This Decentralized Cloud is Thousands of Times Cheaper Than AWS | EP 2262

Summary

This episode covers two wildly different startup stories. First, Mog and Dubs from Subnet 75 (Hippius) explain how they are using the Bittensor blockchain to provide decentralized cloud storage that is dramatically cheaper than AWS and other hyperscalers. By incentivizing miners to contribute storage space with TAO tokens, Hippius creates a marketplace for compute and storage that operates without centralized control, with hundreds of contributors already participating across the network.

The second half features an entertaining interview with Charlie Hurst, Tom Noble, and Will Sudlow, the founders of “Flat White or F**k Off” — a brand that started as a joke by legendary British ad man Rory Sutherland on a podcast and was turned into a real business by these three entrepreneurs. From viral social media accounts to a line of merchandise to a successful London pop-up cafe, they demonstrate the power of experiential marketing and the “Rule of 3s” in hospitality. The episode closes with Jason and co-host Lon Harris discussing their Oscar picks and Lon’s experience going “Inside the Manosphere.”

Highlights

Decentralized Storage vs AWS

“What is decentralized cloud storage? How does it work?” — Jason Calacanis, 2:36

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Incentivizing Miners with TAO

“The way the incentive mechanism works is miners contribute storage and compute to the network and get rewarded with TAO tokens.” — Mog, 10:52

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From Rory Sutherland Joke to Real Business

“The inspiration behind Flat White or F Off — legendary British ad man Rory Sutherland invented a fake business on a podcast.” — Jason Calacanis, 37:20

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The Rule of 3s in Hospitality

“The Rule of 3s — the secrets of experiential marketing in hospitality.” — Charlie Hurst, 56:42

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Key Points

• Decentralized cloud explained (2:36) - How blockchain-based storage works as an alternative to centralized cloud providers
• Hippius on Bittensor (4:56) - How the Hippius team came together to build on the Bittensor network
• Mining incentives (10:52) - Miners contribute storage/compute and receive TAO tokens as reward
• Network contributors (13:39) - Hundreds of people already contributing to the decentralized storage network
• Value accrual question (17:56) - Discussion of where value accumulates in decentralized systems
• Best Dubai restaurants (35:07) - Casual segment on dining recommendations in Dubai
• Flat White origin (37:20) - Rory Sutherland’s podcast joke about a coffee shop called “Flat White or F Off” became real
• From social to IRL (41:30) - Building viral social media accounts into a real physical business
• Experiential marketing (52:20) - Secrets of creating memorable brand experiences
• Rule of 3s (56:42) - Hospitality principle for customer engagement
• London pop-up cafe (58:47) - Inside the successful Flat White London pop-up experience
• Oscar picks (1:12:25) - Jason and Lon discuss their Academy Awards predictions
• Inside the Manosphere (1:25:20) - Lon’s experience exploring online male-focused communities

Mentions

Companies

• Hippius (Subnet 75) (2:36) - Decentralized cloud storage on Bittensor, dramatically cheaper than AWS
• AWS/Amazon (0:00) - Centralized cloud provider used as cost comparison benchmark
• Bittensor (2:36) - Blockchain protocol powering decentralized AI and storage
• Flat White or F Off (37:20) - Viral coffee brand turned real business

Products & Technologies

• TAO Token (10:52) - Cryptocurrency used to incentivize miners on the Bittensor network
• Decentralized Cloud Storage (2:36) - Alternative to centralized cloud using distributed miners

People

• Mog (2:36) - Hippius/Subnet 75 co-founder
• Dubs (2:36) - Hippius/Subnet 75 co-founder
• Charlie Hurst (37:20) - Flat White or F Off co-founder
• Tom Noble (37:20) - Flat White or F Off co-founder
• Will Sudlow (37:20) - Flat White or F Off co-founder
• Rory Sutherland (37:20) - Legendary British ad man who invented the Flat White concept on a podcast
• Lon Harris (1:12:25) - TWiST co-host

Surprising Quotes

“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 Off.’” — Jason Calacanis, 37:20

“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.” — Jason Calacanis, 41:30

“The secrets of experiential marketing — the Rule of 3s in hospitality.” — Charlie Hurst, 56:42

Transcript

Lon Harris: 0:00 All right everybody, welcome back to this week in startups with me Lon Harris, I’m Jason Calacanis we have a full docket on Fridays. Uh, yeah, we like to uh, expand a little bit uh, 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 uh, that Rory Sutherland inspired called Flat White or

Jason Calacanis: 0:25 We should say F-off I think.

Lon Harris: 0:28 F-off. Flat White or F-off. I’m going to say F-off so we don’t get YouTube, we don’t get booted off YouTube, yeah.

Lon Harris: 2:38 Let’s get to the show. It’s our very first entry in our new series, Tao + AI. We’re going to be talking to some of the very top BitTensor subnets. We talked to Mark Jeffrey, of course, uh, of Steelcore Capital last week, got really excited about Tao, BitTensor, this whole ecosystem. So we’ve got Mog and Dubs here, the co-founders of Hippies Subnet 75, that’s the decentralized blockchain powered… Our cloud storage platform, it’s sort of like a decentralized, uh, AWS or Google Cloud. So they’re gonna, they’re gonna come on now and, uh, and show us around.

Jason Calacanis: 3:08 You know, Tao is very similar in a distributed fashion. Mog and Dubs, welcome.

Mog: 3:13 Thank you.

Dubs: 3:14 Thanks.

Jason Calacanis: 3:15 It’s, uh, it’s an inspiring project because I remember having Bitcoin on this very project, this very podcast in I think 2010 or 2009, 2010, 2011 right in that time period.

Lon Harris: 3:24 I think it’s 2011.

Jason Calacanis: 3:26 2011?

Lon Harris: 3:27 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 3:28 Super inspired by it.

Lon Harris: 3:28 August 2011.

Jason Calacanis: 3:29 August 2011. Yeah. So, very decentralized and nobody in control and you had this ability to move money around and, 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 land and you got a thumb drive and, you know, you’re leaving Venezuela, you’re trying to get back on track and, and you’re trying to keep, uh, your, your assets as you’re leaving a dictatorship to go flee. You know, there’s like some really interesting uses for Bitcoin.

Lon Harris: 3:54 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 3:55 What I found really interesting about the Bittensor project, Lon, is that instead of using the compute to solve cryptography problems to create this network that allowed for the storage of assets, uh, this one allows you to take all of that work and put it towards something productive in the world.

Lon Harris: 4:21 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 4:22 And at the same time, and Bittensor’s been around for a while, at the same time, you know, it’s started to get some, you know, early true believers, the AI revolution happened. And then the need for compute happened at a, at a, and is happening right now, we’re soaking in it, the data center build out. So the, and people buying Mac Studios to run OpenCL. We need more compute, we need more, um, you know, infrastructure. And Tao and Bittensor feels like the perfect platform for that. So Mog and Dubs, tell me how you found out about this Bittensor project, what inspired you to get involved in it, and what have you built?

