home. There's a lot of distractions.

• 1:20:12Jason Calacanis?

  Too many distractions.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  Especially now that we've got all the devices and everything. You're constantly being pulled away.

• 1:20:16Jason Calacanis?

  I'm now gonna make the commitment that I'm just gonna go see the Oscar films in theaters from now on. I'm just gonna do that.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  That makes sense. It's hard sometimes with the Netflix ones, but otherwise you can, you can make it. I saw A Secret Agent at the Austin Film Society. Shout out to the rest of the film.

• 1:20:31Jason Calacanis?

  I really wanna see that one too, yeah. I mean... What else you got?

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  One more thing I wanted to talk about at the Oscars, did you see this Timothy Chalamet, your buddy Timmy, did you see he got in trouble for this clip that's going around? It's him talking to Matthew McConaughey.

• 1:20:46Jason Calacanis?

  Oh yeah, let me hear the clip. I know the clip, but I haven't seen it.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll pull the clip up. This is from one of those variety like actors on actors kinds of discussions.

• 1:20:54Speaker 06

  I admire people and I've done it myself to go on a talk show and go, hey, we gotta keep movie theaters alive. You know, we gotta keep this genre alive. And another part of me feels like if people want to see it, like Barbie, like Oppenheimer, they're gonna go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it. And I don't want to be working in ballet or opera or, you know, things where it's like, hey, keep this thing alive, even though it's like no one cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership.

• 1:21:22Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, is 100% accurate.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  It's a very...

• 1:21:25Jason Calacanis?

  100% accurate. And it's, he even contextualized it at the end. There's no reason to cancel them. The ballet people, the opera people are admittedly trying to bring in a new audience. They, that's what they themselves talk about. He's not speaking out of school. And he is being humble in saying cinema is having the same issue that new options and cinema did it to ballet and opera and theater. That was the same complaint people made about movies. These are taking away from the ballet, taking away from the theater.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  Oh, it's gonna kill movies.

• 1:22:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, more options.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  Yes. And I, I agree. It's such a, it's such an obvious thing. And all the people who are getting mad, Doja Cat, actually, you know Doja Cat, the rapper and singer? She, she was one of the people on social media who was like, this idiot, ballet is amazing and opera, how dare you? And then just today, she was like, you know what? She reposted and she's like, you know what? I don't go see opera and ballet. I don't know why I said that about him. I was just jumping, getting mad on social media for no reason. And I think that was a lot of it. Like, how many people are actually paying? If this many people were really that passionate about opera, opera would be huge. You'd constantly be talking about the new operas. Like, I don't think most people could name more than a few operas.

• 1:22:43Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, Puccini, like I can tell you, Madame Butterfly.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, like The Marriage of Figaro is one, Carmen is one. Like, I'm not, none of us are experts. It's a, it's a, it's not, it doesn't mean you hate it. You just say, like, most people, Americans aren't super into opera. That's just true.

• 1:23:01Jason Calacanis?

  All right, I'm gonna give you one. This is like out of left field. It's off duty. I, you know, uh, would love a cherry Coke back in the day.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  Ooh, yeah.

• 1:23:11Jason Calacanis?

  You know, have a nice cold cherry Coke.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  I love cherry, yeah. Cherry flavored sodas, I'm a big fan.

• 1:23:16Jason Calacanis?

  Now, um, I also stopped drinking caffeine in the afternoons. So, um, and I love Coke Zero. So I get Coke Zero and I get caffeine free. But when I was in Italy, I saw, I kept seeing these, uh, this brand, uh, Tosh Chi cherries.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Amarena Toshi cherries, yeah.

• 1:23:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and, um, they come in an iconic, um, there's a very iconic, uh, you know, bottle that these kind of cherries come in from Italy. I, I sent you like the one I buy that's at scale. Like it's a large portion. These are not cheap, let me tell you that. These are not maraschino cherries. These are like cocktail cherries, right? And they're very expensive. Luxardo makes them, um, and then there's like Amarena wild cherries.

• 1:24:09Speaker 01

  Amarena is the one you sent us, yeah.

• 1:24:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and they come in fancy bottles. Anyway, I ordered this in bulk and I will make a little cherry soda for my girls, where I will take a little sparkling water, some crushed ice.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:24:22Jason Calacanis?

  And I put some of the syrup in from this and the cherries. They love it. I'll drop it into my, in the afternoons, caffeine free, uh, whatever and put it on there. But you could also put it on vanilla ice cream. And when I was in Italy, I would, I would order black cherry gelato. And I kept going back to the place and they would give it to me and then I looked and I couldn't find it in the counter. I said, "Oh, you have no more black cherry?" They're like, "No, we have black cherry." I'm like, "Where is it?" She's like, "Well, we, we take this vanilla one." And then they had the giant thing of these Amarena cherries and they just put a scoop of them on top. I was like, "Oh."

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  Delicious, yeah.

• 1:24:56Jason Calacanis?

  That's how you make it. So I make this at home. And I went back to the same place in Florence, like literally with my daughters, like every day.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  I'm going to Florence in May. I'm going to check this out.

