The Pomp Podcast - #759 Protecting Your Online Privacy w/ Brendan Eich

Episode Date: December 19, 2021

Brendan Eich is the CEO of Brave Software, A Browser that focuses on your privacy and features integration of a crypto wallet. He previously created Java Script Programming Language and was one of the Co-Founders of Mozilla Corporation. In this conversation, we discuss ads, privacy, internet revenue models, tracking, and how you can get payed to use the internet. ======================= Nasdaq-listed BTCS was the first US-public company to secure today’s top layer one protocols. Recently, BTCS launched the beta version of its digital asset analytics dashboard! From across multiple exchanges, the BTCS Data Analytics Dashboard lets you evaluate your entire portfolio’s performance with plans to add year-end reports and yield earning on your crypto through linking to staking pools. Test out the BTCS Data Analytics Dashboard today at BTCS.com.  ======================= Fundrise is largest direct-to-investor real estate investment platform out there, giving you the opportunity to achieve upside of an asset class previously reserved for institutions and high net worth individuals.  That’s right, Fundrise is making high-end private market real estate investing accessible to everyone via an easy-to-use, automated platform. See for yourself how over 190,000 investors have built a better portfolio with private real estate. It takes just a few minutes to get started with as little as $10. Go to Fundrise.com/Pomp today and, for a limited time, get $10 when you place your first investment. That’s Fundrise.com/Pomp ======================= Do you want a new job in the bitcoin and crypto industry? You should go apply for hundreds of open roles at http://www.pompcryptojobs.com or sign up for our training program at http://www.pompscryptocourse.com

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off brendan ike is the ceo of brave software they've built an amazing browser with an integrated crypto wallet and he obviously has been around on the internet for a long time being one of the creators of the javascript programming language and also co-founding the mozilla corporation during this conversation we talked about everything from ads to internet revenue models, also privacy, tracking, and how you can get paid to browse the internet. I really enjoyed this conversation with Brendan, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our

sponsors. Today's episode is sponsored by NASDAQ listed BTCS. They're the first US public company to secure many of the top layer one protocols. This quarter, BTCS just launched the beta version of a new digital asset analytics dashboard from across multiple exchanges the btcs data analytics dashboard lets you evaluate your entire portfolio's performance with plans to enable year-end reports and yield earning on your crypto by linking to btcs staking pools this groundbreaking dashboard is currently in beta mode you can test out the btcs data analytics dashboard now by visiting btcs.com. Again, head over to btcs.com today to check out that brand new data analytics dashboard. I think you'll like what you get there, btcs.com. Next up are my friends over at Fundrise. You all

know I believe that the best investors both understand and seek out extreme asymmetry. And Fundrise has a goal of helping you do just that. It's the largest direct-to-investor Real estate investment platform out there giving you the opportunity to achieve upside of an asset class previously reserved for institutions and high net worth individuals. That's right. Fundrise is making high end private market real estate investing accessible to everyone via an easy to use automated platform. They have over 1 million users already that know that an investment with Fundrise is capable of producing strong appreciation returns and income generation while helping to stabilize a diversified portfolio, which is now more important than ever in our

inflationary environment. So you can go see for yourself how over 190,000 investors have built a better portfolio with private real estate. It takes just a few minutes to get started with as little as $10. Go to fundrise.com slash pomp today, fundrise.com slash pomp today. And for a limited time, get $10 when you place your first investment. That's fundrise.com slash pomp. Last but not least, Are you looking for a job in the crypto industry? Are you trying to figure out how do you leave legacy technology or finance, but you don't feel like you understand crypto well enough?

Well, boy, do I have a solution for you. I have created a brand new training program. We've been running it all year. We've done almost 10 cohorts. We've helped a lot of people get a job. It's a three-week intensive program. You come in and we do 50 plus events over that three-week period.