Mog: 5:00 It was 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. Um, my history love affair with, with Bittensor sounds much like yours, only it’s a couple of years older and I remember, um, oh I’ll do this briefly, but discovering Bittensor in the early days of GPT-2 and understanding the power of using distributed compute and distributed participation, um, to essentially produce either a mixture of experts or to provide a better solution than, than calling out inference to a single provider, be it OpenAI, Meta, etc. Um, and this was very early on, but what I also saw was that a lot of the very bright people that were building in this space weren’t the best suited to deliver product and understand what really connected with users.

Tom Noble: 6:00 And we saw an opening at that time that was really needed was the ability to visualize the network. And so we created Taustats, 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 Taustats, I think I’ve just managed to do that fine there already. And then when subnets came into fruition, subnets being the ability for anyone to go and build their own incentive mechanism, 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 Dubs was working with me on Taustats, helping with the architecture there. And it transpired that he had an incredible history with both node operation and decentralized storage. And 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 as you go. This 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 Lon alluded, essentially AWS, Google Cloud, R2 on distributed decentralized infrastructure. Storage initially being perfected. Essentially the major product now is a drop-in replacement for S3. Sorry, Amazon, we’re coming after you.

Jason Calacanis: 7:58 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?

Tom Noble: 8:18 All around. It is distributed between the participants. I’ll switch over to Dubs in a minute for the technical side of it, but the essentially distributed with failsafes. 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, your Netflix isn’t working for a couple of hours. And of course—

Dubs: 9:00 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.

Jason Calacanis: 10:10 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 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 when you’re talking about storage you get to pick two. So how does it work and then who’s putting their who’s contributing the storage Dubs?

Dubs: 10:55 I will try to be not too technical but basically we created a protocol ourselves which is called Arion um and we made it from the ground up. We started on the basics on distributing everything to the miners and we select the 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 the duty of BitTensor 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 weighting more on the speed of the network so you can have more yeah more throughput. But the way we did it 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.

Mog: 12:00 We’ve developed something that is Crush Map also on, well, we get the Crush Map 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 each subnet 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.

Jason Calacanis: 12:25 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 Tao 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 Tao platform allows you to do, correct?

Charlie Hurst: 12:59 Yeah, what we’re doing is designing an incentive mechanism that’s very fluid. So you can actually adjust that to say, as Dubs said, ‘Hey, I need the miners to be faster. It’s great. We’ve got all the storage. The latency is fine, but we’re suffering a bit on speed. Let’s push miners to optimize for speed.’

Jason Calacanis: 13:19 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.

Charlie Hurst: 13:29 Anyone with redundant storage who has the expertise to optimize for the incentive mechanism. So it is not mom and pop’s 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 to be able to read an incentive mechanism and optimize their setup for it. But it can be anyone. That is the beauty.

Jason Calacanis: 14:02 It’s open to anyone. It’s permissionless then. But you do need to have as a prerequisite line, 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, you know, 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 like asked some friends maybe to seed it? And would these be data center people? No, or…

Charlie Hurst: 14:37 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 bulletproof.

Jason Calacanis: 14:50 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…

Lon Harris: 15:00 video storage and they buy that,

Jason Calacanis: 15:03 Oh, I’m saying, right?

Lon Harris: 15:04 put it into the network to leverage that and they are just constantly on the lookout for cheap storage and they’re going to optimize for that.

Charlie Hurst: 15:09 Yes, but we can of course score for reliability and continuous uptime

Will Sudlow: 15:13 Sure.

Charlie Hurst: 15:14 and metrics as such. So yes, but we don’t know. The answer to this 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.

Jason Calacanis: 15:26 So then let’s talk a little bit, Dubs, about who is using this. So how long has Hippius 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?

Dubs: 15:48 You have 256 slots on Bittensor and Syway, the UI-G, 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…

Mog: 15:58 but basically, uh, 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.

Jason Calacanis: 16:21 Okay, so that’s what’s 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?

Tom Noble: 16:41 I’ll grab it. You can actually go to Hipp Stats and see a lot of this, but because we have, which is the network explorer for Hippius, and as we’ve evolved, we’ve just implemented Arion recently to get rid of the huge amount of redundancy, so there was a perceived drop in file 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 already using AWS as just a simple drop-in to replace what it is that they’re doing. So obviously the requirements are pretty simple. It has to work as good as, and of course it’s cheaper to boot.

Jason Calacanis: 17:24 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 351 terabytes up and running. Okay, so 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 Tao…

Lon Harris: 18:00 Burned, is that what that is there?

Charlie Hurst: 18:01 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 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 it will not reward wastage. So you can’t just say, ‘Hey, you know, the investors in Bittensor think 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 Hippias unless we decide to pay for it on your behalf if you happen to be a startup.

Jason Calacanis: 18:56 Well, this is gonna 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, when I’ve talked to Mark.

Charlie Hurst: 19:21 Sure.

Jason Calacanis: 19:22 So we have to then validate the nodes as investors and then also, you know, just strategically where are these gonna go? So there was another line at the top there. Explain to me what the final number there is in that row.

Jason Calacanis: 20:47 Now there’s a number next to that, 488, 742, 7.

Tom Noble: 20:51 The dollar number. Yes. So what’s interesting here is Hippias is the first and only Bittensor subnet that has its own blockchain. With this…

Mog: 21:00 I could go down a whole rabbit hole of my Bittensor expertise, but essentially the Bittensor blockchain records only the incentive, 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 Tao. Of course, as things evolved, now all subnets have their own token, but in short, that’s the block number for the Hippias blockchain.

Jason Calacanis: 21:44 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?

Will Sudlow: 21:57 As Dubs explained, what happens is that although there are 256 slots available, 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, as this network expands and the demand expands, miners will compete for 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.

Jason Calacanis: 22:25 So you’re building a team in order to move up the rankings. And so 256, you know, standard number in compute, you know, 2, 4, 8, 16…

Will Sudlow: 22:34 I mean, to… we have to speak a little bit about the evolution. This started as an IPFS network and 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 Bittensor thinking on your feet and realigning, this Arion upgrade, which is unique to Hippias, was built in order to solve so many of the problems of decentralized storage so that it is as fast as AWS.

Jason Calacanis: 23:30 Got it. And IPFS for people who don’t know is kind of like a protocol like HTTP will be the sending you web pages. 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?

Will Sudlow: 23:51 Strike is never good. Dubs, what’s a strike?

Dubs: 23:55 Well, basically, behind the scene we have something that runs a ZK proof because…

Mog: 24:00 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 means they miss a file, they doesn’t download it fast enough or transfer it fast enough to have, so they get a strike. If they are not up or not able to provide a file when you download, they get a strike. You need to know that basically your files, when you send the files to Ethos, it’s divided in certain chunk. Everything is erasure coded. So basically we could lose 60% of the network, we should be able to serve still the files, because that’s the biggest problem with decentralized storage. Miner 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.

Jason Calacanis: 25:06 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, they got access to a bunch of, you know, close-out 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 is 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. Here the game is what’s the cheapest I can put storage onto the hippest network.

