This Week in Startups - One Genius Rule That Made This Coffee Brand Famous | EP 2262

Episode Date: March 14, 2026

Legendary British ad man Rory Sutherland invented a fake business on a podcast, a coffee shop appealing to the busy commuter called “Flat White or F**k Off.”But it’s one thing to have a post go big on TikTok or Instagram… but to turn that viral moment into an actual COMPANY is a very different challenge.On TWiST, Jason and Lon chat with Charlie Hurst, Tom Noble, and Will Sudlow, founders of the online brand “Flat White or F**k Off,” about how they took a funny little slogan and turned it into a string of popular social media accounts, a line of merch, a pop-up café, and let’s face it, an entire lifestyle.PLUS we’ve got Mog and Dubs from Subnet 75 — Hippius! Hear how they’re using the blockchain for decentralized storage, and providing server space much cheaper than their famous hyperscaler rivals.This Week In Startups is made possible by:Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twistLinkedIn Jobs - https://LinkedIn.com/twist.Wispr Flow - https://wisprflow.ai/twistNorthwest Registered Agent  - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistTimestamps:00:00:00 Intro00:01:28 Plaud - If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off!00:03:22 What is "decentralized cloud storage"?00:05:42 How Hippius came together00:09:57 LinkedIn Jobs - Hire right, the first time. Post your first job and get $100 off towards your job post at https://LinkedIn.com/twist.00:11:38 Incentivizing miners00:14:25 How many people are contributing?00:18:42 But where does the value accrue?00:20:18 Wispr Flow - Stop typing. Dictate with Wispr Flow and send clean, final-draft writing in seconds. Visit https://wisprflow.ai/twist to get started for free today.00:29:55 Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist00:35:53 The best places to eat in Dubai00:38:06 The inspo behind "Flat White or F Off"00:42:16 From social media to IRL business00:53:06 The secrets of experiential marketing00:57:28 Hospitality's "Rule of 3s"00:59:33 Inside the Flat White London pop-up01:13:11 Lon and Jason's Oscar picks01:26:06 Lon went "Inside the Manosphere"Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisCheck out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com

All right, everybody, welcome back to this week and startup with me, Lon Harris. I'm Jason Calacanus. We have a full docket on Fridays. Yeah, we like to expand a little bit. Our horizons talk to maybe some businesses that aren't strictly software-based inside your computer, maybe talk to some entrepreneurs. And we have a really cool one that Rory Sutherland inspired called Flatwhite or... We should say F off, I think. F off. Flatwhite or F off. I'm going to say F off so we don't get YouTube. We don't get booted off.

Leave off. This week in startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more at Northwest Registeragent.com slash twist. Whisperflow. Stop typing. Dictate with Whisperflow and send clean final draft writing in seconds.

Visit Whisperflow. dot AI slash twist to get started for free today. That's WISPR flow. dot AI slash twist. And LinkedIn jobs. Hire right the first time. Post your job and get $100 off towards your job post at LinkedIn.com slash twist. Before we get started here, we want to make sure we don't lose any of these gems. We have a lot of things we'll talk about during the show and we tape the show live and we like to banter a little bit before the show. We'll have a little enter in between that we cut out of the final podcast while we're queuing things up. If you don't want to lose any of those nuggets, any of those action items, any of your

inspiration or ideas, get a plod pin, and then you just press the button, boom, it vibrates. You get a nice haptic. It starts recording. Red light. Everybody knows that you're recording. You may have heard me before. Hey, I'm into privacy. So I say, hey, may I record our meeting?

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Man, they also have one that goes in the back of your phone that I love. So I carry both of these things with me. And I travel a lot internationally. And I am popping out of meetings with my team all the time. and bang, this thing makes me so much more productive. You know, I still will like to have my pen and my pad here sometimes. The old ways never die. It never dies, but I find myself using it half as much.

You should check it out at plod.a.i slash twist and use the code twist, and they're going to give you 10% off. Let's get to the show. It's our very first entry in our new series, Tao plus AI. We're going to be talking to some of the very top bit tensor subnets. We talked to Mark Jeffrey, of course, of Stillcore Capital last week, got really excited about Tao, BitTensor, this whole ecosystem. So we've got Mog and Dubbs here, the co-founders of Hippiest Subnet 75.

That's the decentralized blockchain-powered cloud storage platform. It's sort of like a decentralized AWS or Google Cloud. So they're going to come on now and show us around. You know, Tao is very similar in a distributed fashion. Mogg and Dubs, welcome. It's an inspiring project because I remember having Bitcoin on this very podcast in, I think 2010, 2010, 2011, right in that time period. I believe it's 2011. I was really inspired by it. 2011. Super inspired by it because it was, yeah, so very decentralized. And nobody in control. And you had this ability to move money around and store value.

and then maybe it would work for transactions, maybe there'd be other uses for it. It turned out there was only one real use, speculation, store of value. You know, and maybe if you're trying to get from out of one country to another lawn and you've got a thumb drive. Yeah. You know, you're leaving Venezuela. You're trying to get back on track and you're trying to keep your assets as you're leaving a dictatorship to go flee. You know, there's like some really interesting uses for Bitcoin. What I found really interesting about the BitTenzer project line,

is that instead of using the compute to solve cryptography problems to create this network that allowed for the storage of assets, this one allows you to take all of that work and put it towards something productive in the world. Right. And at the same time, and Betentra's been around for a while, at the same time, you know, it started to get some, you know, early true believers. The AI revolution happened. And then the need for compute happened at him at, and it's happening right now.

We're soaking in at the data center build out. So the, and people buying Mac studios to run open claw. We need more compute. We need more, you know, infrastructure. And how, and BitTencer feels like the perfect platform for that. So, Maga 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? It's actually fantastic.

so many people getting excited about it. I'm glad that Mark was on explaining you a lot of the basics. My history love affair with BitTenser sounds much like yours, only it's a couple of years older. And I remember, I'll do this briefly, but discovering BitTensor in the early days of GPT 2.5 and understanding the power of using distributed compute and distributed participation to essentially produce

either a mixture of experts, or to provide a better solution than calling out inference to a single provider, be it open AI meta, et cetera. 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.