There's everything from study groups, discussions, breakouts, deep dives, technical education, and also curriculum that I teach personally. If you want to get educated on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in the crypto industry, I highly suggest you go to pompscryptocourse.com. Pompscryptocourse.com. You go there. We created the curriculum in hand with many of the leading companies, HR teams within the industry, and we to help people get jobs at everyone from BlockFi, Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, Strike, Bitcoin Inc., and many, many others. Head over to pompscryptocourse.com, sign up today, and I'll see you in the next cohort starting in January. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All

views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brendan, how are you? Good, thanks. I want to start with a couple of things. You and I have talked previously. And one of the things that for this audience, I don't think that they probably are very well aware of is you, as you went through the early days of the internet, there's a lot of similarities and a lot of differences to what we're seeing right now. And so maybe walk us

through what are the similarities you see between the early days of the internet and kind of the proliferation of that the adoption from consumers and then what i'll just call the crypto industry today are there specific things that jump out to you as like yep this is just the playbook all over again some things are similar like the early internet um was really just text and it was academic and researchers and then used that uh which was a news group system and then with Netscape, we did a commercial version of a browser that you could trust to send your credit cards over the wire with. And that took off and took over from the sort of academic front-runner mosaic. And one of the things that's similar is that you have early adopters who are actually

programmers. So, they're giving you ideas. Sometimes they're giving you code if you do open source, or they're doing hacks on their servers that then generate new ideas that you put into the client so even before netscape the image element was added to html before 1993 you couldn't do an image you had to have some kind of crazy plugin and all those early plugins died you remember flash this was way before flash and then in in 1995 i did javascript so we had images in javascript and you could do simple things with animations in the bottom of the browser or in texts or text inputs but it was still pretty limited so in 1996 we added the ability to replace images but all this stuff was fed by the early lead users who were themselves

developers and i see similarities with web3 where you have this sort of back and forth between users of a project and core team or contributors to the project sometimes they overlap sometimes there's just fast flow of innovative ideas because anybody can have a good idea and that is critical if you just pretend you can grand plan this all like you're doing the ibm you know um 360 mainframe it's not going to work. Yeah. By the way, that was such a flex. Like, yeah, I helped bring images to the internet. I appreciate that. We, we, we all like memes and images here. So your, your, uh, your work is, uh, very, very fast. Yeah. Mark Andreas and, and, uh, Eric Bina did images in 1993, but I did the JavaScript that lets you flip them around, change them. Oh,

even better. All right. What are the, what are the big differences that you see between the early days of the internet and today? So early internet was still, uh, kind of a big company game after Netscape kicked it off in the web I would call the web one era and you so you had uh Microsoft come after Netscape that's a story I've told before you had the big server-side powers that rose in the late 90s like uh Amazon was mid-90s when it started and PayPal was was coming up right around the millennium end and uh you know Google was actually there in 1998 I remember seeing them above Palo Alto bicycles in downtown Palo Alto and I wonder what those childish letters and colors we're all about. And, you know, around 98 or 99, we were all using Google and we realized it was

going to totally kill all the other search engines like AltaVista. So, you know, you see now people talk about big crypto powers like Coinbase, Binance, you know, FTX and others. I think that's just the current guard and the guard will change. You'll have new powers rise. And one of the things we're very interested in at Brave is self-custody because it sounds like it's too scary for most people. I can talk about why that's probably not the case anymore. But back then, when these network powers rose, like PayPal or Google, eventually, people were learning how to log into a website. They could learn to log into their bank in the mid to late 90s. And they'd recover their password if they forgot it. They'd use the same password all over the web, which was

a security disaster. But 25 years later, we finally got sort of a handle on this with Apple and others generating email address per site for you to log into so you don't get this sort of honeypot problem with one email address and one password used all over. You have password managers built into the operating system like Keychain, again, Apple has, or others. Or you have one password, which I use. So we finally, it took 25 years,

we finally got people learning how to sort of semi-securely log in. And there's still a lot of people that are just popped through reusing a password or spilling the password or there's a server-side breach. But I think what we're doing with crypto is going to move toward a more secure model, and it may not be that much harder. It may actually be better for people. Yeah. So talk to me about the Brave browser.

Let's start there. I know you guys – we're going to talk about the wallet and a bunch of other stuff. But the browser itself, there's a ton of browsers, right? People have used everything from Safari to Chrome to whatever other one they want to use there. Why build a brand new one? What's the importance of the browser as you thought about kind of entering into this new world? Right. So the browser is kind of an immortal category of app, and people spend more time on it the bigger the screen.

