The Wolf Of All Streets - Brave Browser Will Beat Google By Paying for Your Attention | Brendan Eich, Brave

Episode Date: August 14, 2022

Can anyone take on internet giants like Google and Facebook? If anyone can, it’s Brendan Eich. Brendan is an internet legend, the brains behind Netscape and Firefox, the inventor of Javascript, and former CEO of Mozilla. Now, he’s taking on the monster he helped create. He’s the CEO of Brave - a browser that pays users in crypto (via the Basic Attention Token, BAT). Brave is flipping the model that made Google rich by giving users back power, privacy, and paying them for their time and attention. This is a can’t-miss interview for anyone interested in privacy or the future of Web3. JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER 📩 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen EPISODE LINKS Brendan’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich Brave Browser: https://brave.com/ Production & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/ FOLLOW SCOTT MELKER • Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets • Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io • Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe • Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3FASB2c SHOW NOTES 00:15 Brendan Eich Intro 00:38 Privacy Concerns with Browsers 01:08 What Makes Brave Different 03:07 When Brendan Became Concerned About Privacy 07:16 How Scared Should We Be? 08:40 How To Protect Yourself 10:00 Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT) 13:20 How to Beat Google 16:05 What’s Next for Brave and Web3 18:40 Metaverse 21:20 When Will People Care About Privacy? 23:00 Technological Privacy Solutions

I'm going to be honest. This is one of the most terrifying conversations that I've ever had on a podcast because Brendan Eich, the founder of Brave, told me about how many ways back, forth, and sideways that our privacy is being violated and why we need to take control of our identities and take control of our money. This is the guy who invented JavaScript

and now Brave Browser. So I suggest you listen. So what are the biggest problems that exist right now with the browsers that are the most popular? So the most popular browser is Chrome. It's owned by Google, which is a tracking and ads business. So Chrome actually tracks you. When you log into Gmail or YouTube, you're logged in across the entire browser. All your navigation is used for ad targeting. This is in their fine print, and you can turn it off in your Google account, but most people don't know. So most browsers are participating in this tracking economy one way or another. Brave led

the charge to block tracking by default. So we're putting privacy first, we're putting users first, and then we're building in crypto options so you can actually get a piece of the action instead of just giving it away for free. You're obviously a technologist and have been building for a very long time. What attracted you to the crypto side of it? So once we realized with Brave, and this was early on thinking about it, really pre-founding, that we're blocking all this tracking, and the tracking is how the ads are targeted and confirmed to have been viewed, we're cutting out a lot of the economics that trickles down to the publishers.

They get like 30%, and a lot of the intermediaries take 70%. But whatever it is, there's some money that's getting killed by blocking tracking. So we wanted to allow users to directly fund their favorite websites or fans to fund their creators on YouTube. And the direct way to do that, you're not going to do it with credit cards or they're not going to be on Patreon. The best way to do it that's decentralized and web3 is to use crypto. So you talked about the problem with Google. Nobody seems to understand that and

take the time. I think people rail about privacy, but don't actually do anything about it. It's changed. In 2010, I think Mark Zuckerberg said privacy doesn't matter. And then in 2020, he said Facebook keeps you private. He kind of changed the word. So there's been a rising consciousness of the problem. And people have been adopting ad blockers before Brave started. And then we built all that stuff in and made it work. And now people are really aware. Apple's also marketing to it. You see DuckDuckGo and others. So I think this consciousness keeps rising. It doesn't go back. People don't forget. Yeah. And I think obviously we're in

crypto and we see that with our money, which is why people are so obviously passionate about Bitcoin and fear the central bank digital currency. As they should after what happened in Canada and other places. You just every day you learn more and more why you need to think about controlling your own coin, controlling your own data so you aren't trapped. It goes together. At what point did you become so passionate about privacy, censorship resistance, I guess we can call it? Yeah. I created JavaScript in 1995. The cookie was the year before the first Netscape release in 94.