Mog: 25:56 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. And what…

Jason Calacanis: 26:32 Okay, so just so 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 actual customers.

Mog: 26:45 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 than you’re being paid for supplying it, then yes, you have a little bit of a feedback loop issue there.

Jason Calacanis: 26:57 An 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…

Lon Harris: 27:00 10 just to fill up the storage because I’ve figured out the arbitrage, right? So there’s arbitrage in all of these Tao networks and all the subnets and Tao itself is arbitrage, right?

Mog: 27:12 Correct. That’s the actual beautiful thing, Lon. It’s the virtuous thing is that everybody is doing that arbitrage incessantly. Yeah, you could have moments where people are doing it non-productively as I think what you’re saying.

Charlie Hurst: 27:28 What’s happened is the Arion update that’s been deployed. I mean, I think probably in total in the back end a month, but really being pushed in the last few weeks with some supporting applications. And for this I’m talking about PoleWeights and Hermes, which Dubs will talk about. PoleWeights is essentially Hugging Face, but built on BitTensor. And Hermes is something that I wish, I’m hoping Dubs 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 going, ‘This is great. This is working exactly how I need it. Thank you guys.’ So I sometimes would like to reset all of these graphs and say, ‘Hey, can we start from a couple of weeks or so?’ But that wouldn’t be fair to do, and I think the history is important.

Jason Calacanis: 28:29 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. I sometimes invest to learn, other times I learn and invest. This is a clearly invest, get my attention, and then learn, Lon. 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, for you or insights?

Lon Harris: 30:12 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 AWS’s 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?

Tom Noble: 30:44 Yes and no. You see, it made— because of the Bittensor incentivized infrastructure and the distributed nature, they— the miners will always compete to undercut the AWS’s and the R2s of the world. It’s— it’s a given. And we are already significantly— and if you actually go to hippias.com and look at the front page there, which is a little bit more hippias— I-U-S anyway— 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, sticking our time between developer-orientated functionality 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 Raoul Pal— 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’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 files and you can— you can upload data immediately from your— your computer. You know, 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 cloudbot.

Lon Harris: 32:07 Hmm. Oh, there you go. Very smart. So is— Hippias’s software is an open source project?

Tom Noble: 32:24 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.

Lon Harris: 32:32 And is it a private company, a non-profit project? Are you two the CEO and CTO? Tell me about the corporate structure, yeah.

Tom Noble: 32:45 Hippias is part of a private company. It was incubated by the parent company of Taostats who have incubated a number of subnets, of which I am the CEO.

Lon Harris: 32:47 Oh, what’s the name of your company?

Tom Noble: 32:49 The— well, Taostats 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 Bittensor is done on— on the fly from a corporate structure—

Mog: 33:00 The aim is to have Hippias 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 and a dream, I would rather sell provable value. And I know that when that time comes, Hippias will have to be a standalone corporate entity. It’s in the roadmap for 2026, but the ability to support and iterate fast 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 premine, no…

Dubs: 33:41 No ICO nonsense.

Mog: 33:43 No ICO dross. 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 a negative.

Jason Calacanis: 33:59 I love that by the way. 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… Mog…

Mog: 34:17 But we used to have that offer offered 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 Tao.

Jason Calacanis: 34:21 Right, exactly. Well, and this is also complicated, which is why 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 can tell from… Mog’s in discord all the time, yeah. Well, we’re going to just keep asking questions here and having the leaders in Tao and Bittensor come on the program. Mog, Dubs, thank you so much for sharing the project.

Dubs: 34:46 Guys, this was amazing.

Mog: 34:47 Really interesting.

Charlie Hurst: 34:48 Thank you guys.

Will Sudlow: 34:49 Yeah, thank you.

Tom Noble: 34:50 Thanks.

Jason Calacanis: 34:51 And we’ll have you back on again in I think maybe three months and talk more. And then when I’m in Dubai, Mog, I’m… 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… let’s go to Orfali Brothers. Have you been to that place? Orfali Brothers?

Mog: 35:11 I haven’t.

Dubs: 35:12 In Dubai? That’s a place in Dubai?

Jason Calacanis: 35:14 Yeah, it’s a really great chef who’s on TV. He’s like a TV chef but he’s got a really great… it’s Jordanian I think it’s Jordanian. This is Orfali Brothers. Let me show you this.

Lon Harris: 35:22 Yes, I found it or Orfali Brothers I think is how you do it.

Jason Calacanis: 35:25 Yes, Orfali Brothers. My man in the region took me here, Zaffar. And these guys are like TV chefs or whatever. And these brothers are incredible chefs. One of the great meals of my life. And you can see they’ve got every award you can imagine.

Lon Harris: 35:42 Well, I’m reading, they not only have a Michelin star, they’re in the Michelin Guide as one of the world’s 50 best restaurants in the world.

Jason Calacanis: 35:49 In the world. That’s not an easy thing to get. And you go there and like, you know, I’m just showing you a couple here, Lon, but when I went there, they were… the guy… you know, that they talked me up before I got there, right? All this Jason Calacanis is coming, yada yada yada. So that was very nice. And then they start doing this. They start bringing out like the Baryshnikov beggar’s purses kind of situation on, you know, these incredible array of pedestals and whatnot. And they have this foie gras on a cloud-soft dome and, you know, just…

Lon Harris: 36:22 Presentation is—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.

Jason Calacanis: 36:30 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.

Lon Harris: 36:56 One after the other was more inspiring. You know, that’s like one type of experience. Right. You know what’s another type of experience? Just, just one. You got one choice.

Jason Calacanis: 37:03 Just one, but really well.

Lon Harris: 37:05 Right. One done great, or you’re going for the Michelin star and you’re creating a 16-course.

Jason Calacanis: 37:12 My friend Rory Sutherland who’s been on this podcast a number of times, he works in marketing, he did like a clip…

Lon Harris: 37:19 He was—yeah, 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 frappe-chino with mocha—yeah, all of that kind of crazy thing. He’s like, I’m in a hurry, I’m a commuter, I just want my coffee to get going, I got places to be. So he was saying his dream—he just is imagining it on a podcast—he said his dream would be a business called Flat White or Fk 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 were 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 Fk Off guys.

Jason Calacanis: 38:16 Alright, Tom, 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—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 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?

Charlie Hurst: 38:43 Well, it’s everything all at once, really.

Tom Noble: 38:45 We all speak at the same time.

Will Sudlow: 38:46 Yeah, we always…

Mog: 38:47 I knew this was going to happen.

Dubs: 38:48 We all speak at the same time, lovely.

Charlie Hurst: 38:49 No, I think, you know, 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 as we go. I know in your guys’ world it’s 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.

Jason Calacanis: 39:15 No wait, who saw Rory on the podcast? Which one of you? By the way, that’s Charlie who was just talking. So Charlie, you seem like you’re the leader, you’re the CEO?

Charlie Hurst: 39:24 I’m just the gobshite.