And we saw an opening at that time that was really needed was the ability to visualize the network. And so we created TAL-Stats, 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 BitTencer uses and probably has double figure tabs open on their desktop, not here to big up Towers. I think I've just managed to do that right now. 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 BitTencer,

So 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 Dubbs was working with me on TALStats, helping with the architecture there. And it transpired that he had an incredible history with both node operation and decentralized storage. and have the, I think it takes a certain type of person and work ethic to build a subnet. You have to have thick skin, be very, very multi-spectrum talented across,

and also be prepared to be learning as you go. This is new technology, this incentive mechanism design is not something that really exists in production in such a way, and you're building on an ever-evolving network. And so we set about to create Hippius. Hippius is, as long 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. And for people who don't know, Amazon has a product called S3. Basically, if you need storage, you can just pay the money. 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? All around. It is distributed between the participants. I'll switch over to Dubbs in a minute for the technical side of it, but essentially distributed with fail-sace. 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 around Netflix isn't working for a couple of hours. And of course, they're hugely important infrastructure providers within the internet. But much like so much of the evolution of what we're doing, by distributing and decentralizing it, we create these fail saves.

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in one data center with a massive pipe into it and Amazon has all that, I would assume that they're going to outperform a distributed network, which has to piece together, and maybe it doesn't have the throughput or the speed, or am I wrong? Maybe have you architected it to be faster or just cheaper? So usually you get like a couple of those things. It's either faster and, you know, more stable, but not cheaper, or it's cheaper and stable, but not as fast, you know, when you're talking about storage, you get to pick two. So how does it work? And then who's putting there, who's contributing the storage, Dubs? I will try to be not too technical, but basically we created a protocol ourselves,

which is called it Arion. 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 a duty of Bittencer. It's like you can modulate your algorithm or your incentive mechanism to get the miners adapting what you need. For example, you need to have more speed. You will put more effort on waiting more on the speed of the network. So you can have more throughput. But the way we did, it's, because the big question would be, yeah, cool,

but what if the team goes down or stuff like that? I trust more Amazon. We developed something that is crush map also. Well, we get the crash map and we adapted it for the decentralized storage, which is basically mathematics. You can calculate exactly where your file is on which minor it is. And everything is by the blockchain. We have a blockchain for inches that we run,

and we write everything as a log if you want in the blockchain so you can explore where your fire is how it goes. All right. So to translate that for the audience, maybe, who isn't as technical, when you set up a subnet, you get to define how people earn their tokens on that. And what you can decide if you're doing one based on storage is saying, hey, I care about uptime. So in order to earn the tau and to get tokens as being part of this, you need to have a certain level of uptime. You need a certain level of speed. So I need this amount of throughput. If you don't

hit those things, you can participate, or if you're faster, maybe you can participate at a higher level. But that's what the TOW platform allows you to do, correct? Yeah, what we're doing is designing an incentive mechanism that's very fluid. So you can actually adjust that to say, as Dub said, hey, I need the miners to be faster. It's great. We've got all the storage. The latency is fine, but we're suffering a bit on speed. Let's push miners to optimize for speed. So then they can say 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. Anyone with redundant storage who has the expertise to optimize for the incentive mechanism. So it is not mom and pops at home with an extra 20 gig on their hard disk. It is usually people with data centers or infrastructure. You could technically be doing it at home. but I would say that currently it's those that understand bit tensor to they're able to read an incentive mechanism and optimize their setup for it.

But it can be anyone. That is the beauty. It's open to anyone. It's permission list then. But you do need to have as a prerequisite line knowledge of bit tensor. 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 mob, or you must have like asked some friends maybe to seat it, and would these be data center people? Like, are they? No. In the early days, BitTencer miners are a strong community. And we've got a lot of feedback from them. But the reality of BitTenSer is most people are optimizing for incentives. So they'll do anything they can, including.

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

Yes, but we can, of course, score for reliability and continuous hard time. and metrics as such. So yes, but we don't know. The answer to that this is no, we don't have a close circle of people that we know. The miners are mostly getting contact with you are those that are complaining about something. So then let's talk a little bit, Dubs, about who's using this? So how long has HIPIS been offering storage

and how many people are contributing storage, like the total number of people contributing storage, and how many people, you know, in the last 30 days, have used storage, let's say? You have 256 slots on Bitcoin Sur, the UIG, where the miners can bring storage in. We make something that we can split that. So basically, maybe mortgage would be better to explain that. But you are able to have a family and then bring more server to it to make a cluster. So every miners is able to bring a cluster and make.

and make redundancy between his own notes. Okay, so that's what you're 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?

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

to 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. Got it. So the answer to my question, we have 351 terabytes online across. I love the fact that this is all transparent, because now you get to see the network growing and, you know, you can build confidence in it. So when we're looking at this, Lon, we have 350 terabytes up and running. Okay. It's a modest amount, but these are nascent projects, as I've said. And that's what we do here at this week in startups, is we try to get on things very early so that we can understand them.

And this is super disruptive. There is 100% of the nodes are online. Then we have total tau burned. Is that what that is there? Yes. I actually spoke to dumps about this. I don't know if I like this metric or not. Within big, there's a lot of conversation around a term that I actually

coined called alpha-nomics 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 BitTencer'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 BitTencer 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 hippius unless we decide to pay for it on your behalf if you happen to be a startup.

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

Explain to me what the final number there is in that row. I want to tell you about a product I'm obsessed with and everyone in tech seems to be obsessed with. It's called whisper flow. W-I-S-P-R-Flow. You set it up and then you hit a key combination and you talk. And it transcribes what you say. It does it more accurately and quicker and across all your platforms than any other speech-to-text software I've ever used. When you communicate all day long like I do, even as a fast typist, it is going to be three, four, five times faster than you can type. And because it fixes all of your ums and your ahs and your mistakes and cleans it up, all of the punctuation, all of the filler and unnecessary words being removed in real time,

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Dot A-I-S-T-S-T-Sh. I've been using this product for six months. It is extraordinary. Now, there's a number next to that. 488-7-4-27. Yes. So what's interesting here is Hippius is the first and only BitTencer subnet that has its own blockchain.