When the iPhone first came out, the app model was the web. Jobs held it up and said the web finally works, and the only apps were web apps. And then eight or ten months later, they added native apps because they needed to port a bunch of games that were written in C++ or whatever. So, you know, we then had this sort of ongoing tension between native apps and the web. But the bigger the screen, just as a matter of observation, the more I see people using the browser and not using apps. And I see lots of Gen Z kids uninstalling apps, rightly so. A lot of apps are full of trackers. So the browser is this longtime category winner in apps, and it's a place where you spend a lot of your digital life if you have a big enough screen and you have the right affordances.

Like maybe you need a keyboard if you're doing a lot of intensive typing. so uh we thought this is the right tip of the sphere to create a new model that's not about just the browser it's about the whole web we're trying to turn at brave we're trying to turn the whole server-centric model that google and others profited from upside down and make it user-centric and the only way to do that the real leverage the user has is their apps and data on their devices in their private cloud, whether it's iCloud or Dropbox. And there are always trade-offs on security. I'm not going to get into whether your cloud's truly private

or Apple can get at it. It's more about if you don't protect your data where it originates in your browser, you're lost. You're just going to be like a sheep being shorn of its wool. You're going to be measured and arbitrage bought and sold. And so that's why you've seen the rise of not only ad blocking but tracking protection, which effectively blocks a lot of ads. You've seen browsers since Brave pioneered it and UC Web before us in Asia build in tracking protection that's on by default.

This is new in the last six years or so. Since Brave started, we were the leader in the West, and others offered it as an option like Opera. But now it's on by default in Brave, Safari. They have their own version of it. Firefox, even Edge has some sort of medium-strength tracking protection. And this is a big deal because the whole funding mechanism for publishers that's based on advertising and analytics requires tracking. It didn't have to, but that's the way it happened. So we're out to cut that off to give users their data protected on their device so that they can have maximum economic advantage. If you do that with a browser, you get more data protected because that's where people spend a lot of their time. And then you can start building a platform from that browser that's user-first.

It's client-centric or it's in private cloud or edge or it's on blockchain. So we're building a system that fights against the server superpowers like Google. Got it. And now when you think about the impact of this, right, we obviously saw Apple, for example, with some of the privacy enhancements they recently did. I know lots of companies that basically just throw their hands up and they're like, dude, you know, Facebook ads now are triple the price or whatever. So there's obviously kind of second and third order effects of some of these decisions. What are the positive and the negative impacts when somebody uses the Brave browser to other kind of marketplace participants, if you will, on the internet? So whether it's the Facebooks of the world, advertisers, et cetera.

Right. So we have a sort of principle about not blocking an ad that we call a first party ad. This is sort of semi-standard term in the industry. Suppose you have like a sponsorship image for a wildlife preservation fund. And it's just sitting there. And if you click on it, you go to a separate page where you can donate. There's nothing wrong with that ad. Some people might say, I hate ads, so I hate that. That's a little extreme for us.

We say that's a first-party ad. There's no tracking. If there is tracking, we shield you against that separately. We block all that tracking anyway. So we don't try to block those first-party ads. But if you go to major media sites, you get just swarms of ads and clutter and stuff that flies over. That is so-called third party. It's almost all done through partners or vendors, and there's hundreds of them on sites.

And sometimes the publisher doesn't know who they are because they load each other opportunistically, and they trap you, and they take your data profile out for their own purposes, their own profit, and they don't necessarily pay the publisher well. Sometimes they actually facilitate fraud where a fake publisher pretends to be that publisher and steals the ad revenue. Unbelievable, but it's a huge business. It's estimated maybe 20% of all online ads go to fraudsters, the payment from the buyer of the ad, which is the brand that's trying to sell you something. So we block the tracking. We block the third-party junk. We block YouTube pre-roll ads. So there's a great benefit to users.