• 1:25:05Jason Calacanis?

  I'll send you the place. I would go like twice a day. Every day I would go, they would just hand me my thing. They knew I was going to order black cherry for myself and every day they would put more on it. And then I came back the fourth day and the woman's, you know, like, how long are you staying? I'm like, actually, we're leaving tomorrow, whatever. She put so many cherries on top of it. She goes, thank you for coming. Cause I was giving, I'm a big tipper. She put like 20 cherries on top of it. Scoop of ice cream on top of that, then more cherries. I mean, a total sundae for me. I'm addicted to them. You'll love them. Treat your family. Delicious. Yeah.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  Love it. There was a yogurt shop in LA called Humphrey Yogurt. I don't think it's still there, but that's what they used to do. There were no flavors. It was just plain vanilla, but then they would put the toppings in and like mix it up. And that would be how you do your flavors. So it was like Butterfinger flavor, Snickers flavor, cherry flavor, all that kind of stuff. Really good. You made me nostalgic for it. Oh, there it is. Humphrey Yogurt. There you go. Okay. There is a documentary on Netflix right now that Louis Theroux did. You know Louis Theroux, he's this British TV. He does interviews, but he picks like, like the Westboro Baptist or this group of white supremacists. Like he interviews fringe people and kind of brings this very mainstream sort of mindset.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  Like I want to understand your group and how you think. He's, he's done a whole bunch of these for BBC and different films over the years. So his new one is on Netflix and he goes to a bunch of manosphere guys, like not Andrew Tate, but guys in the Andrew Tate sort of vein who are like coaching young boys how to be anti feminist or how to be, you know, like you gotta, you gotta be one way monogamous. My girl doesn't cheat on me, but I can sleep with whoever I want. Like guys like Sneako and all that. It's really interesting and I think he does a good job of showing how a lot of these people with these big Tik Tok and Instagram accounts. It's not reality. Like you're, it's like reality TV. They're playing a character.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  Everything is sort of set up to be filmed. And when you go meet the real guys, they're not these guys they're playing on social media. And I think it does a really good job of sort of getting them to reveal their, who they really are that, and that this is all an act. And that they're selling, you know, they're selling supplements. They're selling, come join my telegram.

• 1:27:20Jason Calacanis?

  Of course. I mean, half of people's opinions now. Are based on the algorithm. Exactly. And so if you want to understand, you know, I'm not singling anybody out, but I don't know. Maybe the most extreme would be on the political side. There are a group of people who are like just all in on Trump, right? Yeah. Like Michael Wolff. And they just are, you know, releasing content every day about Michael Wolff. Michael Wolff and Joanna Kearns from Daily Beast are just constantly doing Trump stuff, right? Sure. It's kind of anti. And then on the other side, you have the Candace Owens of the world and Fuentes.

• 1:28:03Jason Calacanis?

  Like they know that there are certain keywords, whether it's like anti-Semitic stuff, or they go after Charlie Kirk, or not go after Charlie Kirk, but you know, Charlie Kirk is gonna feed the algorithm. And it's just algorithm feeding. And it's a volume game and it's a titles game. And that's the challenge of like being a media consumer today. Yeah. Is looking at the content and saying, is that person trying to get massive amounts of views by keyword stuffing and feeding the algorithm at this moment in time? Or are they authentically interested in it? When you look at us and we talk about Open Claw and we talk about Tau as like two of the things

• 1:28:46Jason Calacanis?

  that we've been covering here a lot on the show. It's because I personally find these things very interesting in terms of the future of technology. Some people might not be interested in them at all. Or I see, you know, the flat white thing. I'm like, oh, there's something interesting going on here. I build this show not to feed the algorithm, but based on my own personal view of what's fascinating. And then that's what I've charged you and the team with doing. Hey, find me fascinating stuff that's groundbreaking. And when we find something that's particularly fascinating, I want to double down on it. And until it becomes not interesting.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:22Jason Calacanis?

  Makes sense.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:23Jason Calacanis?

  But I think that's not the winning strategy. That's not the winning strategy.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  Well, maybe for YouTube, I mean, I think you have a special because you're sort of well-known outside of this, and so we have like some advantages that a lot of other creators don't have. But when you watch guys like, like, that's a guy named HS Tiki Talky who's on TikTok, they are purely slaves to the algorithm. They're just doing things, they're seeing which things that they could do will get the most people to follow them on Kick or Rumble, to tune in when they start streaming, and like, they're gonna do whatever those things are. And like, that, that, that's a lot of what I think Louis is showing in the film is like, it sounds like, they sound so confident, they sound so brash, they sound like they're coming up with all this stuff off the top of their head and they're desperate to share it with you because it's important life strategies.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  But then, you take a closer look and it's like, they're purely just doing what works and what's gonna add up to the most clicks and what's gonna get them the most attention because they're trying to sell you a subscription to this or this gambling site or whatever.

• 1:30:22Jason Calacanis?

  Great to work with you, Juan. As always, have a great weekend, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  Bye-bye.