With this could go down a whole rabbit hole of my BitTensor expertise, but essentially the BitTensor blockchain records only the incentive that subnets, essentially the incentive landscape, the current scoring, and transactions within the BitTencer 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, of BitTencer.

This was pre-subnets having alpha token, so not having its own secondary token, not trying to extract value from BitTensor-Tal. Of course, as things evolve, now all subnets have their own token. But in short, that's the block number for the hippiest blockchain. Okay. And then you can click on miners here, and we get a rank, and we see the weight. What do we see, like, the total number of minors? And what's the point of this heads-up display?

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, but 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 demand expands,

miners will compete and have more and more child nodes. So there'll still be 256 slots. But let's say you need to provide more storage in order to compete. You may need two, three, four, five, six, seven child nodes. So you're building a team in order to move up the rankings. And so 256, you know, a standard number in compute, you know, 24, 18, 16. I mean, 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 a bit tense of thinking on your feet and realigning, this Aryan upgrade, which is unique to Hippius, was built in order to solve so many of the problems of decentralized storage so that it is as fast as

AWS. Got it. An IPFS for people don't know is kind of like a protocol like HTTP will be the, you know, 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? Strike is never good. Dubs, what's the strike? Well, basically, behind the scene, we have something that run as EK-proof because you cannot 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 means they miss a file, they doesn't download it fast enough or transfer is fast enough to have, so they get a strike. If they are not up or not able to provide a file,

when you download it, they get a strike. You need to know that basically your files, when you send the files to Apius, it's divided in certain chunk. Everything is the code code. So basically we could lose 60% of the network. We should be able to steal the file. Because that's the biggest problem with the centralized storage,

Miner come and go. You need to save the files and you need to be able to reconstruct the fires, 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. How long have you had the network up and running?

Obviously, this is a very nascent technology. This is super inspiring. You could take thousands of participants around the world who work at data centers or have extra server capacity could be competing here to put their unused storage or finding storage that's super cheap in China, in Malaysia. Somebody's got a data center lawn and they got access to a bunch of 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 was kind of like the story of Bitcoin. People went and found the cheapest power. They went and found the cheapest compute. And they then won the game

of making a Bitcoin. Here, the game is, what's the cheapest I can put storage onto the hippest network? 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. Okay, so just to, they were like, hey, I put the storage up here, let me see how it works.

They wanted to make sure that the game was, and the flywheel was going, but they weren't If you're being paid for the amount of storage that you're putting up and it's costing you less to use that storage and you're being paid for supplying it, then yes, you have a little bit of a feedback loop issue there. 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 10 just to fill up the storage because I've figured out the arbitrage, right? So there's arbitrage in all of these tau networks and just all the subnets and Tao itself is arbitrage, right? That's the actual beautiful thing, Lon. It's the virtuous thing is that everybody is doing that arbitrage incessantly.

You could have moments where people are doing it non-productively, is I think what you're saying. What's happened is the Aryan update that's been deployed, I mean, I think probably in total in the back end of month, but really being pushed in the last few weeks with some supporting applications. And for this, I'm talking about pull weights and Hermes, which does. Dubs will talk about. Pull weights is essentially hugging face, but built on BitTensor, and Hermes is something that 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 ago? But that wouldn't be fair to do. And I think the history is important. But there is a And transparency. A lot of 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 they're. I'm an investor in Mark Jeffreys Fund and a partner there so that I can learn. Sometimes I invest to learn. Other times I learn and invest. This is a clearly invest, get my attention and then learn

and 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 long from you or insights? It's easier than ever to build a great new product and launching a startup, even as a solopreneur, is getting easier and easier. But as my experience founders already know, there's a lot more to starting a company than just putting up a website or even building a product. If you're serious about going into business, you need a Delaware Seacorp. That's going to give you a serious leg up on your competition. And you can be taken seriously by investors.

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

Yes and no. You see, because of the BitTens incentivized infrastructure and the distributed nature, the miners will always compete to undercut the AWS and the R2s of the world. It's a given. And we already significantly, and if you actually go to just hippiest.com and look at the front page there, which is a little bit more hippieus I-U-S name. You can see the price calculator and you can work out if you go to pricing for yourself 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 competences of the developers and the users, splitting our time between developer-orientated functionality through API, 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 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's always been my thing. Replace Dropbox, replace Next Cloud, own cloud or anything like that. And there is a console that you can see where you can literally go on, you can select it, and you can upload data immediately from your computer.

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 claw bolt. Very smart. So is Hippius's software is an open source project? There are elements of it.

The minor 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. And is it a private company, a nonprofit project? Are you to the CEO and CTO? Tell me about the corporate structure. Hippius is part of a private company. It was incubated by the parent company of Tau Stats, who have incubated a number of subnets,

of which I am the CEO. Oh, what's the name of your company? Well, Tau Stats is the main operating name. The actual parent company is called T-34, which is a company incorporated in Dubai. And because so much of BIT-TenS is done on the fly, from a corporate structure, the aim is to have Hippius 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, hippius will have to be a standalone corporate entity. It's in the roadmap for 2026. But the ability to support and iterate fast taken priority, which has got us to where we are. So all subnets and BitTensor itself follow the same tokenomic principles as Bitcoin, all fair launch, no pre-mines, no ICO nonsense. No ICO does. There are many subnets who have raised equity through private companies. We haven't. The subnets that we incubate are fortunate enough that we can allow them not to have to go down that route, because I personally believe selling equity in your business too early on is negative. 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. Mag.

We used to have that offer to us early on, and I would turn around to the investors and say, you know what I'm going to do with your capital. I'm just going to buy tau. Right, exactly. Well, and this is all so complicated, which is why I, you know, I partnered with Mark on Stillcore because I knew he knew you and he is. spending literally 14 hours a day trying to figure this out. And, you know, you can tell from 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. Yeah, this is amazing.

Really interesting. And we'll have you back on again in, I think maybe three months and talk more. And then when I'm in Dubai, Mogg, I come to the region for founding university in Riyadh every six months or so. And so next time I come by, I'll definitely come and let's have a, let's go to O'Farrowley Brothers. Have you been to that place? O'Farly Brothers? What happens? In Dubai?