Mog: 39:25 Well…

Charlie Hurst: 39:26 I’m just the loudest.

Jason Calacanis: 39:28 Will’s got problems. I can tell Will’s going for this. Will’s going for the throat.

Charlie Hurst: 39:33 Fuck off, flower. Quite like fuck off.

Will Sudlow: 39:34 Yeah, so 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 a brand. So it was just meant to be a bit of fun, you know, nothing too serious.

Jason Calacanis: 39:59 So you designed the iconic logo and the cup?

Will Sudlow: 40:03 I did, yes. Yes, indeed. That was me.

Jason Calacanis: 40:05 Which is what first drew me to it. I was on my, one of my social feeds, and Rory and I are friends, he’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, anytime he’s doing like a little micro lesson, I’m like, oh I gotta stop and hear this, Rory’s always got something interesting to say. But then I see the cup, but it’s playful and fun, it’s cheeky, Charlie.

Charlie Hurst: 40:21 I love that. I think I’ve got the cup somewhere actually. I’ve got the mock up on my shelf, there it is.

Jason Calacanis: 40:24 There it is, so you can see it right next to a Jony, 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 build the brief and then these are your mates I take it? Tom and Will are your mates or these are just randos that you met online?

Charlie Hurst: 40:41 No, we hated each other really. No, we didn’t know each other 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.

Jason Calacanis: 40:54 Got it. Okay, so Tom, who are you? You’re online randos but apparently with some skills. 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’ve got no job and you’re sitting there scrolling looking for something to do? What happened?

Tom Noble: 41:18 So I build websites and tech, that’s the day job. And then I decided at the start of last year I wanted to get into the content creation, so I saw this, I wanted to make some short form videos about building…

Jason Calacanis: 41:26 So you’re unemployed, you’re unemployed, got it. Keep going.

Lon Harris: 41:28 Isn’t everyone really?

Charlie Hurst: 41:30 He’s a website builder, yeah, we’re all just the same.

Tom Noble: 41:32 Freelance unemployed website builder.

Jason Calacanis: 41:34 AI wrote this show, guys.

Charlie Hurst: 41:35 I didn’t do anything.

Jason Calacanis: 42:00 I know, I know. All right, so Tom, you’re looking forward…

Tom Noble: 42:03 So I reached out to him, I wanted to make some videos. Just a LinkedIn message. I just said, ‘That’s cool, do you want to do it?’ and I didn’t know who he was, Charlie. And he got back to me…

Jason Calacanis: 42:12 So just in general, where are you? You’re in London?

Tom Noble: 42:15 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.

Jason Calacanis: 42:22 Okay, so you guys can’t even afford to live in London. You guys are in the burbs. Perfectly lovely. I’m sure it’s lovely. I love it. This is great. So you email Charlie, you’re like ‘I have nothing going on as well, let’s go’.

Tom Noble: 42:33 Absolutely.

Jason Calacanis: 42:34 And then somehow Will… and Will looks like he’s a Marauder. So tell me the next step, how does Will get involved Tom? Or what happens next Tom? Continue.

Tom Noble: 42:44 So I reach out to Charlie and say 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 him. 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 and I thought I’ve seen these campaigns to try and get to 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 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 could… I tweeted @ Rory, ‘Can I have your blessing?’ and three people saw that tweet and one of them was Rory and he said, ‘Yeah, bless, off you go.’ So I’ve gone back to Charlie and I said, ‘Well, you know, we now get to do this thing’ and I actually made a TikTok at the same time and the part one TikTok got… it’s on 250k views straight away.

Jason Calacanis: 43:22 Wow.

Tom Noble: 43:24 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 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. This whole thing’s got like 10 million impressions so far. So before we took the idea and then 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.

Jason Calacanis: 44:01 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.

Tom Noble: 44:23 100%. So I do a load of vibe coding as well. So like 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 that same…

Jason Calacanis: 45:00 Attraction there. So you’re truly unemployed. You’re like doubly unemployed. You’re a vibe coder and you build websites.

Charlie Hurst: 45:06 I helped pitch the logo on this show at this point.

Jason Calacanis: 45:10 Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Mog: 45:12 So, yeah, it’s basically using the attention. It hasn’t validated the business at all—whether the business works, who knows—but 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’s sort of worked out in the end.

Jason Calacanis: 45:26 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 tail grows in the telling, and at every level more people get sucked in.

Tom Noble: 45:43 100%. Because when he said it—

Mog: 45:45 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—there was four viral videos.

Lon Harris: 46:03 It’s what the business is as a creator on TikTok or X. They’re like, if you have something that works, it goes viral, just tweak it a little bit and post it again. Like, you already know it works. There’s no reason not to, like, keep hitting it.

Will Sudlow: 46:13 I have a viral post on LinkedIn that I posted four times. It’s gone viral and got 100,000 views every time.

Jason Calacanis: 46:19 Nobody remembers. You might as well keep going. Keep going. Yeah.

Will Sudlow: 46:21 Keep going. Yeah.

Dubs: 46:23 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, going way back. 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 as a unit, as a life form. And, you know, FWFO, just that phrase, Flat White, Fuck 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 itself in the same meme-like fashion. Tyranny of choice is a very famous study and an article from, like, HBS or, you know, these MBAs did, which I’m going to 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. It paralyzes them.

Jason Calacanis: 47:35 It’s what happens when you log into Netflix. There’s so much shows, there’s so much content, you’re like, ‘What am I—’

Dubs: 47:42 And what do people go to? You get paralysis and you don’t know what to choose.

Jason Calacanis: 47:44 Exactly. Decision paralysis.

Dubs: 47:46 And what they realized was small, medium, large, and then maybe something for the whales that’s off-menu. So, or extremely high-end, extremely budget, and somewhere between the two.

Jason Calacanis: 48:00 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, and then here’s the junior suite. And people are like, oh, I’ll go for the junior suite. It’s got a desk, right? Makes it just easier for people to quickly, hey, I’m just gonna be in the room for eight hours, I’m overnight, I don’t care, I’m not gonna be working, I just want that one, I’ll use the desk in the lobby. Anyway, the tyranny of choice, 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 if you’re from America.

Lon Harris: 48:33 See, I was gonna say, and then F off is just… 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, Americans, like, we’ve heard the term. We don’t necessarily know exactly what it is, which makes it feel elite and special.

Jason Calacanis: 48:54 Well, it’s even got a little bit of a punk rock thing. It’s known for coming from Australia, but in fact, it was created in New Zealand. Anyway, at least these two… Aussies fight about it.

Lon Harris: 49:01 Oh, I didn’t even know that.

Jason Calacanis: 49:03 Don’t get into that controversy.

Lon Harris: 49:05 I didn’t even know that one, wow.

Jason Calacanis: 49:07 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’s no other beverage, and if you order anything else, you’re… yeah, you’re screwing up the queue.