Images, which play a part in tracking, or did in 93. So we all did this in the 90s to make things more useful. We wanted the web to have pictures. We wanted to have websites remember you when you log in, so you don't have to log in every page. That was cookies. But we didn't realize that this could be combined with embedded elements from tracking sites to track you. And it's built this entire surveillance economy that is really unfair to a lot of players. Publishers, I mentioned, get underpaid. Users get turned upside down and looted. And sometimes they get malware targeting them through this ad system too.

So I realized having done JavaScript that I'd created a sort of Frankenstein's monster. And so like Dr. Frankenstein, I had to go kill it or rein it in. And that's what Brave does by default. Before that, like at Firefox, we talked about blocking cookies. Only Safari among the big browsers did it. I think from the beginning. I think Steve Jobs wanted to do something about privacy. He also did private windows in Safari 1.0. Firefox was late to that party.

But with Brave, we wanted to do it from the ground up, do it right, and make it part of our automation. So it keeps working. Are there challenges that come with that being a part of the automation with speed or with certain sites not even being accessible? What are the challenges you have to overcome? Yes, we get a huge speed up in battery savings from blocking all the scripts. Like I created JavaScript, you should block a lot of it because it just chews up your CPU, it runs over the network, so it chews up your battery running the radio on your

phone. So it's a big win to block it. But once you block it, some sites may have a mistake where they think because you blocked Google Analytics, they can't function at all. And that's not true, but it's just an accident. So we have to be careful. We have to develop a machine learning practice trained by humans to automatically correct these problems. And that's what we've done at Brave. And that's a big part of the research team's work. So how does that work at scale? Let's say that you replace Chrome completely with Brave and every user on Chrome is now, you know, using Brave exclusively.

Yeah. So I'd love to see us get to that point. I demand a recount. But if we ever got there, we'd probably have other browsers like Safari next to us. And we'd force web standards to change so that instead of just this sort of passive blind runtime that helps ad tech track you, the browser became something more active. It could tell whether a cookie was needed for a login credentials. You didn't have to log in at every page on your bank versus when it was coming from a third party to track you. We wouldn't even be

using cookies as such. So we'd have better syntax and a grammar for expressing privacy. And that should be in the web standards. And the way to get it there is by building great products people love, paying the user so you put them first and align your interests, and getting other browsers to see the light and join you. And as that march continues, the web evolves and the standards move in the direction of privacy by default. It's interesting that you say getting other browsers to join. This isn't a one-man-eat-all. Right. You're actually looking to improve the standard across the board

and admitting that it's going to be a multi-browser. Yeah, I'll take the market if I can, but I'm not going to see that happen instantly. And I think it's better to try to get all the browsers moving, and it's happened. Like I said, Firefox was late to the tracking protection party. Even Microsoft Edge does a little bit, but it's pretty weak sauce.

Google is starting to talk about privacy sandboxes. This is the Fox guarding the henhouse. I mean, right, so they're the biggest player and have the most to lose. Yes. So they're never going to adapt to that. What they're doing instead is sort of building a kind of privacy sandbox where they're inside the sandbox,

but you can trust them because they're Google. I don't think it'll ever be standardized. Apple would never accept it, for one. Right, so in theory, they're inside the sandbox, but you can trust them because they're Google. I don't think it'll ever be standardized. Apple would never accept it for one. Right. So in theory, they're building something where you can somewhat opt out if you have enough knowledge and understanding of what's happening. Or it uses federated learning of cohorts or all these bird name themes. And it's super science and it's new code that's very complex. And it's probably full of leaks and accidents. And the worst part is it privileges Google. Again, it sort of treats Chrome, which tracks you as the default, and then says, hey, we're better because we're a little less leaky. And by the way, we see your data still.