That's a place in Dubai? 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 a Jordanian. I think it's Jordanian. This is Ophali brothers. Let me show you this. Yes, I put it.

Or Folly Brothers, I think, is how you do. Yes, or Folly Brothers. My man in the region took me here, Zoffer. 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 got every award you can imagine. Not only do they have a Michelin Star, they're in the Michelin Guide as one of the world's 50 best restaurants in the work.

Yeah. That's not an easy thing to get. And you go there and like, you know, I'm just, I'm showing you a couple here along. But when I went there, they were, the guy, you know, they talked me up before I got there, right? Oh, Jason Calcanus coming out, yada. So that was very nice. And then they start doing this. They start bringing out like the Barry Wine Beggars purses kind of situation on, you know,

these incredible array of pedestals and whatnot. And they have this foie gras on a cloud source dome. Sure. You know, just. The presentation. If you're going to get a presentation. If you're going to 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. 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 long. One after the next was more inspired. You know, that's like one type of experience.

You know, it's another type of experience? Just one. Just one. Yeah. But really, wow. Right. One done great. Or you're going for the Michelin Star and you're creating a 16 course.

My friend, Rory Sutherland, who's been on this podcast a number of times, he works in marketing. He did like a clip. 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 Oval, 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 rappuccino with Motia. Two pumps. Like, yeah, like, I'm in a hurry. I'm a commuter. I just want my coffee to get guy got places to be. So he was saying his dream, he just is imagining it on a podcast. He's saying his dream would be a business called flat white or fuck off. And you're only there to get a flat white. It's an orderly and quick and easy process to get a delicious flat white. He was just throwing this out another idea, but three guys who are listening, Charlie Hurst, Tom Noble, and Will Sudlow, they have turned this Jason into a brand and a business, and we have them here to talk to us about it today.

Welcome to the flat white. 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 pop-up, a put-on, a publicity stunt, or a real business? And I don't know who speaks for the company here. You've got three founders.

That's a red flag. But, okay, who's in charge here? Who makes the final decision? Who speaks for the group? Well, it's everything at one time. We all speak at the same time. Yeah, we always have one thing. I knew this is going to happen.

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, which I know in your guys as a world is probably absolutely insane, but we don't really do things like traditional businesses, and we sort of own that really. But yeah, you know, Rory gave us his blessing, and we're trying to do the best with that blessing and make something pretty spectacular,

hopefully. No, wait. Who saw Rory on the podcast? Which one of you? That's Charlie first talking right now. So Charlie, you seem like you're the leader. you're the CEO? I'm just the gobshite.

Well. I just want to talk to the nice. I can tell Will's going for this. Will's going for the throne. Fuck off. I'm quite like fuck off. Yeah. So I saw the,

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

just meant to be a bit of fun. You know, nothing too serious. So you design the iconic logo and the cup. I did. Yes. Yes, indeed. Which is what first drew me to it. I was on my, one of my social feeds. And Rory and I are friends. It's been on the pot a number of times. And I see the iconic cup go by and I hear his voice. So I stop on any time he's doing. like a little micro lesson. I'm like, oh, I've got to stop in here. Roy's always got something interesting to say. But then I see the cup.

But it's playful and fun. It's cheeky, Charlie. I've got, I've got the cup somewhere, actually. I've got a little on my shop there is. It's, here it is. You can see it right now next to a Johnny. 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 maids. or these are just randos that we hate each other really like no we didn't know each of before this uh before this started so i put it on uh linkedin just as a little uh PR piece and then that got the attention of mr tom noble who enters the story got it okay so tom so we are you're you're online randos but it's apparently with some skills you found detourley's got

the design skills he makes something iconic he puts it online he's of action in the world lawn 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 Pollack told me. So now what's your involvement, Tom? You've got no job and you're sitting there scrolling,

looking for something to do? What happened? So I build websites and tech. That's the day job. And then I decided, like last year, I wanted to get into the content creation. So I saw this. I want to make YouTube videos about building.

You're unemployed. Isn't everyone really? Yeah, we all are all the same. Freelands on him. Free lance, unemployed website builder. Hey, I wrote this show, guys. I didn't do anything. It's over.

I'm at all right. So, Tom, you're looking for work. So I reached out to him. Just on email? Yeah, so I reached out to him. I don't want to make the videos. Just a LinkedIn messenger. I just said, that's cool.

Do you want to do it? And I didn't know who he was, Charlie. So just in there. And where are you? You're in London? 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. Okay, so you guys can't afford to live in London. You guys are in the Burbs. Perfectly, yeah. 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. And that somehow Will, and Will looks like he's a marauder. So tell me the next step. How does Will get involved, Tom? What happens next, Tom? So I reach out to Charlie and say, do you want to actually do this thing? And he says only if we can get Roy's permission. because I didn't actually know it was Rory's idea at the time.

I'd never heard it. I thought it was Charlie's. So I said, should we do it? He said, reach out to Rory. And then if you do that, then we should do it. So I put it on LinkedIn. I thought I've seen these campaigns to try and get 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 post it on LinkedIn and it gets about 5,000 views. But someone connects me an email like a few days later. but I went on Twitter or X and I said, because Rory, I tweeted at Rory, can I have your blessing? And three people saw that tweet and one of them was Rory. And he said, yeah, blessed, off you go. So I went back to Charlie and I said, well, you know, we now had to do this thing. I actually made a TikTok at the same time.

And the part one TikTok got, it's on 250K views straight away. And then the second TikTok of, yeah, yeah. So that's how we knew it was going to work. Well, I say work. That's how we knew that people would actually like care about this thing. And then I made a part two, which was where Rory actually said yes, and that got another 100K or so. Both those videos today, 400K.