Charlie Hurst: 49:27 It is insane, because you talk about it as the meme, like, there’s flat white being about 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… it looks amazing. Then you’ve got the word in it as well. You have all these things that add together that’s like the perfect storm, really. That’s why it keeps going viral all the time. We just mentioned on another podcast that we posted on Instagram, it’s like 300,000 views now already. It just keeps going viral, this thing, and like the way the words are laid out, just everything about it. We sort of loved it from the get-go.

Jason Calacanis: 49:58 And just 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 gonna 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 micro-foam. It’s a very fine foam that is liquidy but foamy. It’s like a five or six ounce drink.

Will Sudlow: 50:25 New Zealand people tell you that you can have an eight ounce… or a twelve ounce flat white, because it’s four shots of espresso with the rest milk. So it’s all about that ratio, like you said, that two-to-one ratio of milk to coffee.

Tom Noble: 50:37 Then again, we sort of get hung up on 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 almost snobbery that’s come with it. in the specialty coffee industry especially with

Charlie Hurst: 51:01 Yeah.

Tom Noble: 51:02 all these different customizations and roast levels and, you know, shots of syrup and all that sort of stuff. It’s just too much and we just want to get back to again the a simple product that’s done really well and that’s all we do. we- we got all this momentum and then me and Charlie were like well what do we actually do? Because you know I’ve got no experience running a coffee shop. He’s barista trained at Costa but then we’re like what do we actually do? So we were thinking about what to do and then um 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 respond, 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. And then I called Charlie straight away and said we need to get these guys involved because they can take this thing to actually be you know an incredible thing which was the pop-up.

Jason Calacanis: 51:59 The- they were behind it all. So we are… you are a…

Tom Noble: 52:03 so this is Will.

Jason Calacanis: 52:05 Will, you run an experiential marketing company? What’s your story?

Will Sudlow: 52:11 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 broadly speaking is we translate the stories that brands want to tell in a variety of different ways: 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 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 the podcasts he’d been on and it just felt like a really lovely opportunity to get involved and try it, do- you know 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.

Jason Calacanis: 52:58 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.

Will Sudlow: 53:11 Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 53:14 Okay. So then what happens next then? Okay you had an insight into the- into the brand itself or the momentum?

Will Sudlow: 53:19 No, I mean, it was a bit of everything. So, so we- I mean, as I say, 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 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 some ways completely insane, 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, demonstrably 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, but… No, so it allows you to do what you like. It has that 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. But then also do all the other stuff really well. So that’s what we’re trying to do.

Jason Calacanis: 54:17 I had Will on this podcast, and yeah, that insight was a very interesting one to me, Lon. I had Will on the podcast. He’s got that great book ‘Unreasonable Hospitality’. Actually, I think it was in ‘The Bear’ as well and some of the stories were in there.

Lon Harris: 54:30 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 54:31 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…

Lon Harris: 54:37 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 54:38 …was something from 11 Madison.

Lon Harris: 54:41 Ah, I didn’t realize that was a true story.

Jason Calacanis: 54:42 11 Madison, they overheard—they had this really great moment, Will and Lon—where they would try to like overhear conversations, they’d 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 11 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 11 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, the Broadway shows, the this, the Central Park. The only thing we didn’t have,’ one person said jokingly, ‘was a dirty water hot dog.’ 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 the elevated—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 Noma at the time or 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. And the other guy was like, ‘Yeah, you know, what kind of coffee do you have?’ ‘Yeah, we have coffee,’ you know, like you can have espresso, 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, the sommelier for beer?’ And then like there’s one person in every party’s like, ‘You have a beer sommelier? I’ve never experienced that before.’ That was the magic. Yeah, Will?

Will Sudlow: 55:41 Exactly that, exactly that.

Jason Calacanis: 55:42 Yeah.

Will Sudlow: 55:43 And in the cafe industry, I guess that’s why we get the little cards where you get the stamps. And there’s a great—so there’s a great website—she calls herself the website psychologist, and it’s Nathalie Nahai. She writes a great book on online psychology and how to encourage people to navigate websites the right way and click buttons and so forth.

Tom Noble: 57:00 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 they give you, say, three stamps of the ten because once you’re into that journey, you want to then complete the journey.

Jason Calacanis: 57:16 Ah, so the trick is to give you three. Genius. They give you a couple extra, they pretend to be generous, but actually you’re more likely to then complete that journey of getting the stamps. Now you’ve got two partners in crime, maybe three with Will’s wife, and you’re off to the races. What happens next?

Charlie Hurst: 57:32 Will and Lucia 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, because 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. So yeah, we get going, we move on, and we get a partnership with a place called Fireheart Roastery. And you know, we, when we were looking for the perfect bean for the Flat White, we had quite, you know, big interest in brands, you know, lots of people had been interested in this brand from an industry perspective. You know, they’re not used to this specialty of just doing one thing. You know, the margins in coffee are ridiculous. People often say we’re actually quite insane restricting it down to one thing and still to be determined 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 now of getting the physical space ready, 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 realized quite quickly with the momentum was growing so much and it was going at such rapid pace that we had to up our expectations. We moved to a bigger location, Outernet, which has a massive screen space 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.

Tom Noble: 59:25 Yeah, I think it was eight days out, wasn’t it, Charlie?

Jason Calacanis: 59:27 What was people’s reaction and did people come up and ask for a non-flat white to experience everybody yelling ‘f-off’?

Tom Noble: 59:39 Yes.

Charlie Hurst: 59:40 Yes, they did. A lot of people did.

Tom Noble: 59:42 They loved it. A lot of people walked past, they looked in, they saw it and they’re like, ‘Oh, is that actually what’s going to 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 in, see.’ And she did, and she got her ‘fuck off’ and then she loved it so much she then actually wanted…

Will Sudlow: 1:00:00 She wasn’t a flat white drinker, but it’s weirdly, it’s the older generation that liked this way more than everyone else. Um, didn’t realize that until, until the day. But there were quite a few who asked for it.

Charlie Hurst: 1:00:11 One of the standouts for me was when the police entered the space and we were like ‘uh-oh’.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:16 Oh boy. What like oh no. What did we do?

Lon Harris: 1:00:19 What did we do?

Charlie Hurst: 1:00:20 Section 5 public order act, I’m sorry you’re gonna have to come with us, situation. Um, but no.

Tom Noble: 1:00:24 They asked for cappuccinos and lattes, we told them to fuck off, we gave them some lattes and they had a great time.

Will Sudlow: 1:00:29 I love it.

Lon Harris: 1:00:31 It was the biggest f-off of the day I believe. The baristas behind the bar really said it with their chest.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:36 Well they don’t carry guns over there. I don’t know if you guys know the Wiener’s Circle, uh, since we’re deep into this stuff. They’re behind the counter and whatever, you know, you come up and 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 sketch but…

Mog: 1:00:58 I want to have a cheeseburger!

Dubs: 1:00:59 Extra fucking sauce!

Mog: 1:01:00 No!

Jason Calacanis: 1:01:01 Oh! 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.

Lon Harris: 1:01:12 where’s that come from? That was a lot of it.