Now, you would say, oh, the publisher's getting hit by that because whatever isn't taken by the intermediaries, the 30% or less sometimes that gets left in the pie for the publisher, the crumbs that get left in the pie tin for the publisher, get denied by Brave Shields. Well, that's true. That's true of people using good, rigorous extensions like uBlock Origin. It's true even with some of the ad block extensions that say they block ads but actually have a whitelist for payola scheme where they let Google and other ads through. And they let trackers through so those ads perform. So blocking ads has been around for a long time. It's within the user's right. And what we want to do at Brave is find a cleaner way to reconnect fans to creators, subscribers or readers to publishers so that there's not this 70% take from the middle of the pie.

we want to have a lower take 30 15 we want to deal the user into the ad revenue and we want to let the user support the sites and creators they love yeah and then talk to me about the brave wallet this whole idea of like an integrated wallet where i actually can hold my own assets etc because i think what's fascinating about what you're doing is you're essentially recreating many key components of what most people think of as their internet experience so the browser and you're then saying, hey, don't change your consumer behavior at all, right? You just keep doing what you're doing

and we're going to basically protect you. We're going to give you added privacy. We're going to give you this wallet that's integrated. So explain the wallet and how that works. Yes. So when you go to your bank, you have to sign in and they check you out and maybe they throw a captcha at you.

They text you a temporary access number you have to type in. There's a lot of security issues there. With the wallet in Brave, we're starting from self-custody. That's the model where you have the private key expressed as a passphrase or a word list and backup. Ideally, you have hardware wallet private key widget like a Ledger wallet or a Trezor or something like that. And you can plug that in and it keeps the private key on that secure piece of hardware. And it uses a cryptographic protocol across the USB connection to your laptop.

And you can just keep your private key safe. You own the key, so you own the coin. There's no intermediary. There's no bank. There's no Coinbase or Binance holding the custody of your crypto assets. That's a good model for users who can manage that key. And we're trying to make it easier for everyone to do it. But if you buy into that model, a lot of things become possible without intermediaries.

If you can find a merchant online that will take crypto, and a lot of them are starting to do it, or there'll be a way to do it through the credit card interchange charge, which I won't get into too much. we can start matchmaking you with all these merchants and publishers and you can support them there are uh projects like my friend julian's unlock protocol that use an nft model for membership it's like being a member of a club or a subscriber to an online publication once you have that nft which you could sell if you want to a friend you can then get benefits you can get pay a uh into subscriptions you can also get rewards out so we're looking at very direct

ways to connect publishers and readers or subscribers to connect fans and creators. And the wallet is essential there. If you had to go through an intermediary every time, you know, you go through the process that we've built. It requires a custodial partner like Uphold or Gemini. This is the Brave reward system. And it has friction. It has people who don't like it. They're like, why should I have an intermediary? Why should I sign up? Well, unfortunately, the laws require this still we've gotten to over 1.3 million creators verified all in on this system and that's a big number and a lot of them are youtubers so we're helping people on different platforms who have been demonetized or underpaid or just kind of not given their fair share to have

a direct way for their fans to send to them and with the wallet that can be super direct that can be you're only paying the fee on the network maybe you want to get off the l1 that has high fees you can find a better l1 so we're also going multi-chain on the wallet we're we're kind of pragmatic about it we're going to add a bunch of chains and we're letting you send on l2s that look like ethereum we're adding bitcoin we're adding solana that the idea of the wallet in the browser is suddenly the user becomes the bank in some ways the user of the browser can choose directly to support somebody they don't have to go through intermediaries you don't have to go through this high friction you know uh path that has a fee often has other problems with it like

possible censorship has um lack of support around the world or with people you want to connect to who just don't have that you know custodial relationship they're not going to sign up with uphold but you want to support them as a creator and they'll take crypto with the brave wallet you can just send to their address yeah it's absolutely fascinating when you start to think about uh having the wallet right there almost using it as a sign-on using it as a bank like there's so many different components to this and you have it integrated right into the browser which in my opinion maybe you disagree is that's really what the metamask and other of the world are trying to do with the browser plugins right they're trying to get as much integration as possible but obviously

having the native uh build out uh provides some advantages there uh you mentioned that you guys have a bunch of partnerships i know you just announced a brand new one uh how do you think about partnerships what are those partnerships entail as well so when you have a browser you have this problem that you can't make everybody uh you want to partner with appear in the user interface it would look like one of those you know crazy calculators with 100 buttons on it so you have to give a priority to a default choice sometimes so that happens with search engines and browsers notorious example uh is like safari has a default search deal with google and they make a lot of money off this uh i'm told that google doesn't particularly like paying them