That's on TikTok. And then on Instagram, it's on like 500K. This whole thing has 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. And this is the classic lean startup or startup engine playbook for. 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. 100%. So I do a load of vibe coding as well. So like a vibe code websites. And then it's even easier to not even vibe code the website. Just make a video about it. And you get the traction there. So you're truly unemployed. You're like doubly unemployed. You're a vibe coder and you build websites. It's like I'll pitch for some work on this show. At this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. So, yeah, it's basically using the attention. It didn't, I don't. It doesn't validate the business at all the business work, who knows. It validates that people will actually care about this thing. It validates the attention, and it's easier to sell something if it gets attention than not. So it sort of worked out in the end. 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. And then they start posting things that other people are like, hey, that sounds great. The tail grows in the telling at every level more people get sucked in. 100%. such a simple concept. Because when he said it, yeah, because when he said it on the podcast, it went viral. When Charlie posts about it, it went viral. When I asked Rory, it didn't actually go viral. But there was two instances of it going viral. So it was a viral topic. And then I put the TikToks out and it went viral again. So you have instances of like those four viral videos.

It's what the business was a creator on TikTok or X. They're like, if you have something that works, it goes viral, just retweak it a little bit and post it again. Like you already know it works. There's no reason not to like keep hitting it. Well, what's so great. I have a viral post on LinkedIn that I posted four times. It's gone viral and got 100, 200,000 views every time. Nobody remembers. You might as well keep going. What's really interesting about this is it really goes back to memes.

And like really in the Marshall McLuhan like 50 years ago memes, 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, F-W-F-O, just that phrase, flat-white, F-O-F-O, 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 in an article from like HBS or, you know, what 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 looked very serious. But that tyranny of choice was they realized giving people, you know, 400 chairs to pick for them.

Yeah. Not a great idea. It's what we say. Like when you log into Netflix, there's so much shows, there's so much content, you're like, and what do people go to? You get paralysis and you don't know what to choose. Decision paralysis. And what they realized was small, medium, large, and then maybe something for the whales,

that's off menu. So, or, you know, extremely high end, extremely budget, somewhere between the two, right? So when you're booking a hotel room, they're like, here's the presidential suite. here's the suite, $1,500 a night. Here's this, like, tiny little room in the bag alley. Then here's the junior suite. And people are like, I'll go through the junior suite. It's got like a desk, right?

Makes it just easier for people to quickly, hey, I'm just going to be in the room for eight hours. I'm overnight. I don't care. I'm not going to be working. I just want that one. I'll use the desk in the lobby. So anyway, the tyranny of choice.

But does 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. See, I was going to say this. If you're from America 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, America's like, we've heard the term. We don't necessarily know exactly what it is, which makes it feel elite and special. Well, it's even got a little bit of a punk rocking. It's known for coming from Australia, but in fact, it was created in New Zealand. Anyway, I didn't even know that. Ozies, like, fight it out.

Don't get into that controversy. I'm not, yeah, I don't want to go. That one. Wow. 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. It is insane, because you talk about it as the meme, like, there's flat white being that

drink that's well known, and then you've got Rory's involvement. Then you got the logo. the brand, which is looking, it looks amazing. Then you got the word in it as well. You have all these things that add together, like the perfect storm, really, that turn this thing into, that's why it keeps going viral all the time. I just mentioned on the other podcast that we post it 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. It's just like, we sort of luck on to the concert. And just to be, absolutely. And to be clear, Flatwhite is a double shot of espresso with like a, microfoam, not like your cappuccino foam where you're like, is there any liquid here? I'm going to, I'm going to tilt the cup back, and it's going to give me a mustache and then burn my lips off when the actual liquid comes?

No, it's a microfoam. It's a very fine foam that is liquidy, but foamy. It's like a five or six-ounce drink. New Zealand people tell you that you can have a 12-ounce flat white because it's four shots of, it's four shots of espresso with the. rest of milk. So it's all about that ratio, like you said, the two to one ratio of milk's coffee. Then, you know, again, we sort of get hung up on this, this, you know, we only serve one thing, flat whites. But, you know, we're also trying to get away from the potentialness 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, um, almost snobbery that's come in the speciality coffee industry, especially with all these different customizations and roast levels and, you know, shots of syrup and all that stuff. It's just too much. And we just want to get back to, again, a simple product that's done really well. And that's all we do. We got all this momentum.

And then me and Charlie, like, 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 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, we love the concept. We'd want to help out in any way we can. So I went across London. I saw the Grey Goose was doing an event where Will and Luchee were doing and met them, saw the sort of production that they put on. So they run production. And then as I called Charlie straight away and said, we need to get these guys involved, because they could take this thing to actually be an incredible thing, which was the pop-up. They were behind it. So Will, this is Will. Will you run an experiential marketing company? What's your story? Yes.

Yes. 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. So PR stunts, marketing, experiential, whatever it might be, whatever story they want to tell, we work out the best way to tell it through production. And, you know, we 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 this. The podcast he'd been on, and it just felt like a really lovely opportunity to get involved and try it. 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. 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. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, so what happens next then? Okay, you had an insight into the brand itself? I mean, the momentum. So we, I mean, as I say, I mean, 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 capture the attention and the imagination of people. And I guess that's what we've done with flat white is do something that's,

if everyone's operating over here doing the same thing, demonstrable 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 things, but also it allows you to do what you like. It has a sort of freedom.

And it's not Rory, but it's Will Godara, but Rory talks about him a lot. And he says, don't go to your competition to 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. Yes.

And then also do all the other stuff really well. I had Will on this podcast. That's what I was trying to do. Yeah, that insight was a very interesting one to Milan. I had well on the podcast. He's got that great book, Unreasonable Hospitality. Right. actually, I think it was in the bear as well.

And some of the stories were in there. So the story in the bear where they go out and get the pizza and then bring it so they don't miss Chicago Deep Dish, was something from 11 Madison. Oh, I didn't realize that's a true story. 11 Madison, they overheard. They had this really great moment, Will and Lon, where they would try to like overhear conversations. They would ease drop. And they hurt.

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, we did a Broadway show, that this, the Central Park. The only thing we didn't have, one person said jokingly was a dirty water hot dog. Will Godara 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, blah, blah, and then they drop it and say, we didn't want you to leave New York without having a dirty water hot dog elevated with truffles and caviar, 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 Nome 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 then their guy was like hey yeah you know what kind of coffee do they'll get 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 somelier, you are the coffee somelier. When we go, we say, would you like a wine, or would you like to talk to the somelier for wine or a sommelier for beer? And then, like, there's one person in every party, it's like, you have a beer somelier?