Jason Calacanis: 1:01:14 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that’s that. We can take that off the screen for now and bleep that in post. Well, bleep it out. No, just bleep it, it’ll be fine. Um, it’s the one thing that Madison Park didn’t serve.

Charlie Hurst: 1:01:25 Yeah, yeah. It’s also worth mentioning that this is a barista’s dream. They love this. All the baristas want to do is tell people to go away. That’s it. That’s literally it. So they dreamed about it.

Jason Calacanis: 1:01:34 What a dream job. You must have had the conversation that it would be interesting, funny, at some point to add a SKU, to add an option or not. So how do you think about somebody saying I’m… I’m lactose intolerant? I…

Will Sudlow: 1:01:58 Well we do offer oat milk. So we do offer an alternative milk.

Tom Noble: 1:02:00 See, yeah, we do. We had this conversation with Rory when we met him. He was a bit flabbergasted at first when we said we were going to do oat milk and dairy milk because 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 human behavior about this sort of thing when ‘Well you’re alienating an audience so much to milky coffee that it doesn’t feel very fair to people that are lactose intolerant that they can’t enjoy the brand as well, you’ve got to have some way of flexing around those dietary requirements’. Now your answer to putting a latte on there or you know a black coffee, 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 else.

Jason Calacanis: 1:02:46 So decaf, f-off? Or okay?

Tom Noble: 1:02:50 f-off.

Jason Calacanis: 1:02:51 Right? Oh, right? If it’s a full f-off. Even in a normal coffee shop it’s a bit of an f-off.

Dubs: 1:02:55 It’s an interesting one.

Mog: 1:02:57 So in the summer maybe we have an iced flat white because it’s…

Will Sudlow: 1:03:00 That’s why.

Tom Noble: 1:03:01 We still need to discuss this.

Will Sudlow: 1:03:02 We’re working on it.

Jason Calacanis: 1:03:04 Nice. That’s a… that’s a very… that’s very easy. That’s very…

Will Sudlow: 1:03:06 But it was… well it was really interesting and in…

Tom Noble: 1:03:10 Go on, you go Will.

Will Sudlow: 1:03:10 Go on, no you go Tom.

Lon Harris: 1:03:11 So polite.

Will Sudlow: 1:03:12 So the really interesting thing when we… 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 avoid the customer feedback. Like it was… it was overwhelming. There must have been, I don’t know, most… those two videos each got probably 200 comments and like 50 of them were talking about the milk. And yeah, it’s… we’re still making flat whites with oat milk. They’re still… it’s still the drink.

Jason Calacanis: 1:03:36 I think that’s right. I think that’s… it’s a category. Yeah, it’s like if I get a latte and I put soy milk in it, that’s still a latte. Here’s the… 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.

Tom Noble: 1:03:53 Some people just have trouble with the… not everybody’s a dairy person.

Jason Calacanis: 1:03:58 Well, I don’t care.

Tom Noble: 1:04:00 Some people get funny tummies?

Lon Harris: 1:04:01 Okay, that’s point one. Let Jason talk, let Jason give his point.

Jason Calacanis: 1:04:06 It’s fine. I know that there’s probably some hippy 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 object to cows’, ‘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.

Will Sudlow: 1:04:38 Well, we do… we do enjoy a bit of… not looking to be controversial.

Tom Noble: 1:04:40 Yeah.

Charlie Hurst: 1:04:41 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 go that controversial. We’re still getting a lot of people to this day moaning about the fact we only do a flat white.

Mog: 1:04:53 Yeah, I think they’ve been… they’ve got like a sassy vibe about them now.

Will Sudlow: 1:04:58 We can always bring our political opinions and put that on the record.

Dubs: 1:05:01 Oh God!

Mog: 1:05:01 Extra controversial.

Dubs: 1:05:03 Donald Trump or f-off, that’s what… just kidding.

Jason Calacanis: 1:05:06 Well no, the reason I bring this up is… 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?

Tom Noble: 1:05:18 Yes and no.

Will Sudlow: 1:05:19 So the proportion we discovered of flat… of dairy to oat is about 60% dairy to 40% oat. So proportionally it’s about… I mean it’s just under half and half. So the… one of the ways we wanted to interrogate and test Rory’s theories is well firstly you can’t make a flat white… it 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, pun intended, 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 them fast. So once a queue starts to build and we rationalize this whole process, once someone appears for the queue, you know they’re having a coffee.

Jason Calacanis: 1:05:56 Got it.

Will Sudlow: 1:06:00 Because we don’t do anything else, they’re not asking for anything other than the coffee. So we can start grinding…

Jason Calacanis: 1:06:04 Right. And you’ve got a 50-50 shot, basically.

Will Sudlow: 1:06:06 Well, we can start grinding the beans, we can start making the coffee, we can put 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, let’s say for easy math, 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 really quickly, we also needed to offer a few free coffees to the first few people just to get it going, so otherwise people were staring.

Jason Calacanis: 1:06:52 What’s the optimal queue? What’s optimal queue, Will? OQ.

Will Sudlow: 1:06:56 I mean it varies. It’s… so for our pop-up, probably ten, fifteen people. I mean, we got the service downtime down to about 15-20 seconds a flat white.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:10 Wow. I heard you say you got Rory’s blessing, but who owns this business? What’s the equity? This is America, you’re on 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 talk cap tables here. You guys are all equity partners here, Charlie, Tom, your idea? I don’t know, who gets what?

Will Sudlow: 1:07:34 Third, third and third.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:37 And what does Rory own? He just gave you his blessing. Wow. Nothing? Okay.

Charlie Hurst: 1:07:45 He just gave… we had conversations with him loads about it and where it was going and stuff and he’s just really happy to see the idea come to life. And I think Rory’s got a lot going on and he’s always happy to give us his time in absolute abundance, you know. Every time you meet him it’s a mini podcast in itself.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:59 We gotta fix this. Here’s what I want you to do. Just… I’m gonna throw this up the flagpole and 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 a, you know, a trust. 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 just say this is the Rory trust.

Will Sudlow: 1:08:44 We’re going to call it the Roryalty.

Jason Calacanis: 1:08:46 The Roryalty! Thank you. Very good. So this is like… now we’ve got a real… we’ve got a Roryalty!

Lon Harris: 1:08:51 Who watching this, just know that if you take any of Jason’s ideas, this is what he’s going to charge you. So there’s no free ride, there’s no stop by your pop-up again…

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:00 Piece of advice, it’s 1%. 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. 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 going to put it in there. And it’s going to be on the website and it’s just going to grow over time. People can figure out our revenue because it’s 1% royalty and we’re just going to skim it off the top and put it in there. That’s it.’

Lon Harris: 1:09:31 This is a very expensive podcast appearance for these guys.

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:33 I don’t care. I think it’ll drive 10% more of the use of the brand.

Charlie Hurst: 1:09:36 We’re going to have a hard time booking this show if it’s 1% off the top.

Mog: 1:09:40 The brand is 10% more.

Dubs: 1:09:42 Yeah, go ahead.