a share of their revenue but they do it because otherwise you know safari apple might do its own might do a deal with Bing. With crypto, you have multi-chain dApps and the rise of multi-chain DeFi. And so the opportunity to pick a default network presents itself because not all these dApps are going to say, if I work on Ethereum and Solana and EBM compatibles, I want to always use Polygon or I want to always use Solana. They may just leave it open and do some kind of detection to see what's supported. So in Brave, we will say, okay, you're open to different networks. we're going to make Solana the default if you support it because the fees are so low and it's faster. That's a choice we just announced in Lisbon in early November. And that's something

we can do with other places where you have to pick a default to avoid bugging the user all the time to say, would you like this? Would you like that? Would you like the other? Everybody wants to go up to a browser and type some keywords into the address bar and get search results. So there's a default search opportunity. Same thing comes up with multi-chain dApps. And we're going to do more things like that with e-commerce. When I talk about using the wallet for buying stuff and not just for supporting creators, that means we want to integrate with a lot of merchants around the web. We don't want them to all have to put their stuff on Amazon and suffer what happens there where they get sort of undermined by cheap lookalikes and so on. They should have their

website be the place you go to. But then the problem is, do you want to give me your credit card. And this is where a similar system to the email address generation I mentioned early on for sign-ins happens. You can get a credit card number per site from certain systems. I think the privacy.com credit card does this. We can do this if we play our cards right with crypto in the interchange for credit cards. We can generate from a block of MasterCard numbers a unique number for that site so you don't get owned if that number breaches. And if we can get a partner to help us, we can actually let you pay with crypto and it'll settle through the interchange. So we're trying to sound ambitious. We're trying to take down Amazon, too. We're trying to undermine all

these network powers that grab too much of your data and control over you. You should have that data in your browser. You should have direct connections to not only publishers and creators you love, but merchants you want to buy stuff from. And if you do that right, you know, there's still there's still the interchange drives. The banks are hard to get rid of in life. But if you do it right, you can pay with crypto, you can pay directly, you can have the flexibility you want without having to go through all these signup processes and trust your credit card around the web. So there's a lot of people who don't know how to do this, but obviously if you use the Brave browser, you can get paid to actually browse the internet or use the internet. How

exactly do you get paid to use the internet? Right. This is the system we call Brave Rewards and the basic attention token is part of it. We prototyped it in Bitcoin in 2016 and it was a user-funded system at that point. We couldn't pay the user. What we created with basic attention token has a private ad system you opt into. It's not on by default, even though it does all the ad matching in the browser. So there's no data collection by us. We're not trying to be a mini Google. There's no point. We don't have the scale. We look like we were talking out of both sides of our mouth. We let you opt into a private system that matches against the shared catalog everybody in a region gets of the current ads, just the links to their creatives on edge caches

and keywords about those ads and the machine learning in the browser you turn on when you opt into brave rewards picks the best ad you get to adjust the frequency you can go into ad settings look at your 30-day ad history and give thumbs down on ads you didn't like you can give thumbs up on ads you do like if you get an ad it looks like a little notification a little bit of toast and we're playing around with different ways to do this some are os some are in-app if you like the call to action it's a little bit of text like a search ad that's disembodied from any search engine click on it you get a full tab landing page just like in a search ad and that gives the ad buyer a big canvas to paint on and there you can have a direct relationship with the

brand that's advertising so again we're trying to directly connect users to not only creators publishers merchants but advertisers get rid of the intermediaries accept your browser which is always in the picture and we do this privately there's a private ad matching i mentioned there's a confirmation protocol which we're moving on chain with solana that uses zero knowledge proofs uh blind signature cryptography so you don't identify yourself there's no link we can see that fingerprints you we don't have any profile on our on our server side we don't have any personal data in gdpr terms to purge if you send us a erasure request there's nothing for us to do we can prove that there's no data on you uh so this is this is a powerful uh innovation

in the sense that people thought advertising meant tracking and tracking created all this The problem with intermediaries taking 70% and stealing your data for other purposes, doing ad fraud or even malware distribution led to the rise of the Pareto Power winners. Google is in antitrust court now, and they're in antitrust court in a way that looks bad because they're talking to other big companies about how they can lock down markets and fix prices. Allegedly, Facebook and Microsoft in particular hold back privacy. Even Apple is in antitrust trouble. We want a system that is more fair to the user and the creator or the merchant that doesn't have this network problem where all the data gets sucked into a server, and then that server becomes the winner and takes all. So we're trying to build the system in stages, and that meant we wanted to go from the early prototype we did in Bitcoin to a system where if the user chooses private ads, they get paid. They get 70% of the revenue, and that is the cut the app store pays the app publisher.