I've never experienced that before. That was the magic, yeah, Will? Exactly that, exactly that. In the cafe industry, I guess that's why we get the little cards where you get the same. And as a great, so as a great web, she calls herself the web psychologist, their name's Natalie and Hiret. 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. 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 cards, if they give you one stamp, you're more likely to throw it away than if they give you, they give you, say, three stamps of the 10. Because once you're into that journey, you want to then complete the journey. So the trick is to give you three. They give you a couple extra. They give you a couple extra. They pretend they're being generous, but actually you're more likely to than 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 race is what happens next? Will and New cheer 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 belving 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's 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 Roadway. You know, when we were looking for the perfect being for the flat light, we had quite, you know, big interesting brands. You know, a lot of people are interested in this brand from an industry perspective. You know, they're not used to this speciality of just doing one thing. thing, you know, the margins in coffee are ridiculous.

People often say we're actually quite insane, restrict it down to one thing and still there'd be to determine whether that's right or wrong yet. But, yeah, did loads of coffee tasting, picked the beans. And then it was all about the production then of getting the physical space ready, the activation of how we're going to first tell the joke of Flat White or Fuck Off. And we had a location. It was at Russell Square. It was something that me and Tom acquired before.

Will and Lucia came on board. But what we realised quite quickly 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, Outtranet, which has a massive screen place in London, Tottenham Court Road.

You know, we were thinking we would get 600 people on the day. We were up in that to 1,500. So eight days out, yeah, we really up to our expectations. And it was a lot of slings. sleepless nights, getting the graphics ready for the screens. Will, I know for a fact, the production went into overdrive just before then. Yeah.

I think it was eight days out, wasn't it, Charlie? What was people's reaction? And did people come up and ask for a non-flat-white to experience everybody yelling F off? Yes. Yes, they did. A lot of people did. 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's like, no, no, there's no way you'd say that if I asked for something different. I said, well, go on, go and see. And she did. And she got her fuck off. And then she loved it so much that she then actually went and bought a flat white. She wasn't a flat white drinker. And weirdly, it's the older generation that liked this way more than everyone else. Didn't realize that until the day. But there were quite a few who asked for it. One of the standouts of me was when the police entered the space and we were like,

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

I love it. It was the biggest, it was the biggest F off of the day, I believe. The brist is behind the barrow. I really said it with their chest. Well, there are many guns over there. I don't know if you know the Wiener's circle, since we're deep into this stuff. They're behind the counter.

and whatever, you know, you come up and you order, and they just roast you, and they just abuse you to a level that is like triumphed the insult comic dog. I don't know if you guys know that Conan O'Brien skit, but I want to have a cheeseburger. Oh, wow. That's probably why we didn't. Wow.

That was probably why we didn't. I'm going to need to bleep that one out. Wow. We're a tape compact to that. I love that. Yeah, wow. Yeah. Yeah, so that's that. We can take that off the screen for now at the bleep that in post. Well, bleep it out. No, we just bleep it. It would be fine.

It was the one thing 11 Madison Park didn't serve up. Yeah. It's also worth mentioning that this is a barista's dream. They love this. All the baristas want to do is helping them to go away. That's it. That's literally it. So they dreamed about it. You must have had the dream job. You must have had the conversation that it would be interesting. funny at some point to add a skew, to add an option or not. So how do you think about somebody saying, I'm lactose intolerant?

Well, we do offer oat milk. So we do offer an alternative milk. So yeah, so 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 flatlights 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 things. Well, you're alienating an audience so much to milky coffee that it doesn't feel very fair

for people that are lactose intolerant. They can't enjoy the brand as well. You've got to have some way of flexing around those directory requirements. Now, your answer to or putting a latte on there or, you know, a black coffee, 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... So, Decaf. F off or...

F off. Oh, yeah. F off, right? It's a full F off. Even in a normal coffee shop. It's an interesting one. So, it's interesting because in the summer, maybe we have an ice flat white because it's still a flat white. We still need to discuss this.

We're working on it. Yeah. That's a very... But it was... Well, it was really interesting in... Oh, you go. Well, can't. I know you go, Tom.

So, plot. 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 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, you know, we're still making flat whites without milk.

There's still, it's still the drink. I think that's true. I think that's a category. Yeah. 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 going to take the other side of this one. I know I'm outnumbered.

People who order oat milk are generally annoying virtue signaling hippies. Some people just have trouble with, sorry, I don't know. I don't know. I get the feeling. Well, I don't care. Some people get a funny tummy. They said, this is Jason talk. Let Jason give his point.

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

Well, we do. We're not looking to be fully hated. Yeah. I mean, I would say a lot of people are disagreeing with us still about just doing one thing. I don't think we need to get that controversial. We're still getting a lot of people to this day, moaning about the fact we only do a flat white. Yeah, I feel like in time, we can go to more people, but for now.

We can always bring out of political opinions and put that on all the other than that as well to get extra controversy. Donald Trump or F off. That's what it's. Well, no. If we really want to get canceled. 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?

Yes and no. So the percentage we discovered of dairy to oats is about 60% dairy to 40% oat. So proportionally, it's about, I mean, just under half and half. So one of the ways we wanted to interrogate and test various theories is, well, firstly, you can, can't make a flat white. You can't sit there and wait and then someone picks it up five minutes later because after a couple of minutes, it's too cold. It's too dead. It's too, well, pun intended flat. The bubbles deflate. It tastes disgusting. So you kind of have to make it live, but there's an onus on speed and we have to make it fast. So once a cue starts to build and we

rationalize this whole process. Once someone appears for the queue, you know they're having a coffee because we don't do anything else. They're not asking for anything other than the coffee. Right. And you've got a 50-50 shot, basically. Yeah. Well, we start grinding the beans. We can making the coffee, you 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, as I say for easy maths, 10 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 10 have progressed through the queue, a few more have joined. So it's just a case of keeping up with the numbers. but one of the funniest things about the Brits love a Q, but also they hate there to not be a Q 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

for the first few people just to get it going. What's the optimal Q? What's the optimal Q will? I mean, it varies. So for our pop-up, 10 or 15 people, I mean, we got the service time time down, to about 15, 20 seconds of flat white.