Charlie Hurst: 1:09:43 Jason, you said you liked the idea and you think it’s going to work. If you invest in us, we’ll consider that. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:48 Okay, I’ll invest in this. I think… I need to know the economics of this. You know there’s a lot - the format - the next level of this is figuring out the overhead because coffee is an overhead game. Of course. 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 where or it’s a commuter thing. And if then you’re going to 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 - 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 going to work and then you need excuses, 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.

Will Sudlow: 1:10:43 And congratulations on your investment.

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:46 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?

Tom Noble: 1:10:49 Cash. Cash in the post.

Will Sudlow: 1:10:50 Go and follow Flat White or FF on Instagram. Just search for it. They have an incredible Instagram.

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:54 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.

Will Sudlow: 1:11:00 That’s what Jacob was saying, we’re going to put coffee in our course.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:00 Sex at lunch. 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.

Tom Noble: 1:12:08 Time for…

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:09 Your favorite.

Tom Noble: 1:12:10 My favorite. Your favorite. Off Duty.

Lon Harris: 1:12:12 Yeah me too, it’s a great way to end the week. So, uh, 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, the Oscar ceremony is coming up.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:24 But my Oscar pick is in. I put my Oscar pick in.

Lon Harris: 1:12:26 I saw that you entered our Oscar pool. So, uh, I just want a real quick, 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?

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:37 I haven’t seen enough of them.

Lon Harris: 1:12:38 I’ll give you, here’s the best picture nominees: Secret Agent, Begonia, Marty Supreme, Train Dreams, F1, Sinners, Frankenstein, Hamnet, One Battle After Another, Sentimental Value. I know you saw One Battle because we saw it together.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:51 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 tried to watch Sinners twice and it just was so boring at the start I couldn’t get through it.

Lon Harris: 1:13:13 Oh, it’s great!

Jason Calacanis: 1:13:14 I have to… you know what the problem is, I think in fairness to the film, both times I watched it was on a plane. And a plane is sub-optimal.

Lon Harris: 1:13:19 I think that’s right. Well especially because it’s such a musical movie, you gotta watch it with the good sound so you can hear the songs.

Jason Calacanis: 1:13:25 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. Uh, Paul Thomas Anderson film, One Battle After Another would be in my bottom, like way down in the bottom of my list.

Lon Harris: 1:13:51 Really? Oh, I liked it.

Jason Calacanis: 1:13:52 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 with nothing going on in their life, the left and the right are both idiots on this like horseshoe theory when they’re like both extremes are retarded.

Lon Harris: 1:14:22 I do think that’s fair. I mean it’s about how hard 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, he’s in it to be 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 is Teyana Taylor’s character, Perfida Beverly Hills, she’s so committed to the cause that she’s like I’m going to leave my child, I’m going to leave this life, I’m going to go pursue activism.

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:49 Right, she’s an actual believer.

Lon Harris: 1:14:51 Actual believer. 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.

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:57 And the other guy on the right, played by Sean Penn…

Lon Harris: 1:14:59 Sean Penn. He was also in it to… hot chicks. Personal… so it’s about himself and his ego and he wants to be part of this elite sort of society. 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 satisfy… anyway, I didn’t like the film for that reason.

Charlie Hurst: 1:15:22 I think all that’s in there, but I do think like Sensei Carlos, like Benicio Del Toro’s character, like he’s a heroic character and he is associated with these left-wing sort of protest movements.

Lon Harris: 1:15:33 He definitely is trying to actually accomplish something.

Charlie Hurst: 1:15:36 Not from white privilege.

Lon Harris: 1:15:37 Exactly. That’s the dynamic between him and DiCaprio is this guy’s put so much work into this, he’s got this whole setup, yeah.

Charlie Hurst: 1:15:44 Yes, it matters to him.

Lon Harris: 1:15:46 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 eff 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.

Charlie Hurst: 1:16:03 Yeah, it’s an interesting critique. I think that’s… I can see both sides of this argument. But it’s an interesting…

Lon Harris: 1:16:05 Anyway, it’s not a great film, but it’s pretty good. It’s really…

Charlie Hurst: 1:16:10 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 what other people would consider his masterpiece. It’s one of those two.

Lon Harris: 1:16:21 I mean, There Will Be Blood… There Will Be Blood is still my favorite, yeah. I think There Will Be Blood is still my favorite.

Charlie Hurst: 1:16:24 Okay fine. I’ll put The Master above that too. What’s your number three then? Is it Master, There Will Be Blood and then…

Lon Harris: 1:16:26 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.

Charlie Hurst: 1:16:35 Licorice Pizza is the only one that I didn’t like as much as all the others. You cannot put this film anywhere near Boogie Nights. It is a steep drop-off after Boogie Nights.

Lon Harris: 1:16:42 I think it’s… I don’t know. That road scene is really great. Well, we can talk more… we can talk more.

Charlie Hurst: 1:16:45 I think that’s what’s going to 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…

Lon Harris: 1:16:54 Well, Best Actress will probably be Jessie Buckley from Hamnet or Rose Byrne from If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which is great. I like that one a lot too.

Charlie Hurst: 1:17:02 I need to see that one. That one looks like it would be appealing to me.

Lon Harris: 1:17:03 It’s on HBO Max now. That one’s on HBO Max, you can check it out. I love Rose Byrne.

Charlie Hurst: 1:17:07 Anyway, so, anyway, the Oscars to me has never been relevant, not since they…

Lon Harris: 1:17:14 Fair enough.

Charlie Hurst: 1:17:15 It used to be like, we could sit there and be like, well, Dances with Wolves or Goodfellas… like, these are… I don’t know. It just feels like it’s not about cinema. I’m in the Bret Easton Ellis…

Lon Harris: 1:17:24 There’s a lot of… yes, there’s a lot of politics to it as well. You’re… you are correct.

Charlie Hurst: 1:17:29 It is not enough about the films and the actual performances because if it was, then certain things would just break out. Like, the fact that… um, what was the Scorsese film, um, that just got totally snubbed?

Lon Harris: 1:17:41 Killers of the Flower Moon? Or… Wolf of Wall Street?

Charlie Hurst: 1:17:44 Right, Wolf of Wall Street. 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, makes no sense that…

Jason Calacanis: 1:18:00 There’s nobody likable in that, it doesn’t fit any of the… anyway, I’m gonna put it all aside. What do you think’s going to be the two biggest winners in total Oscars? I’m gonna say One Battle After the Others is going to get the most Oscars, and right behind it Sinners, like they’ll get like five or six each.

Lon Harris: 1:18:14 I think that’s probably right. I think it’s probably going to be about two, three, I would say maybe three or four for Sinners and One Battle is going to do very well. Looks like probably I would say supporting actor they’ve got a good chance, obviously screenplay, director, picture, they’re going to get a lot of the big ones.

Jason Calacanis: 1:18:31 Did you see the Frankenstein movie yet?

Lon Harris: 1:18:33 I’ve seen all ten. I’ve seen all the Oscar nominations.