I don't think people will fall for it. When you say they track you, how scared should we be of that? So Google, don't be evil, got retired in 2018. They're a business. They have to do this. But when they track you, they're also working with publishers who have ads on their pages. And those publishers insist on using third parties that aren't Google. And there's zillions of them. And you don't know these companies. Some of them have trackers on their backs that smuggle in their JavaScript through the main partner. And the publisher is getting malware on its site, or it's getting

ad fraud committed against it. And this could lead to users being hurt. You could be stalked, you could have malware installed on your PC. So you should be afraid of not blocking this stuff. You should block it for safety. It's a user's right to do so. I mean, you don't have to look very far to see the problems that have happened there. I remember when Uniswap was launched, and the first, if you Google searched Uniswap, the first three things that came up would be effectively copycat sites that will steal all of your coins. Yeah. Yeah. This is a problem with search and Brave has a search engine too. So we're trying to make our search engine result page have authentic crypto results, including Web3 widgets right there in the result page.

And that means if you have a self-custody wallet, you could click on the result widget and you could start signing and committing things through your self-custody wallet. How did we get here? How did we get to a point where we are the product, obviously, and that all of our privacy is gone and we sort of willfully participate? It seems like that didn't just happen overnight. No, these things happen. Sometimes you could say it's organic, but usually there are a few who rise and become monopolies

and get into antitrust court, which happened with Microsoft versus Netscape, and it happens now with Google and antitrust court. So I think what happens is the users have to band together and form a union of sorts, whether it's through Brave or other browsers, where we take a stand, we protect our data, we prefer decentralized approaches where there's no intermediary and there's no censorship and there's no Google in the middle. And if we

vote with our fingers, not our feet, in enough numbers of users, we will have an effect because the users of Brave are valuable. They are transacting, searching, they're smart, they're technical, they buy online a lot, but they're off the grid because they don't want to be tracked. So if they're not using Brave or if they're using multiple browsers, which people do, they're using uBlock Origin, which is a very good extension you can use on Chrome. Google's trying to cripple it a bit with their new extension model, but there are ways to protect yourself. And if you do, and you're a valuable user and you're unreachable to Google, their advertisers will want to get to you. And that's why Brave is doing a direct ad sales business for the private ads that we pay the user to share from.

With the BAT token, obviously, and the incentivization model, how much money can somebody make switching to Brave? It varies. So obviously obviously we'll call money tokens and not the conversion to. Yeah. I mean, it depends on the region. We have sales going in all the tiers, including tier one US, tier two is UKU, and those pay more. And we see people tweet, I made $8 last month. And, you know, they cash it out or they hodl it. We don't care. They can put it into other assets. They can exchange it or swap it, swap it through a DEX low fee. We're not telling them how to use it. It's really theirs. We want to make sure that users participate and benefit ahead of us or in the same proportion as us, because we want to fail if our users don't like us. Whereas Google, I think, can be the monopoly

that says, you have to use us anyway. We've got your videos on YouTube, you know, suckers. Good luck. But they're right, to some degree. Unfortunately, I just don't think people understand that every single thing they throw into the universe. I mean, when I'm in my 40s, I'll date myself. But you know, when I was a kid, we just did things. We didn't take pictures of them and upload it for everyone to see.

Right. It's changed. And you could say that about Instagram. Sure. Exactly. What I've seen, though, with the web is it's this wonderful platform that is open box and open standard. So you can actually see an image on Instagram. And even though they try to fight you, you can usually find a way to save it.

Or on YouTube, you can say, hey, OK, YouTube's going to host my video. But they never monetize me at all. I'm not a partner who's paid, but my Brave fans can start tipping me directly or set up monthly contributions to me. And then I don't need to have YouTube as a gatekeeper. They're just my video hosts for free. So the last step in Brave's takedown of YouTube will be when we take on the hosting cost, because that's a big cost, and the routing to make sure you know how it is when your local ISP is not connected well and YouTube tells you, hey, your video's stalling because of your ISP. Google has a wonderful routing network and storage system there. That's costly to replace,

but you can attack these monopolies by letting them bear the costs and moving all the value onto blockchain and into browser endpoint software. And that's part of our game plan. That's really interesting. I've taken down monopolies before. I know how to do it. I know you have. But no, I mean, that really is interesting that you can sort of utilize their system and make it better. Sound leverage, judo. Yeah, exactly. That's incredible. I really wasn't aware of that sort of application. Don't tell them. They might be. But we need to tell people who are creators and who are actually posting their content onto YouTube.