Wow. I heard you say you got Rory's blessing, but who owns this business? What's the equity? This is America. You're an American program. We talk about these things. I know in England everything's like,

oh, well, the king owns a piece, the queen owns a piece. This prince owns a piece. And then we, you know, our 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.

Tom is your idea. I don't know, Charlie. Who owns what? Third, third and third. What does Rory own? He just gave you his blessing? Wow. Nothing.

We just gave up. We have 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. I think Rory's got a lot going on and he's always happy to give us his time in absolute abundance. Every time we meet him, it's a mini podcast in itself. We got to fix this. Here's what I want you to do.

I'm going to throw this up the flagpole. We'll see if anybody salutes. I want you to take it. take 1% 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 going to do a reverse Ray Kroc. And you're going to tell him, we're going to put this 1% into an annuity. It's going to be like, 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 1% royalty forever. And that's the royalty. And that's the royalty

royal trust. You know, like you have the Queen's trust and all this other stuff and whatever? You're just saying this is the Rory Trust. We're going to call it the Ruralty. The Ruralty. Thank you. So this is like now we've got a real. Just know that if you take any of Jason's ideas, this is what he's going to charge you. There's no free ride. There's no stop by your pop up to give you some advice. It's one percent. 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 T 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. This is a very expensive podcast appearance for these guys.

I don't care. I think it's a killer. I think it'll drive 10% more usage of the brand. You're going to have a hard time booking the show if it's 1% on the top. No, the barang goes 10% more. Yeah. Go ahead. Jason, you said you like the idea and you think it's going to work.

If you invest in us, we'll consider that. Yeah. Okay. I'll invest in this, I think. I need to know the economics of this. You know, there's a, the format, the next level of this is figuring out the overhead. Because coffee is an overhead game. 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, or it's a commuter thing. And 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 set up on the front and you would drive it and park it places. So it's 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 to add skews, right? Let's talk offline. I'll have you guys back on. I think we need to answer that question. This has been amazing. Guys, congratulations on finding employment in two of your cases. And I think this actually, I think you've- Congratulations on your investment. Yeah, absolutely. Let me know who to make it out to.

Is it Will's wife? Is it Tom's Bitcoin wallet? Where am I sending this investment? Cash in the post. Go and follow Flatwhite or F off on Instagram. Just search for it. They have an incredible Instagram. I think I could raise a syndicate for this.

I think I could put in like 100K myself. I might need to do it personally because it's outside of what I do. But I think I would put like 100K personally and then raise a million dollars for my syndicate. That's what Jacob was saying. We're going to put coffee in our core six at launch. No, definitely not. It's not that kind of business. But I agree with the syndicate.

I've got a bunch of lunatic investors who might be interested in doing this. Time for your favorite. My favorite part of the week. Off duty. Me too. It's a great way to end the week. So I do, before we get into streaming recommendations, I do have a few. I wanted to talk about it's the Oscars on Sunday, Jason.

I don't know if you knew. Oscar ceremony is coming up. I put my Oscar pick in. I saw that you. entered our Oscar full. So I just want to real quick, what do you, what do you think of the crop this year? What's your pick for best picture? Have you seen

a bunch of the Oscar movies? I haven't seen enough of them. I do think... 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. Yes, we start together. I think sinners in 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. Oh, it's great.

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 suboptimal. I have to watch it in my movie theater. You got to watch it with the good sound so you can hear the songs. I have a movie theater in the ski house. That's where I do most of my watching. I did go to the theater C. Bagonia. And I was fascinated by that film.

Very art house, very experimental. So I like that that exists. On Paul Thomas Anderson films, one battle after another would be in my bottom, like way down on the bottom of my list. Oh, I like to. 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. Sure. With nothing going on in their life, the left and the right are both idiots on this like horseshoe theory. when both extremes are retarded. 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, he's part of this revolutionary movement, but there are indications that he also just likes the ladies and he's a big part of it. He's sort of in it for himself. And when it comes down to the family, that's the divide.

Is Tiana Taylor's character Perfita 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. Right. She's an actual believer. Activism. And then you get him and it's sort of like, well, not really. He wasn't really that committee. He just like the left guy. And the other guy on the right played by Sean Penn.

Sean Penn. He's also in it to meet hot chicks. Personal. So it's about himself and his ego and he wants to be part of this elite. 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. Yeah.

Or just don't have game with girls who are trying to meet girls or try to status. Anyway, I didn't like the film for that reason. I think all that's in there, but I do think like Sensei Carlos, like Benicio Datoro's character, like he's a heroic character and he is associated with these left-wing sort of protest. He definitely is trying to actually accomplish something. Right. Not from white privilege. Exactly.

That's the dynamic between him and DeCaprio is this guy's put so much work into this. He's got this whole set up. Yeah. 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 will just have privilege. They can F around and be part of movements because they have options in life.

And if it doesn't work out, they can always go back to their next option. Yeah, it's an interesting critique. I think that's, I think I can see both sides of this argument. Anyway, it's not a great film. It's pretty good. It's really good. It's a good film. When you, you cannot put this film anywhere near the master, which is his masterpiece,

or there will be blood, which is. what other people would consider his masterpiece. It's one of those two. There will be my favorite. Okay, fine. I flip-flop between the same. What's your number three then? Is it master?

There will be blood the master and then? I mean, I think I would, yeah, I would probably go like Boogie Knights versus one battle sort of right. I like Phantom Threat a lot, too. They're all great. It's hard for me to pick. Lickish pizza is the only one that I didn't like as much as all the game. You cannot put this film anywhere near Boogie Nights.

It is a steep drop off after Boogie Nights. I don't know. The road scene is really great. Well, we can talk for all. 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 brain. So I think that they're not. Well, best actors will probably be Jesse Buckley from

Hamnet or Roseburn from if I had likes I kick you, which is great. I like that one. I need to see that one. That one looks like it's on HBO Max now. That one's on HBel Macs now. I love Roseburn. Anyway, so anyway, the Oscars to me has never been relevant, not since they. Fair enough. It used to be like, we could sit there and be like, well, dances with wolves are good fellows like these are it's i don't know it just feels like it's not about cinema i'm in the brett east and ellis yes there's a lot of politics to it as well you're you're 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 scorsesey film um that just got totally snubbed um killers of the flower moon or

no wolf of wall street 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, it makes no sense that like there's nobody likable in that. It doesn't fit any of the garbage. Anyway, I'm going to put it all aside. What do you think is going to be the two biggest winners in total Oscars?