maybe 85 now on a good day. If you're lucky with Apple, you're a small publisher, you've been around a while, they like you. So we're trying to give that kind of old school 70% or better deal to the user who gets these ads, because it's your attention that the ads take up. It's your inventory, the space where the notification is, or the new tab that opens if you click on it. So you should get paid in principle, we think, and you should get paid at least as much as we make. And if you're the owner of that space, you should get 70%. That's the industry standard, thanks to the app store. So, and we can only go up from there.

We could go to 85% if we get big enough. That's the Brave Ads model inside Brave Rewards. And some people don't want ads anyway. They say, I want to give back. I want to tip and donate. I want to set up monthly Patreon contributions, but I just don't want any ads, even your private ads. That's fine too.

You can turn on Brave Rewards, turn off the ads, put your own crypto in. Unfortunately, for legal reasons, this requires a custodial partner of ours. And you can start giving of your own largesse, of your own wealth. But some people do both. They take the private ad revenue and they also supplement with their own funds and they give back. Others just take the private ad revenue, let it go back or tip it, but also accumulate and hodl the basic attention token. And that's part of this triangular flow. That's why we have this equilateral triangle logo. We're trying to connect users, advertisers and publishers as directly as possible. So that's why we have that triangle as our logo. And people have opted into it to a scale that is, you know, because it's opt-in, not everyone's going to do it. We have like 46 million users heading toward maybe touching 50 in January. We're getting like 20%, between 16 and 20% of people opting into this, even though we don't force it on you, we don't promote it.

But it's a system that allows people to get paid for looking at ads without losing privacy. And that's the big innovation. And I think that feeds into browser competition and web standards evolution. So you're starting to see Google say, we're doing a privacy sandbox. We're doing, you know, Turtle Dove or all these other bird themes, bird named projects. They're starting to, like, say, we're going to make everything private. Trust us. We're Google.

Not going to be a standard. Not going to be an instant standard. They can put it in Chrome and try to get publishers to use it through their market power. It's a bad look while you're in an NFL sport, but if they want to, they can do that. It's just not going to make Apple do the same. Apple is never going to do that stuff. So what's going to happen instead is we'll get competition, including from Brave, we'll get bottom-up standards for things like the zero-knowledge proof or blind signature, ad confirmation or click-and-view confirmation protocol. Pieces of the system can be standardized.

And this moves the state of play on the web toward privacy, toward more direct relationships. And it's good for us because what we build is we blaze the trail and we get loyal users who like the deal we make. And we're out in front with those users. We keep those users and grow from there. We're not trying to take over the web. If we ever got 90% of the web, I would demand a recount. Joe John, what questions you guys got? Hey, Brendan, thanks for doing this.

I appreciate you coming on. Actually, you sold me. I just downloaded brave while we were talking here. That's good. Your pitch is working. Uh, my question would just be like, when you're building this, what was the hardest thing you encountered or the most difficult thing you went through to do it? So I would say, uh, we had to go through some real pain learning how to make a browser that competed with Chrome. We thought we could do it with just the engine from Chrome. And we actually started with Mozilla's engine because we knew that better, but it just wasn't able to do the things we needed. Like you need

to watch the Netflix movies that need DRM, and those require a black box module to do HTML5 video DRM. So that was something Google made free as in beer, and it's part of what you can get if you're starting when we did, and you get big enough and keep your nose clean, and you operate pretty much like Chrome does. So we ended up moving from our original browser, which was not as Chrome-like, it had its own front end, toward a fork of Chrome. And learning to keep up with Chrome on the security fixes, investing in that, that's hard. And that took more than a 10 person team we started with. So we had to grow into that and it cost us, I think a little bit, but we learned and a lot of other browser companies that build on Chrome, you know, have learned the same