And they can't really arms race us too much because Google and Alphabet, YouTube, whatever it's called, at the end of the day want to be a web company. They tried to make it more like Netflix. They did custom content and YouTube Red or YouTube Premium, whatever it is. It's hard to step away from the web. If you go too far, you become like a Netflix wannabe and look at their stock this year. Particularly poorly, of course. I always love to point at Netflix stock when people tell me that Bitcoin's too volatile. It's a fair example. Touche. Yeah. Come on. come on, they can do 30% in an hour. They're much worse than us, obviously. And I mean, to that end, how do you get to the point where you replace not only the

browser, but YouTube? And that's a pretty ambitious goal. IPFS, streaming of IPFS needs some kind of caching servers around your neighborhood or with fast network. You never get away from that need for having machines close to you or very good links to those machines, good routing to those machines. But I think if you build up things like IPFS, or I like Helium as a separate project for low-raw radio, I think there's a future where we build a more decentralized internet, and we're in the middle of it right now. And in some parts of the world, you can leapfrog to it. This sort of happened in Africa and India when people just bypassed old wireline internet and went to 2G or

LTE even. Yeah, straight to their phones, no internet ever. Would you consider Brave Web 2 or Web 3? So I've been around for Web 1, 2, and 3. I see them as evolutionary steps. And you don't burn the old boat until you're ready to steal the gold. So you've got to be ready. Right. But it feels like there are certain large tech companies that are resistant. Don't think Web 3 will even be a thing.

Not going to address it, probably. Google would be probably one of them. And then there's the wholesale change of Facebook to meta and saying the entire world will be in the metaverse, so much so that we're going to rebrand our name. Yes. So they still have a lot of economics tied to Facebook and Instagram and so on. I feel like in 100 years, we might have Google. General Electric survived to become a subprime lender and a tax cheat. I mean, Thomas Edison was spinning in his grave, we might have Google. General Electric survived to become a subprime lender and a tax cheat. I mean, Thomas Edison was spinning in his grave, right? So Google in 100 years may be a shadow of its former self.

In some ways, I think it's not what it was when I worked with them when I was doing Firefox. And they were just a great search engine. So they really grew. They bought DoubleClick, the ad business. They bought YouTube. They did Android. And they started tying everything together in a monopolistic way. And that always hurts you, I think. Even if you make a lot of

money, it hurts your innovation. You start taking advantage of your users. And the lead users, the ones who are valuable and off the grid, unreachable, start to leave. And that's where products like Brave are important. I grew up with what I believe he was the first employee at Google, Craig Silverstein. Yeah. And I can tell you he's probably the most altruistic human being I've ever known in my entire life. But he eventually left. Yeah. He was first swore.

He wrote some great C++ code. He's gone. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that there's probably a reason. And it's interesting you say that maybe they'll exist in 100 years. I have my doubts. Like GE kind of exists.

Yeah. Right. But I think that with the trajectory and sort of exponential growth of things and how fast systems are replaced. I mean, you can even look at the last 20 years and the top 10 stocks by market cap are completely different.

Yeah, motus infine velocior. Things speed up in the end. Yeah, and so I don't think that'll be a 100-year replacement. So let's say that 100 years is now 10 years in crypto or technology. What does Brave look like in 10 years? Okay. I guess we do take over the market. No, just kidding. I think we could get big. We could forge new Web3 standards and protocols that help everybody have a better say in creator economics and get rid of the YouTube centralization problem as much as possible.

You know, IPFS plus fast servers to feed and cache videos, detached comment systems that can be part of your browser. I've talked about my ideas for social, which aren't yet another social network, or putting everything immutably on a blockchain. It's more like I want a muscular client that does the aggregation for me because any aggregator out there that's a server is going to get shut down by law suits or is going to be centralized and censored yeah absolutely but the vision we talk about here threatens the largest centralized organizations on the planet yeah it's not even specifically obviously with brave but you know we talk about replacing the money very casually as if banks and credit cards are going to be resistant to that. We talk about decentralizing politics as if governments are going to have a problem with that. Are there roadblocks here that are inevitable that we may not be able to get past because these systems are so powerful?