I'm going to say one battle after the other is going to get the most Oscars and right behind its centers. Like they'll get like five or six each. I think that's probably. That is probably right. I think it's probably going to be about 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. Did you see the Frankestine movie? I've seen all 10. I've seen all the Oscar movies. What's up with the Frankestine movie? I like... It's beautiful.

It's gorgeous. It looks amazing. The sets are incredible. I like Maggie Gillenfall. Well, no, that's two different movies. Maggie Gyllenhaal did a movie called The Bride with her and Christian Bail. Oh, this 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. Now I understand why I'm so confused because I saw the whole press tour of Maggie. I did see the first 15 minutes of the Frankenstein one. Right. That's the one with Oscar Isaac is Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Allerty is the creature. That one's more like the book. The Bride is like this feminist 20th century re-immonet.

imagining that gets real freaky and it's all different. It's more like a comedy. For me to get through films now, I have to go to the movie theater. It's tough. It's tough at home. There's a lot of distractions. Too many distractions. Especially now that we've got all the devices and everything, you're constantly being

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. It's hard sometimes with the Netflix ones, but otherwise you can make it. I saw Secret Agent at the Austin Film Society. I probably want to see that one too, yeah. I mean, what else you got? One more thing I wanted to talk about of the Oscars.

Did you see this Timothy Shalame, 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... Oh, yeah, let me hear the clip. I know the clip, but I haven't seen him. Yeah, we'll pull the clip up. This is from one of those variety like actors-on-actors kinds of discussions.

I admire people and I've done it myself to go on a talk show. Hey, we've got to keep movie theaters alive. You know, we got to 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.

I mean, is 100% accurate. It's a very much. 100% accurate. And it's, 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 in saying cinema is having the same issue that new options. And cinema did it to ballet and opera and theater. That was the same complaint people made about movies. These are taking away from the ballet, taking away from the theater. Oh, it's going to kill movies. Yes. More options. And I agree.

It's such an obvious thing. And all the people who are getting mad, Doja Cat, actually, you know Doja Cat, the rapper and singer, she 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. I mean, Puccini, like I can tell you, Madam Butterfly.

The marriage of Figaro is one. Carmen is one. But, like, I'm not, none of us are experts. It's a, it's a, it doesn't mean you hate it. You just say, like, most Americans aren't super into opera. That's just true. All right. I'm going to 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. Ooh, yeah. You know, you have a nice cold cherry Coke. I love cherry flavored sodas. I'm a big fan. Now, I also stopped drinking caffeine in the afternoons.

So, and I love Coke Zero. So I get Coke Zero and I get caffeine free. But when I was in Italy, I kept seeing this brand. Tosh-Chi cherries. Amarena toshi cherries, yeah. Yes. And they come in an iconic, there's a 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.

These are not cheap. Let me tell you that. These are not Maraschino cherries. These are like cocktail cherries, right? and they're very expensive. Luxardo makes them. And then there's like Ammarina wild cherries. Ammarina is the one you sent us, yeah.

Yes. And they come in fancy about it. Anyway, I order this in bulk and I will make a little cherry soda for my girls where I will take a little sparkling water, some crushed ice. Sure. And I put some of the syrup in from this and the cherries. They love it. I'll drop it in the afternoons, caffeine-free.

whatever and put it on there, but you could also put it on vanilla ice cream. And when I was in Italy, I would order black cherry gelato. And I kept going back to the place. And they would give it to me. And then I looked and I couldn't find it in the counter. I said, oh, you have no, we have black cherry.

I'm like, where is it? She's like, well, we take this vanilla one. And then they had the giant thing of these Amarina cherries and we just put a scoop of them on top. I was like, oh, delicious. Yeah. 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. I'm going to check this out. 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 to the fourth day and the woman's, you know, like, how long you're staying? I'm like, actually, we're leaving tomorrow or whatever. She put so many cherries on top of this. Thank you for coming because I was giving me. I'm a big tipper. Yeah. She put like 20 cherries on top of it. scoop of ice cream on top of that, then more cherries.

I've made a total Sunday for me. I'm addicted to them. You'll love them. Yeah, that sounds delicious. Treat your family. Delicious. Yeah. Love it.

There was a yogurt shop in L.A. called Humphrey yogurt. I don't think it's still there. But that's what they used to do. There were no flavors. It was just plain vanilla, but then they would put the toppings in and like mix it up. And that would be how you do your flavor. So it was like butterfinger flavor, snickers, flavor, cherry flavor, all that kind of stuff. Really good.

You made me nostalgic for it. Oh, there is. Humphrey yogurt. Yeah. Okay. There is a documentary on Netflix right now that Louis Thoreau did. You know, Louis Thoreau, he's this British TV. He does interviews, but he picks like the Westboro Baptist or this group of white supremacists.

Like, he interviews fringe people and kind of brings this very mainstream sort of mindset. 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 fit a bunch of management. 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 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 who they really are 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. Of course. I mean, half of people's opinions now are based on the algorithm. And so if you want to understand. And, you know, I'm not singling anybody out, but I don't know, maybe the most extreme would be on the political side. There are a group of people who are like just all in on Trump, right? Yeah.

Like Michael Wolf. And they just are, you know, releasing content every day about Michael Wolf. Michael Wolf and Joanna Kearns from Delhi Beast are just constantly doing Trump stuff, right? And it's kind of anti. And then on the other side, you have the Candace Owens 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 OpenClaw

and we talk about Tao 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 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 in the team with doing.

He 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. Yeah. Makes sense? 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 Tiki-Toki who's on TikTok, they are purely slaves to the algorithm.

They're just doing things. They're seeing which things that they could do will get the most people to follow them on kick or rumble, to tune in when they start streaming. And like they're going to do whatever those things are. And like that that's a lot of what I think Louie 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.

Great to work with you. want as always have a great weekend everybody we'll see you next time bye bye bye bye