way. Some of them have done their own version of a front end, like Vivaldi browser. My hat is off to them because it's hard work. Google does not make it easy. We taught Google at Mozilla how to do open source and they forked WebKit, which was Apple's fork of an old open source project called khtml and when you look at the lineage here they're all shared open source projects but each new super company just kind of takes it over all the engineers who work for that company sort of live in that code and if you're an outsider you're downstream like we are you're kind of second class and you're you're going to have to keep up you're going to scramble you have to be careful where you make your surgical changes one of the things we had to do right away with the

chromium engine which people worry about still on reddit is turn off all the tracking that's baked into it because Google engineers lived in it. They started putting in all sorts of tracking based on your Google account. I don't know if you know this, but in Chrome, when you log into the browser in 2016, there was a little knob in the corner to do this. It was convenient because then you'd go to a new tab and you'd load YouTube. And because you already had logged into the browser and it knew your Gmail ID, you'd log into YouTube. But in 2018, they said, ah, people aren't doing that enough. We're just going to do that for you. Whenever you log in any tab into a Google account, we're just going to log you in across the browser and they'd already changed their privacy policy

so let's let them take web navigation and use it for ad targeting chrome is a tracker it's it's actually on by default if you go into your google account settings you can turn it off and this is still not as widely known as it should be but as people learned this they all said oh i'm turning that off or i'm dumping chrome and it's led to you know lawsuits there have been not just antitrust but civil suits uh about how incognito windows and chrome still track you uh and these have been successfully waged against google so we had to find in the open source chromium called all the places that did this weird signaling and tracking of you and we found where they go through choke points and we just cut them off and turned them off or nullified them and that was a

piece of work too and we have a github page that talks about it but i would say to pull out from the engineering level the hardest thing with the browser is you want to really pop with your users There's, like you said, there are other browsers. Why would you use Brave? If you block tracking and fingerprinting as aggressively as we do, protect privacy, you start getting real wins on page load speed and on things related to cutting off of the network activity from all those tracking scripts. That saves you battery on mobile. It saves you data plan on mobile. Whether you're paying or not, there's still costs. So cutting all that stuff off really saves a lot of time and power. The radio is the number one or two consumer, depending on what you're doing and how bright your screen is on your mobile device. So the Brave Shields aren't just protecting your privacy. They're saving you battery life and they're saving you data plan. And this is something we show on the new tab page.

We give you some estimates of the savings. So people who use Brave start putting screenshots on Twitter of, you know, a million trackers blocked and, you know, two hours saved all in on page load. Or, you know, sometimes we do bandwidth estimates in certain areas on savings. And that's a real win. That's something you can market to users. When we went to Mobile World Congress in 2019, we ran into a company called Green Spectre from the UK, and they independently measured Brave and other browsers. And we won. We were the most battery efficient.

we were the most green browser because we block all this tracking junk. It's just unbelievable how much JavaScript flies around to target and measure you before the ads even show up, then deliver the ads, then confirm the ad impressions and cheat on them and stack cookies and do all sorts of other nonsense that cutting that Hydra head off and burning the stump like Hercules did keeps a whole bunch of stuff from blooming from it that just sucks your battery and sucks your network. John, what do you got? Brennan, thank you for doing this.

nice to meet you you are just you're an internet og you love it um so my question is what do you think around privacy within like a decentralized social media platform we touched on a little bit of this earlier but could you expand on your thoughts around that yeah i've talked about this a little bit with lex fridman and it's it's a big topic because when we did uh you know javascript and the web one stuff in the 90s or when web 2.0 happened in the mid 90s let's say with google maps people realized the browser was back thanks to firefox and safari and opera we did html5 there was you know myspace or friendster and facebook was suddenly coming up and taking over from them but we didn't quite have a model for social everybody logged into different sites and

if you all your friends went from you know friendster to myspace you just jumped with them um the problem is i think the big social platforms now have so much uh you know user data they have so many of your friends there that it's hard to leave them. And yet they're also wide open. So they're subject to, you know, abusive behavior and I would say psychological warfare, right? There's even a group in the UK government that does this. And they even sometimes say, well, maybe we shouldn't have been so, you know, we shouldn't have done so much behavioral modification on our citizens. So I think these platforms are actually dangerous and I'm not a fan of them. I use them and, you know, Reddit, I use less, I use Twitter more and it's good for

customer support, and developer relations, but these are all tricky to use. When you talk about them, you're talking about central social networks because it's hard to decentralize. Now, there are the Fediverse, the Mastodons, and similars that are open-source projects where you can make different instances and you can run your clubhouse and somebody can run their Mastodon differently, and then you can kind of link between them so that messages pop up with some extra friction. That's gone to a certain level of adoption, but it's kind of techie.