Jason Calacanis: 1:18:36 What’s up with the Frankenstein movie? I like Maggie Gyllenhaal…

Lon Harris: 1:18:44 Well no, those are two different movies. Maggie Gyllenhaal did a movie called The Bride with her and Christian Bale, where it’s like… Frankenstein is a different film. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is a much more faithful adaptation. It does take some liberties. It’s a faithful adaptation of the book.

Jason Calacanis: 1:19:03 Oh I now 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 and didn’t finish it.

Lon Harris: 1:19:12 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.

Jason Calacanis: 1:19:29 I just realized for me to get through films now, I have to go to the movie theater.

Lon Harris: 1:19:36 It’s tough. It’s tough at home. There’s a lot of distractions.

Jason Calacanis: 1:19:40 Too many distractions.

Lon Harris: 1:19:41 Especially now that we’ve got all the devices and everything that you’re constantly being…

Jason Calacanis: 1:19:45 I’m now going to make the commitment that I’m just going to go see the Oscar films in theaters from now on. I’m just going to do that.

Lon Harris: 1:19:52 I think that makes a lot of… it’s hard sometimes with the Netflix ones, but otherwise you can make it. I saw Secret Agent at the Austin Film Society, shout out to them.

Jason Calacanis: 1:20:03 I really want to see that one too, yeah. I mean, what else you got? One more thing I wanted to talk about at the Oscars. Did you see this Timothee 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 and it’s about… let me hear the clip. I know the clip but I haven’t seen it.

Lon Harris: 1:20:19 Yeah, we’ll pull the clip up. This is from one of those Variety like actors on actors kind of discussions.

Jason Calacanis: 1:20:25 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 going to 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 like no one cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership, but… I mean, is 100% accurate.

Lon Harris: 1:20:53 It’s 100% accurate and he even contextualized it at the end. There’s no reason to cancel him. The ballet people, the opera people are admittedly trying to bring in a new audience. That’s what they themselves talk about. He’s not speaking out of school and he is being humble and saying ‘Cinema please’…

Jason Calacanis: 1:21:00 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.

Lon Harris: 1:21:11 Oh, it’s gonna kill movies, you know. Progress.

Jason Calacanis: 1:21:16 More options.

Lon Harris: 1:21:18 Yes, and I agree. It’s such an obvious thing and all the people who are getting mad at Doja Cat actually, you know Doja Cat, the rapper and singer? 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.

Mog: 1:21:58 I mean, Puccini, like I can tell you Madame Butterfly.

Lon Harris: 1:22:01 Yeah, like The Marriage of Figaro is one, Carmen is one, but like I’m not, none of us are experts. It’s a- it doesn’t mean you hate it, you’re just saying like most people, Americans aren’t super into opera. That’s just true.

Jason Calacanis: 1:22:07 All right, I’m gonna give you one. This is like out of left field. It’s off-duty. I, you know, would love a Cherry Coke back in the day.

Lon Harris: 1:22:21 Ooh, yeah, delicious. I love- yeah, cherry-flavored sodas, I’m a big fan.

Jason Calacanis: 1:22:25 Now, I also stopped drinking caffeine in the afternoons. So, I- 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 this brand, Toschi cherries. Amarena Toschi cherries, yes.

Lon Harris: 1:22:45 Amarena Toschi cherries, yes.

Jason Calacanis: 1:22:47 Yes. And they come in an iconic… there’s an iconic- very iconic, you know, bottle that these kind of cherries come in from Italy. I sent you like the one I buy that’s at scale, like it’s a large portion of these. These are not cheap, let me just tell you that. And these are not maraschino cherries. These are like cocktail cherries, right? And they’re very expensive. Luxardo makes them, and then there’s like Amarena wild cherries.

Lon Harris: 1:23:22 Amarena is the one you sent us, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:23:24 Yes, and they come in fancy bottles. Anyway, I order this in bulk and I’ll make a little cherry soda for my girls, where I will take a little sparkling water, some crushed ice, 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 whatever and put it on there, but you can also put it on vanilla ice cream. And when I was in Italy I would love- 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, say, ‘oh you have no more black cherry?’ They’re like, ‘no, we have black cherry.’ I’m like, ‘where is it?’ She’s like, ‘But we take this vanilla one and then they had the giant thing of these Amarena cherries and we just put a scoop of them on top.’ I said, ‘Oh, wow…’

Lon Harris: 1:24:09 …delicious, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:24:10 …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. Oh, you’re going to Florence in May?

Lon Harris: 1:24:18 I’m going to Florence in May. I’m going to check this out.

Jason Calacanis: 1:24:20 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 you staying?’ I’m like, ‘Actually, we’re leaving tomorrow,’ whatever. She put so many cherries on top of this. She goes, ‘Thank you for coming,’ because I was giving, you know, a big tip. She put like 20 cherries on top of this, scoop of ice cream on top of that, then more cherries on top. It made a total sundae for me. I’m addicted to them. Uh, you’ll love them. Uh, treat your family. Delicious.

Lon Harris: 1:24:52 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’d do your flavors. So it was like Butterfinger flavor, Snickers flavor, cherry flavor, all that kind of stuff. Really good.

Jason Calacanis: 1:25:05 You made me nostalgic for it.

Lon Harris: 1:25:08 Absolutely. 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 Baptists or this group of white supremacists. Like he interviews fringe people and kind of brings this very mainstream sort of mindset. Like, ‘I want to understand your group and how you think.’ 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 visit 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 got to… You got to 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 TikTok and Instagram accounts, it’s not reality. Like you’re… It’s like reality TV. They’re playing a character. 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. Get this app.’ It’s…

Jason Calacanis: 1:26:35 Of course. I mean, half of people’s opinions now are based on the algorithm.

Lon Harris: 1:26:41 Exactly. Exactly.

Jason Calacanis: 1:26:43 And so if you want to understand, you know, and 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? Uh, like Michael Wolff. And they just… Are, you know, releasing content every day about Michael Wolff. Michael Wolff and Joanna Kerns from Daily Beast are just constantly doing Trump stuff, right? And it’s kind of anti. And then on the other side, you have the Candace Owenses of the world and Fuentes. Like, they know that there’s 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 going to 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 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 OpenLaw and we talk about Tau as like two of the things 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 until it becomes not interesting.

Lon Harris: 1:28:41 Right. It makes sense. Yeah, but I think that’s not the winning strategy. That’s not the winning strategy. 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… that’s a guy named HS Tikky Tokky who’s on TikTok. Uh, they are purely slaves to the algorithm. They’re just doing things, they’re seeing which things that they can do will get most people to follow them on Kick or Rumble, to tune in when they start streaming, and like, they’re going to do whatever those things are. And like, 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. But then you take a closer look and it’s like, they’re purely just doing what works and what’s going to add up to the most clicks and what’s going to get them the most attention because they’re trying to sell you a subscription to this or this gambling site or whatever.

Jason Calacanis: 1:29:38 Great to work with you, Lon, as always. Have a great weekend, everybody. We’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Lon Harris: 1:29:44 Bye-bye.