I think there are some definitional issues. Like if you have nation states with borders and armies and illicit police power, they can jail you or kill you, draft you. You're always going to have something like money with the face of the emperor on it. But you're already seeing inevitable movement toward Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. And this is not just among the libertarians. It's among the family offices and the corporations and the banks even, right? Jamie Dimon said Bitcoin's a Ponzi. And then he discovered crypto and he said, oh, but mine's good and everything's good now. So Morgan coin, it's not like the others. So, you know, people will embrace and extend. I think there'll also be sort of a difference in

kind. You may have to use the local script in some border. But across the border or on the border or in the metaverse, then anything goes. And that's where I think things start to transcend, not physical reality. We're embodied. We live in the world. But people will do more. Like we learned, this was one of the few upsides of lockdowns, I think, was people could work remote and they don't have to go into the office every day. And now big companies want to put them back in the office for, I think, productivity reasons. But I think that's maybe an illusion. So having the ability to work remote, working remote with XR, doing things with blockchain, I think it all ties together in a decentralized way. You mentioned the metaverse. I think everybody has this different sort of

vision of what that means. What is your vision of what the metaverse, and I think everybody has this different sort of vision of what that means. What is your vision of what the metaverse is or looks like? Yeah, I've said this on Twitter because I'm friends with Jules Orbeck of Otoy, and he gave a talk last November at Solana Breakpoint. He talked about an open metaverse, which is not owned by Mark Zuckerberg. It has to be an evolution of the web. It has open protocols. I talk to people like Tim Sweeney of Epic Games, Fortnite fame.

I think there's a common vision that could emerge where you have these different worlds that have to run in fairly intensive hardware to have 100 million shared objects among millions of users. You could then portal them together. You could have protocols for hopping between these worlds. You could have a true aggregated metaverse or an open metaverse.

And I think that's the right way to do it. It's just an evolution of the web, just like you have different websites. Yeah. I mean, my crazy uncles can already yell at me on Facebook. I don't need them to do it in my VR goggles. And I think everybody obviously would prefer a decentralized version than the Zuckerverse or whatever we're talking about. But do you think that it's a fully immersive, ready player one opt out reality and you take your goggles off to go to the bathroom and maybe put them back on? Or do you think it's more of an augmented reality version of what we have now? Throw on your goggles and you drive past an ad and you can interact with it. But there are a lot of challenges with the fully immersive one. we have now. Throw on your goggles and you drive past an ad and you can interact with it.

There are a lot of challenges with the fully immersive one. And I think that in some ways, that's a dystopia. We're all in our pod like Neo in the Matrix. And you wake up and you're all skinny and hairless. I think what the augmented reality offers could be good. But you mentioned seeing ads. You don't want to be trapped and targeted. But I think that's what the reality of it is. It is. Whether it's VR, AR, it's any kind of XR. If you're in some kind of game world, something's tracking your eyes and your line of sight. And there are privacy solutions here. There are things we're using on blockchain to ensure privacy. And Brave has a toolkit that includes things like blind signature certificates and zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation.

These can be applied in the metaverse too. There are even interesting ideas that have to do with how you preserve created content without it being stolen, like watermarking and embedding the watermarking in a way that if you try to extract it, you degrade the quality of the art. That's something that Otoy actually worked on a while ago. So I'm hopeful that we can do this, but it's always a fight for individual rights, user rights, creator rights against these monopolistic central powers.

I mean, you said before that you feel like there's at least been some sort of general awakening about privacy, that people are starting to care. I think that's a very optimistic view. I think still that most people don't care. It's sort of like the joke, like, why don't you ever read the terms and conditions and they're a thousand optimistic view. I think still that most people don't care. It's sort of like the joke, like, why don't you ever read the terms and conditions? And they're a thousand pages long. How do you get to, do you think that there's a breaking point, something that could happen that can really trigger people to say, wait, this is really wrong? People always expect things to be either all privacy nihilism or everything's private now. And it's not. It's lead users who move markets. And it only takes a few percent. This is a stubborn or intrans private now. And it's not. It's lead users who move markets. And it only takes a few percent.