It's a little hard to use for the average person. And again, if all your friends are on Twitter, you're just going to get pulled into Twitter. If you want to see all the celebrities that are there, you're just going to get pulled into it. So what I said to Lex and what I'd like to do in Brave, we haven't built yet, is something that's more like using the browser superpower, using the user-first approach of starting where your data originates. And that means you own your own friend links.

You own your own posts because they're not that big. Even if you have videos and images attached, that's like your photo library. You can upload that to your Dropbox or your iCloud. You can just sort of stream it as you post. And then you'll never lose your posts if you get suspended. You'll never have to worry about switching to a different network and having to redo those posts because a lot of them are interesting sort of knowledge bases that I search. And other people keep it as a sort of self-database to search, an instrumented self-database. So if we built that kind of power into Brave, you would own your posts.

You would own your direct friend links. And then you could use like your private address book on your device to match your friends across different networks. You could even conceivably overlay different networks in a user interface that kind of shows you messages on two networks appearing into a thread for you or a thread for you and your friends. I know somebody who built a prototype of this called Private Party, Mark Nadal. this actually encrypts your exchange with your friends against the host of the user content platform like twitter so they can't see your post they'll think they're full of ciphertext it's it's it needs some work but there's something to it if we use these platforms this way well they might shut us down they might say oh you're you're just using encrypted messages

on our platform that's against our terms but if you do it in a way that maybe doesn't encrypt the text but allows you to own your relationships and track people across networks then you have the ability to not only just use the particular network's features to protect yourself, to mute and block if you have to, or report abuse. You can follow people to better networks more easily. You don't get this all or nothing problem. I'm going to leave Twitter. Now I lose everything. I lose all my posts. I have to find my friends all over again. And there's only three of them instead of 300 on this new platform I'm switching to. So I think the browser can help you. I think what's happened again with the social platforms is the same centralization the same hoovering up

of data unfairly because it's your data it's not twitter's right you make the posts you assert your friend relationships so you or your follower relationships you should have first say and how those get used but unfortunately they get sucked into the database on twitter and then they can be killed they can be censored they can be abused um they can be used to target you Brendan, when you think about this, before we finish up, what's your 30-second pitch to somebody as to why they should use the Brave browser? You meet somebody on the street. They say, hey, what do you do? You say, we're building Brave.

What's your pitch as to why they should go download it? If they're just using Chrome, I say, we're like a faster Chrome, no tracking. Get rid of that Google tracking. Block all those tracking scripts and ads. Faster, saves your battery, uses less data. If it starts to get more technical, I say, join us. This is the revolution. This is where users fight back, not just on the web, but in finance, in crypto, in self-sovereign identity.

You want a platform that puts you first. That means we deal you in first on the revenue. If you opt into the private ad system, it means that you can directly connect with fans from fan to creator to publisher to merchant. You can do things in the browser advertiser if you want. You can do things on your own without having to ask permission or to get blocked or censored or abused. You can avoid being held upside down and shake until the money falls out of your pockets. So, brave is really an assertion of user sovereignty. And for users who understand that phrase or the kind of things I just mentioned, that's a good pitch. Other browsers

are slow or they're captured by search partners. I hate to say it, but they get captured by the big revenue share deal from the big search engine and the biggest one's google and at that point they kind of stop innovating and they just become a passive runtime for ads and that's not what the browser should be that's a pretty damn good pitch man where can people find you on the internet or find brave so brave.com and we have uh basic attention token over if you're interested in that we have a lot of twitter accounts named the same thing like uh at brave at attention token i'm at Brendan Eich, and same name, I'm BrendanEichBrave on Reddit, I believe.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I think people really enjoy listening to you, and obviously lots of people are very excited about what you're building, so keep it up, and we'll have to bring you back as you guys make more progress. Thanks. Thanks, Brendan. My pleasure.