This is a stubborn or intransigent minority. It's why you have halal and kosher salt in the same salt form and skew in a store. You don't make three kinds of salt and sell them. If you have enough people demanding privacy, and Apple's catering to this, I mentioned Brave and DuckDuckGo and others, you will start to see that becoming standardized. Even Google putting the perfume on their privacy sandbox, which doesn't fool people,

shows that they're reacting to this. So we just need to keep the lead user movement growing and being valuable and being isolated through protections like Brave Shields, tracking protections. And I think it'll work. I mean, we've seen the government approach the Apples and Facebooks of the world and demand, hey, there was a crime. We need to see what happened. You know, give me the phone, things like that. How do you fight that at Brave when that happens? That was interesting.

Yeah. There are a couple of things to say there. One is I think that was a bit of theater because this Israeli firm, Celebrite, already gave the government access to the phone in question. So they just wanted to see if Apple would actually give it up or not. Apple actually looked virtuous because they wouldn't dare give up that code, but they also do things like key escrow for your encrypted backups so the government can look at those. I do think, like I said, if the government has the guns and controls the border,

they can enforce certain things we won't like. One of the blog posts I did before I found a Brave with a friend, Andreas Gow, said there are ways to detect this and verify it. So this is why when you use Signal, you should be careful that your safety numbers are up to date. You should look for signs that somebody has breached the system. And even the Signal operators can't hide all these signs. There was something called a warrant canary, like a canary that falls over in the coal mine. If you see that go down, you should stop using the product. But now people can be taken to a secret court and gagged from even putting up a warrant canary. So I'm interested in technological solutions. There are, again, cryptographic

solutions, not cryptocurrency, by which you can be sure that if someone violates the integrity of a product and puts a backdoor in it, you will know and you can stop using it. This isn't great, but it's better than nothing. And it's one of the ways you can defend against even nation state threats. You can say, OK, I can't use that anymore. It looks like it's probably compromised. So I'll find something else. I'll go somewhere else in the world. Ultimately, you have to be able to exit. And that's why I think crypto matters because you can exit from fiat. I think, you I think the metaverse does matter to some degree because you can exit from the constraints of your having to work locally in some place.

And ultimately, maybe we should all go to Mars, but I think Earth's really our home. So we have to fight for freedom within some defensible boundary, whether it's virtual or real. And that never goes away. It's a much more terrifying world than I think people realize. People have to face it, though. And I think once they do, you'll get this lead user movement and it'll matter. I mean, you can see that even in the trajectory of Bitcoin itself, right?

It starts with the cypherpunks and the ones who are crazy and anti-government. And then slowly but surely you get this mass adoption and then it awakens people to the importance of these things. And all of a sudden it becomes. And they're still awakening. And the privacy consciousness and the sort of Bitcoin consciousness are both rising together. In fact, we did a research paper on a lot of Web3 sites try to help you do like DeFi and they pre-sign or pre-format a transaction and do one of and signatures on it. A lot of these sites have third party tracking and nasty ad tech tags on them you should use brave if you use these sites because otherwise you could get your key stolen there's a lot of threats out there so it's

important to have privacy and self-custody i think together in in the web3 future so the moral of the story is use brave use brave be careful with careful with your key. Not your key, not your coin, but also block those trackers. Anything else practical people can do outside of the internet to protect their privacy before we finish up here? So people say VPNs are good, but you have to trust the VPN operator. And we have Tor built into Desktop Brave. We'll bring it to Android. I think people have to think about network privacy. So there's solutions coming there to look at, but there's a deep stack to work through and we're working where the value is being extracted

from the users first and we'll get there. Thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate everything you're doing. And I think that now everybody's going to just use Brave. All right. I think we sold at least the seven more people that are watching, right?

Hope so. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you haven't already left a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please do that now. Spotify just added ratings, so please go ahead and click that five star. I'll see you guys next time.